In this webinar, Irina Cismas, Marketing Lead at Custify, sat down with Angeline Gavino, CS Coach at CS RevSpeak, and Neha Singh, Principal CSM at Adobe, to explore a crucial topic: navigating tough times in Customer Success when standard playbooks fall short.
Together, they discuss how CS leaders can effectively prioritize amidst resource constraints, strategically leverage data to inform difficult decisions, and build resilient teams capable of thriving even under pressure.
Summary points:
In this session, we explored how Customer Success teams can navigate resource limitations, align strategies with business objectives, and build resilience in tough times.
Key takeaways include:
- Navigating Resource Constraints Strategically: CS teams face increasing pressure with fewer resources. Strategic prioritization and clear communication of value help balance workloads while driving customer retention and satisfaction.
- Effective Customer Segmentation: Reassessing customer segmentation and engagement models ensures teams focus resources effectively, providing appropriate levels of service to maximize impact.
- Leveraging Data-Driven Insights: Utilizing data and analytics helps identify areas of inefficiency, forecast churn risks, and pinpoint opportunities for targeted growth.
- Harnessing AI and Automation: Implementing AI and automation tools can streamline routine tasks, enhance customer education, and empower CSMs to focus on high-impact strategic activities.
- Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Goals: Shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive, strategic initiatives enables sustained growth, improved customer relationships, and long-term business success.
- Cultivating a Resilient Team Culture: Building a culture of transparency, trust, and sustainable workload management is critical for maintaining team morale and preventing burnout during challenging periods.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:02
Hello everyone, welcome. I’m super excited to have you all here today. I’m Irina Cismas, the marketing at Custify and I’ll be your host for this session.
Let me ask you this, what happens when you’ve done everything right and it still isn’t enough? And I mean, you follow the best practices, you’ve pushed for retention, you’ve stretched your team to the limit, but what if the problem isn’t you? What if the usual CS playbook just doesn’t work anymore?
And that’s exactly why I wanted to have this conversation. We all know the theory, now let’s talk about when the theory doesn’t apply. But before we dive in, I want to acknowledge that one of our planned speakers, Raman Bindra, is unable to join us today due to a personal emergency and I want to wish him and his family all the best.
But that being said, I do have two incredible speakers with us. I’m talking about Angeline Gavino, CS coach at RevSpeak,and Neha Singh, principal CSM at Adobe. Angeline and Neha, welcome, and thanks for taking the time to speak with us today.
Angeline 1:24
Yeah, thank you so much for having us. I think this is a super important topic in CS, so we’re excited to be having this conversation.
Cutting back but delivering the same results
Irina 1:32
And for the next hour, both of you will be under the microscope and this is the chance of the audience who is watching us live to ask the real questions, the ones that we don’t always talk about openly. So don’t be shy and ask the questions that you would want both Angeline and Neha to answer to you. And because I know tough times demand a smarter solution, it’s worth mentioning how we at Custify help CS teams do more with less and we try to help teams prioritize customers who matter most, automate low-value tasks, and focus efforts where they truly make an impact.
And in short, we’re trying to give CS leaders a tool to work smarter, not just harder. A few housekeeping items. This event is being recorded and you will receive a copy afterwards.
We really value your participation, so feel free to ask all the questions using either the question tab or chat function. I’ll monitor it and we’ll try to answer them throughout the session or during the Q&A at the end. And now let’s get into it.
We hear it all the time, it’s do more with less, but at some point there’s just nothing left to cut. CS teams are expected to drive retention, expansion, renewals, yet resources keep shrinking. So how do you even begin prioritizing when everything feels like a priority?
And I want to start with you, Neha, by asking you, where do usually the CS team go wrong when making the CS cuts? Because they are constantly forced to cut back while delivering the same results.
Neha 3:27
Yeah, I think that’s a hot topic. Everybody has gone through cost-cutting experiences and there are a few things where there is a common trend of seeing these mistakes happening again and again. I think the number one mistake is the mindset that customer success is dispensable.
It’s a cost center. So if we talk about a subscription-based business, then the profits are going to come only after the client is acquired and after they stay with you for a while. So retention is important.
Even if it is not a subscription-based business, having repeat customers is more important for your business because they cost you less in acquisition. So this mindset itself is extremely flawed and that is something that again and again I see organizations adopted while cost-cutting. The second mistake I find them making is the assumption that cost-cutting is going to save the day.
Now, only cost-cutting cannot save the day. You have to have a growth strategy. Even in difficult times, if you’re cost-cutting and you’re releasing funds, you have to have a strategy of where those funds are going to go.
It doesn’t mean that you cut costs and do things the way they were and somehow magically you’re going to have the tides turned. So that’s another mistake I see where there is absolutely no recalibration happening, which is very related to the next mistake that is people completely ignore data and metrics. So they go ahead looking at their Excel sheets and saying, okay, let’s remove this particular line item and so many dollars in savings.
