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good afternoon everyone thanks so much for making the time for this wonderful session uh my name is tom tungus i'm a partner at red point ventures we're a venture firm with about three and a half billion in assets under management i focus on early stage software investments and we're fortunate enough to work with a lot of great software companies including twilio stripe zendesk looker and fur and zwora and as anthony mentioned i'm really passionate about customer success i write about it extensively on tomtongus.com and one of the reasons i'm so excited about customer success is that we see firsthand as board members for these software companies the importance of customer success and some of our initial research has shown that customer success is incredibly important because it's often the most significant determinant of a company's valuation more so even than growth but one of the biggest challenges of customer success is figuring out how to scale and grow and recruit a customer success team and so today i'm really excited to welcome two leaders in this field the first is boazma who is the vp of customer success at mashari and the second is mike who's the svp of customer success at rapid seven so just to do a quick introduction of our two panelists today boaz is the vp of customer success at mashri which was acquired by intel in 2013 boaz founded the and grew the team to about 60 people and he's been able to achieve some notable results including expanding the customer success programs by 60 and reducing churn to a remarkable half percent per month uh before mastery boaz was vp of sales and marketing at waveguard an early stage cleantech startup in israel and before that he was vp of customer success at new scale which was acquired by cisco in 2011. mike is the svp of customer success at rapid seven he oversees a team of about 150 people before taking this position in 2015 he was the svp of services and support and planning and before rapid 7 he was working at ptc the makers of pro-e in a variety of different finance sales and operational roles around the world and before that he was at high wired broadview mckinsey and goldman he was also professional hockey player and played 150 games so thank you gentlemen both for joining us for this session i think it would be great to just jump right into the slides and otherwise i think you're first and he kept all his teeth so good morning good afternoon 3 20 p.m not the best session timing right this is when food from lunch sinks in and people start to doze off we'll start we'll try to keep you awake for just a little bit my name is boz i run the customer success team at mashari which is a business unit at intel right now and this is the agenda i want to cover a little bit of a background about uh mashery who we are what we do so you can put things in perspective and then give a case study literally three slides on how we structured the customer success team what were the foundations behind the decisions we make to structure it the way we structure it and then try to extract from that some best practices for you uh in literally three slides on things that you can take for your jobs and implement so let's go quickly into it i believe we are here because we believe that in order to get the best results we need to structure our team in a thoughtful way it's not just we we hire people and we let them go we want the right roles the right structure kind of a chess game mashery is an api management company which means we help companies manage their apis which is for those who don't know application programming interface is the way a software requests and receives information from another software this is uh predominantly was used in mobile devices and if you think about today's world what used to be connected device in the past different types of computing has now turned into just about everything and because everything is getting connected those everythings need apis to get information to them that's why we're in business helping those companies get this information the reason why apis is the best means to deliver this information to those applications because applications unlike search grant wishes you don't search for something and then refine your search your app knows what you want and get you directly to where the kind of data you want to get here is one simple example if you want to search for a movie on a movie app and you select a piece of information about it you'll start to see different pieces of data that are specific to what you want these pieces of data if you think about it sits within um the database there are different types of data they all sit in the database of your company and what you want us is to enable a means for some application out there your application your customers application a partners application to get access into this data so they can present it on all kinds of devices that layer that makes this happen is apis and this is what we are helping customers to manage we are predominantly and this is why the background is important so you understand the background from which i'm talking to you we are predominantly a business to business enterprise level type companies so the kind of companies that you see here in the different industries travel retail financial services healthcare industrial our predominantly large companies although we do have uh small and medium-sized customers as well wonderful background let's get into it so the way we structured the customer success team is based on one fundamental belief that we had which is take away number one if you don't believe this statement then we're not talking the same language if you believe this statement and your ceo does not you should move to another place but we believe that in the end of the day the company and therefore the team the customer success team is likely to be more successful the more value we can create to our customers this is not how much value we create to us that's secondary it's how much value we deliver to our customers and therefore the primary goal that we have for our team is to maximize value our customers derived from our solutions and the two secondary roles are maximized the value we can get from our customers monetarily and non-monetarily so there's a primary and secondary roles there consequently the first question that comes to mind is okay so what is that value to the customer how do you measure that and this is a simplistic simplistic way to look at that think about the volume