Customer success pipeline stages for corporations

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uh and uh i'd like to welcome bernie kasar why not bernie how are you thanks uh bernie is uh is in charge of customer success at exactly which is the leading uh incentive compensation platform company and uh bernie was born in a sudan uh and made his way to minnesota right and a little change in temperature there so welcome welcome bernie and then our next guest is chris swarovski the vice president at dynatrace in charge of customer success at dina trace uh chris welcome thanks uh the dynatrace is the best application performance management software uh and he's a michigan wolverine a long time michigan fan and uh is uh at once interviewed with the cia so another alternative career could have been the cia we'll have to talk a little bit about that so uh both are experts at customer success and compensation we've got a great panel for you today and let's get started he didn't tell me he was a wolverine i'm a gopher okay i'm jeff epstein i'm an operating partner at bessemer venture partners and i'm the former chief financial officer of oracle so we were very interested in compensation at oracle and bessemer is an investor in gainsight i personally when i heard about gainsight was so excited i i've invested uh and a little uh background about me i just came back from the berkshire hathaway annual meeting in omaha nebraska so for those of you who are warren buffett fans we can talk about that a little later uh what i'd like to do is to start with questions from the audience to get uh questions about about who you are uh for instance what of the people in the audience raise your hands here who has a significant amount of international revenue so we can know whether we talk about that okay it looks like uh 20 or so people have international revenue what about significant revenue through partners who here sells a lot through partners okay some people there and then in terms of company size if you divide companies between under 350 employees 350 to 4 000 and 4 000 and up who here is in the 350 and under category okay who here is 350 to 4 000 and who is 4 000 and up okay so we got a sense of who that is for we can i think tailor our comments to that uh great well let's start with uh with bernie you'll tell us about customer success compensation absolutely thank you so i wanted just to set the stage about what we were planning for our fy 16 when we looked at our comp plan year we really wanted to focus on three major things keep it simple uh when it comes to comp uh i've been in this space for about 15 years on the software side automating comp solutions for companies of all sizes which i'll talk about in a minute but it's really keeping it simple and easy to understand so that they have the right focus you want to reward performance and drive right behaviors the whole idea of paying compensation variable compensation is to drive the right behaviors and then finally you want to put in the appropriate mechanics of what what you're trying to accomplish and i'll talk a little bit more detail about that when i talk about our actual comp plan structure so for us we're a typical organization we're focusing on four major things uh customer adoption uh my team owns all the renewals as well as the majority of the add-ons we do about 90 to 95 of the add-on business within the customer base as well as customer references so really understanding our customer base and who's happy and who's not and telling the different success stories and the value that they're getting from our solutions so to put in a little bit into context exactly as a late stage startup we've raised close to 80 million dollars and to give a better understanding of the team and the types of customers that they're working with i thought i'd just break it out we have three different tiers enterprise midsize business and smb and the logos on the right gives you a sense of the types of companies so as you look at the enterprise it's multinational companies with complex structures and in just trying to work with these individuals you can see how the customer success person that's managing these accounts really is a a different type of profile than say a person that's managing the smb business exactly like i said has been around for 10 years and we automate comp for sales professionals but we also automate comp for folks that are on mbos so any sort of management objectives and we can talk a little bit more about that when you guys are ready to automate your compensation putting in a shameless plug so our current compensation model as well as the team model is i think pretty typical in the industry we do an 80 base pay and 20 is variable and we have two types of roles we have customer success reps and and they're really focused on adoption but their day-to-day interaction is making sure that the companies that are up for renewal are renewing and they're trying to find new opportunities for add-ons and and such the customer success managers they're dealing with our largest accounts and trying to preserve the revenue for our real big enterprise companies so their focus is slightly different they're obviously focused on the renewals and add-ons but because of the amount of accounts they're managing it's a much smaller amount they're focused on blueprinting success so how is that customer using our application and making sure that they're hitting all the all the right milestones to to make those customers successful and in certain situations i know nick was talking about it earlier depending on your strategy we have a big land and expand strategy so we could get a company like honeywell on board as a customer and over time we will grow with throughout that company and go either international or go into different divisions of that organization so their focus is really to get that first company up and running that first division and then being able to expand so the focus of the comp is a little bit