But can you look at your customer success dashboard, can you look at a customer dashboard, whatever it is, if not just customer success, can you bring in the marketing, sales, customer success data together and look at some insights where you see growth opportunity with minimal investment. Or sometimes there is no investment needed, but if you just change the way or you incrementally improve few processes, there can be a huge improvement in the end result. But that can come only when you’re looking at things in a holistic way and not just looking at data, but really looking at insights out of the data.
And there are just so many, so I’m going to stop here. And last but not the least is we just overwork the remaining teams. Whatever teams that remain, they just go in this hyper firefighting mode because nobody bothered to recalibrate their work, nobody bothered to prioritize things, nobody bothered to manage expectations now because things are going to go different.
So in my mind, if you can even address these problems and just think about it, then cost cutting can actually have the impact that you want on your business.
Irina 6:34
Which one do you think it’s the ones that it’s first one that it’s cut by a CS leader and it shouldn’t be?
Neha 6:50
It’s very difficult to answer it because I’ve seen different leaders looking at different subheads. So it’s very difficult for me to just say that, oh, you know what, mostly leaders think that a launch advisory is not important and the CS can do it. Or maybe, you know, something like support and CS can be plugged together.
So why don’t we remove people from both sides of the teams and so on. So it’s for me very difficult because usually I haven’t personally in my experience seen leaders say this particular function of customer success is not important. They really look at the whole thing and then they’re like, OK, maybe the middle management is no longer needed.
You know, that’s one line of Excel. Remove this layer of managers altogether. But then does your junior manager have that experience or do your executives have the time to guide the managers who are left?
So that’s a question that nobody thinks about before just removing that line in the Excel sheet.
Irina 7:54
Angeline, what’s your take on this? I know that you are also working with different CS teams, different setups, and different maturity levels. What is the line that you usually see cut without further negotiation?
Angeline 8:13
Well, you’ll be surprised. You’d think that this often happens in early-stage startups where, you know, you have a limited budget. But I really do think that cutting the budget on customer success is a universal thing, however mature your organizations are.
And it goes back to what Neha was saying that, you know, they think of they don’t realize the ROI of customer success. They don’t realize the value of customer success. And I honestly believe, especially when I look, I work a lot with startups.
I think this is my fourth startup now building and scaling CS. And in early stages, it’s typically coming from that legacy investment mindset, because, at the beginning, when you’re starting your company or you’re creating a startup, naturally, a lot of the initial budget goes to sales and marketing because you don’t have customers yet. It’s about finding customers, finding market fit, and so on and growing that base.
But at some point, right, as Neha was saying, too, the revenue of your organization will come mostly from your customers as you grow your ARR. And I think typically, this is around like the 30k mark, or 30 million mark, where you see that more of your revenue comes from your existing customers. But we’re still stuck on that legacy investment, where we put all our budget on sales and marketing, because that was how it was working before.
And so I really think that’s also one of the difficulties that we have. And as CS leaders, we need to be able to showcase the value. And sometimes like we really need to sell the value of CS even to hire more people.
And going by your question, I think it what’s being cut depends sometimes you cut to the headcount, or sometimes you may have to cut the budget on tooling, on enablement, like non-headcount resources that you don’t realize are also as important.
The business impact of scaling back your CS team
Irina 10:12
I want to deep dive because I recently had this conversation with one of CS leaders who told me, you know what, it is hard to prove with data, what is the business impact. If I am forced to scale down the team with one member, I would have assumed that it’s a simple funnel, as I do in my marketing activities. But the person told me, no, it’s actually hard, because it always is. It depends.
So now I’m curious, is it like simple straightforward math? Dear CEO, if I have a team of five, and you tell me that I have to fire one, okay, that’s the impact and you will gonna lose, I don’t know, 20k in business. What’s your take on this?
Angeline 11:10
That’s a very good question. You know, I feel like I agree with you in some ways, it’s not like an apples-to-apples comparison, right? Because the post-initial sale journey is very long.
It’s well, once a subscription, if you have an annual subscription is one year, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong in the middle, that would lead to the the impact being felt at the time of let’s say, a customer renewal, right? Because we all know churn in itself is a lagging indicator. When churn happens, well, when churn is about to happen, it’s too late, we need to understand the whole funnel to see if whatever we’re removing, what’s the impact and, and oftentimes, it could be tied to ARR, right?
Because each of your CSM will carry a portfolio of customers. If you take out this CSM, what does that mean for their existing portfolio? So you have, it depends from case to case, but oftentimes you go back to well, what’s going to happen to this X amount of customers that used to be handled by that CSM?
Recalibration post cost-cutting
Irina 12:27
I want to, there are some questions already, and I want to ask them because it’s in the context of what you mentioned, Neha. So I think that’s one for you. I’m going to try to read it.
Neha talked about inspecting data plus insights and approaching the recalibration post-cost cutting strategically. Can we double-click into this with an example?