of the cube as the value to the customer and i'd like to suggest that there are three primary dimensions that determine that the first one is the program scope think about it as the what if you have an order form the line items on that order form obviously the more services and solutions your customers get from you the more likely it is that you deliver more value to them the second dimension is the how the prom execution if you sold the customer everything and you weren't able to implement or you were able to implement but there are lots of service disruptions availability problems performance problems the value is minimized but then there's a third dimension which is as normally things are the hardest to measure and this is the why why are the customer using your solution think about it this way you sold them everything you have you implemented it perfectly and there are no service disruptions but because of the lack of strategy or thinking or planning on the customer side or yours the result is cannibalization of the customer revenue stream from other products you might create a wonderful lots of waste as opposed to lots of value so you do need to connect to the why why does the customer use your solution the way we structure the customer success team at mastery is to address these three dimensions so the first thing that we have inside is the professional services the professional services team is predominantly looking at two dimensions the what they are helping the customer define what services and solutions they need from us and the how they help implement they make decisions about configurations and settings that help the customer maximize the value they get from whatever they bought from us the second team is the technical support services which takes over from the professional services team the ongoing technical management of the customer deployment they are making sure that the availability stability performance are maximized but also predominantly because we are a multi-tenant sas environment so we have a finger on the pulse with everything the customer really do with our solutions they can get a very good insight into why the customer is using or why there are problems and by looking at that why that developer is starting to get rogue calls that setting on the customer side is you know deviating etc etc they can help advise the customers on how to better align their product and their program into driving more value to them the third team we call customer program success management it's a mouse mouthful but we try to differentiate from account management or any other terms like that by the way how many people in the room use account managers or talk to them refer to their customers as accounts okay you might have noticed english is not my first language in my mind an account is an entity in the bank that you get money in and out of i'd like to think about our customers as different than that so the one of the first thing we have done at mastery is we named customers customers not account and we call our people the people who manage them customer managers not account managers i think words matter so that's part of it the customer program success managers are responsible for two facets of that cube right one is the program scope they're working on not only the renewals but also the expansion the add-ons to the customer program so they're influencing the what what should you use from our solution but the primary area of focus is the why they're the ones that maintain the business relation between us and our customers so they can help the customer fine tune what they're using us for with business value to them they conduct quarterly reviews with their management they engage other units they do evaluations of the deployment etc etc um this team is reporting to the ceo i think this is quite important you'll see lots of options out there for reporting structures i think a lot of what we are talking throughout today and probably tomorrow is this team really needs to be at the ceo level to make an impact and that's the way we have it here we are structured as you can see on the bottom professional services technical support customer management we split customer management by the way regionally because in some regions around the world europe and asia in particular it's important to have more face time so that's part of the determination inside beyond that it's mostly industry based because fundamentally we want to force our people to understand the business of their customers so we align them not geographically but rather industry-wise there's one more team there that you can see on the right-hand side called knowledge services the idea behind knowledge services is twofold one we all live in a knowledge intensive environment right we deal with with software solutions with customers not with hardware and therefore we want to build tools and capabilities to help us and our customers do their job better so we have a team that's responsible for training knowledge assets community management etc all right a few best practices um so step number one um you probably want to start by developing a plan for what the future is going to look like what do you want your future state to be when it comes to customer success how do you want your team to look like what kind of roles you want to see two years from now etc i very strongly suggest not to start by analyzing where you are today rather start with where you want to go when you start with today your mind gets oriented to the challenges to change it's much better to start with where you want your team to view to be in the future so this is designing the future state only then you need to assess where you are today and then you need to talk about okay so how do i get from today to tomorrow and manage ongoingly obviously this is not linear this is a circular state because you want to improve all the time but again the takeaway here is start with the future not with the present i'm not going to talk about organizational design there are lots of resources out there this is one example there are endless amount of information out there that you can go into to get best practices plans etc for organizational design all i'm going to say is three best practices one your organization designed for customer success needs to match the company dna you can go against the stream too much you can deviate too much it's good to be slightly different if you're very passionate about and stretch your company and help the company evolve but if your vision for