In this webinar, Irina Cismas, CMO of Custify, facilitated an engaging discussion with Sara Arreco, Head of CS at Antavo, Christopher Warren Gash, VP of CS at Sympa and Porter William, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire. The conversation delved into three pivotal strategies for driving customer success in 2025: customer journey mapping, digital CS strategies, and expansion.
Read on to discover:
- Why customer success teams should lead the charge on customer journey mapping
- How digital CS strategies can streamline onboarding and engage smaller customer segments
- Best practices for balancing automation and personal touch in digital CS models
- Proven approaches to driving upsells and expansions within enterprise accounts
- The role of cross-functional collaboration in building seamless customer experiences
- Tips for leveraging AI and data-driven insights to improve CS strategies
Summary Points
1. Customer Journey Mapping: Building the Foundation for Success
Why CS Takes the Lead: Sara emphasized the importance of customer success teams driving this initiative due to their unique insights into customer pain points and satisfaction.
Collaborative Effort: Involves engaging all departments to identify their impact on the customer journey and prioritize areas of improvement.
Practical Execution: Break down the journey into mini-journeys, address pain points systematically, and continuously iterate based on team feedback.
2. Digital CS Strategy: Automating for Scale and Efficiency
Streamlined Onboarding: Porter shared how tailored content, short-form videos, and self-serve resources can enhance the onboarding process while minimizing manual intervention.
Automation in Action: Using tools in-product guidance to guide users through critical workflows.
Start Simple: Focus on clear, small objectives and expand based on customer engagement data.
3. Driving Expansion: Strategic Growth within Accounts
Automated and CS-Led Approaches: Christopher explained how annual price increases and usage-based pricing models can drive automated growth, while CS teams focus on uncovering upsell opportunities.
Leveraging Data: Map white space opportunities in geographies, subsidiaries, and business units for targeted expansion.
Collaborative Selling: Align sales and CS incentives to ensure smooth handoffs and consistent account growth.
4. Leveraging AI in CS:
AI tools enhance note-taking, conversation analytics, and predictive health scores. However, clean and well-organized data is critical for effective use of these technologies.
5. Cross-Functional Collaboration:
Sales, product, and engineering teams play crucial roles in ensuring the customer journey is seamless. Shared KPIs and aligned incentives foster accountability across teams.
6. Building for the Future:
For CS teams in 2025, success will come from balancing digital tools with a human touch, aligning organizational incentives, and creating scalable strategies for growth and retention.
Transcript
Irina 0:01
Hello everyone and welcome. Thanks so much for joining us today. I’m Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify and I’ll be your host for this final webinar of 2024.
When I started planning this theme back in October, I knew I wanted to end the year on a high note, not just wrapping it up but delivering real value that we can carry into 2025. I love a good retrospective but I’m even more excited about what’s next. So I like to start the year with a solid plan, a clear strategy and a sense of direction.
That’s why today I’m bringing you not one, not two, but three different customer success strategies and three fantastic guest speakers. Sara Arreco, Head of CS at Antavo, Christopher Warren Gash, VP of CS at Sympa and Porter William, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire. Sara, Christopher and Porter, thanks for joining us today and taking the time to share your insights with us.
Sara 1:10
Thank you.
Go-to-market and CS strategy
Irina 1:12
And for everyone joining us live who are catching the replay later, consider this our Christmas bundle of insights. I mentioned I prepared three different CS strategies. We’re going to talk about customer journey mapping, then we’re going to transition to a digital CS strategy and last but not least, we’re going to cover also the expansion.
We do have a packed agenda and a lot of things to cover. And speaking about those three different CS strategies, once you map them out and you identify those key data points, you definitely don’t want to manage it all manually, I assume. And I mean, who wants to be gringed both down in spreadsheets and posts?
So don’t forget that CSP like Custify can streamline it all, making it easy to implement what we discussed today efficiently and at scale. Housekeeping items, so that everyone is on the same page, this event is being recorded and you will receive a copy afterwards, no worries. I know that that’s the number one question that we receive on chat.
Do I receive the recording? Yes, you do via email. We value your participation, so please feel free to ask the questions using the question tab or chat function.
I’m going to make sure I’ll monitor and we’ll try to answer them throughout the session or during the end of the discussion. We’re going to save a few moments for the Q&A. And now, to kick things off, I want to start with a quick read on where’s everyone heading in 2025.
And we put together a poll to see which go-to-market and CS strategy are top of mind for you all. So I’m going to publish a poll and I’m going to invite you to answer.
Give me one sec. Here’s the published poll. Is everyone seeing it?
Sara, Christopher, what do you think? Okay, perfect. We’ll give it a few moments.
I invite everyone to participate. I think it’s important to set the foundation of the conversation because we’ll start discussing about the customer journey. We’ll approach the digital strategy and then we’ll continue with the expansion.
But I’m curious, how is the distribution? So it seems like we have a some sales-led with high touch but also a hybrid approach. I’m curious, do you see one of those, while we are waiting for everyone to submit their vote, do you see product-led or sales-led or hybrid picking up momentum?
Or is it a mixed bag out there? Sara, do you want to try to answer?
Sara 4:51
Yeah, I think it very much depends on the product that companies are using. Because you have more simple products that are so much more adaptable to a more hybrid and even more digital kind of approach. Or you have more complex products that literally require a high touch approach.
