In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, sat down with Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire.
What You’ll Learn:
- How past experiences impacted customer success
- How to focus on delivering value to customers
- How to scale your business with clear systems and processes
- How to adapt a structured playbook on specific goals
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Adapting to Organizational Growth Stages: The structure of a customer success team evolves with the company’s growth. Early-stage companies often rely on generalist roles, while mature organizations differentiate functions like support, onboarding, and account management. Porter highlights the importance of recognizing when to create dedicated roles, such as implementation managers, based on workload and operational needs.
Customer Results Over Customer Sentiment: While customer satisfaction is important, measurable results drive retention and loyalty. Porter advises focusing on delivering value as defined by the customer, not just relying on being “liked.” This approach ensures that the customer recognizes tangible business benefits, making the relationship more sustainable.
Scalability Through Systems and Processes: Investing in scalable technology and tools is crucial for efficiency and growth. Porter advocates for making the right actions easy for teams through well-designed systems, gradual improvements, and automating repetitive tasks. This allows teams to focus on strategic priorities rather than manual, time-consuming processes.
Tailored Playbooks and Goal Alignment: While having a structured playbook for customer success is valuable, Porter stresses the importance of adapting it to the specific goals, context, and needs of the organization. Blindly applying a one-size-fits-all playbook can lead to inefficiencies. Leaders should first align on project objectives and customize their approach to ensure the playbook supports the desired outcomes, avoiding unnecessary complexity or misalignment.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:02
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today’s guest is Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at Bright Hire. Porter, welcome and thanks for joining us today.
Porter 0:19
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Irina 0:22
It’s my pleasure. Your career has been all about building, from founding customer success teams to expanding operations globally. In some cases, if you ask me, this can be a blessing or a curse.
I’m curious, how do you see it? How was it for you?
Porter 0:42
Overall, definitely a blessing. I’ve had a really fun and exciting career that I’m really proud of. I’ve gotten to work with a ton of talented, wonderful teammates all over the world.
I’ve made friends all over the world. But it’s definitely been, it hasn’t always been easy. Especially the expat assignments that I did.
I’m so excited that I, I’m so glad that I did them and I would absolutely do them again, but I would probably do them differently. It did, those were some of the best, but also some of the hardest years of my life and like in my family life and things like that. So there’s a lot of pressures and difficulties, but I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had and I would absolutely do it again.
Blue Ocean strategy
Irina 1:35
I would say you are judging from your experience, you are like a fish, you are like a fish in water when it comes to navigating those new environments. And I’m curious, what is it that pulls you into this blue ocean situations?
Porter 1:51
Yeah, blue oceans are interesting. I hadn’t, I have not set out, like I never intended for my career to focus on startups and particularly blue ocean startups. But it’s kind of turned into that and I really enjoy it.
Blue ocean companies are all about pushing out into kind of the frontier of a new space. And because of that, it involves a lot of new ground. It involves a lot of customer education and involves a lot of customer evangelism.
That’s a term I use a lot when talking about customer champions and stuff. There’s folks who partner with you and work with you. There are customers who are champions that love you.
And then there are evangelists who go out and they make your, they attach their star to your star and they drive that momentum with you and it drives their careers. And they’re out preaching about what you’re, about the change that you’re trying to make in the market or in the world. And those evangelists are so much fun.
It is so much fun to be able to partner with those people who see a vision. Blue ocean companies are all about a vision. It’s not just about what you’re doing today.
The customers who buy into an early series A, series B startup, they’re not just buying the product you have today. They’re buying the vision that you are charting towards and they want to be part of that. And oftentimes one of the benefits of being a big company who buys the product from one of these early startups is you get to have a lot of input in the direction that those companies go.
When I think about my early days at HireVue, some of our big early customers had a profound effect on the direction of our product. And at my current company now, Brighthire, we have some big customers now that again, have a shape and it’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits all of us. And that, so that blue ocean experience of partnering with champions who are just as excited about your vision as you are, that’s pretty magical.