Neha 12:57
So to give you an example, let’s say, and I’ll talk about a couple of years back when I was seeing that my team was shrinking. The first thing that happened was a very reactive, you know, reflex thing that, okay, fine. So many people are going, let’s just re-divide all the customers equally amongst whoever is there, and let’s get on with however we were.
Thankfully, I had leaders who said, you really have to think through this. So let’s say when you have just a re, just a redistribution of your clients, what is the basis of that redistribution? Who is the CSM who’s going to get more clients?
Or if you’re doing equal number of clients, what is the maturity of the team that is left? What is the skill level of the team that is left? If you look at the clients that are being left unattended by the CSMs that are no longer with you, what is, yes, for us from an organization point of view, we are going to look at the ARR, we are going to look at the lifetime value, but think of it in terms of what is it that the customer needs to be successful and how are you going to provide for that in the absence of these sources that you had. That led me to look into the data. What were the features they were really using?
What were the kind of problems they were really raising with support? What were the conversations that were happening on year-on-year renewals? What were the key things that were being discussed in the mutual success plan?
More importantly, we had to dive down into the revenue data that, okay, not every customer is equal. Some of the customers with minimal effort, they were giving us so much in return, and that’s not only about revenues. We had beautiful partnerships with them.
We had know-how exchanges. We had a cultural fit. We were working beautifully.
On the other hand, there were other set of customers that really needed that kind of focus where we couldn’t say, hey, you fall under a certain ARR, so now we are going to put you on autopilot. So those are the kind of things that you can’t decipher until or unless you get into the trenches, look at your data, look at your segmentation, figure out the maturity of your CSM team, whatever is left, look at their capabilities, and then you have to recalibrate it. So, of course, we had to, we didn’t do it well right in the beginning.
We had to do our share of experiments. We had to kind of shift accounts, you know, not once but probably twice, not the best experience, but it worked only because we decided to get into the details, get insights out of our data, and not do things the way they were being done before. I hope that answers the question.
Angeline 16:05
I want to add a little bit to that if you don’t mind. I want to double down on what Neha said. Every time I have, this is one thing I always review.
I always review our segmentation and our engagement models, which is what doubled, like I said, kind of doubling down on what Neha said there. Every time we need to cut people, or maybe we don’t cut people, right? We maintain the same number of CSM, but sales have closed more customers.
So your customer is scaling, but your CSM is not. And the reality is, in customer success, scaling doesn’t mean adding more headcount. So even without a budget cut, we know that at some point, you don’t keep adding CSM as you keep adding customers.
And so every time I always revisit a segmentation, understand which threshold we need to move. Because we don’t treat our customers the same way. We can be high touch across the board.
Understand which threshold of your customer can be shifted to scaled or digital engagement, right, without compromising the value, and that’s why you need to look at your data. And then you readjust your remaining people to, and line them up or map them to the engagement model, depending on the segmentation thing that’s, and segmentation and engagement models. Like I said, whether or not there is cost cutting, you actually should be reviewing that probably on an annual basis.
Because, for example, our segmentation right now, it’s based on ARR. And at some point, that ARR threshold increases, because also your customers become bigger. And so you can’t maintain that same segmentation that you have when you are 10 million versus when you are at 100 million ARR.
How often to revisit the segmentation and engagement model
Irina 18:00
How often do you revisit the segmentation and the engagement model? Is it something that you do time-based, or is it something that it’s event-triggered? How do you handle this?
Angeline 18:14
Event triggered if I need more customers and I don’t get my jet. The event is cost-cutting, every year we plan for the following year, right? And so typically, when I’m doing my planning for our strategy for the next fiscal year calendar year, I look at do I need to readjust the segmentation models?
Does it still make sense for our scale right now? And for the number of customers that are coming in?
Using AI to scale CS efforts
Irina 18:46
I want to address one question from Jonathan because I think it makes sense in the context of the discussion. And he is asking, how do you effectively use AI to scale CS efforts when head count is frozen budgets are shrinking, and maybe even layoffs are in motion? So let’s give some examples of using AI effectively to overcome this challenge.
Angelina, you want to continue the discussion, and then I’m going to pass the question to Neha.
Angeline 19:21
Yeah, I feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface of the applications of AI and customer success. I alluded earlier, right? What, when you re-segment your customer, what can you push to scale in digital CS engagement?
I think there are a lot of applications of AI in creating scaled engagements and automating engagements. So definitely using AI to create relevant content, but then I know that there are AI now that analyzes your churn signals, all your data and churn out or push out like those signals. Based on those signals, you are going to be able to create, and use generative AI to create the content for them.
That’s one thing that you can leverage AI for customer engagement. Another one is for making your CSMs more efficient at what they’re doing, and trying to understand which of the things that they usually do on a repeated basis that you can automate, right? Can you arm your CSM with data at the right time, which, again, that kind of AI that surface those signals will help the CSMs understand which accounts they need to focus on.
I personally have been looking at AI tools this year, it’s key to scaling, but then also, even more so in a situation where you don’t have all the budget in the world.