Porter 5:14
Yeah, the product-led growth specifically, there’s a bit of a split between like digital CS is one thing, product-led growth is another thing. They feed each other but they can also be in different areas. And a lot of products, most of the ones I’ve worked on have not been very suitable for a product-led growth approach, at least not in their initial phase.
They may have gotten there eventually. And so some products can really build that virality internally and some don’t. But I think product is an important partnership in a digital CS motion for sure.
CS driving the customer journey mapping
Irina 5:51
In our case, it seems like a hybrid approach for both go-to-market and the CS. So it’s a combination of the two, followed closely by sales-led with the high-touch CS. And with this being said, I want to start the discussion with what I consider to be the backbone of any solid CS strategy.
And that’s understanding the customer journey. And Sara, I’ll start with you because I know that you have it on your roadmap for next year. And to be honest, when we debriefed and we picked the theme and you mentioned this one, I was surprised because I’ve often seen product teams leading this type of project.
In some cases, it was marketing, but never CS, to be honest. So first of all, kudos for making it a priority for next year. And now let us know what led the team at Antavo to drive this initiative from a CS perspective.
Sara 6:53
Yeah, thank you for the question. I think there is a few reasons really for why our customer success is driving the customer journey mapping at Antavo. The first thing is that these are the pain points, honestly, that the teams are feeling.
As customer success, we are always responsible for successes, but also failures of our customers. And that includes instances where we are completely in the driver’s seat and really driving success or sometimes even driving failure. And we’re responsible for that.
And some instances where we’re not in the driver’s seat. But at the same time, the responsibility is always ours and customer success is always the ultimate responsible party. So this means that it’s 100% in our interest to drive all of the internal initiatives that help us in retaining customers and upselling customers and making sure that customers pay more money, stay with us for the longest period of time.
So designing a better and more seamless, even tidier, customer journey is definitely one way to be leaders of the change that customer success needs right now. And of course, it’s a collaborative effort. So it’s not like customer success is imposing our point of view on everybody else.
All the other teams like product or marketing sales, they’re all very much involved in the process. But I think it’s because it’s in our very much interest to make sure our customers have a positive experience with us. That’s why we’re in the driver’s seat.
Irina 8:42
How are you planning to actually map this customer journey? I know that it was something that it stayed in your mind. And I remember you told me that, OK, everyone was talking about, but no one was providing the concrete things on how to actually execute it.
So how was it in your case? How are you planning to roll it out?
Sara 9:09
Yeah, I think it’s very funny. I listened to tons of podcasts. I went to tons of webinars.
And everybody can say, yeah, we sat all in a room. And in six hours, we mapped our whole customer journey. And I’m like, yeah, that’s not happening.
That’s not happening. So for us, it’s taking a lot longer, to be honest, just because we have a very complex product. And it involves loads of different teams.
As I said before, it’s a collaboration effort. I’m not imposing my view on anybody. So I think the place where we started was first of all, understanding that everyone has an impact on customer experience.
And we started with a survey for internal awareness and to try to understand, how are you aware of the impact that you have? Even you, a person in HR, you in engineering, you in finance, are you aware? And the results were not where I wanted them, to be honest.
So we started customer journeys for that reason. And also to tidy up a little bit the customer experience. I made sure to map out what every single team and every single role in the company has to contribute to the customer journey.
All the interactions, direct and indirect, that they have with customers, from sending invoices to sending email for onboarding, et cetera, et cetera. And then we’re doing a prioritization exercise right now to understand what is more urgent. What do the teams want us to start and to start working on?
And then we’re going to build every mini journey based on that, making sure to highlight what the customer sees, what happens behind the scenes, and also the importance of every single step.
Irina 11:06
And in the case of day-to-day CS operations, so in the case of your team, how will you leverage those? How are you leveraging the customer journey? How do you use the insights that came out through the exercise that you just mentioned?
Sara 11:22
Yeah, I think it very much depends on the journey. Just because, for example, if we’re talking about tickets, we might be looking at time to resolution, making sure that customers’ complaints are reduced, et cetera. But for other journeys, like showcasing customer roadmap, we’re looking at other metrics or other success criteria.
So I think it’s really about – it’s very specific to the mini journey that we want to tackle.
Irina 11:49
So you split the whole journey. Are you – speaking of that, are you tackling step-by-step? So for instance, okay, now that we mapped the whole process, we make it a priority for next year to, I don’t know, improve the flows and the processes from the onboarding, let’s say, or from the first initial moment.
So do you tackle all of them from once or step-by-step?
Sara 12:15
No, we are tackling step-by-step. That’s why the prioritization exercise is so important, because I don’t want to necessarily start from onboarding. I want to start where the pain is.
So that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to map out all the interactions and where the pain points are. So every team has scored from one to five, like, we really need to work on this right now.
Or I’m fine, don’t need to look at it. And based on that, we are deciding how to proceed.
Building a digital CS strategy
Irina 12:46
Porter, I know that your focus for next year will be on building a digital CS strategy. Do you have a customer journey mapped out that supports that?
Porter 12:58
Lightly. Particularly in the early time, we’ve been really focused on time to value and getting people into their a couple initial major objectives and milestones. Because thus far, in our current state in our business, most of our customers are not in a landing.
We’re not in a land and expand motion with most of our customers. We have some where there’s growth. But in a lot of cases, our customers are sold out right from the beginning with enterprise licenses.
