In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, discussed with Christopher Warren-Gash, VP of Customer Success at Sympa.
What You’ll Learn:
- How past experiences impact customer success
- How to create customer success strategies depending on the industry
- The critical steps you need to take to build your CS career
- How to scale an existing CS team
- How to bring churn to zero
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Transition from B2C to B2B in Customer Success: Christopher highlighted how his transition from B2C to B2B was pivotal. In B2B, businesses expect tangible value and ROI from the product, creating a greater need to manage churn risk effectively. This experience shaped his understanding of CS dynamics and the need for a must-have product, especially in high-stakes sectors like hospitality.
Industry-Specific Customer Success Strategies: Christopher noted that customer success strategies can vary widely depending on the industry. In sectors like e-commerce tech, where there’s a direct relationship between the product and the customer’s bottom line, it’s easier to prove ROI and lose customers if ROI isn’t clear. This complexity calls for tailored CS strategies across different sectors.
Critical Steps for Building a CS Career: Christopher advised CSMs to be selective in their job search, focus on companies aligned with their values, and treat interviews as two-way evaluations. His own criteria for taking a role include a genuine interest in the product, a motivating scope of responsibility, and belief in the company’s growth trajectory.
Put the Customer at the Core of All Decisions: Christopher emphasized putting the customer at the heart of every decision in customer success. He shared that while many companies talk about customer-centricity, few truly execute it. Representing the customer’s voice in company strategy is essential to driving long-term value and achieving sustainable revenue outcomes.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:00
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 Christopher Warren-Gash, VP of Customer Success at Sympa. Christopher, welcome and thanks for joining us today!
Christopher 0:18
Thanks very much Irina, nice to be here.
Irina 0:20
It’s my pleasure. To kick things off, I want to ask you how you found your way into customer success.
Christopher 0:30
Yeah, great question. I fell into it. I worked at a B2C company that had a huge consumer dream and as is the case with many B2C companies, we ended up realizing, hang on, we actually need like a revenue stream here.
So we ended up moving into B2B. We were working in hospitality and so naturally our customer base were going to be hotels. So we ended up productizing the product that we did have and selling it directly to hotels.
And we then actually started to sign up a few hotels, a few customers. And we were a very small company at that point. Our CEO then said super casually in the office, hey guys, we’ve actually got some customers here, like who’s going to look after them?
And I quite like building relationships. So I said, yeah, I’ll do it. And it really started from there.
So we had a small portfolio of a few customers. I looked after them, ensured that they understood what they were getting out of the product, that they were getting value from it. And then I guess I learned a pretty big lesson in B2B and in SaaS and that’s that you’ve got to have a product which is an absolute must-have rather than a nice-to-have.
And so that ended up in us very much evolving the product base to understanding what is the biggest pain that our customers are facing? How should that have an impact on the product that we’re selling? And we then iterated the product and everything sort of took off from there.
So I ended up going from having a small portfolio of customers myself to us then growing from 30-odd customers to signing up the odd boutique hotel there, small hotel groups, large hotel groups, massive partnership deals, and then suddenly we had 14,000 customers. And that scale journey that came with it was certainly the most exciting lesson in my career up to this point. So that really forced me to move from being a CSM to handling a team of CSMs, building out approaches for large hotel groups, which would basically be your enterprise customers, all the way through at-scale approaches for these smaller long-tail customers that we found ourselves with as well.
Irina 3:01
We’re gonna dig deeper into the scaling process and what are the goods and the bads of that part because I’m sure that there were also some unpredictable things that happened in in the scaling of the team process. But now I wanna ask you something. You mentioned that you’ve started into B2C and then you pivoted into B2B.
And I have this curiosity, from your point of view, what’s the main difference between customer success, if we are talking B2C versus B2B? Well, is there a difference between the two? Is customer success different in a B2B environment versus B2C?
Customer Success in B2B vs B2C
Christopher 3:47
From my experience, yes. I think with B2C, you can lean on the brand a great deal more, whereas I think when it’s B2B, essentially your stakeholders are businesses that will be expecting to get a certain amount of value out of the product and will want to drive a return from the product they’re buying. For as long as there is another product or another solution in the market that can deliver a greater return, you are at risk of churn.