Neha 20:53
Yeah. I think those are fantastic points from Angeline. I couldn’t have agreed more.
Some very important ways I look at AI are both in terms of back-end and front-end, where let’s say you’re looking at the generative AI that we experience in nowadays, but even if you look at the ways AI was being used before, and not just in CS, but in other disciplines, and we can borrow it so beautifully. So we have had predictive analysis for the longest time. It’s not something new.
It’s only a matter of time before most of the tech companies can make it a little more easy, but also more accurate for us to start using them. And they are, there are just unlimited ways of predicting so many things, which would be mind-boggling to do manually. The second thing would be, of course, automation, like Angeline already spoke about.
And now with AI, that automation can become so much more intelligent. It can learn on its own. You don’t have to feed things into it.
And it can just be a smarter version of something that’s learning itself, of course, with guardrails and all the caution that we have been advised about. More importantly, I see some very practical examples of AI being adopted. And of course, there’s room for it being polished further and to be refined, but custom education is such a beautiful use case for AI.
Be it where you have a certain segment of customers and can AI be trained on a very specific closed data where it becomes smart enough to understand what is relevant for them. Can it aid in course creation? Can it aid in analyzing the results?
Can it aid in giving you ideas of how well the course has been internalized? Can it create automated quizzes and so on? So once you have that, then you can just implement it in a customer success scenario where you are training your clients in a way that’s impacting their success, that’s impacting your business outcomes and so on.
So these are some practical examples that I could think of.
How to regain control as an overwhelmed CSM
Irina 23:27
Those are awesome. And to be honest, I never thought about customer education and the use case. I’m also thinking on the productivity part of AI, on how can I get more practical, but I never thought about the customer education part.
Angeline, I want to ask you, when a CS leader is completely overwhelmed, what’s the first thing that they should do to regain control? Since we’ve been speaking about navigating difficult moments.
Angeline 24:03
Yeah, that’s a great question. Really, the first step is just to pause and zoom out and look at the whole picture. Like you said earlier, when everything is high priority, then there’s really no high priority.
And as leaders, we need to be ruthless about clarity. And so we need to understand what actually moves the needle for our business. And we need to anchor it to our customer success charter in our organization, our core levers.
And nowadays, for customer success, this means they’re in charge of retention, value realization, but then also revenue growth, right? We’re seeing more and more expansion being an ownership, a core ownership or responsibility of CS. So we need to be able to map where your team’s time is going.
So what I like to do is do a time-in-action exercise. I want to understand, well, what are the activities that you typically do? And that goes beyond what they do for the customers, time they spend on internal meetings, time they spend on firefighting and so on, and then understand how much do they spend time on these.
And then I recommend you do impact versus effort analysis or matrix. So think about a grid with two axes, right? One axis is impact.
The other axis is effort. You map your team’s activities into each of the quadrants. And then you understand, like, what are the high-impact but low-effort wins that you can double down on?
But then on the other side, what are the high-effort but low-impact tasks that you need to stop doing or you need to delegate or you need to automate or maybe deprioritize? So I think, like, it’s about zoning out, understanding what actually provides value, and prioritizing those, basically.
Impact vs effort: How to establish what’s important and low-effort
Irina 26:03
You know what? I’m curious, because I’m also familiar with both the exercises that you mentioned. And I have two follow-up questions.
When you do the scoring in terms of impact versus effort, is it only based on, I wouldn’t say feeling, but do you also have quantitative data to pick up the decision? Or is it just a team discussion? And okay, this is a three, this is a five, or on a scale from one to five, you give a score.
How is it? How do you try to make it up or to be as realistic as possible?
Angeline 26:41
Yeah, the scoring part, the best-case scenario is you’re using data. And typically, I try to look at our churn reasons, right, to understand where churn, what is the number one cause of churn. And in that scenario, we understand, okay, these are the activities that we absolutely need to do, because this is, you know, causing churn.
But the reality is, I think most CS organizations also don’t have enough data. And so don’t be bogged down by not having data, you can still do this exercise. And it can be just like a collaborative discussion or a workshop with your team to understand, hey, where do we feel like we’re getting value?
And the truth is, I think at a high level, most of us in CS know how onboarding is important, right? For example, how value realization is important. And then I guess, you know, just map out what are those activities that are tied to all of those lifecycle stages, if you may.
Reducing costs by firing customers
Irina 27:42
We started the discussion about cutting costs, about the impact on the team. But now I want to provide another perspective. So I want to ask you what about reducing the costs by firing customers?
Because somehow, not everyone will renew. So who do we fire? And I’ll pass this question to you, Neha, how do we decide which customers to fight for?
And which ones to let go?
Neha 28:21
Sure. So that’s one of the most difficult decision anybody has to make. And I don’t wish anyone who has to make this, I don’t wish this on anyone.
But to give a principle to think about it would be really keep the customers that are aligned with you and keep the customers that are not aligned with you and there are different layers to it. What do I mean by misaligned customers? So when we talk about bad fit or misaligned customers, there are two myths.