So we’re really focused on getting them up to speed with an initial use case and then helping them flesh out into their full use case. And so it’s the initial journey for about the first six months. We haven’t done a complete journey map, but the first six months of kind of walk or crawl, walk, run.
And so that’s we’ve been particularly focused and implementation. So Sarah, you were saying like you’re not having been super focused on onboarding. Onboarding has been our major focus, because if we can get our onboarding right, then customers coast for the majority of the rest of the year quite well with our product.
But if we don’t do that, then we’re going to be dealing with just friction for months and months and months. So we’ve been really focused on that on that early stage.
Irina 14:19
Speaking of that quarter, I used to focus on we’re not sure if you guys at BrightHire have this type of statistics in which you tied up the time to value with the with an element of retention prediction. So a statistic or a north star metric such as if the client finishes the onboarding in three months or in two months and a half, the likelihood of him to remain and to renew is closer to, I don’t know, 93% or 94% or whatever. So those types of metrics, do you find a correlation between the time to onboard and to the concrete metrics or KPIs?
Porter 15:08
I have done that in the past at other companies. At Brighthire, we’re not at that point yet. We’ve been doing a lot of like data readiness.
So that is the kind of thing I want to be able to do as we go into this next year and a year from now, I might actually have something to tell you right now. From this past year, I couldn’t have even told you for a good chunk of the year, how long an onboarding was taking. So I’m actually just now at a point where it’s like, hey, I can actually measure this.
So I’ve been getting a lot of the fundamentals in place to even be able to measure some of these things, much less have a benchmark and correlate to an outcome. But a year from now, I’m actually hoping I can do that.
The challenges of measuring time to onboard
Irina 15:53
I want to ask Porter, but feel free to jump in, Christopher, for instance, because I want to tie the customer journey to expansion as well. You’re not the first one from whom I’m hearing, Porter, that it’s hard to measure some things. So why do you think it was harder to measure the time to onboard?
Was it because every customer has a different use case? Or is it because of the particularity of each and every one? Why is it hard?
Porter 16:28
The biggest thing is just that we hadn’t set it up. And because we just hadn’t set up the mechanics to get it done. It just hadn’t been a thing anybody was looking for.
And so getting that, you know, it wasn’t super difficult to do. It’s still not automated. I still need to tackle that.
But at least with some manual work, we’re getting it now. But it just wasn’t a thing we’d prioritize before. The thing that has made it somewhat tricky is the definition is like, okay, so wait, is it the first time?
We’re an interview intelligence platform. People use our platform to help their, or recruiting teams use our tool to help with their hiring process. So it’s like, okay, is it the first time somebody does an interview?
Is it the first time, or is it right after we train and go live? Is it the first time they actually get out to a, like, where there’s a number of points at which you can choose to draw a line. And depending on where you choose to draw that line, you’ll get widely differing outcomes.
And so kind of that has been a point of discussion. And in particular, the handoff, as I’ve recently switched from having CSMs do everything on board and then manage the customer stabbing, and implementation manager take that over, the handoff between those two teams, they’re both within me, so we’re working really close. But the handoff is creating not friction, but just like, it’s a question.
It wasn’t even, when a CSM does everything, you don’t have to answer some of these questions. They just kind of roll with it. But when you start having someone go, okay, well, is my job done yet?
Or am I still responsible? You have to start answering those questions.
Christopher 18:18
Do you mind if I ask a question, Porter? So you broke out, you had a CSM that was running the entire end-to-end process.
And now you’ve gone into like more of these like specialized positions within CS. This is something that’s for full transparency, like I’ve done in the past as well, and then actually needed to roll back elements. How did, what drove your decision-making around like deciding that the CSM should no longer be running this end-to-end process and you’ll get better business results from like driving a specialization?
Porter 18:55
Yeah, so I have an analogy. Anyone who’s known me for a while has heard me talk about spikes and plates. So, and I don’t think this is true in all SaaS businesses, but it’s at least been true in all the ones I’ve been working in, which is managing, once a customer is live, the amount of energy it takes to support them is fairly steady and long kind of long-term application of effort.
So it’s like a plate kind of thin and long. And onboarding implementation is spiky. It’s high intensity, it’s short-term, it’s very date-driven, and it’s urgent.
And when I start out, and this is what I found out when I got to BrightHire that’s continued the picture I’ve seen before, is you have CSMs with a bunch of plates of their steady accounts, and then they’ve got their onboarding. So those are spikes. If you have those spikes on top of a bunch of plates, people end up way over capacity.
And when that happens, because of the urgency and date-driven nature of onboarding, they prioritize onboarding and they start dropping the balls on plates. You can get by with that for a while. You really can.
But there’s a point where people start dropping, they have no choice but to drop painful balls that hurt. I talk about glass balls and plastic balls. You’re juggling, you drop the plastic balls.
When people have no choice but to start dropping glass balls, you have a problem. And so by breaking it out, an implementation manager who’s managing nothing but spikes can handle a lot of spikes, because the spikes drop off and they go away. The stack of plates keeps growing.
So anyway, that is what I’m seeing. And it has made a significant impact on my team in just the last five months getting this implementation manager in, even though it hasn’t been neat and tidy. We’re still sorting out a lot of the transitions and people kind of finding their swim lanes and stuff, but it’s making an impact.