different and i'll show you those two structures here in a minute when it comes to the customer success reps uh the plan components really fall into three main areas so 30 of it is on a corporate plan and our corporate plan really focuses on three measurements it's mrr churn as well as ebitda so this gives the opportunity for the individual whether they're a csr or a csm to really focus on things that will help the company so when they're out there taking a customer out to lunch when they're doing different things that include their expense corporate plan really helps them because they're thinking about ebitda because that's one of the bonus areas that we have so they're going to be fiscally responsible with our budget the other two areas they have a lot more control over and that's the add-ons and the renewals and we split those in half so the 70 of their variable pay is half and half on renewals as well as add-ons the incentive plan type is percentage to goal and at the beginning i talked about the objectives one of the main things that we want to focus on is making sure that we pay accelerators once they've hit that what we call the excellence mark so when we believe that they've hit that excellence mark we believe in paying them for that performance and paying them well because you want them to overachieve when they're when they're doing something spectacular our performance period it's a mix of year to date versus quarterly so the churn number is year to date just because there's different accounts that are up for renewal throughout the year and it's not fair to penalize them based off of what accounts are up for renewal so we run that churn metric at year to date and then for the add-ons we do that quarterly so we hit the reset button every uh every quarter with whatever that number that target is and then finally our payment frequency is quarterly for the csms it's slightly different same component breakout meaning they're also on the corporate plan 30 percent their 70 percent is focused on mbos and i mentioned this earlier they have a smaller set of customers so they're really focusing on customer strategy and making sure they're meeting with their customers on a some sort of cadence for these types of customers these size it's a weekly type touch they're focused on the renewals for those specific customers that are coming up for renewal within uh this fiscal year and then they're also in charge of customer success program assets because of the size of their accounts they're working on building out the assets for the team and those roll downstream so that we can take advantage of them and leveraging them one-to-many for the smbs but then really the high interaction for the high touch falls under the falls under the enterprise area they're also their mix is percentage of gold and they have some things that are just binary did they do it or did they not and same mix of year-to-date as well as quarterly and the frequency of payout is court is quarterly as well so the last thing i want to talk about is just lessons learned over the years of doing this being in the comp space we also have some best practices should never come more than three things three variables on a comp plan when you especially when you're using mbos any more than that it just gets too convoluted use concrete metrics whenever possible you want to define these so that they're not gray and if you anytime you can use a metric a number driven way a variable i would highly suggest that also introduce quarterly strategic themes so what we like to do for example this quarter is our user conference and so our whole goal is to get customers in attendance so next week in fact we're having our user conference at the hyatt in san francisco if you're interested in joining us and that whole quarter is was all based about running some spiffs with the customer success folks to make sure that they're getting folks there so we always want to have some sort of strategic theme each quarter and then finally is create these plans quarterly or biannually and that lesson is more about don't be afraid to try things don't feel like you're attached to the plan for the whole year if you want to try something run a quarterly plan and finally something we did that was interesting this year is president's club eligibility this is going to take a little bit of work but i think you really should talk to your uh executive presence so whoever's running president's club whether it's your cro or your ceo or if you have a president it's really impactful to get the folks that really performed well in the customer success group to club this year we got three folks there from my organization and i believe their loyalty is going to go through the roof based off of their experience they did a week in cabo and it was it's fantastic to be able to sell the executives that these folks have an impact to the business because they're keeping revenue and they're adding revenue terrific yeah thank you bernie now we'll hand it over to chris swarovski and for those of you who are uh familiar with the alphabet chris swarovski customer success his mother was thinking about customer success many years ago when when he was named so we can remember chris's name chris take it away thanks jeff uh good after good morning everyone um just a bit first off about my company dynatrace uh interesting what we're going through right now jeff introduced us as the best apm solution um i certainly feel that way our competitors might disagree but uh we're a company that's actually got a 40-year history we were originally part of a company called compuware compuware went private in december of last year and effectively split into two pieces one piece is the legacy copyware company which is focused on mainframe software and then dynatrace which is focused on the application performance management so it's kind of interesting and exhausting in the same breath going through this transformation because a lot of the legacy things we did as a publicly