One is that a demanding customer is a bad fit customer. That’s not true. In fact, demanding customers can actually get you out of your comfort zone, help you create a product that you couldn’t think of help you add value to the industry in in ways that you couldn’t imagine.
So don’t fire a customer simply because it is a demanding customer. The second myth is that it’s okay to fire low ACV customers. It’s okay to just look at it as a blanket and let them go.
Again, that’s that’s a mistake because you’re not looking at the customer in a in a holistic way. You don’t know what potential they have. You don’t know how much value both of you put together can add to the industry, to the end customer and to each other.
So when you look at misaligned customers where you think that we would be better off without it, I think there are a few criteria. One is look at the customers where you know that there’s no product fit. Your product cannot solve their problem or service for that matter cannot solve their problem.
So no matter how hard you work with this customer you’re not adding value to him or her. The other thing would be what is the success potential of that customer. Some customers on their own they would be fine but we are looking at success potential in a certain context, in the context of the services or the product that you offer.
Now sometimes you need a certain technical prowess, you need certain functionalities, you need certain strategic expertise so that they can make the best use of your offerings and then grow. But if they are not at that stage no matter how hard you work you can’t grow with them and you can’t grow them either. So it’s best to part ways and let them have a partner that can add value to them and their where they are.
And then of course you’ve got to look at what comes from the growth potential is your partnership potential. So that is beyond just growth and just business. You really want to be partners, you want to see are there are things that resonate with each other?
Is there know-how that you can exchange? Is there a partnership where there is an aligned vision? So you might look at how where the industry is going in a similar way and what needs to be done.
And there’s so many things you can do together without the friction of dragging one one party or the other one in a direction they don’t want to go. And finally there’s this cultural alignment which I think most of the people ignore because we are running after dollars, we have we are in survival mode, but cultural alignment is so important. Just imagine if you’re a company that is making data-driven fast decisions and getting people on board versus a client that believes in census-centric decision making which would take six months to get everybody to sign on that proposal.
So not that these partnerships don’t work, sometimes it’s important that you make them work, it’s the job of a leader to make sure these things happen, but when you are triaging you want to look at these factors and then see whom you want to part ways with.
How to handle customers requests that can’t be implemented
Irina 32:33
There’s one question in the again in context and I’m going to address it now. When a customer requests a feature and threatens to cancel, how should we handle it when as a CS head we can advocate for it but have limited control due to the product roadmap and budget constraints? So how do you balance customer satisfaction with business priorities in such cases?
And then I’m addressing the same question to Angeline.
Neha 33:07
I think that’s a reality every business lives with and everyone has a different take but I would say the answer to this question is no different from looking at the principle that I just mentioned. How far can this client go with you and where does the feature request fit into your product roadmap? Does it enhance it?
Let’s look at the very basics, keeping aside the fear of the client churning, if we can just disengage the two and ask some very relevant questions. One, how does this feature empower your client? You have a success outcome to deliver.
Can you deliver it without the feature or is this feature critical to that outcome? Second, is this something that is blocking the client even if it is not towards the successful outcome but let’s say there’s another business use case where the client is completely blocked if this thing is not done. The other thing would be looking at your own business.
Your product roadmap is designed towards a certain vision. Now is this feature aligned with that vision or is it just going to be a botched-up add-on because you have to do it? And again, look at the client itself.
If the client is threatening to go, can your client pass the criteria that we just talked about? Are they good partners to you? Can they grow with you?
Are they aligned with you? And then make a decision. Sometimes the right answer is, let the client go.
Sometimes, and there are exceptions when you say, look, it’s not part of a roadmap but let’s just do it. We are going to do it because we want the client. So there is no black and white answer to it but there are underlying questions that you should ask and if you’re not asking the right questions, you might end up taking the wrong decision.
Irina 35:13
Angeline, what’s your take on this?
Angeline 35:15
Yeah, no, I think Neha has addressed it spot on and surprise because there’s no more like growth at all costs is not a thing anymore. Every department actually gets budget cuts and I’m pretty sure product also, the product teams have limited resources to deliver and they have a roadmap. And so on top of what Neha said, what I typically do is I try to reach out to the head of product, like the head of this, the product head, VP of product or so on, and try to come up with an alignment on how do we address this at scale moving forward.
Like basically creates a process. In one of the startups that I work with, we created like an internal product prioritization framework, especially if it’s not part of the roadmap. There are actually, this is a thing in product management, they have a lot of frameworks.
So one framework is called RISE, where you’re looking at the reach, impact, confidence and effort and you’re scoring the feature requests based on those four elements. And so reaches how many people beyond this current customer, is this a universal thing in the industry or is this just like a very special case that this customer wants? And then the impact is how many of the existing users are going to be impacted by this, even if they didn’t ask for it?
The confidence, how much data do we have to back the estimates that they have? And then the effort, like how much resources does it require to develop that feature? And that way, we don’t always have to take it on a case-by-case basis.