And I can already see that the CSMs are going to be able to stay a lot more focused because we have commercial CSMs who are managing renewals. I think that’s a big part of this dynamic, where I really need them focusing on renewals and transaction and focusing on de-risking renewals that are six months out. That kind of stuff just doesn’t happen if they’re focused on the onboarding customer who just signed and is ready to go tomorrow.
So that’s the dynamic that I’m navigating. And so that’s why I made that decision.
Christopher 21:31
Absolutely. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re very focused on time to value.
Porter 21:35
Yeah.
Customer journey mapping supporting an expansion strategy
Irina 21:37
Christopher, I know that your focus for next year will be on the expansion side, but do you think customer journey mapping can also support an expansion strategy? And if so, how?
Christopher 21:51
Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing with expansion is that you can’t run before you can walk. So having a strong customer journey mapping is essential in order to have really like a foundation, a foundation of predictability, of engagement, which will then build trust and will then derive value for the customer.
I mean, you need all of those things in place in order to be in the position to drive predictable expansion right down the line. So I think this is a, it’s an absolute must.
Irina 22:26
And in the case of the Sympa, your own organization, did you guys have a similar project as Sara was mentioning earlier, or how did you map this out?
Christopher 22:40
Well, I’m quite new in the role, so I can’t really tell you historically. My observation with full transparency is that we haven’t gone about it with the same degree of rigor as Sarah has mentioned. I mean, I have to say that I love your approach, and I was madly writing down notes because I think this is exactly what we need to do.
I mean, needless to say, everybody who has some form of customer interaction is therefore going to have an impact on the perception that the customer has on the service. That is going to have some form of ripple effect on satisfaction, health, the building of champions, likelihood of renewal, and then, in my case, around my focus, also the ability to open up expansion channels as well. And I think we’re seeing some examples at times of times where the end-to-end customer journey has sort of let us down a little bit and then has led to adverse outcomes for us in CS.
So absolutely essential piece of work to do.
Encouraging teams to collaborate on customer journey mapping
Irina 23:51
We have two questions from the audience, and I want to address it because they make sense in the context of the conversation, and I think it’s a Sara question. Let us ask, how do you encourage other teams to collaborate on this customer journey mapping for them to acknowledge its importance? So how did you promote it, and how did you sell it internally?
Sara 24:14
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the main thing is that we did have a customer journey before, but the customer journey mapping is never quite completely done. So as your company evolves, as you develop more product, more capabilities, more features, you’re always going to need to review it a little bit.
And then, at the same time, and to do that, you need really leadership approval. So I’m answering directly to our COO, our Chief Operating Officer, and the first thing I did was go to her and say, look, we need to do this. There is, I build my business guys and say, okay, these are the reasons, this is what I’m hoping to achieve, this is why we need all of this.
And then together, we presented at leadership management meetings and made sure that everybody had to buy in, everybody understood what was going to be also their benefit. I think that’s a really key part, to make sure you’re talking to everybody’s language. Because it’s so easy, especially for a product or engineering team saying, oh, it is not my problem, I don’t want to hear about this, because it’s just going to be a waste of my time.
I don’t interact with customers directly. And sure, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that you do not have an impact, because it’s a collaboration effort.
And ultimately, we all needed a company to retain customers. Well, otherwise, we’re all out of a job, really. So ultimately, we are all working towards the same goal.
And that was buy in, I think.
Irina 25:56
Was there something that triggered you to go and have a discussion with your COO? Or do you remember what was the thing that made you think, you know what, I’m going to pause everything that we do, and I’m going to ask for a customer journey mapping project?
Sara 26:15
Yeah. So I’m also heading customer experience, together with customer success. And we were looking for new initiatives that we could run this year.
We run voice of the customer, we run loads of stuff. But I was looking for new ideas, to be honest. And that’s when I said, okay, why do not I ask internally.
And that’s when I found out that a lot of our teams did not have a lot of awareness on their impact on customer experience. So that’s when I definitely took the final decision said, nope, this is not going to work, we need to we need to work on this, we need to make sure that everybody knows how much their job actually counts, because it does count. And it’s really fundamental that everybody gets it.
Planning the CS and digital strategy for 2025
Irina 27:00
I most probably we will go on. So for everyone who is watching, watching this live, use the question tab or the chat function to ask any other question about the customer journey mapping process. We have one question, but I’m going to leave it on at the end of the conversation.
And now I want to switch gears to the digital CS strategy. So I wanna ask you, Porter, what, what do you need for the successful strategy and digital strategy next, next year? How are you going to tackle this part?
Porter 27:44
So a lot of what I’m looking at is auto. So a couple pieces, automation and content. And a bit, the way I’m really thinking about this is trying to create different resources, digital resources in the form of mostly short form videos, or kind of interactive type forms, where we’re able to replace what is today a series of guided discussions around workflow and configuration choices and things like that.
Where a smaller customer can still go through something to help them reach these decision points and help explain some things that are a bit nuanced. And so like the kind of thing where it’s like, yeah, it’s in the help article, but nobody reads the help article. And so how can we serve up content that through, that is automated in the early journey, in the sequence of, okay, first things, this, then this, then this, what are the things you need to think about?
And we serve it up through an onboarding, an interactive onboarding workspace that we share with the customer. And for like all the tasks and things. And today, those tasks take them to our content in our help center.