what you want to do is too different from the rest of the organization is too different from what your ceo your founders would like it to be it's likely to not succeed so bear in mind it needs to be consistent with your company dna second acknowledge that like everything else it will evolve over time you're probably not going to have the budget the means the time to get into your future state in one so you need to develop some kind of a path forward moving along from where you are today to where the future is and it's okay to evolve over time you need to understand where you want to get to but take steps towards that direction the last one if you think about the previous slide with all of those fancy models that you can get from consultants or um you know the education community schools and books and whatever those um those really give you options they can help you clarify the options for your design right it can help you narrow down the pros and cons so you can understand what's better or not in your organizational design but really the decisions among those options need to be made based on the individuals you have in the specific roles right for example the very fundamental decision a lot of us are looking into day in and day out around should customer success include renewals or not should customer success include add-ons and expansion or not depends a lot on the identity and characteristics of your vp of sales not only who you are and what your team does but also the other side the scope the breadth of support or training or documentation depends on the identity and characteristics and wants of your vp of engineering or vp of product so you need to align yourself with other people and i think the the concept of get your options based on theory but make decisions based on people is probably the best practice i would advise once you've defined your future state you need to hire towards that state right fill up the positions with the right people and again four easy best practices one um obviously fit hire people that fit your character right the kind of people you want to have second um and this is maybe a pet peeve of mine but the the feedback the negative feedback i like to hear the most when i get feedback from people on interviews right when we interview people we normally have between seven and ten people that interview a candidate and then we do a debrief around that candidate to decide are they are good and good enough or not and whenever i find i hear a comment this person is overqualified that to me is a signify that this person is a good hire right hire the best people you can especially if you're a young company and growing company hire the best people you can challenge them if they grow into other positions down the road that's a wonderful thing whether it's inside your organization or in adjunct organizations never pass on a good person just because they're too good for the role change the role and hire the good person the last thing is um sorry the third thing is um high also one plus one equal three my first hire when i joined uh mastery into the customer management organization for example was a person that removed from the sales team and was a junior account manager we then added to that person my first external hire was a woman that i knew from previous life that had a very strong sales background so now i had someone with account management background and someone from a sales background so the third person i brought in had a very strong program management in it and the fourth person had very technical background and the fifth person had a um consulting management consulting background and the idea there very purposely was every person in the team obviously need to meet a certain bow of requirements for the job but i also want them to have some kind of a spike that adds value to the team beyond their current job right over time we started to add people with specific domain expertise to add to the quality of the team from that dimension and i think that's very valuable the fourth one is the one the the item that's hardest to measure but probably the most important that's passion for customer success right you'll bring people from different uh backgrounds into your organization they all need to share if you want it that passion right what keeps them at night is not whether they lost the deal or you know the technical specificity was not good enough but rather is the customer suffering or enjoying right and if what they love is the customer success aspect of it they are likely to figure out the rest and be good for you the ongoing management this is maybe a takeaway slide i don't i i won't spend too much time on it but if you think about kind of my management 101 if you want for my team the way i think about the ongoing management it's people goals trust and communication you have the best people you give them as clear goals as possible so they know what you expect from them if they know what you expect from them what are the outcome metrics then you don't need to tell them what to do they are smart they are good they are experienced and you tell them what to do they'll figure it out then your job becomes building the environment that helps them do the kind of job you want them to do and that's around trust and communication trust is about enabling them the confident to focus on their job because they trust the other teams to do theirs right if you're in your job as a customer success manager and you can't get around the fact that engineering is not delivering or the sales is not selling the right deals or whatever other teams fault you never focus on your job you worry about theirs if you're confident and you trust that the other teams are doing their job you can focus on yours communication is the means to make that happen over communication around the team in internally and among the team and other teams is the way to share that knowledge so trust can be created great thanks so much for that perspective boaz it's a terrific overview of how you built the customer success team at uh mashery now to hear a slightly different take on how to build a large successful organization here's mike thanks very much thomas and thank you boaz all right so once again my name is mike mckee i'm from rapid7 rapid7 is a company in the security data analytics space and one thing we talk about as it pertains to customer success is creating security heroes and this is something that when i moved into the position heading up customer success i thought i would lead by example so last