And we have some guardrails around, okay, even if it’s not part of the product roadmap, but it scored high on our prioritization framework, then let’s do it. It’s basically what Neha said, but I guess having a framework and really working it out with your product team to understand how do you address it moving forward. And obviously, immediately the first step is, is there an alternative solution?
Maybe there is an alternative solution and they’re asking for something so specific, but there’s another way of going about it. I mean, that is the low-hanging fruit, but beyond that, just having that system and collaboration with product makes it also easier in the long run.
Pausing a contract is just delaying churn?
Irina 37:32
We have another question. Is there ever a scenario where pausing a contract is recommended or does just delay churn and waste resources trying to fix the problem while regenerating no revenue?
Angeline 37:50
I don’t think finance will like that. I work a lot with finance. They have very strict rules around reporting revenue, right?
When you pause a contract, I think it has ramifications on your cash flow, on your revenue that you’re reporting. So generally speaking, I don’t know that if that’s a good practice. I mean, from a CS perspective, maybe we’re more able to get into a customer’s shoes and understand.
And if it’s an opportunity to save the customer, I’ve never personally have to pause a contract because like I said, finance doesn’t like that kind of thing, but maybe a different way. We give them credits for the time that we don’t have it. If we really plan to do that, then we know that at some point it will be available.
We kind of give them credits that they can use on their next renewal. But I don’t necessarily think that is good practice in general in finance to do that. But yeah, I don’t know if that’s easy to see differently, Neha.
Neha 38:58
I’m going to speak from my personal experience and frankly, I’ve not seen contracts being paused. There are companies that offer it. I know I haven’t personally worked with them or know the inner workings.
What I have seen is contract restructuring. What I have seen is more value add for the same amount. If in any possible way, the customer success team can do that.
Probably more focus with the executive team if the client is big enough so that their success plan or their success journey can be expedited. But pausing contract is something that I’ve not personally worked with. And in my opinion, which is a very personal one, I think the moment you pause the contract, you’re dependent too much on the goodwill of the other person.
And unfortunately, not everybody has goodwill. What if they don’t continue? But there’s just too many ifs and buts around.
So I would really think through this.
How to shift from chaos to control
Irina 40:03
We talked about making the right cuts and choosing battles wisely. But we know that CS teams are constantly in firefighting mode. How do we break the cycle and take a more strategic approach?
Angeline, you’ve built CSWorks from scratch and helped leaders step out of survival mode. What’s the first step in shifting from chaos to control?
Angeline 40:31
Very good question. I think it goes back to like what we kind of alluded to or talked about earlier. The segmentation.
Go back to the foundation. Look at your segmentation and engagement models. I think I’ve explained that enough earlier.
But then after you do that, you have to systematize the basics, right? You need to give your team structure. You need to build a strong foundation that your team can operate on or from consistently.
So what do I mean by that? Look at your customer journey. If you’ve already built that out, understand what’s working, what’s not, what can you improve, right?
Sometimes it’s not about reinventing the wheel. It’s not about scrapping and starting all over again. It’s really more about tightening up your existing operating rhythm.
So look at are your QBRs driving impact or are they just check-in meetings? Do you want to maximize your face time with your customers, right? And even so, because face time with customers means this is time that your CSM spent not doing something else.
So more than being efficient, they also need to be effective. So you need to ensure that your customer journey and the activities that your CSMs need to execute is really very crystal clear. And then, again, going back to a very important question earlier that was asked around data, I really believe that every CS leader, no matter what stage of company, you need to always invest in data.
When I joined my current organization, one of the first things that I looked at is data. Because we know that a lot of the decision-making that you need to do, including understanding where to automate, how to scale engagement, they need to be anchored in data. And the truth is, it’s not very easy to get data right from the very beginning.
I personally, it took me over two years in my current organization to get our data to a point where my team could confidently rely on it to understand risk or expansion potential or the engagement trends. And honestly, even now, it’s not perfect. But you have to start somewhere.
So start investing on your data. And the truth is, for customer success leaders, it’s often left on us to rally the cross-functional teams to make that 360-degree customer view a reality. Because there’s several data that lives in your finance team, in your support team, in your product team, and in the marketing team as well.
And they all look at their own data. But it’s only the customer success that needs that holistic data to service the customer. And that’s why it’s often left to us to really work on it.
So don’t wait for someone else to hand it to you. I always hear CS leaders complaining about, we don’t have good data. You really need to push for better systems, better alignment across your team, across CS, product, support, marketing, sales.
And I really think that getting the basics of your data right will really help you to scale. Like, again, whether it’s a cost-cutting issue or not, you need to scale. And you will need that along the way.
And when faced with cost-cutting, it even makes you more efficient and be able to react faster, because you have the data to back up any of the decisions that you’re going to make.
What are some data points that make a difference
Irina 44:02
I want to dig deeper. I know that this is a topic that most probably we will need one dedicated webinar for it. But because you mentioned data, and because you mentioned, I’m working on this topic for two years now.