Starting from scratch with a new team or process
Irina 4:14
Now, I’m curious when you are starting something from scratch, and this is where you have a lot of experience and whether it’s a building a team from scratch or a process, what’s the first step for you? How do you approach this part of building? Is it like a playbook for building success?
How do you tackle it?
Porter 4:39
Yeah, so I think it’s, I do have, I do actually have a playbook for customer success, like for customer success functions. It’s actually, I pulled it up in my Evernote this morning to refresh myself on it. But it’s, anyone who has known me for a while will have heard me talk about the pillars of the practice, which is kind of my playbook of the things we, you must put in place in a, and I have found it to be true as I’ve navigated through these different companies that I’ve kind of bounced these ideas off other sales, CS leaders.
And this framework is coming into shape as what feels like a semi-universal playbook for B2B SaaS companies, not HR tech companies, which has been my area, but these are agnostic, but it is probably specific to B2B environments. I don’t know B2C at all. But the pillars of the practice that I like to talk about are customer onboarding, driving adoption, showing value, renewal and growth, and then like the systems process and tools that kind of underlay everything, and the talent within that team.
And so this is just, so I, if listening to those, those probably don’t sound magical to anyone who’s been in customer success for a while. They’re, they’re kind of, they feel like kind of duh, but they are critical that when I sit down and I’m working with a new company, or maybe I’m consulting a company, these are the, these are the lenses that I go through and kind of look at the operations that either need to get built or that are operating today and how are they operating. So I’ve been kind of refining these and testing these out over a couple iterations now, and they, they work really well.
However, the, there’s an important thing I think you have to do whenever you’re starting something new, and that is to not just come in with your playbook and say, here’s my playbook, go. It’s really important to make sure that you’re, you are clear on what the goals of that project are, whether this is a new customer success function, whether this is a, a, you know, a support team, whether this is an NPS program, whether it’s a whole new product support. Getting aligned on what the outcomes are is really important.
We just rolled out a new freemium customer experience at BrightHire, really exciting new, new opportunity for us with, through a partnership. And as we were working out sort of the, the, the experiences and the journey, there were a couple of things where we’d start going through some discussions and we’d realize, wait, wait, wait, wait, that’s a problem we solve for like big, for like full rollout customers. Let’s go back to the goals we agreed on for this experience.
The goals are one, two, three, some very simple things to get them in, get them experiencing the product. We were, we were getting sucked into the weeds of some complexity that wasn’t relevant to these goals. So we got it off the table and refocused on like, what are the goals of this experience?
So whatever step thing, whatever thing you’re walking into, don’t go copy a playbook without first making sure that the goals of that playbook align with the goals of your project. Otherwise you’re, you’re going to get yourself into a big mess of trouble.
Irina 8:21
I reallylike this advice. And speaking of copying the playbook, I often see companies where I often see people who step into new roles and they come up with the playbook and they try to execute it without actually understanding the things that are particular to that industry, to that company, because what worked for company A, it don’t work for company B. And I noticed that for my role as marketing.
So I don’t have a marketing strategy that I can copy paste from one organization to another. And because the CS also means impact growth. Well, another, I would say mistake is trying, I saw is trying to go and ask for growth advices or try to find things externally rather than analyze what the data tells you, what are the things that worked and why.
Combining all the, or connecting the data points that you already have. We prefer to rely on external expertise, hoping always that the answer is outside the organization rather than inside organization. Somehow, I’m not sure why, but we often tend to implement things that work for others rather than looking our own.
Porter 9:55
And I think it’s because on one hand, like it is valuable to learn from the, you know, you want to learn from the mistakes and experience that other companies have gone through in other environments. And I think it’s really easy as a leader who’s, when you do multiple rotations to plug something in that worked before, and sometimes it’s going to work really well, but it might be a perfect fit, but you shouldn’t, I think the key is just don’t assume that it’s a perfect fit. Ask yourself the question first, before you charge off into the weeds.
