In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, discussed with Sandra Campo, Head of Customer Success at Froged.
What You’ll Learn:
- The importance of a customer success team
- How to prioritize the important tasks
- Bootstrapped vs venture-backed structures
- How to prioritize value and scalability
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Diverse Skill Set is Essential: Sandra emphasized the “chameleon” nature of customer success, requiring a range of skills—from sales and technical knowledge to project management and communication—to effectively support clients across various stages.
Strategic Shifts from Pre-Growth to Growth: She highlighted the differences between customer success approaches in pre-growth and growth stages. Pre-growth focuses on validating product-market fit and early renewals, while the growth phase prioritizes scaling, revenue expansion, and specialized roles to support these goals.
Adapting to Bootstrapped vs. Venture-Backed Structures: Sandra shared her experiences working in both bootstrapped and venture-backed companies. Bootstrapped firms require lean, retention-focused efforts due to limited resources, while venture-backed companies focus more on scalability and rapid growth with additional resources.
Prioritizing Value and Scalability: In her current role at Froged, Sandra’s team focuses on delivering value tailored to each customer’s needs, ensuring that customer success is both scalable and impactful. Automation is a key component, with high-touch support reserved for enterprise clients while smaller accounts are supported through efficient, low-touch methods.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:01
Welcome to Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. And your host, Irina Cismas, and today’s guest is Sandra Campo, Head of Customer Success at Froged. Sandra, welcome, and thanks for joining us today!
Sandra 0:20
Thank you and thanks for the invitation! It’s a pleasure.
Irina 0:24
You said it yourself, you’ve been lucky to have expertise in sales, in customer success, in account management, in project management, in customer service. I’m curious, why did you focus on customer success in the end? And how did the other roles shape your approach to customer success?
Sandra 0:44
Well, I guess I’ve always worked in customer-related environments and after a few years working for multinationals, I decided I needed a change and I wanted to step into the tech world. So I guess that moving into customer success was just a natural move. And at the time I joined the B2B SaaS company for the first time as the first CSM.
So my experience in strategic account management and similar things was very helpful for the founders of the company because they weren’t doing things around things like account planning or speeding up billing and collection processes, setting up customer operation processes and playbooks. So yeah, that was it.
Moving from multinational companies to B2B SaaS
Irina 1:31
How did you find the transition between multinational companies into B2B SaaS? What was the first thing that struck you when you made the switch?
Sandra 1:41
Well, the resources that you have at hand are so different. So in a multinational you have a great stack of tools, people at your service and in a startup it’s all about hands-on work. You need to think, you need to deliver.
Everything is yourself. You have to put multiple hats at the same time. So the rhythm is also very different.
But it’s way more fun, to be honest, to work in tech.
The skills you need to excel in Customer Success
Irina 2:08
I totally feel I like to laugh now because I also started my career with the pleasure of working. I was blessed to work in multinational companies and I do think that they have their role, at least in the early stages of the career, but then depending on your personality in some cases might not be enough. When I experienced the B2B SaaS environment, it was cowboy style.
So it was like today I was doing if I needed to do a copy, I was doing a copy. If we needed to do operations, we were doing operations. So it’s like whatever you need, I’m here and I can do it because this is the startup life.
It teaches you to be adaptable, to adjust, to change and do whatever it needs to get the job done. Speaking about all these different hats that you wear, I assume that you also need different skills for this. So I have to ask, do you think CS is a chameleon role in terms of skill needed?
Do you require sales skills, technical skills, project management skills, communication and maybe industry expertise all in one to be successful in a customer success role?
Sandra 3:37
Yeah, absolutely. I think customer success, as you said, requires wearing multiple hats at the same time. No day is the same.
You need a full stack of skills to do your job properly. The skills you mentioned are quite accurate. On one side, you need sales skills because your job has a commercial focus—handling renewals, upsells and cross-sells.
You also need tech knowledge. You need to know your product inside out; otherwise, you won’t be able to help your customers succeed with it. You mentioned project management and onboardings, which we handle all the time.
To me, these are like little projects. So we need to be at least small project managers every day, handling those onboardings and the resources around them. Every implementation requires coordination and communication.
Now, moving to communication—this is my favorite skill for many jobs, but especially for CSM. You’re handling relationships with many stakeholders internally and externally in the customer organization.
You need to know what to communicate at the right time in the customer journey to get it right. And last but not least, you need to know the industry as well. It’s always changing.
Your competitors are making moves, your customers’ needs are evolving, and the technology is advancing. You need to stay aware of that too.
Irina 5:20
Of all the skills you mentioned, which do you think can be easily taught, and which ones are harder—where you either have them or you don’t?