But I’m trying to build more engaging content that folks will actually work through on a self serve way. And I’ve kind of been, I’ve been mapping this out through very short, highly edited video content, which is different than recording a webinar or recording a instructor led training, the kind of content here, you need to be able to really edit it down so that it’s short, punchy, and gets the point across quickly. And then presenting them with questions and then type using type form, because type form lets you embed a variety of multimedia things and then ask a question and then take them to a branching point.
And then it’s like, okay, so you chose path A, here’s a couple things for you to now do. Now go do these tasks and map that out and replacing what is today a human conversation without it, while still making it feel like a rich, engaging activity. So that’s kind of, that’s one of the big things I’m mapping out right now.
We did actually just launch a pretty significant freemium option through a big partner in our ecosystem that has caused a big influx of kind of limited, like trial customers, basically. And it’s been successful. And but one of the big things that created a forcing function for me to work with our product and engineering team to map out a very, really delightful onboarding account setup flow that has completely taken a piece off of my hands for my team of what was usually a manual account setup, setting up their primary integration, inviting initial users.
It works so well. Now it only works for this very defined path of a customer with a certain tech stack combo through this partnership and stuff, but it’s beautiful. And now, and it just created the burning, the burning platform for us to get something done that I’ve been talking about for the last year.
And now that that work is done, now we’re going to start expanding that into other paths. And so of customers with different configurations and things like that. And in that process, one of the things that I really appreciated was a conversation with my VP of engineering.
I am prone to overcomplication. I don’t know if any of you out there like me, we can do this, get the context and the nuance. And next thing you know, you’re like, you’re like that guy with the crime map with strings and pins.
And my VP of engineering has a real talent for simplification. And he’s like, no, no, no. So we actually pulled back and we got ourselves into some very simple funnel buckets.
We’re taking very much a kind of like a marketing automation approach to this experience of once we get them through this very short onboarding process, some very simple defined milestones to get them through. And it’s very simple and I stripped out a lot of the complication and nuance that I was trying to put in. He was right.
So my big like advice to folks is as you’re trying to map out a digital strategy, start small with a single objective in mind and give yourself, think of it like a marketing funnel. How do you get people in and what are the steps you need them to get through and keep it really simple with a simple objective and then move on to a next one. But if you overcomplicate it, you get paralyzed.
And it makes creating that journey really hard. So, so special content, you know, special content for the purpose, made purpose, simple automations and very simple stage like funnel definitions of what you’re trying to get your target to what actions you’re trying to get them to take.
Irina 33:07
Or based on what you said to follow up questions, I’m curious about something. You mentioned from the very beginning, the content part and now marketing person needs to ask how did you identify what’s the content all about? What was the source of inspiration that triggered that particular content?
Porter 33:34
So, example of this was, okay. So today we have this series of like, for example, helping a customer set up an integration with their applicant tracking system. It’s one of the very first steps that we have to do for onboarding.
In a high touch customer setup, that is a, one of our first implementation calls after the kickoff, we’re walking, we’re help, we’re sharing the requirements. We hold their hand going into the ATS, setting up an API key, setting up a web hook, doing, we were, what we did is we looked at that conversation. I’ve sitting down with my, with my, with Prada and going, okay, so the thing we need to do is this, this, and this.
The outcome of this discussion are these steps. How can we make that really easy and embed that into this onboarding journey? Well, it turned out they were able to pull some stuff from the partner system, bring that in, make it easy.
Then they were supposed to be like, well, we don’t know what we can do if we can at least link them out to it. And we were able to make it self-explanatory enough with the information we presented on the previous screen that 90% of people get through that cap. They jumped the chasm fine because we gave them the heads up.
Now, what I ended up doing was making a, like a traditional approach would be let’s make a training video of walking people through this. I made a very compressed, just a few minutes video of the old, the preview of the steps everyone’s going to go through. Highly edited, highly scripted.
And put that at the front end of this experience. I see a lot of engagement of people watch the video and they sail through this onboarding experience now. So by giving them a preview of what’s going to come, making sure we give them signposts in the product along the way that the product led them to the place they needed to go, we were able to get them to reliably take the actions.
And then we build in an automation that says, if someone initiates the signup and within like, can’t remember the timeframe, an hour or two, some reasonable period of time that if you haven’t gotten to that point, you probably got stuck or got intimidated. We triggered them an email from me that says, Hey, I’m Porter, buh, buh, buh, buh. You know, we noticed you got started.
If you, you know, if you need help finishing this setup, schedule a call with us. And we’ve been able to catch those people who did get intimidated or got stuck with a, those few people, we give a, a scheduled session to walk them through it to get, but 90% of people are getting through it successfully. So we’re trying to like catch the exceptions with a little bit of handholding, but most people are successfully getting through it when we armed them with what’s to come and a well-structured product experience.
Irina 36:21
I want to tackle one question from, from our audience. Francisco asked:
What are the best approaches to drive upsell via CSQLs in the one to many digital model? Any examples and outcomes that you can, that you can share?
Porter 36:43
It’s a very good question. So the customers that I’m running through this digital model are small customers with no upsell possibility.
And so CSQLs, this is a thing I’ve that I’ve has come up in like I’ve thought about, I have not done this at all. And I actually, I would need to put some much better thought into it. The, the, the first thought Christopher or Sarah jump in.
If you’ve got like, Hey, I’ve, I’ve done this thought on this. What I thought about in the past is signals. What are the signals in the system driven behavior that you could capture through analytics and a dashboard that equal, you know, if they do, if in the last month they have done this, this, and this, that equals an opportunity that is the, it may not, it’s probably not perfectly predictive, but it’s likely circumstance that somebody should probably go talk to them.