And so I think the dynamics are very different between B2C and B2B. Of course, there are some commonalities around how you manage a community versus how you manage a base of customers. But I think the dynamics and what needs to be delivered for a B2B company are very different from a B2C company, yes.
Customer Success in various industries
Irina 4:42
I really like the fact that you made the association between B2C and community. I think this is what you were mentioning, right? So for B2C, it’s a community.
It’s a very nice analogy. I’m going to keep it in mind. You also mentioned hospitality.
And I want to ask you if you think that CS is different depending on the industry and what you do and how you approach it. Because you mentioned hospitality. Have you been operating in other industries?
Have you noticed the differences between the way you apply customer success depending on the industry?
Christopher 5:22
Yeah. So I’ve had the opportunity to work in three different industries within the SaaS world: first with hospitality, then e-commerce, and most recently in recruitment tech, which has now morphed into HR tech. I think my biggest learning actually came from my experience in e-commerce tech.
In e-commerce, the dynamic was far more based on driving a return. The opportunity you have in e-commerce tech is that there’s generally a very strong relationship between the product and the bottom line you can drive for your customer. And I think that is both an opportunity—because if you have a strong product, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate, “You pay me $1, and I can pay you back $10.”
But it’s also a challenge, of course, because it means that if you have a product that isn’t able to deliver those numbers, then again, you find yourself at potential churn risk. I think in other industries I’ve worked in, the relationship between money invested and the money the customer gets back is a little more obscure or opaque. And again, that comes with the same set of opportunities and challenges.
It means that you can sometimes get by with strong stakeholder management and the perception of value. But it also means that you’re at a greater risk from someone who joins the organization with a prescribed view on what type of company or solution they want to use, or perhaps someone more financially focused who’s only looking at the numbers. So, you know, there are opportunities and challenges wherever you find yourself in customer success.
So yes, it’s never a straight line, right? It’s a road.
Pieces of advice for CS professionals during the recruiting process
Irina 7:35
For sure. And from my experience, every company has its own definition of customer success in some cases. And it’s not only the company; it’s also the industry and the moment where the company is in its journey.
Is it a startup? Also, I think the investment— is it bootstrapped? Is it VC-backed?
All those elements, even if considered externally, do impact the way you shape the CS strategy. In some cases, it’s more in your face; in others, it’s blended in, and things happen, but you can’t directly allocate it to one cause. It could be the company structure, the people, the objectives, or the higher goal.
I was curious if you see it the same way, which is why I asked. But now you mentioned HR tech, and I know that you recently switched jobs.
And now that you recently started, I want to ask you— because it’s a market and an industry where you see a lot of “open to work” posts on LinkedIn—what’s your advice for CS people going through this recruiting process?
What should they be focusing on?
Christopher 9:13
Yeah, well, first things first, it’s a tough recruitment market right now. I mean, there’s a short supply of roles, and it’s a candidate-heavy market. But I think the good news is that experienced CSMs are in high demand.
So I think my advice to anybody out there looking for their next CS gig would probably be three things. The first is to start by taking a critical look at what you want to achieve in your next role. Second, narrow your search to companies or roles that can offer what you’re looking for.
And then, the third is to approach the recruitment process as a set of two-way interviews. Ask plenty of questions and be brave enough to walk away from opportunities that don’t fit your criteria. It does feel scary.
But in the grand scheme of a 50-odd-year career, which sounds scary in itself, taking a couple of extra months to find the perfect fit is much better than bolting for the wrong role.
Irina 10:23
I’m curious, because I consider those three milestones that you mentioned, but in your case, what does it take for you to say yes to the job or to consider, “Yeah, this is worth taking on”? What did you look at?
Christopher 10:44
Yeah.
Irina 10:46
In your particular case, so let’s speak about your experience, not in general.
Christopher 10:50
What? Of course. Well, I mean, first, I think it’s easy to look back on your whole career and, if things more or less pan out, convince yourself that every step you took was methodically calculated, but I’m not sure that would be fully accurate.
But that said, in my case, at least one of the following criteria has to be true for me to consider taking on a new role. I have to like or love the product or solution, be very motivated by the scope of the role, or really believe in the company’s growth trajectory. And if you’re very lucky, you can find all three.