Sandra 5:35
I think technology is something you can build by spending time on learning your product and meeting with your product teams. That’s something you can learn, and the same goes for industry expertise.
If you stay up to date with the market, you’ll be fine. I think sales and communication skills are more related to who you are naturally as a person. You can learn and improve, but I think there must be something in you already that helps you step into these kinds of roles.
Irina 6:16
Would you say that sales and communication are your go-to skills whenever you start a recruitment process? Are these skills non-negotiable and need to be there from the very beginning?
Sandra 6:38
Probably, yes—especially communication. I think an interview itself tells you a lot about how a person communicates and how they’ll communicate with your customers. Sales—you can train people on that, but as I said, there must be something within you.
It’s like a little spice that shows, “OK, this person can sell an idea, an opinion, a product, or really anything.”
KPIs and objectives in different stages of business development
Irina 7:09
I think you need that differentiator to be successful. You’re right; in CS, it might be sales.
Even if it’s not traditional sales, in the end, they are the advocates of the product. They’re selling the product’s value, and in some instances, they’re selling the product or the solution itself.
They support the customer all the way, and it’s a longer journey, I would say, because sales is very focused on securing and getting the sale and then moving on to the next one. In the case of CS, you’re sticking with the client, hopefully, for a longer period of time. So you better find a way to get along.
Speaking about the business side, I know you have experience on both sides. So I’d like to take advantage of this and talk about pre-growth and growth company phases. You know, same, same but different.
Let’s discuss the differences and similarities in terms of objectives, KPIs, and CS team needs in each phase, as some of our audience members are either in pre-growth or growth phases, and I’m not sure if the same principles apply.
Sandra 8:51
Okay, I’ll try not to speak too much because this is a big topic. I’ll go over the differences first. In terms of objectives, if you’re in a company that’s in the pre-growth phase, you’re looking to validate your product-market fit and find your first customers who can help you validate that.
Whereas in a growth-phase company, you already know your product is working well, so you’re focused on scaling and expanding your customer base and revenue. In terms of KPIs, in pre-growth, you’re likely looking at basic KPIs to gauge sales performance, such as conversion rates, cash flow, runway, and achieving your first renewals for a decent renewal rate. In a growth phase, where the focus is on growth and expansion, you’re looking closer at MRR and NRR—super important metrics in SaaS—as well as profit margins.
Your investors and C-suite will also want to monitor upsell and cross-sell rates, and churn, which becomes an all-star metric. You also need to make sure your sales cycles and customer operations processes are as profitable as possible.
As for team needs, in a pre-growth phase, you probably need generalists—people who are hardworking, hands-on, able to wear multiple hats, and work without much direction because there’s a lot of experimentation.
You’re likely changing priorities every day, seeing what works, what doesn’t, and moving forward from there. In a growth phase, you already have a strategy in place. You know what’s working, so your focus is on growing and scaling. You need more specialized people, clear functions, defined roles, and specific skills.
I also think you need coachable people—those who can learn continuously and follow the strategy to meet your goals. In the beginning, people are more autonomous, while in a growth phase, they should be open to guidance from leadership and strategy.
Bootstrapped SaaS companies vs venture-backed
Irina 11:33
Now I want to stay focused on the team and segment it differently. So, we have pre-growth and growth. Now, I want to discuss the right setup for a CS team in a bootstrapped company versus a venture-backed one, since pre-growth companies can be venture-backed from the start.
So, what’s the difference between bootstrapped SaaS companies and venture-backed ones when it comes to building the right CS team?
Sandra 12:09
Yeah, in essence, it looks the same, but it’s not. I’ve worked with both types, and in a bootstrapped company, things require more effort. Retention, efficiency, and profitability become very important.
The team must work in a lean way and wear multiple hats. In a bootstrapped company, it’s crucial to keep every customer and every dollar because it probably took longer and more effort to gain those than in a venture-backed company, where you have more funding. With more money, certain things can be easier.
There are other challenges when you have funding, but at least you have the resources. In a venture-backed company, your CS team will likely have more advanced tools to achieve goals, which will always be more focused on scalability, growth, and revenue expansion. Things have to move quickly, so people must be highly focused and have the right resources to do it.
Irina 13:29
What would you say, or at least in your case, what was it harder to work for bootstrapped companies or for venture-backed ones?
Sandra 13:40
I don’t know if I can choose. Both. Both have their challenges. As I said, in a bootstrapped company every customer and every dollar is precious.
So you don’t want to hear that someone is churning. That is always super bad news. And in a venture-backed company, you have to report on where you are spending the money, especially if you’ve been hiring a larger team and subscribing to advanced tools that are expensive.