traded company where re-engineering is a privately held one compensation being one of them and trying to rewire everything up around new goals and objectives and not necessarily having all the systems in place to support that also creates some some challenges so i've been involved uh in a number of different roles not just customer success in my tenure with compyware now dynatrace and particularly around compensation planning not just in customer success but in pre-sales engineering and our services function so i've i've had a chance to try a lot of different things and also make a lot of mistakes so i try to summarize for you kind of my perspective on on the whole compensation planning process and it is a a yin and yang when you when you sit down and you have a customer success team and you're thinking about how you're going to do compensation you've got the balances of what the business needs and so far as a return right what's the cost for your team versus the return they're going to get based on the focus on retention right and the monies you're getting from that how do you align them with strategic objectives or initiatives that the company has uh regional nuances i'm i'm big on that one because i've lived a lot of hard lessons and i'll talk more about that but obviously too and and i think if this is kind of a micro thing when you're when you're incentivizing somebody around compensation you know how do you how do you get them positive about the plan right how do you get them motivated by the plan that they think the goals are achievable that they're realistic and likewise too how do you tune it so that you're not creating some dysfunction or maybe some internal conflict or conflict with external partners how do you make sure that you try to nullify that right so um and then again the financial reward part of incentivizing someone it's it's a challenge and you know thinking about all those angles and trying to get to uh to a place that works isn't always very easy in terms of the way we're doing compensation and you know again considering what's happened to us in the past the past six months we've got a lot of different things going with regards to our product portfolio we have multiple products both sas as well as on premise and obviously for those of you who have experienced products of those nature and the retention process it is different there are similarities but it is different so trying to make sure that we've got a proper balance there uh something i'll key on key in on a little bit but that's part of our plan that's about 80 percent we also look to spiff our people on services what we find in our space is that our customers may not have the bandwidth may not have the talent in their staff to wheel the technologies right because they've got so many other things going so we try to spiff our csms around looking for opportunities to open up for our services function team versus individual goals my experience has been that when i can find a good balance there and an emphasis on team it it makes it a lot easier for the person administrating the plan and some of you may view this as a bit unorthodox but when you have individual goals where you give csms individual accounts makes tremendous sense logically but what i've seen happen and i learned this the hard way with my pre-sales engineers you create also a challenge with regards to when you have like splits and trying to referee like well so and so took over this responsibility when that person went on vacation and who deserves credit for this based on timing and things so i've always looked for a way of trying to emphasize the team side of it as much as possible but also rewarding the individual behavior particularly through spiffs i've got 45 people spread out across the world and so a lot of them share geos so it's worked out well for us i mean the the great thing i think that we've been able to accomplish is building a team that really looks to share and help each other right that that dysfunctional con or uh conflict has really been nullified um you know balancing the components again when you have sas and you have on premise on premise tends to be a little bit easier sas tends to take more heavy lifting the challenge that i've been seeing or that i've experienced is that when you're spread out across different geos and so you've got market penetration with one product line that you don't have in the other trying to make sure that that product line doesn't get lost in the mix right weighing the components differently also again trying to make sure that what you're setting up aligns with sales targets maybe the sales goals are to grow that somewhat nascent uh penetration you have with that specific product so you know a lot of trying to figure out a nice calibration right so that you're achieving those business objectives i think for me the lessons learned here just a couple things um consensus is achieved at 80 tolerance what does that mean well there's a famous comedian who i won't mention his name because he's a bit controversial now but he's he's credited with saying something along the lines of the best way of angering everybody is trying to please everybody right and what i found with comp plans is that you know there's always going to be people that get focused maybe on the edge cases you know the what-ifs well what if this happens right what if my dog eats my comp plan or what if this happens i try to calibrate myself and knowing that if i get like 80 percent buying from the team that's using it or that's under it i know i've done my job right obviously i've got to make sure that my management team is comfortable but i kind of look for that you know if 80 of the people are checked in and they believe that it's achievable and that it's financially rewarding i've done my job engineering for effectiveness uh also means efficiency and execution i just as bernie said i mean keeping the component simple understandable right also makes it easier to make sure that things get