Framework and steps for customer success
Irina 10:32
I like when you describe the framework and I want to revisit it. So you said that it’s for, it’s for pillars and you mentioned that onboarding, you mentioned adoption, you mentioned proving value along the way and the renewal and the advocacy where it was on the renewal.
Porter 10:54
Yeah. Renewal and growth.
Irina 10:58
Renewal and growth. And you mentioned that, okay, those were, while you were speaking, I was envisioning those, those pillars. And what I meant is the fact that you said, and this in order to have a foundation, it relies on the, I think you mentioned people and technology.
Porter 11:14
Yeah. Yeah. So I actually built a slide of this for, and, but yeah, it is, it’s four pillars.
Irina 11:22
Yeah, exactly.
Porter 11:24
And then two foundation layers of systems processing tools, and then the talent, the people that you’re, that you’re, that you’re, that are part of, part of all this. And so that is the framework. And the, at one point I was playing with, you know, the people and process stuff being other pillars, but it realized that felt wrong because they’re things that are at the, they’re really the core of stuff.
And if those are off of the, they’re, those are inherently meant to support the, the other elements. They’re, they’re meant to support the pillars and that’s really the role that they play. And the pillars fall without those pieces being in, in place and being healthy.
Structuring the CS team
Irina 12:11
I want to tackle the talent part and I want to tackle the systems because while you were describing and I was envisioning, so you need a solid, you need a solid foundation because otherwise everything falls, regardless of what you build, if it doesn’t have a solid foundation, it don’t have an impact. I want to speak about the talent.
How do you structure the CS team to support this?
How do you tweak the structure of the team? While the company goes through different growth stages, do you have a different app depending on the company growth stage?
Porter 13:06
Absolutely. So the, the structure of how you structure a CS team will, from what I, from my experiences, will, will, will evolve based on a couple of factors. And one of the first questions that people get into is like the all-in-one CSM who does everything, they onboard, they manage accounts, they renew accounts, they expand accounts, they do everything.
They are, a CSM in an early stage company is the entire post-sales experience. Sometimes they’re providing support, you know, there’s all these. So I think it’s, I find it’s helpful to, you know, customer success has become associated with a role of a customer success manager.
So I often use the term post-sales because all of these things are intertwined. You have a, you have support needs, you have customer onboarding needs, you have ongoing adoption and account management needs, you have renewal and growth needs. And all of these theoretically could be run by separate individuals.
And at a certain stage of growth and complexity, they might all be run by different individuals that at a very early stage of the company, they tend to be all existing in a single, you know, single person. And then one of the first splits that happens is often support, differentiating support from customer success. That has been always the first thing in my world.
I joined HireVue specifically to build a support structure before we even had customer success. And then my onboarding work turned into the proto versions of professional services and customer success down the road. But that, having a separated support from success function is most notable when you have separated end users from like admins.
Not every SaaS platform does that. There are SaaS platforms that only have a handful of users in the company and they all engage with your CSMs. And it kind of is the line of end user support and admin relationships is non-existent. But my companies have had that dynamic.
So we always have separated end user support. Onboarding is also one of the next functions to almost always separate out. And again, this is a question of scale.
It’s a question of how complex are your onboarding projects? Are they six month, 12 month long ERP system? You know, there are some onboardings that are incredibly complex and deep and take a long time and it demands a specialist function, or it just exists for so long that the role of someone might argue that the role of onboarding and customer success is undifferentiated and it’s just the same job.
In my current case at BrightHire, we have a pretty fast onboarding cycle that runs from anywhere from two weeks on the short end to, you know, three months on the long end. And so we have recently differentiated it. When I got here a year ago, they weren’t differentiated and it was one of the first things we recognized we would need to do.
And we now have a dedicated implementation manager. We went through that same evolution at all of my companies. Every one of them has gone through that evolution at a different time when it became necessary.