year this is halloween this isn't day to day but it's something that we do take very seriously occasionally try to dress like the security heroes that we're trying to create with our customers um as i said rapid7 is in the security data and analytics space we effectively do two things we help companies understand their threat exposure and we help when they've been compromised so if you use the metaphor of a house we tell you what windows are open and which windows you should be closing and if there's anybody inside and we fortunately have a lot of hackers on the payroll and attackers so not only do we have products but we have services that like i said help companies understand their threat exposure and when they've been compromised we're based in boston uh it's much warmer out here which is very nice we're about 600 people now 3 700 customers most of those customers right now are in north america and they span all industries and all sizes okay on to the topic of the day so dan steinberg uh i think in the first rule on the bessemer top 10 rules for customer discuss talked about the importance of company top-down commitment and boaz said earlier if your ceo isn't behind customer success you have a problem it's absolutely essential there's many different organization structures out there and roles and responsibilities but it absolutely in my mind has to start at the top and there has to be broad commitment to customer success across the organization so when we were getting going in 2015 you know those are nice words and stuff like that but we put it in the context of numbers and about a third of our business and i should say that we're a combination between perpetual and maintenance and sas so we have both models that we're managing but about a third of our business is renewals obviously driven by customer success about a third of our business is upsells and cross sells to existing customers also driven by customer success and then when working with sales i'm a huge believer that the number one selling tool out there is stories and once again that's driven by customer success so these are slides i showed at our sales kickoff these are slides i use a lot that are very basic at one level but super important to get that organizational commitment around customer success so moving to the topic around organizing and structuring a customer success organization in 2014 last year we're much more traditionally structured where you have human resources and finance and marketing and sales and international sales services support products as you can read and one of the big moves we made in 2015 to focus even more on customer success and move more into this land and expand model is to consolidate a bunch of different areas within what we call the services and customer success function with a mandate to really operationalize the growth of customers and really make sure that we're driving customer success across all different sizes of companies so what's a little bit different in this function is we also have sales engineering and the neat part about this is our ceo can hold me much more accountable for customer success if our group has a hand in the sales process we can't just say hey we got served up a bunch of garbage by the sales guys there's nothing we can do expectations were set the wrong way because we have some sales engineers that were part of that so without a doubt sales engineering's number one objective is to help drive new bookings and support sales but one of the shifts that we've tried to enforce this year is don't just sell the product but try to set that customer up for success so a very small portion of their variable compensation scheme in sales engineering is now on acv renewals you know it's once again it's like 10 90 still on new bookings but this whole idea of signaling to them the importance of like i said setting the customers up for success is very important on the professional services side you know many services organizations are all wired around go live you know meet all the requirements in the statement of work check all the boxes and you're done what we're really trying to shift there is this focus much more towards usage not just implementation and the services organization needs to be understanding we have a program success scorecard that goes with a lot of the engagements that we do and they need to be thinking about how the organization is going to use our software in practice not just plug it in and integrate to the other applications that are there the actual customer success management organization i'll talk about a little bit more in a couple of slides but as i said the majority of our business is still perpetual with maintenance so historically their primary focus was renewals it still is but what we're trying to do is shift the focus from renewals minus 90 days to purchase plus 90 days so once again the whole focus of the renewals organization the past is hey the maintenance renewals coming due in 30 or 60 days i better send the invoice out there we want to try to be much more proactive and we've really bolstered the onboarding capabilities we've really bolstered the usage metrics that we're getting so we're being proactive and we're driving adoption with the basic assumption being that retention and renewals and expansion will follow and then finally our technical support organization which once again is your typical global technical support organization we've added this learning and support so we get 20 000 calls a year from our customers that's 20 000 opportunities not just to help them with the problem that they had or log a bug or request for enhancement or whatever it might be but it's 20 000 opportunities to tell them how to use the software so we've been trying to move their mindset from product mastery to product usage mastery and once again take advantage of all those customer touch points that we have in our technical support organization to really help customers learn and adopt the software this is our internal who's who in the zoo slide which we've used externally with customers once again kind of going back to that top-down company commitment to customer success it's very important here the words are delicate because sales wants to be the owner sales wants to be the quarterback and sales or account executive you can see here still is and that's why we use the word relationship lead and the whole idea is that sales with sales engineering brings the customers in you then introduce your customer success manager and you say hi this is our customer