Behavior driven by observable behavior driven definition that you can then flag on a dashboard, automate a message into a, into a Slack channel or something like that that says, Hey, this, this customer has met these criteria and a, and let’s create a, this is now an opportunity. Someone go qualify if this opportunity is real or not. That’s my thought, but I have not done that.
And I don’t think that’s going to be in my priorities this year.
Irina 38:16
Sarah, do you work with CSQLs?
Sara 38:19
Uh, to be honest, very rarely. Um, just because our customers are usually big enterprises. So we try and we drive, uh, for us, customer success is also, um, a commercial team.
So we try, uh, we usually try to keep it internally as much as possible. Uh, unless there is the need for a full sales process. Um, so for us, it’s a little bit different, but I completely agree with what Porter said.
So I think it’s about studying the behavior, knowing what, uh, what successful customers look like. What is your definition of a successful customer? So how fast do you complete your startup?
How fast do you complete your initial onboarding and then that’s basically a signal for understanding who to target.
Focusing on expansion on 2025
Irina 39:12
Good. I’m also keeping an eye on the time. I want to allocate, uh, a few minutes at least to tackle the expansion part. I know that we had, as I mentioned at the beginning of back agenda, and it’s hard to speak in less than one hour to tackle all three of them, but with your permission, we’ll do some follow-ups next year.
So if you are interested in diving into a specific one CS strategy, put it on the chat and we’ll try to accommodate it on the agenda for next year. Now let’s take out the third strategy that we mentioned at the beginning – the expansion- and that’s a Christopher topic. How are you planning to approach it?
And what are some specific steps you are focusing on in order to make it effective?
Christopher 40:09
Yeah, for sure. I mean, for us, maybe a little bit of background is, you know, similar to Sara, where also this like sales led, like high touch approach. Um, most of our customers, we’ve got a range of customer size, but you know, the majority of our focus is going to be on the, like the larger enterprise type customers.
So we’ve identified a few different expansion levers and, you know, I think at its most basic, you can break these out into two streams. I mean, most likely these won’t be revolutionary, but they are important to try to get right. So the first is like automated expansion.
And, you know, here, I think that we benefit on two fronts. I mean, firstly, we’ve got very healthy, shall we say annual price increases. And I know that this is something which there’s quite a lot of nervousness around in the market. Can we drive annual cost increase or annual price increase to our customers?
What if they push back, driving up the price by 5% is going to lead to churn? Well I was actually speaking to our, to our board about this and they’ve run, they’ve got the numbers and they’ve run a number of studies and they’ve seen that there’s virtually zero correlation between like modest price increases on an annual basis, especially if they’re well defended, well argued and churn. So if this isn’t something that you guys are already doing, if you feel like, you know, you’re sort of extracting one or 2% in annual price increase, make that change immediately.
Try to adjust that in your contracts moving forward is the easiest way that you can just go from like default 100% to like default 105% NRR or something even punchier, especially if you feel like you’re actually delivering like a core value, which means that there’s no reason to move away just for, you know, a few, a few euros or 5% increase. The other side is that, um, on the automated front, our pricing model is based on per seat or like per user. And of course, what that means is that in different economic climates, you open yourselves up to a degree of risk.
But also, you can open yourself up to a lot of opportunities when the market rebounds. I’m no economist, but I think we’re probably the worst times are behind us. So again, this is something that we’re feeling increasingly bullish about going into next year.
Then on the other side, we’ve got the you know, the CS driven expansion, right? And that can look different from company to company. Like in our case, I’m really focusing our efforts on two areas.
And this is based on what we can see within the existing base, those two areas are kind of your classic upsell. So, you know, we unlike Porter, like we’ve, we’ve signed a number of customers without an intentional land and expand motion, but we’ve assigned a lot of customers that are not maxed out. And there, we’ve got tremendous opportunities to really build a total addressable market or a serviceable addressable market from our existing customer base and say, right, like, where does the white space exist, and there is a lot of it.
And we’re looking into geographies. So, you know, customer uses us in geography x. And they’re also present in geographies A, B, and C.
So we’re looking at geographies, we’re looking at subsidiary stroke business units, we’re looking at child organizations, parent companies, in some cases. And, you know, this is a this is an exercise that very rarely like we’ve actually take the time to do within customer success, we can do that as like a sort of a top down approach to some extent, so that we’ve got a sense of like, what does the what does the opportunity look like within the base. And we can also run that on a CSM by CSM level, as more of like a bottoms up approach and find something in between.
But there’s a lot of opportunity there. And then the other side, and this is probably the most controversial, but I think all companies that have been around for a few years have probably faced this or are already tackling it, or don’t quite know what to do about it. But we’ve got a lot of legacy pricing with the existing base.
And, you know, if you look at the delta between what customers pay today versus what list price looks like at the moment, there’s a very, very scary gap. And, hey, like, no surprise there, right. But, I mean, what do we do about it?
I mean, clearly, there’s one approach where you craft, you know, the world’s best email, and you press end, and you see what happens. You go run and hide.
And that’ll probably be the last thing I do in my role, right? That’s not gonna work. So instead, we’ve actually started to split out.
We’ve taken what is like a big opportunity, and potentially, like a large problem of just splitting customers out into different slices. And we’ve said, we’ve got these customers that meet this criteria, be based on health, be based on NPS scores, be based on like the size of the delta, and then like set a number of or set a process specifically for that slicing customer. Is it CS led?