And there are pros and cons.
Irina 16:41
Let me interrupt you here because you said that at some point in time, it comes naturally that need of creating a dedicated role. In your case, it was the implementation.
One year and a go, you didn’t have it. Now you have it. I’m curious, what was the trigger?
What happened in BrightHire as an organization that made you think, you know what, now it’s time to create this role?
Porter 17:11
Yeah. So I have an analogy that I like to use. I’ve called spikes and plates.
And it’s the nature of onboarding work versus account management work. So if you imagine the workload of account management is thin and long. It’s a long-term thing and it’s low effort at any given time.
And so you can stack lots of plates on top of each other to create a really good, healthy balance of work. Because it’s a little bit of work all the time scattered throughout a week or a month in a year. Now, onboarding is spiky.
It is intense. It is short-term. So it’s a spike.
It’s a lot of effort for a short period of time. You can set lots of spikes up side-by-side with each other and have a manageable workload capacity still. However, if you have a stack of plates and then spikes sitting on top of that stack of plates, people get overloaded very quickly.
And what happens every time is that because of the urgency and importance of onboarding work, because it is so important and people are right there going, I bought my thing. I want to get going. Invariably, a team member who is responsible for both at a certain point in capacity will start prioritizing onboarding work and letting the account management work slip.
There will come a point where they can’t do everything and they will start prioritizing. And it is the right choice in that moment to prioritize onboarding. And the way you recognize it as time to change is when you’re having good conversations with your team about what balls are you dropping.
I know you’re dropping some balls. I accept that. I talk to my team a lot about juggling glass balls and plastic balls.
And you need to know which balls are glass and which balls are plastic because some days you’re going to need to drop a ball and that’s fine. Drop a plastic ball. I will never have a problem with that.
We’ll talk about it. We understand. So the way we know it’s time to start changing the team is when your team is consistently telling you, I had to choose to drop these balls.
And that was a choice. I did it on purpose. And I go, yeah, that was the right choice.
And they start going, I am in danger of dropping glass balls.
Irina 19:45
Okay.
Porter 19:46
Now you know it’s time.
The wellbeing of the team vs the growth of the business
Irina 19:48
I really like this analogy. And there’s another thing that I like. The fact that dropping a ball usually has a negative impact.
And what you did is instead of blaming the person and focus on why the hell did you actually drop the ball is, okay, now that this happened, how do we turn it into something positive? How can I actually help you not to do this? And I really like this mindset shift toward a different positioning.
It’s a nice thing. I like it. And I want to ask you one thing.
I often wonder, speaking of dropping balls or dropping plastic glasses, I often have the feeling that you either pick the team and the wellbeing of the team, or you either pick the business. How do you balance in between?
Porter 20:57
Yeah. This is actually a thing we talked about a lot when I was at BetterUp. This was a thing we remember what book it came from, but we had some required reading and this came from one of our books.
But it was talking about there absolutely is often a conflict between team and business. And it’s really easy to optimize the team or the subsystem at the expense of the overall organism. And very often optimizing for the organism involves intentionally sub-optimizing the team in order to make the overall system work.
And I think one of the marks of management readiness is the ability to step out of your role on a team in the role of an individual contributor and look at the broader context of the business and understand how your team is fitting into the broader priorities and recognize that sometimes the thing that you selfishly want for your own personal experience in the team is actually not the right answer for the broader business. So one of my team members I got to work with for almost the entirety of my four years at BetterUp, and I really enjoyed working with her, I was kind of preparing her for management.
And one of the things that constantly impressed me was her ability to recognize that. And recognize that, hey, this is a thing that I know we want this, but it’s probably better for the rest of the business if we do this instead. It’s like, yes, that is inconvenient for you, but it helps everything else work better.
And if someone called me for a reference for her today about a management role, that’s what I would say is she has that already. She has that wisdom, that sight, she’s ready. And I had another team member that wanted a promotion, and that lack of readiness was apparent through the interview process.