service manager they're responsible for helping you drive adoption and making you successful you can still call me the sales guy if you want but your customer service manager is going to be a whole lot more useful in driving that adoption and driving making sure you're using it and getting value from the software and then right now if there is upsell and cross-sell it goes back to the account executive this will kind of go into conversations that i'm sure we'll all have this week around you know do we really need the full cost of sales of going back to the sales it's something we're debating once again we're evolving in this direction right now we didn't want to change too much too quickly so right now it still goes back to sales but i can certainly see a day and i don't see any rapid seven sales people in here i can certainly see a day where at least the upsell stays with the customer success manager maybe if it's cross-sell of a new product that goes back to sales so once again that's an evolution that i think that we'll be undertaking one of the key points here are the yellow arrows uh once again having the company-wide mindset around customer success and making sure you're transferring information between the different groups absolutely essential we're trying to get better and better systems to do that but it's one of the things that allows i believe customers to go in and go through that adoption retention expansion phases key learning number two uh and this i kind of gave a prelude to this on the last description of what's the right balance between efforts on adoption versus retention versus expansion because our customer success management team still has a very big renewals number that hit they have to hit so oh yeah this is a fancy slide you ready for this oopsie not that fancy operator i'm just gonna go behind the stage now and disappear for a second all right we had a computer crash apparently uh so i can tell a story about this morning i was taking a cab from the airport after flying in from boston and i'm kind of in a hurry to check in and stuff like that and get to the conference and stuff all right we'll come back to this and uh i'm in the cab i'm waiting i'm getting kind of impatient i couldn't use uber and stuff like that and the guy's like my cab is rebooting and he starts taking my luggage out of the back and my stuff out of the back i'm like buddy what are you doing and he's like i got to reboot my computer i got to remove my car so i figured i must be in california i got out of the car i went to the next cab anyways the slides back i've really built expectations for it so we shifted this year from renewals to adoption don't start going crazy on me again please i can hear noises over here talking to uh an empty headset if you could go back a couple of slides please that would be great i'm not sure who i'm speaking to but there we go seems to be working um as i said this renewals plus 90 days uh renewal purchase plus 90 days versus renewals minus 90 days okay back one slide please thank you um so we changed the name of the organization from account management to customer success management and small little nuance here uh we didn't call it the customer success organization because our ceo wanted to make sure that all functions within the company feel responsible for customer success we specifically call it the customer success management organization which one as i said it's a subtle difference but i think it's a meaningful difference we tried to align it exactly like sales we aligned by customer size enterprise name mid-market here's some of the gory details that tom was going to ask me about later in terms of compensation structures the majority of the team still focused on the renewal you'll see on the next slide their time allocation is shifting they leverage the global learning and support organization a lot for technical needs and you can see the numbers around base variable mix and the bottom bullet point on here i think's an interesting one which is 80 of their variable bonus is still based on renewals and 20 is based on leads to sales so to put that in a time context and once again this is an evolution so last year was sort of 20 70 10 if we had to break that down between adoption retention and expansion and i would say we're evolving more towards this 35 55 10. as i said in the future as we get better through this onboarding and adoption more time might go towards the expansion but right now we're really trying to drive those onboarding and adoption activities early in the cycle and i put that out there just because i think it's very important organizationally not just within the customer success team but across the organization to make sure people are aware of these things so just last week we're in a meeting with our svp of products the person heads up our r d and we were going through this with them and part of us part of the reason we were doing that is we were impressing upon him the importance of building functionality into the product so we could see usage so we can see what features the customers were using and once again if you don't do those kinds of things product guys will be thinking about the releases and they'll be thinking about their requests for enhancements and they'll might not appreciate the extent to which really being able to see what customers are using is essential to driving once again adoption retention and expansion okay last couple of slides here so i say know the customer success manager profile you were after we haven't nailed it um i purposely didn't put points on this spectrum um we're sort of experimenting with what's right i will say some surprises along the way on the i mean hunter versus farmer we're more on the farmer end of the spectrum i think most people would agree with that boa has made a very good point around the importance of being passionate around customer success and not necessarily just passionate about the deal i think that passion around customer success inherently makes people more of a farmer this technical versus non-technical is interesting to me so as i said through our adoption efforts we've been much more focused on usage and proactively reaching out to customers this year one thing that we found is our customer success managers who are relatively non-technical were able to increase usage a lot so we pushed on that a little bit we're like how our software once again security data and analytics it gets pretty complex pretty quickly networks firewalls the whole bit and i was pushing them on like