Is it sales-led? Is it even like the leadership team led because of the strategic importance of the customer? And then you can think about how we phase these increases?
Do you go from, from current price to list price? I mean, it’s an option, but it’s not realistic, it won’t be well received by the customer in most cases. Or do we talk about, this is where we need you to go.
This is and these are the steps to get to that place, lock the customer in for a longer period of time, phase the increase. But of course, in these scenarios, CS is value exchange, isn’t it? So, you know, in order to ask for more revenue, we need to give something in return.
So we’ve been thinking very carefully about how that, how does that practically look from like, from a product basis, and to some extent from a service level as well. So needless to say, there’s a, there’s a lot that we can, there’s a lot that we can do. There’s a lot we can be sinking our teeth into next year to drive quite significant expansion.
And something tells me the team’s going to be pretty busy.
Porter 46:55
Chris, I’ve got a question: Is that expansion for the land index in your land and expand model? Are the CSMs driving that expansion? Or is it like a partnered account manager is an account executive who runs the early sales and keeps driving further expansion? Like, what’s your model there?
Christopher 47:14
Yeah I can tell you what the model has looked like. And then I can tell you about how I’m designing it since I’m quite new in. Up until now, it has been left to the CSM to like their own devices.
They’ve got, they’re running onboarding, they are doing they’re picking up some slack for support. We’ve got quite a technically complex product as well as they spend a lot of time interfacing with customers to help them navigate the platform to get value. They have a lot on their plates as it is. Adding expansion like that on their plates is, I mean, number one, difficult from a capacity perspective.
And like a number two, I think, while CSMs are, you know, jacks of all trade, in many cases, we’ve got to be very clear about what are the expectations on the CSM? What are the behaviors I want to see? I really like what’s the profile of a CSM that’s, in my case, simpler.
And so we’ve not moving forward, we’re not going to continue to have the CSM, like run this, we’re doing two things. I mean, first is more like specialization within the CS umbrella. So bringing in sort of your like a key account manager type profiles, who would be like commercially focused on a small portfolio of their own, but then also supporting the CSM.
So the CSM is like creating, creating the value for the customer introduced, like essentially is creating opportunities for this key account manager to come in and help with the closure, which of course, is a slightly different, like profile. And in the interim, we’re pulling in help and collaboration from our sales team. They already have the bandwidth, and they certainly already have the skill sets and competence. So yes, that’s how we make sure that we still succeed in H1.
And we’re not sort of forecasting this hockey stick outcome in the second half of next year.
Porter 49:20
The ability for a CSM or the skill set to prospect within a customer base is a skill set. And it’s one that I often find folks who are traditional CSMs often don’t have. And so if you know, in a land and expand model, where you have a lot of expansion opportunities amongst subsidiaries and children accounts and geographies and stuff, you’ve really got to have someone with that prospecting muscle.
And so I think that’s a good thing to be thinking about.
Sara 49:49
Yeah, I think it’s also interesting in terms of the profiles that you’re hiring. I, for example, love to hire from sales myself, I like hiring salespeople that want to come into customer success. So I have a question for you both. What usually do you like to hire if you’re looking for this kind of role?
Hiring the right profile of people for CS
Christopher 50:14
Yeah, I mean, from my side, I can briefly answer. I think the commercial background is most important. As we know, if you type in CSM, or customer success manager to LinkedIn, you are going to get a smorgasbord of like different profiles, because CS means different of every org, right?
So the important thing is like is, does the CS that this person has done in the past as it looked like the CS that I’m hiring for, and the papers I need to see within my organization. And a failsafe is often like going towards more of a sales profile. So yeah, I’m open to both parts, I suppose.
Porter 51:02
This is another argument from my point earlier about smoothing. When you have a CSM who’s trying to onboard, manage the relationship and renew, and maybe expand, like you are looking for unicorn profiles there to expect them to be good at all of those things is really hard. Whereas, you know, finding someone who can be really good at that early stage, at the onboarding and early setup and project management and detail focus and that stuff, getting is one profile, getting a profile to renew and also be a consultative thought partner throughout the lifecycle of the fit.
That’s a great profile, very findable. And finding someone who’s going to drive renewals and expansions, very commercially minded, that person probably can’t do implementations. Well, you know, so like, there’s these couple different profiles, and they’re not none of them are better or worse.
But it’s really hard to find somebody who can do all of those things. Those people are unicorns.
Q&A
Irina 51:58
So we only have seven more minutes and make sure that we tackle all the questions that were coming from the from our audience. Sara, you have one. One of the most critical points in the customer journey lies with the sales team.
In your view, what is the ideal way for the sales team to contribute and participate in this customer journey?
Sara 52:21
Well, from my experience, what we’re doing with the sales team is to collaborate very closely. But because our implementation is also led by a professional services team, because our implementation is fairly long, so customer success is in charge, but we have a technical team to support us every step of the way. So I think, you know, we have loads of touch points with our sales team, and we have made sure to include different phases of the customer journey.
The first one is obviously sales and how we handle the handover from sales to customer success and professional services. And then also the business as usual part where sales actually needs us for references, except for case studies, etc. So I think that’s the way that we’ve been looking at it always in a collaborative effort and saying what works, what doesn’t work, what are the challenges, and let’s be all open to talk about it.