paid on time that exceptions processes are as streamlined as possible the global aspect i've learned the hard way make sure if you've got a global team you really understand local hr labor law implications with regards to these plans some countries that we deal in if you change otes you can only increase them you can never decrease them even with spiffs so if you've experienced that or you're aware that you know you got to be really you know well understood on what those countries allow uh your partner distribution network we do a lot with partners particularly in asia pac and latin america our csms try to work closely with those partners and you know again making sure the goals are aligned and making sure that the behavior of the csm of course aligns to the partner achievement right so that the partner can be healthy that can be a bit tricky sometimes right when you're sharing that customer always analyze i i love bernie's idea of quarterly plans because you can spend the time and look at what's working what's not working i know we're going through finalizing our plan for this year now and i did a lot of analysis from last year and it really helps me think through okay did that component work and is does it line up to where the business wants to go this year and then finally and just echoing bernie again the budget for spot bonuses or spiffs make them fun it doesn't have to be extravagant i try to do fun things for the team where it's like you know here's a gift card go take your better half out for a nice dinner that that that to me makes a lot of a difference in terms of building esprit de corps terrific thanks chris uh we we've got a few more slides but what i'd like to do is to uh open it up to questions in a minute and so if you have questions why don't you come to the aisles i think we have people with microphones so you can come up to the microphones and and we'll we'll start the questions in a minute but first let's go through some slides here that we have about compensation uh and we've done a survey of gain sites actually done the survey of customer success industry in terms of what are the compensation parameters of the the staff within uh the customer success teams and bernie would you like to start just talk about your observations about these yeah it's interesting and the especially the customer success side of it where it says that one to three years is really the median i think customer success has been around for a while it's just taken different names whether it was account management back in the early 2000s just a quick story i was a sales rep for a software company it was an on-premise software company and my territory was every company that was i believe was uh 200 sales reps at the time but they were growing to a thousand and so the the thing was it was 2 000 things were great 2001 things turned all those companies were not doing so well they weren't going to be a thousand so it was the vignettes the red backs those types of companies so i was asked to create a customer advocacy role so i became the first customer advocate at the time i thought it was a demotion but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because i got the opportunity to build a customer advocacy group which over time evolved into customer success but that advocacy group is it was one of those things where you went in you talked to companies that owned software on premise and you tried to talk them into upgrading and spending thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars where in today's model it's just turn on the features and let's figure out how to make you successful so it's interesting that it's been around for a long time we're just in a stage now where we have the power as individuals to make these companies successful because of the way the technology's delivered so that's probably the most interesting thing is things they've been around for a while and because i've been in this space for i would say 10 to 12 years but now it's an opportunity for us because we can really move the ball forward without without having professional services get involved doing major upgrades doing things that were out of our control in the past so all we could do was be a customer advocate we couldn't actually make them successful let's uh take a look at this slide here about uh the compensation of by level uh chris you want to take a look at that and see how does this resonate with what you've seen i i love the slide uh and i i love it because today i had a meeting with my management team and i used it so i want to thank jeff for uh for a timely delivery there um i think as the industry evolves and some of the things that i'm seeing that certainly correlate to this is that you know the complexity of the organization that you're in and so far as multi-products large portfolio obviously you know plays into this but i think it highlights the fact as well going to you know nick's excitement this morning that you know this is a job function a career path that is very lucrative and very important uh for those of you who saw the presentation by the gentleman yesterday from ti tsia and he talked about revenue streams i think related to large enterprise companies how they kind of bottomed out and kind of correlated with the acceleration in this insofar as customer success growing as a function i mean it all adds up right so you know for for me personally when i look at this it really makes sense to me and it's really helping me fortify what i'm trying to do with compensation and you know making sure that you know people are seeing that this is an opportunity that that's worth their while talented people that have a desire to work with customers to make sure that customers are achieving value it's it's not only fun but it can be lucrative and then this last slide here showing the variable comp uh comp levers and and whether people are bonus annually quarterly or monthly it looks like a pretty even split between annual and quarterly now you you were