But I think what’s interesting is, as you mentioned, I’ve just changed roles. And on this occasion, I’ve actively decided to join a company that’s a little different from the businesses I’ve joined or worked for in the past. I’ve traditionally worked for startups aiming to reach a certain install base or company size.
And on some level, I think I was afraid of being typecast as a CS leader for these types of companies at this stage of growth or maturity. So I’ve decided to go down a slightly different path, taking on a fresh challenge. And, hopefully, as a result, I’ll open myself up to brand-new learning opportunities as well.
Irina 12:14
What made you take this? What drove this change, this leap of faith?
What was it that happened where you said, “Okay, I’m gonna step up, I’m gonna go out of my comfort zone”?
Christopher 12:33
Yeah, well, I mean, there are push factors and pull factors and most big decisions in life.
Irina 12:38
I have to say, I really like the push-and-pull strategy, because it reminds me of the job-to-be-done methodology.
Christopher 12:46
Yeah, right.
Irina 12:46
Yeah.
Christopher 12:48
I used to work with a lot of people who were very, very keen on that methodology. And I have to say, there were no push factors for my previous role.
It was entirely about being enticed by the stage of the company I’ve now joined. In fact, I think they’re at a really interesting stage of their evolution. They are about 20 years into their growth journey, have quite a sizable install base, and are in a position where they’ve taken steps to modernize ways of working across the organization.
This modernization has been rolled out department by department. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to modernize how we work within customer success so that we can deliver even more value for the customer base. They also boast a lot of very exciting logos.
I think there’s room for improvement in how we systematically work with these customers. So it was a combination of the stage of the business, the size of the business, and feeling that I would be slightly out of my comfort zone by taking on this type of role.
Irina 14:05
I’m curious—I would reach out later on and ask you if you feel like your role fits more into a smaller company or a bigger company, because I have this strong belief that there are people who can be successful in larger organizations, and people who thrive in smaller teams. In some cases, you blend in; in others, you don’t.
But also, in my experience, I’ve noticed that some people can’t make the switch. They’re either used to working for a larger organization with very well-defined roles and responsibilities, or they feel more comfortable in smaller teams where they’re wearing different hats.
And it requires different styles. I’m curious how you’ll feel about this later on, so I’m gonna ask you this question in, I don’t know, one year from now.
Christopher 15:06
Great. Maybe we should do another podcast.
Scaling an existing CS team or building it from scratch
Irina 15:08
In one year, I’m gonna reach out, and we’ll do a follow-up.
And speaking about teams, you’ve built CS teams either from scratch or by scaling existing ones. And funny enough, you’ve been in smaller teams and now in bigger teams. What’s been more challenging for you, and why—starting from scratch or scaling existing ones?
Christopher 15:37
Tough question. And they’re both fun challenges. You enjoy the ride either way every minute of it.
But I think scaling an existing team is more challenging, but arguably more rewarding as well.
Irina 15:52
Yeah.
Christopher 15:53
The reason being, existing teams have a set dynamic, established ways of working, and customer-facing processes, and these take time to iterate. So I think this requires the CS leader to be adaptable and to thoughtfully manage change over time, because it’s impossible to change everything all at once.
I’ve found that this is best done by really having an open ear to what is—and probably more importantly, isn’t—working, then celebrating what is working and understanding the pain and impact of updating what isn’t. Next, create a game plan to address the team’s greatest challenges, be transparent about what will be fixed by when, and outline the benefit to the team. Drive total clarity around what is expected of the CS department, what’s expected of CSMs individually, and explain why this is important.
And then, of course, always be open to input and be open to iterating the plan slightly. Once you’ve built this foundation of trust, then—and only then—can you introduce new ways of working and truly empower CS to achieve their goals. Of course, it’s very fun, but it can be challenging.
Irina 17:20
I second you also. I also find it harder to work with existing teams. I’m also the type of person who likes to build things from scratch.
But I’m not fully convinced; it definitely has its own challenges. In some cases, it’s like, okay, if I want to be out of my comfort zone, I’ll go through the process of working with existing teams. If I want to stay in my comfort zone, then it’s building from scratch and doing my own thing.