Irina 53:26
Do you also implement the shared KPI model or shared OKRs? I often saw in other type of organizations that this principle often helps because it’s not the sale, where sales doesn’t necessarily own the volume, but it also owns the quality. And then somehow it also helps on what comes next.
And if you have shared OKRs, usually the customer journey is often smoother. Not sure. Do you guys have this where you’ve seen it implemented in the companies you are working where you’ve used to work?
Sara 54:10
Not from my side. And maybe I’m very lucky because our sales team is doing a great job, to be honest. And they don’t send us completely unqualified customers.
Porter 54:25
I found that like doing it with the vision of most salespeople actually really do care about what you’re trying to do. I think there’s a lot of like pictures we put out there of, you know, the bad sales. Most of them are fantastic people who really care and they do want their customer to be successful.
And so if you can really get a long way by motivating around, hey, this is how you can make sure that your customer is going to hit it off well with us. And they often will really dig into that because it’s a point of pride for them to have successful customers who go on to be the marquee accounts in your business.
Christopher 55:04
For sure. Sometimes it’s about incentives and making sure that the incentives are set up in the right way as well. I’ve worked in a company before where commission for salespeople is obviously standard across the board, but they would receive their commission in tranches.
So like one at signature, another at successfully passing the opt out phase if there is one, and then another actually at renewal point as well. So that there is full financial alignment between the salesperson and actually bringing in the right types of deals for the business as well.
Irina 55:40
That’s a very good example. And it’s another type of implementing the shared OKR perspective. Going back to the questions from our audience, how can AI improve CS and the enterprise value?
How do we leverage AI to improve the value that we deliver? Do we use it?
Porter 56:07
Cool. We use it for conversation. We’re using conversation analytics and note-taking for that in customer calls right now.
I’m trying to use it for data analysis. I haven’t gotten very far yet. Next week, we have a company hackathon.
And one of the things I’m going to be sitting down to do is really trying to map out some better automations. And so I’m hoping I can maybe come out with some more stuff there. But I’ve been left a little flummoxed on this for our field so far because I’m not going to put an AI agent on customers yet.
Support, a whole different ballgame. But for CS, I’m not quite there yet. I see health predictions is the big thing that took…
Health prediction has taken a huge jump forward with the empowering of AI. People have been doing it for the last 10 years with different algorithms, but that has taken a big jump forward. So that’s better in quality there.
I think the key is that none of these things can help you unless you have your data house in order. You have to get your data house in order for any of these tools to help you, whether it’s automation or whether it’s AI, because they all feed off of data and garbage in.
Irina 57:33
Porter, you have one question.
What KPIs and metrics are required for a good CS strategy?
Porter 57:41
I think this is going to be very specific to your business, but you have to define what success means. The key to that is going to be segmentation because it’s very hard to define a criteria for success from a data-driven standpoint that is applicable across your entire customer base. So for us, for instance, we’re looking at a percentage of footprint is essentially what we are.
It’s the number of interviews going through a customer’s applicant tracking system. That doesn’t matter to any of you, but it’s essentially our footprint within a customer. And the way we measure that for one class of customer has to be different than a different class of customer.
So segmenting those customers allows us to define success appropriately for different segments. So a lot of these things first come back to what are your use cases and what are your segments? And for each of those buckets, now you can start defining some useful KPIs, but I believe you’ve got to have KPIs around adoption.
You’ve got to have KPIs around satisfaction. And also you’ve got to have probably not KPIs, but data definitions of stakeholder engagement and like champion management, that kind of stuff. And that’s hard, but is often what I found some of the most important pieces for identifying red flags coming in accounts more so than adoption.
Irina 59:16
I think I suggest that because our time is somehow up and I know that some people mentioned that they have to jump into other meetings and I want to be mindful with your time as well. I think Gianni asked the follow-up questions on the incentives between sales and CS. I think you partially covered Christopher, his answer.
But Gianni, I encourage you to connect with Christopher. I would say offline or LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, Christopher, if you are okay with it, I’m going to pass the question and maybe send a more detailed reply to Gianni.
He wants to know how do you incentives between sales and CS as fair as possible? If you are firing sales people to do CS, how do you keep motivate them to not want to do sales for the commission part? If you have some experience, maybe we can tackle this offline.
And I know that you also had Porter one thing. Maggie, I think if you ask me, I might be wrong, but I think Maggie wants to know the details of the way you implemented the digital strategy, the content connection, and how you rolled it out. I think if you ask me, that’s the program she is pushing.
Porter 1:00:44
Oh, I see. It’s a smorgasbord. It’s a tech stack.
It’s not a single program. It’s a tech stack of multiple things interacting with each other and leveraging the content to deliver it effectively at the right time. It’s not one tool.
Irina 1:01:03
Okay. But what I encourage everyone who registered, please connect on LinkedIn and follow Sara, Porter, and Christopher. Get in touch with them.
I know that they’re very responsive and I know that they will be willing to help and share from their experience. And with that, I think it’s a wrap. Huge thanks to all of you for joining us, for contributing, for your questions, and to Sara, Christopher, and Porter for sharing their expertise.
I want to wish you all a wonderful holiday season filled with rest, joy, and sometimes a recharge because CS people do need it. And don’t forget about as you bring these strategies to life, CUstify can definitely help you make it happen without the Grinch-level effort. And we’ll see you next year.
Thank you all for this wonderful conversation!