well you're talking to pretty technical end users how are you helping them use our software and the truth of the matter is many software if not the majority of software companies are guilty of having way too many features and functions and at the end of the day if the customer is using the top 20 or 30 percent of those features they're much better off than they would normally be so our customer section managers even though they're not that technical they're pretty familiar with the top 20 or 25 percent of the features in the software and most of the customers aren't using the top 20 or 25 percent of the features in our software so through this we've seen that you can get away with more towards the non-technical end of the spectrum and have a very successful customer success manager we've also bolstered a little bit by having some a couple of people on the team that are very technical that they can refer to junior versus senior same kind of thing we've been really surprised if you get a good junior person with good aptitude good attitude passion for customer success can learn quickly how successful they can be and then finally this team versus self once again it's very very important to be able to mobilize different functions within the organization and be very good at bringing those resources together to help out customers so that's it uh once again top-down commitments key understand and socialize the balance between adoption retention and expansion and once again understand and socialize what kind of profile you're after over to you tom thank you very much round of applause please for our great presenters great so we've got about 12 minutes i want to make sure we get the audience engaged as soon as possible so who has a question burning inside of them about how to structure and manage a customer success team there are a handful of microphones around the floor if anyone has questions please raise your hand we will get you a microphone thanks i i'd actually i have a question for the entire audience if i may i'd like to know how many people have organizations like these gentlemen have where you have services and support as well as customer success managers all under that organizational umbrella versus customer success managers who operate independently so who has operators independently customer success managers versus the ones who have more of an org structure like these guys looks like the vast majority have a far more complex organizational structure i would say i would say the you know this is a new field so we each use words that are clear in our minds and are different in other people's minds when you say customer success manager you have a certain profile in mind each one of us and a lot of people in the room have different views over that for me my team is customer success management all of it is for you it seems like it's a smaller narrower different thing that's part of what we all need to figure out what's your future state where you are today how you evolve into that that was sort of the point is that that evolution thanks and go blackhawks great another question from the audience um tables takes content so when you equip and enable these guys how do you think about what kind of material you create for them to help them be more effective in what they do yesterday um so you asking you asking about how we do we enable the customer success management team yeah it's somewhere between sales and sales engineering so they're getting a little bit too bosses point it's somewhere between sales sales engineering and support meaning they're getting some of the support soft skills training of how to deal with customers they're getting slightly more technical than the sales guys and they're getting some of the commercial training that sales gets one other thing i thought that was unique about both your customer success structures was that you both have knowledge teams under your management that create a lot of the content can you talk about how those knowledge teams empower your customer success managers to be more successful yeah sure so to me this is part of the evolution of your team over time right we didn't have a knowledge team when we started but as we grew we found that it's useful to extract someone from the team and then build a team around them to take out the creation of tools that help us do our job better right when i started i was managing some of the customers i had different people doing different things we created our own tools over time it became better to have someone that consolidate the knowledge across teams and then what they were able to do is a get best practices in knowledge management involved b create consistency across the team and c create tools that sometimes are different from what we use internally to what we enabled customers but it's under one framework so it's easier more scalable to manage yeah boaz is a word around evolving is a good one and i'm smiling a little bit because our knowledge team within support is evolving and the beautiful part about i think putting it within support right now is they have a very big incentive to make that good knowledge because they're getting 20 000 calls right now and they prefer to get fewer than 20 000 calls and the better learning assets and knowledge base they create the more uh the less stress they'll be on their team so as i said there's a nice built-in incentive there number one and then the other thing about having to be part of having the services organization of the same umbrella is we minimize the wars between services trying to charge for training and some training some training assets being for free because once again people are trying to figure out what's best for the customer and what's most cost effective and we can figure that out in the family so to speak terrific another question from the audience who's got a question um just curious about your thoughts on ownership of renewals right there's there's the one school of thought that says csms can own it and be incentivized to to own renewals and then there's the other component where you can manage that with sales or inside sales you know kind of preserving the consultant relationship with customers and just curious on your thoughts either way yeah so i guess you could say we're still a little bit old school um i mean i should say that one thing that's somewhat unique about rapid seven is we have both we have an inside sales model to begin with primarily where by 85 90 of our sales people are inside sales people and the customer success management