And I’m still tweaking on it. And it’s an ongoing thing. I want to ask you, because there are a lot of data points.
And I’m not necessarily concerned about one. At some point, it might feel like a rabbit hole. So you go and you search for data, and you need more data.
And then at some point, you have all the data in the world. And it’s like, OK, now what? And now what do I do with it?
Which are those data points that make a difference that you really have to have it?
Angeline 45:00
I think off the top of my head, product usage data, as much as people say that adoption metrics is like, so surface level, it’s so important, right? You want to know what your customers are doing on your product, how often they’re using it. And obviously, if they’re not using it, where can they find value?
So I start with that. And the truth is, your product team has this. It’s living somewhere in your data warehouse.
It’s not being surfaced to you. It’s there. And I know that oftentimes, the initial problem is how to get that product to help you out with the data.
And that’s where, if you are a CS, that’s where you use your influence. Like, you know, help them understand how important it is, not just for CS, but also for product to understand how our users are using the product itself. And I think non-negotiables are obviously like contract data.
We need to know, when is the renewal date. Is this a multi-year contract? How much is the ARR?
Because it’s so important for us to be able to forecast, retention, and expansion as well. And if we don’t have all the contract data, then, you know, we won’t be able to forecast effectively. And I would say, to a certain degree, support data, like, I would say secondary to those.
If you really are pressed for time, go for those two. But then when you have that, start looking at support data. And if you have community, if you have, like, an online training portal, you can start also looking at that.
The thing is, there are so many signals and so the problem becomes, now we have access to too much data, or there’s too many dashboards. So there’s always a problem with data and whatever, however mature your data and systems are. But I think now, when we set this up, we were very deliberate.
We wanted to understand from our perspective, what are the data that we understand is correlated to retention and growth. And so we tried to do an analysis and an exercise. I had to borrow, again, I don’t have, I didn’t have a data engineer when we did this.
I didn’t have a data analyst. I didn’t even have CS ops at that time. So I borrowed from product because they have it.
And we have also like a data team in our organization. So I borrowed resources. So as you can see, even if you don’t have the headcount, if there are adjacent roles that can help you out, leverage that.
And so we started to do some correlation analysis, looking at historical data. Back then, AI wasn’t as, you know, as where it is today. And I think now there are AI tools that can do that for us by we plug all the data and they help you analyze, like what are the signals that are really moving the needle for you?
And so again, that’s where AI can come in. But if you don’t have the budget to also do AI, then that’s one thing that I recommend to do a correlation. I would tell you, based on our study, at least for our product, product adoption was the biggest correlation to retention.
And there was no correlation to support tickets, for example. And so we decided that, OK, let’s let’s focus on product adoption. And again, it will differ from maybe industry to industry, product to product.
Create time for long-term strategic thinking
Irina 48:32
Because I want to but I’m also keeping a close eye on the on the time. And I know that we only have 11 more minutes. I want to shift a bit to the discussion from and end the webinar.
Let’s shift to a more positive note since we’ve already covered the challenging and difficult aspects of Customer Success. I want to ask you: When CS leaders feel stuck managing short-term goals, how can they create space for long-term strategic thinking? How can they carve out time not just for daily operational tasks but also for planning and prioritization?
Neha 49:19
Yeah, you see, it’s a vicious cycle and doesn’t matter what starts the cycle. But it goes like you think short term, everything becomes urgent because everything is urgent. You think short term.
So sometimes it starts because you’re a short-term thinker. Sometimes it starts because you’re put in a situation where everything is urgent. Now, you need to break the cycle.
And like anything else in life, it calls for being intentional. So the first thing is to be aware that because everything is on fire, there is a little chance that you could be just doing everything short term and you’re not thinking beyond the quarter. So the moment you have that, then just take intentional, very small, consistent steps because being long-term doesn’t mean that you just disown everything that’s going on in the short term, because that’s also your responsibility.
So you really have to start with very small steps. It can be as simple as having white space in your calendar for 30 minutes every day. And you really respect that 30 minutes.
And in that 30 minutes, you probably pull out that forgotten dashboard and look at the data from a long term view. Or you just step out away from your computer and have a conversation with somebody in your network or a client or a cross-functional leader or so on. So you just give yourself that half an hour every day.
Another thing could be you just can’t do without prioritizing, because the moment you think long term, suddenly you will have a vision. And when you look at everything on your table, it’ll be very clear for you that so many things that you thought need your attention, suddenly they don’t. It’ll just evaporate.
So you have to be very strategic about what are those 20% things that are going to give you that 80% impact. And when I say impact, don’t just think impact next quarter, but really think long term, whatever that duration means to you and your business. I’m a big fan of Eisenhower metrics, which actually puts things in the urgent, important delegate and put it in on the.
I mean, don’t even bother about it, just put it in the drawer. And that works because suddenly you know there are things that are important, which will become urgent if you don’t attend to it within a reasonable time. That gives you some amount of focus.