saying earlier backstage chris that you you comp your what is your comp bonus plan for your team we do it on a quarterly basis and bernie we're also quarterly and i think um if you could do monthly great i think quarterly is a better cadence annually is tough because you really want to reward people closer to the event so i would be bummed if i was paid annually for a bonus so i think you really should think about quarterly if you can do monthly grade but i think the maintenance on quarterly is perfect it's a good cadence the other thing i'll mention is all these variables are excellent and what you will find when you if you're new to this you might want to add all of them to the comp plan but it goes back to what chris and i both said just pick three or even two that are really important to your company at the stage you're at so if it is mps scores and you want people to really uh get get in there and actually answer those questions so that you can understand how your customer base looks pick that one and pick another one but don't try to do more than than the human on the other side of it that's that's managing that comp plan can comprehend that's great well thank you very much that's uh terrific presentations we do have time for questions from the audience don't be shy any questions it's hard to see up here with the lighting uh over here can you get get a mic uh is there a mic back there or who has somebody have the mic here he comes and if other people have questions just come to the front here on either aisle and then we'll we'll rotate back and forth thank you uh just starting a customer success practice and finding that some people do not want to be incentivized in other words you know i find that some good candidates for customer success are people who didn't really like the pressure of sales and therefore are pretty uh reticent to to you know work under that kind of structure can you can you do you think there's a place for that do you think there's a place for a purely fixed compensation structure for a customer success manager or do you think it really needs to be incentivized so it's interesting to rephrase that question there's a there may be personality self-selection the kind of people who like to go into customer success have a different personality profile for the people who go into sales and therefore how do you think about incentive compensation team versus individual compensation uh bernie why don't we start with you and then share your comments so it's a good question and i think it depends on your solution and what you do because if you if you have a customer success manager that's highly technical and their job is to make a customer successful and they're going to be going in and really working with the product a pure salary type compensation structure might make sense but in most cases i think having a portion at risk is valuable to you and the company so you can really drive certain behaviors depending on the period of time i like chris also believe in team goals because no territory is created even the customers are always different so i always go with the team goal it makes life so much easier and everybody's motivated yeah not much that i'd add to what bernie said it if it's somebody that that's focused i mean it really boils down to how do you evaluate their performance i definitely see that and we're trying to do these things where you have a stratum of your csms who are very technical and are more working with the customer at a lower level but you know they're not necessarily trying to emphasize their actions around the renewal they're there as more of a technical source that would make sense to me but at the end of the day you know the way you're showing their value right to the organization is based on the renewals based on an attainment level based on nps scores so there has to be some objective metric great question over here good morning i was here yesterday intrigued to hear the intact team talk about timeliness of renewals as something they really focused on and in fact penalized against if renewals didn't come in on time curious if you have any penalty clause could you put the microphone closer okay i'm sorry curious if you're using any penalty clause for your customer service or customer success teams or if you have any thoughts on that so you know are you focused on the outcome itself or timeliness in addition to the outcome so if i'm understanding the question is it that are we compensating based on not only the renewal but also based on the timeliness of the renewal is that fair summary yeah absolutely the we call them stragglers right the renewals that come in late and we do try and calibrate the plan so that the incentivization is for a timely renewal right we want it on time we obviously want to make sure that we maintain our revenue streams and our plan is based on that attainment so there is there are some things that we do in terms of if they come in late i'll call it a penalty charge right depending on how far out it goes excuse me i i will say it's challenging to do that though in certain geos where we tend to see a higher volume of stragglers just because the complexity of the distribution channels so you know we try and tune around well you know we expect a higher strag amount here because of how we have to deal with partners it's it is something though that i think is important that you are emphasizing the timeliness right because that that maps to what your cfo wants to see in so far is your revenue run rate great next question um this is a bit of a follow-up to the first question but when maybe you're starting a younger customer success organization you're building out for the first time wanting to be metric driven how do you balance that with setting those goals if there aren't historical baselines within the company how do you determine what the csm's targets should be obviously one wanting to properly evaluate success but also retain talent by making them feel it's achievable how do