team is an insights inside team as well so you know i'm trying to stay objective about this but i'm biased towards the customer success management team owning it i think if they take this approach that i was showing whereby they're really focused on the purchase plus 90 days and adoption and helping customers through escalations or any problems that occur through their life cycle then the retention just or they could be the renewal just naturally follows so i think it sits well there right now the way i think about it is unless you have a very very large company that has already majority of the potential customers as existing customers right meaning if you're not there you're in some form of a growth company where you have fewer customers than you want to get out then there are two teams theoretically that can sell to the existing customers but there's only one team that can grow to new customers in my mind if you're a small growing company and you want to grow more customers you should divide and conquer focus the sales team on the target market that they are the only ones that can go after get new deals and let the existing customers be managed by the existing customers team we call it customer management or whatever you want to call it it's a divide and conquer um some of it is maturity over time really change um you know we can talk about other reasons why this is valuable but at the very fundamental level of managing a company it's a divide and conquer yeah i totally agree and the sooner you can get the sales person away from the adoption and get them on to that next customer i mean it's easy as a sales guy a sales person if you're there you know living off those renewals and farming that and once again obviously for much larger for trans for organizations that have million dollar per year engagements with customers it can change a little bit but i agree with boaz's sort of divide and conquer approach on the land and expand side and i haven't seen situations where the customer doesn't trust the customer success manager sometimes that exists with sales but usually that customer success manager has built up enough goodwill and enough of a relationship that the customer doesn't feel like they're getting worked for the renewal or work for the upsell by that person the follow-up question that you should have is so assuming we give we hand off the commercial renewal expansion to the existing customer team how do we get the sales people to agree to that uh especially in the sas model where it's a land and expand the initial deal is always smaller than the one you want to have because you want them to close the deal quicker right and the way to that is double commission for some portion of time so in our organization the salespeople get comped on anything that happened with that customer for another year the renewal the add-on anything so there's no question about it if i'm a salesperson and i sold a deal and someone else is going to go and expand that's free money i can now go and do something else so talking about evolution for the way that you're structuring your teams obviously it's easier easy enough to implement with new customers that don't know any different but with existing clients how do you implement the new structure without adversely impacting the relationship that you already built with existing customers and clients yeah i'll start that um so we have a lot of customers that got a lot of calls from people at rapid seven and they had no idea who did what so clarifying for them who's who in the zoo and who's responsible for what and what their primary responsibility is built our relationship and improved our relationship with a lot of existing customers if you believe the new structure is better then tell the customer why it's better if they push back on it then you probably got it wrong so one of the things that you guys haven't mentioned is um you know you've evolved the csm and you're debating kind of owning who owns the upsell and expansion how do you think about that in terms of like career track and development for uh a csm because you know that's one of the hardest things especially with the competition right now with member success so i guess i just wanted to see how you guys think about that is that a more senior role in the csm world where they're actually running like that second voice and just elaborate on that yeah that's a good question so we've taken from and given two sales so we've had some sales reps become csms and we had a customer success manager go be a regional director and that's great as far as i'm concerned and it's allowed sort of depending on where people fall in those different spectrums for them to land in their correct spot we've also talked about with one see or a couple csms in particular about moving into project management roles within the services organization so we're big fans of moving people within functions internally and it's provided a pretty good platform for them to pull people in or send them off to different functions so far how about moving people up within the organization how does that happen within the csm csm world yeah i mean if if you're a growing organization you will have new roles both hierarchical and sideways right that knowledge management function did not exist initially it exists now we have a new leadership role in uh global team that did not exist before because we grew to the point where we wanted to have a leader around that team and do you find do you find that the middle management or you know the more senior leaders within customer success are those best promoted from within or hired from outside you have to have a balance i think this is true at every level of the company right if you're a growing company and all the growth come from the outside you'll demoralize internal people if all the growth come from the inside you're not infusing new enough talent from the outside you have to have balance that's true at the company level that's true at every team level let's read our level as well yeah i would agree i mean we're biased towards internal promotions whenever possible and to your first question thomas around promotion within csm i mean it's whoever has all of those skills so if they have the soft skills and the commercial instincts and the technical skills they naturally have a broader skill set that allows them to do more and mentor more people in that direction great thank you so much that's all the time we have for today could have a big round of applause for the panelists thank you very much