You need to make sure you are delivering on results. Otherwise, investors are not going to be happy. So I don’t know.
I wouldn’t be able to choose what is more challenging because both have their challenges clearly.
Irina 14:27
In my case, I always felt that venture-backed, even if it feels like it’s more easier, as you mentioned, it’s actually not. The pressure you can’t use as an excuse. I didn’t scale because I didn’t have the money.
But then having the money and burning it, you can easily end up in a situation where you burn the money and you didn’t scale. And it’s a more difficult conversation rather than okay, I didn’t rather than in a bootstrapped company. So I always felt like having the money, it’s not actually a bless, but it’s more like a curse because you have the pressure.
Spend it, spend it, spend it. And then, okay, now that I’ve spent it, okay, why didn’t it provide the results that we were expecting? And I think in some cases, it’s hard to convince that it’s not always okay, I invested 10x and I got in return 10x.
The cost went 10x and the revenue is also 10x. It’s not a line projection. And usually, okay, when you scale, it’s also a lot of garbage in.
So you have to balance this part. So in my case, it was actually a curse to work for venture-backed companies. But that’s my personal thing.
And yeah, you’re right. It has their benefits, their pro and con, and there’s no perfect setup or ideal scenario. But actually, this is the part which takes us out of the comfort zone and help us grow also as individuals and as professionals.
Sandra 16:28
Yeah, that’s why we are in this world in the first place, because we like those things.
Driving value
Irina 16:34
Exactly. Let’s go into a more practical discussion. And I’m curious, you are now working at Froged, you are in the growth phase, right?
Okay, what are your current objectives? What keeps you up at night?
Sandra 16:55
Okay, well, because the job is very demanding, I try not to let anything keep me up at night. I focus on prioritizing, being smart about the work every day, and staying productive. But if I have to name one main focus for myself and my team, it would be driving value to our customers.
If we do this right, the rest of the CS KPIs and objectives will follow naturally—renewals, account growth, customer satisfaction metrics, product feedback, and so on. So yes, driving value is our norm, our metric.
Irina 17:37
And since you’ve been with the company for almost three years, was this the focus from the very beginning? Did those objectives evolve over time? Three years ago, was it still about driving value, or was it driving value with a specific focus?
Sandra 17:59
Well, Froged is still a relatively young company. It was born in 2019, 2020. As you said, almost three years ago.
It’s always been about, as I was saying, delivering value to our customers and trying to do it in a scalable and sustainable way. That’s always been the priority of the business and the function. But I guess, because our product which is an omnichannel communications platform has been evolving a lot in the last couple of years.
The way in which we deliver that value has also changed. So before we used to target more mid-market companies. And now we’re focusing more on expanding into the enterprise sector.
Because that’s where our broad solution now covers what people need really well. So it has changed not the objective itself, but how we deliver it. There’s just small tweaks to it.
But it’s always going to be value.
Irina 19:12
And you mentioned value as your North Star metric. How did you split? What does value mean for you and also for the board, for the top management at Froged?
Sandra 19:28
Value means whatever the customer needs. So, value for customer A may mean one thing, while for customer B, it may be different. It’s our job to figure that out first.
We need to ensure our product matches that definition of value. As I said, if we do this well, it means our customers will renew, which is important for my team and top management. Those who are successful and positioned to grow will spend more with us because we’re doing something right, and they need more of it.
And if we’re doing extremely well, they’ll recommend us, speak positively about Froged, and bring in more customers. That’s where we focus, and that’s what management values.
It’s not only about serving these customers; it’s about our brand reputation out there. So, serving the world, let’s say.
Irina 20:28
So it’s about renewals, upsells and advocates, and referrals from existing customers.
Sandra 20:36
Yeah, pretty much it.
Balancing strategic initiatives and hands-on involvement
Irina 20:38
How do you balance the hands-on involvement with strategic initiatives and how do you approach this balance?
Sandra 20:47
This is probably one of the hardest parts of our job because no day is the same with customers, so you never know what you’re going to encounter. My team and I try to block a few hours every week.
We stay off chat, email, and other distractions to make sure we have time for strategizing and brainstorming, despite the hands-on work. The hands-on tasks fill our daily agendas, and most of the time, we can’t skip them because it’s our job. We can’t be picky about it, especially since we work in a startup, so we have to do it all.
But I think the key to everything is prioritizing. For the hands-on work, if it’s revenue-related or tied to customer satisfaction, then we go straight to it. If it’s something less important or urgent, can we throw it out?
Can we delegate it? So, yeah, it’s a question of prioritizing.