She didn’t get the promotion, but we gave her that feedback. We worked with her in the course of the next year. We started really developing that broader consciousness of the business.
And a year later, she actually did it. We did end up getting her that management promotion. I was really, really proud of her.
But that was that specific point of understanding the need to step out of optimizing my team and what my team wants, and recognizing the context of the broader business and how we optimize for the success of the business, not for the success of our team. And that is what I think is one of the key roles of good management.
The importance of technology in CS
Irina 23:46
Thanks for the, I would say, the summary. And thanks for painting it so, I would say, clear and straightforward. We’re going to talk about another type of readiness.
But before we jump into this, I want to address a bit the second layer that is also important in your foundation is the technology and the processes. And how do you prioritize the technology part in your case? What’s your take on the technology?
Porter 24:30
I really like systems and tools. I think in my, deep in my heart, I’m an ops guy. I really like a really well-designed CRM or customer success platform is a really beautiful thing.
So the, it’s really important to make for your team, if you want them to do something, you want to make the thing you want them to do the easy thing. You want to make it easy for them to do the right thing. And because when you tell them, this is the thing I want you to do, but that’s the hard thing.
You have a lot of likelihood that they’re going to go off in other directions because people will tend to naturally follow the path of least resistance. So if you can, and this is not, this is hard. This is not an easy thing to do, but if you can recognize, this is the steps I want them to take.
How do I make that the easiest thing to happen through automation, through resources, through, you know, through making it hard to do the wrong thing, then you are helping the team do the, go the right directions. That is, I have definitely not always succeeded in doing that, but I try. So this is, you know, this is stuff like having, you know, good data.
It’s much easier to have a good renewal forecast. If you have a good view for the team of their upcoming renewals that are easy to go through and, and do their updates and categorize. If it’s hard to do their updates, you don’t get many updates and you constantly chase people.
If you make it easy to do, you get more updates and you have a cleaner forecast. It’s remarkable, you know, account health. If you’re setting up an account health scorecard, the more manual inputs that you have to that scorecard, the harder it is to do.
I’m still working in an, in mostly manual account health card, but we’re, we’re working towards how we can make that automated. I loved at a point in our history at BetterUp, we moved from an entirely, well, almost entirely manual scorecard to an almost entirely automated scorecard. It was fantastic.
I loved it. And it was so much, it started, it got so much easy, not just easier, but it got better because it was reliable and up to date. But again, that’s not easy.
And so you can’t expect those things to happen right out of the gate and it can get really overwhelming because it feels like you have to do everything all at once because you have to do it eventually. These are the key, like systems and tools are the key to process and scale, but you can’t do it all at once. So you pick a thing and, you know, so I, I try to improve one thing, you know, at least every quarter, you know, whether it’s how we do our renewals, how we’re doing contact management, how we have our, you know, our dashboards, how we view adoption.
And it just week by week, quarter by quarter gets easier for the team to do the work they’re doing. And next thing you know, two years from now, they’re focusing on different problems or a QBR now takes 30 minutes to prepare instead of three hours to prepare. You know, and those things have a huge impact on what the team can focus on, where they spend their time and the scalability of the business at large.
How the CS team supports the IPO process
Irina 28:16
How do you eat an elephant piece by piece? It’s exactly what you, how, what you said, you take it piece by piece, problem by problem, and you try to prioritize and try to solve based on the biggest impact that you that you have. Because I don’t often have a chance to speak with the CS leaders that went through an IPO process.
And through IPO readiness, let’s call it like, like this, I wanna ask you, and I know that I had a lot more questions on this topic, but I also have to be mindful with the time. I want to ask you, how can a CS team, a CS function support the IPO readiness of the of the company? How do you contribute as a team to this to this process?
Porter 29:21
So the thing that stood out to me the most was first of all, first of all, base level, numbers have to be good. You know, sales owns that customer retention and growth. And if those numbers are off, you’re not going to go public.