But switching from the team side to the business side, I want to ask you—and I want to talk about two important KPIs in CS: churn and upsell. I want to start with churn, because I know that you brought it down to zero before, which is like, oh man, okay, I really have to find out how you did that. So let’s talk about churn, and how did you bring it down to zero?
Bringing churn down to zero
Christopher 18:33
Yeah, sure. I mean, look, I’d love to sit here and take all the credit. But I really can’t.
Irina 18:42
So actually, so I joined, would have been a lie. But I would have been a lie.
Christopher 18:47
Exactly. Can’t be lying on a podcast.
Irina 18:49
No, for sure.
It will be also misleading. Because what I noticed is that a lot of CEOs do listen to our podcast. And it’s like, I know that somebody brought it down to zero.
So if they can, you should definitely do it on your own. Why can’t they? Why can’t they do it?
And we can. So please be careful and paint on the whole story. What did it take to bring it down to zero so that we don’t create false expectations for other Head of CS?
Christopher 19:21
Very, very good point. I’m here to protect the CS community.
Irina 19:24
Please do that.
Christopher 19:26
All right, so the story then. I joined a company many years back, and they had a big churn problem.
It was the old proverbial leaky bucket scenario. And, you know, naturally, this was stifling the company’s growth. The bad news was that not only was there a big churn problem, but it was random.
It was unpredictable, and therefore, it was not forecastable either.
Irina 19:55
Okay.
Christopher 19:56
The good news was that the core product was good. It directly and positively impacted the customer’s bottom line. Also, the company was working with top-tier logos.
So clearly, there was something there. But while we were able to win these great logos, we just weren’t able to keep them. So at this company—and I think this is actually an initiative that could be applied in other settings as well—I started by personally meeting with each of our tier-one customers.
The goal of these meetings was to go back to basics, to understand the customer’s pain points. One thing that CS often does is focus the conversation solely around the product itself. But I think there’s a broader conversation to be had. What are your pain points, not just with the product but more broadly within your department? What are the things that keep you up at night? What do you care about? I was really looking to run deep discovery around the customer.
Then, I’d seek to understand: well, you did decide to sign up at some point, so why did you buy the product in the first place? Where are we? What are we doing to solve your pain points, and what have we not done to solve them? I would feed these learnings back into the rest of the business.
At that point, we could start iterating on the company’s priorities, based on the customer’s needs so that the customer truly had a voice within the organization. I always like to think that if we were sitting in a management team meeting, each member of the management team would be there, plus an empty chair for the customer. It would be my job as the head of CS to represent the customer’s voice in those meetings.
Lastly, with these customers, I would bluntly ask them, “How do you see the partnership?” I’d break the partnership down into four pillars. The first pillar is the product. How do you see the product? Simple traffic light system: red, amber, green. How do you see the relationship with key contacts on our side? How do you see the performance of the product? And most importantly, how do you see the value of the product? For each of these, I’d just look to gather a traffic light.
The real meat of the conversation would come through the answers to these questions. If we’re green across the board, fantastic. That likely means the customer is committed to renewing. In other cases, can we leverage this positive sentiment to drive customer stories or other business priorities?
But often, there would be more reds and ambers. That’s our opportunity to really probe and understand: why are you not experiencing value in these areas? Where is the partnership falling short?
Then, we’d create an action plan together with the customer. I’d use that to feed back into the organization, because really, CS should be the nucleus of every SaaS business. This made us more customer-centric as a result.
It meant we could systematically shift toward more value-based conversations with our customers, and it ultimately allowed us to pass this way of working across to the customer success managers as well. This way, we could scale this approach across our teams.
Upselling: a natural part of the CS process
Irina 23:57
And what about upsell? How do you build a model that makes upselling a neutral part of the CS process without being too pushy?
Christopher 24:07
Well, it’s sequencing, first and foremost. You know, you can’t run, you can’t run before you can walk. So I think, I think really like a guiding a guiding principle of developing a commercially focused CS department, because I mean, really, that’s what that’s what upsell speaks to is, first, you’ve got to do this initiative of deeply understanding the customer base, once you have, then develop strong advocacy within the customer.
And that will then lead to like building a strong, like foundation of retention. And it’s only then that’s like building systematic approaches. So you can start to build systematic approaches to drive predictable expansion.