Scaling with the right tech stack
Irina 21:58
And in the process of prioritization, what’s the role of technology? How does it help you basically scale your CS efforts and run everything smoothly?
Sandra 22:13
Well, at Froged we are technology so we embrace it, no? If not, we’d be lying to ourselves. So technology is for all those things that are more manual, more time-consuming, so everything around repetitive tasks or boring processes, things that are constantly coming to our table.
We have to work on automating those or improving those and smoothing those. So that’s where technology comes in. We use our own platform to work with our customers and we also have other customer success tools and platforms (like Custify) to help us with that.
And that way we liberate time for our team so they can focus on where humans are more valuable, where human skills are needed, which is communication, building relationships, creating a brand reputation and things like that.
Structuring the customer success team
Irina 23:08
And because the team is very important, how did you structure it? What roles do you currently have on the team, and how do they align with the customer journey? Are they aligned with the customer journey?
How did you configure it?
Sandra 23:25
We are still a small team and I’ll tell you why. So we have two CSMs and myself leading the function and the reason why Froged has not been growing the CS team at the same pace as the company has been growing is because we have focused from the beginning on building something scalable and sustainable. Our lead direction has always been, OK, we have to build materials, customer location, stuff, processes so we can scale, so we don’t need a CSM per X number of new customers that we have.
We are a technology company, we sell technology so we want to make sure that’s on top of our minds to help grow the business. We’re small but we do a lot of things.
Irina 24:20
Can you go into a bit more detail? What are the things you’ve managed to automate? And now I’m curious—when did you make your first hire, and what happened in the organization that led you to decide, “OK, these are the things we can’t automate anymore”?
Sandra 24:46
So the two CSMs that we have in the team came around one year ago and we made that decision because we onboarded a very large enterprise customer. So we wanted to ensure we had a larger team to make sure they were properly served but also we were learning from that experience so we could replicate that afterwards with new enterprise customers. So that’s probably the reason that took us there because with larger customers also you need more people involved with stakeholders and building relationships.
So you still need human beings there. And we had already done all the efforts on the other stuff like trying to build materials, you know, videos, workflows within our tool which are automatic and tell the user what to do when they onboard a platform. Yeah, that’s the story.
Irina 25:49
The driver was the enterprise view on things. Would you say that your CS approach is a hybrid so it’s low-touch and high-touch and the low-touch can easily be served through a lot of automation, through playbooks, through a combination of email. So that’s something that you can definitely automate at some point but on the enterprise side of things you need a different approach.
Sandra 26:23
Yeah, you do. I guess we try to focus at the beginning of the journey. So make sure that during the implementation and the onboarding, we work very heavily to learn everything we need to learn about what the customer needs and how our technology is going to help them achieve that and also the resources we need to build for them because even though they are enterprise and they have high priority in terms of attention and they’re going to be demanding and they want to be autonomous as well so you still need to build resources so that relationship is scalable too.
Stepping into enterprise doesn’t mean we’re not going to continue working on the scalability because that’s going to be key forever for us.
Collaboration between different departments
Irina 27:21
I know that you also have experience with support. Do you also have a support organization currently and how does support, CS and sales work? What’s the dynamic between the triangle, between the three?
Sandra 27:40
Okay, so CS handles a small part of support because we are the first phase the customer sees, and we escalate more technical issues to other support tiers, like our tech or product team. The way we work with our sales team is that we know about every open opportunity. We discuss these in our company meetings so the customer success team is aware of potential customers before they come on board.
There must be smooth communication between CS and sales so we can also help close sales faster. Since we know our product very well, if there are specific requirements, we might step in and suggest, “Hey, recommend this,” or offer to help with a more technical demo and things like that.
Irina 28:42
Okay.
Sandra 28:42
I guess we’re at the center of everything within the company and in between the company and the customer so it’s a key function definitely.
Irina 28:52
You are very lucky because, in companies where CS is at the center of everything, you don’t have to do the heavy internal selling or constantly prove yourself. I think you have the benefit of the doubt, so you don’t start with “prove to me that you’re needed.” It’s given, and you just have to meet the expectations.
Since I want to be mindful of time, and we need to wrap things up, I want to ask you: If there is one key takeaway about CS that you would like our audience to remember from this conversation, what would it be?
Sandra 29:44
Okay. I guess that would be if you can create memorable customer experiences do so because people never forget how you make them feel. Humans are all about emotions. I know, we sell technology, but we sell to human beings. So, if you are able to create positive emotions during that process, you are going to encourage your customers to grow with you, stay loyal to you and to actively recommend you. Creating memorable experiences.
Irina 30:26
Thank you so much, Sandra, for sharing your insights with us today! A big thank you to all of our listeners. Until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success.