That’s just base level or baseline. So yeah, you’ve got it, you’ve got to be performing well. But the actual IPO readiness, the thing that struck me, as I was a regional director during that period was how important it was for us to get clean.
Every piece of your business has to get ready. Be audited and scrutinized, and it might not, but you need to assume that it will. So this involved a lot of making sure that data was available, and it made sure, or it required a lot of cleaning up or ironing out of previous exceptions understandings that might not have been in paper, or weird contracts. So in the year leading up to IPO, for instance, there were contracts that were really funky and outside of our outside of our standards, and we had to, you know, renegotiate those contracts to get them in line with other other practices. Because it would, it would, it would be a problem in an audit or, you know, if there was a situation that called for that, we thought, well, maybe we could do XYZ exception. It’s like, yeah, that’s something we could get away with. Two years ago. We can’t do that now that we need to be we need to be like we need to be following the, the the letter of our contracts now. So, you know, keeping, keeping customers on after, after a contract is expired. For instance, you know that, or various like, just things that you could slip and slide and make exceptions for when you’re when you’re private you you had to be a lot more tight around in your readiness So, and that involved a lot of just discussions with customers about, hey, I understand this is an exception we’ve made for you in the past. I get it that is a thing we did that is not something we can do going forward. Let’s find a solution that we can work with within these parameters. And so sometimes those conversations went well, sometimes they didn’t. It was it was difficult, and then it was also a lot of the team recognizing, and this involves giving the team a lot of context and priority guidance around the business and how things are moving is, you know, things need to be replicable and they need to be consistent. It doesn’t mean we have to be perfect, but it need means we need to be consistent and fair. And there’s a great framework, not not from that time, but one of my, my, my current founders actually gave me one time when I was at we were kicking around an idea, and he’s like to make your decision follow this approach. Assume you had to explain it to the customer. Assume that you have to go write a post about it on LinkedIn, and that you also have to explain it in a board meeting, and if you can kind of find an answer that you feel good defending in all three of those contexts, you have found a right answer. I’m like, that’s I really like that. That’s a really good framework for finding solutions that feel fair, equitable and appropriate for all of your stakeholders.
Irina 32:58
We didn’t cover where I think we covered only 20% of the things that I have prepared for our so we’ll definitely have to do a take two on this. But now I want to ask you if there is one key takeaway about customer success that you want our audience to remember. What would that be?
Porter 33:30
I would say, and this is, this is not my creation, but it’s one of, one of my early mentors, Greg Danes. He’s a CS consultant here in Utah, and I really love his work is that, but I’ve really taken it to heart for the last 10 years. Is cut. It doesn’t matter nearly as much as people think that customers like you sat customer satisfaction really only goes so far. It matters that they’re getting results. Unfortunately, people cancel vendors that they like all the time, but they very rarely cancel vendors who are getting provable, measurable results for their business that makes a difference in how their business operates. That is very hard to cancel, and it’s very rare, but they cancel peak customer, or they cancel vendors that they like all the time. It is not enough to be liked. You need to be like you. Need them to like you to at least at least a degree, otherwise they won’t cooperate with you. But ultimately what matters is they get the results. So focus on results. Don’t focus on whether they like you. It matters. It’s worth measuring. That’s why I’m very cautious about NPS. But what matters is that they get value out of your product, and value. Is defined by the customer, not by you. If you are, if you are delivering a message of value that isn’t in the lens of what they care about, you are wasting your time. So make sure you understand value, in turn, in what the customer values, and focus on that and helping them see that, and that is, that is how you achieve that second pillar, and that might be through QBRs or decks or success planning, or there’s all kinds of ways to do it, but the answer is, make sure they see that value, and if they don’t, you’re in trouble.
Irina 35:37
Thank you so much, Porter for sharing your insights with us today and a big thank you to all our listeners, until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success. Thank you. Bye.