But I completely understand that like upsell expansion, it can feel scary. But really, it’s all based on a on a foundation of value. If the customer is experiencing value, then it feels natural to expand in order to in order to get more value from from the product.
But I think that it’s really important to understand like the levers for expansion, like where, where is the expansion potential across the organization, or across the customer base, I should say, and how can we create a list of priorities or a list of customers that we’re going to approach first and foremost, and then start to systematically take those ones off.
Game plan for the first months in a new job
Irina 25:36
I also want to speak about your new role in customer success. And I want to ask because I know that you just started: What’s your game plan for the first few months?
And what are the milestones you are aiming to hit early on?
Christopher 25:59
Well, I gotta say I’m two and a half days into the role.
Irina 26:02
That’s good. That’s good.
Christopher 26:04
So, I would say don’t quote me on this. But, you know, the nature of a recorded podcast means I will be quoted on this. But look, in terms of milestones, really the underpinning goal is impact.
In no particular order, we have an expansion target for 2024. Not sure why I gave that a thumbs down—we have an expansion target for 2024, and my goal is that we need to hit it. So, that’s one milestone.
We’re also now in a position where we’re starting to plan for 2025, looking at our growth targets across the organization. There are, of course, growth targets for customer success, both on retention and on the expansion side. So, creating a concrete plan for how we’re going to attack these 2025 targets is essential.
And, you know, some of that can come from strategizing on my end. But, of course, it’s going to take buy-in from the entire team for us to achieve this. We’ll also need enablement from the rest of the organization because customer success can’t operate in a silo.
Related to that, I think it’s also about enabling the team by understanding where the “time sucks” in customer success are today. What is holding us back from performing in our roles and delivering value for our customers in the best way possible? Then, creating a plan to enable the existing team to achieve more with the same resources.
Based on what I said before, I think there’s work to be done around truly and deeply understanding our customers. We can do that through producing account plans and making a few key changes to our customer playbooks. This way, we aim for maximum impact with minimum effort.
Lastly, I’ll be looking to take control of risk. This means identifying at-risk customers, both qualitatively and by leveraging improved health scoring, and using this as a foundation for more accurate revenue forecasting in 2025.
Now that I say all this, it seems like quite a lot of work for, what is that, three months or so?
Irina 28:57
Yes, yes. So, yeah, a lot of work. And in two different—well, I wouldn’t necessarily say two different directions, but it’s a blend of focusing on the short term, delivering on the expansion targets you have, and also putting some thought into what 2025 will bring for the global team.
How do you adjust? How do you align the CS KPIs with the overall company goals? And how can CS support the company’s growth while working on a strategy and a concrete plan alongside everything else?
I’d say you definitely have ambitious plans. And I want to do a follow-up on this because I’m super curious to see how this will develop along the way. So, please don’t ghost me when I drop an email and ask for another episode!
Christopher 29:57
Okay, so we’ve got two things to talk about in a year. Yes, excellent. Looking forward to it.
Irina 30:03
I need to wrap it all up, and I want to ask you, if there is one key takeaway about customer success that you would like our audience to remember from today. What would that be?
Christopher 30:18
Put the customer at the heart of everything you do?
It’s it’s almost sounds like a cliche, but from my experience, it doesn’t always happen. You have a customer success department that the business knows that the customer is important, and yet the customer isn’t always represented in all the forums that it should be so put the customer at the heart of everything that you do. That’s how you’re going to create value and and systematically achieve achieve great revenue outcomes over time.
Irina 30:54
I would continue by saying that this actually reminds me of the beginnings of social media. I’d say 20 or 25 years ago, when everybody wanted to do it, but nobody knew how to do it. In this case, I think everybody wants to put the customer at the center, but few people actually know how to execute it.
Everyone talks about the idea that the customer is central to everything we do, but that’s in theory. In practice, I see fewer companies that truly execute this belief at its core. They say the words, but standing by this belief in action is rare. So, yeah, even if it’s a cliché, I think it’s important to call it out more often than we do and to also talk about how to actually execute this and what it really means. But that’s definitely a discussion for another episode.
Now, thank you so much, Christopher, 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.
Christopher 32:09
Thanks, guys, and thanks, Irina!