You have to learn how to say no if you do all this, but at the end of the day, you can’t say no to things that don’t fall in that frame of things for you. You just can’t go forward. And then if you’re a leader, you have to set a culture of long-term thinking because you can’t go very far if your team is thinking short-term.
They’re not going to rally behind you. And I think Angeline covered some wonderful points earlier when she was talking about how a leader can really lead and set examples. Some of the things that I have experienced at my role in Adobe is very little things make you nudge towards long-term thinking.
If I want to raise an enhancement request and I’m like, hey, the client is really about to leave and the contract is going away. They’ll be like, sit down. What do you think is going to happen if we do this five years down the line?
What is really going to happen to our roadmap if we include it and we shift priorities? What is going to happen? Are there other customers who are going to use it?
So there is this whole culture no matter where you are, they will force you into thinking the long-term without sacrificing the short-term. So just a few things to get started and of course, there’s no end to the journey.
Building a CS team culture during tough times
Irina 53:09
Speaking about culture, I have one more question for you, Angeline. How do you build a CS team culture that can handle tough times without burning out?
Angeline 53:20
Yeah. I really think that it starts with transparency and building trust, right? Your team needs to feel safe knowing the why behind tough decisions, right?
If we’re faced with a budget cut, I think you need to be open to the team and help them understand the why and that they will feel confident that they’re not being left to carry unrealistic expectations that you’re going to be vouching for them, right? And then create a culture of prioritization. I think that’s like the overall theme we have today.
When you have few resources, you got to prioritize and you need to empower your CSM to say no to low-impact work. That meeting could have been an email or you didn’t need to be sitting on that meeting. Give them the space to really make those kinds of calls and decisions.
And most importantly, you got to model the sustainable behavior yourself. If your team only sees you working late and messaging them on odd hours, firefighting, then they’re going to think that that’s how they should be doing things, that that’s the standard. I lead a global team with global customers, and so typically it’s fair evening calls for us.
I don’t think I’ve said that. I’m based in APAC, so often when we’re working with customers in the US or my team in the US, I would have to have evening calls. And the same is true for my teams who are located everywhere else in the globe.
And if you don’t create that culture and create guidelines for them, they’ll end up working almost like what, from early morning to late at night. And so simple things like I always tell them, you control your calendar. Nothing is going to burn if you don’t reply to that meeting that can be replied to tomorrow.
Nothing is going to happen, nobody’s going to die if you don’t have that meeting at that exact same date and time. Compromise and be very honest with your customers as well. Set the right expectation.
If you can’t make the time, protect your calendar accordingly. Simple things like I actually put blocks on my calendar and I’m very, very transparent with my team. We have focus hours.
I recommend them to have a focus time block on their calendar. Scheduling my emails and Slack messages so that if I have that thought today, but I know it’s out of office hours, I just schedule it. I’m still getting better at that.
If I do send an email, because I want it to be sent at that time, I always say, hey, I put a disclaimer. You don’t have to reply now. I just want to send this so I don’t forget about it.
And then normalize holidays and vacations. I think if you don’t take that, people think that they’re not allowed to do that. Like I said, just model the right behavior.
It starts with you and starting with building that culture of, I guess, that transparency and building that trust across your team.
How to regain trust when the team is losing confidence
Irina 56:13
We have one more question from Sebastian, and I want to address it before we wrap it up. He’s asking, how can we regain trust if the team already is starting to lose confidence? Neha, do you want to take this?
Neha 56:28
Wow, that’s a tough one. I think it’s a very core leadership question. And every time there’s a loss of trust, the only thing that can restore it is, one, taking responsibility that something happened, whatever that reason was, and if you were responsible.
And again, please don’t take responsibility as blame. Maybe something happened. You have nothing to do with it.
But if your team is lacking trust as a leader, you don’t have to take the blame, but you are responsible for your team. You have to have a very, and Angeline mentioned about it, that you have to have that transparency. You have to own, if you’ve made a mistake, you have to own that mistake, be very open, authentic about it.
And then the next important part is, what are you going to do about it? Because no amount of being transparent and being open and authentic can address the rebuilding of trust without action steps and follow through. So you have to take responsibility, you have to own it, and you have to tell your team that why this is not going to happen again.
Or if you don’t have an answer, that’s also fine, but your team needs to know that, look, I’m trying to do my best. These are the risks, but this is the upside of doing it, and that’s the reason you need to rally with me.
Irina 57:58
Thank you both. I think that’s a wrap. Thank you, Angeline.
Thank you, Neha, for sharing your expertise and for keeping it real, down to earth, no fluff. And of course, thank you all for joining us live. Before we wrap up, I want to ask one favor, actually, for the ones who are still live with us.
I want to make these webinars actually useful and impactful for you. So I need your help. So tell me what’s a topic you’d love to see covered next.
What’s keeping you up at night in CS? Drop it in the chat if you know, or leave me a message on email. I’m going to actually type my email address so that everyone has it.
Thanks again for being here. Watch your inbox for the recording, and see you all next time.