you set that when you might be doing new initiatives or no baselines or contracts that are a year out from renewal i'm curious on your thoughts on that yeah well i'm going to add a question a sort of an add-on question to that which is if you quantify it what is the optimal percentage of people customer success people making their goals should 100 of the people make their goal should 50 is it some other number when you set your goals what is your what are you trying to achieve because of the role and the impact that they have i don't really want to be 80 or higher making their goals because that's that's the type of job 80 or higher you do want to or don't do do you want to be honest do you want them to be making it because you're giving them goals that they have a lot of control over versus sales is slightly different where you are really finding the lead cultivating it and getting it close these are already there now you it's up to you to put the right focus in place one of the things i would say with early with early teams and you want to keep them motivated you have to define the metrics you want to uh to measure but if it's just reality as you don't have any data then maybe focus them on some programs that is going to get you there and put some numbers out there that you want them to try to achieve you might not be paying them on that you i would pay them on the effort to start getting the programs in place and the processes in place so that the following year everything is set up yet they're feeling incentivized and they're collaborating on okay how do we want to do this so that we're all efficient and we have measurements that we can actually achieve and attain and you start working together as a team so i would set the goal you might not want to pay them because you don't know what the outcome is going to be but then really figure out the process that's going to drive to that goal great yeah i would just simply add i mean in some way bernie's saying an nbo focused around like getting to a process building that and making it so that you can execute against it you can show demonstrable um progress that would be a good place to start so then you could start looking at objectively where you're at today in terms of the benchmark and where you need to grow to question over here yeah great great session very helpful uh two two questions one is a quick one percent of folks on the team that should qualify for president's club we just introduced that we did 20 essentially of the team is going to qualify uh wondering if you've got any comments or best practices second question relates to team versus individual in quick backdrop we just moved from a 100 individual for the first half to 100 percent team based approach for the second half and basically you framed it as well it's going to be 50 50 for the year tempted to go with 100 team for 2016 wonder if you've got any you know views or comments on that thank you bernie if you could comment on that to start but also to reflect on something you said earlier about the idea of experimenting that when you're a young company and you don't have everything set that's an interesting idea yeah that's that's actually a perfect segue to try it don't don't say that this is what we're going to do for the whole year just try for a quarter see what happens if you like the results take it extend it to the next quarter and so forth so let the folks know that you have the opportunity to change it i like that you changed it to team i truly believe that's the way to go individual goals start moving towards that sales mindset so doing the team is is you're going to find you're going to get more bang for your buck but you're you're recommending actually for most cases a mixture of team and individual right yes yes what would the opt in your case in your company what do you do what's the mixture so the team part of it will be the metrics so the goal the churn number the add-on number that's all team the individual will be certain things that they're going to have a deliverable at the end of that quarter and for us it would probably be of that 70 that we talked about 30 percent of it that's outside of the corporate bonus would be tied to that individual piece where they have that deliverable um for your club question i think that's a good number um 15 to 20 percent of your top performance i'm i'm impressed that you got it done i find that when i talk to other peers that it's still a discussion and it's not reality so good job on that question over here hello yeah so um regarding that last slide on compensation and ver the variable comp i saw the uh retention was the number one uh choice and book of business or revenue was very very low is there is there some pitfall in uh compensate variable comp focused on the total book of business or any comment on that i mean maybe that was a gain site survey i don't know but i think that was the survey slide yeah that was that was the survey that from from gainsight across several hundred customers so the question is uh which is more important dollars of essentially upselling versus retention is that what the question is yeah versus uh of retention like the book of business was a very low i don't know if we can bring the slide out but book of business was very low and total revenue was very low in terms of one of the choices and retention was number one just wondered if he had a comment on that yeah so that was the survey responses that the customers that responded that was their the way they managed their business um opinion wise i think retention is still higher than book a business because at the end of the day that's the overall number that if you're public or private that's what you're reporting to the board and they want to know where are your customers staying with you and if not why and how are you going to go fix that problem from a financial point of view that the key metric is the net retention so it's if you have 100 customers and you lose 10 of them so you're down at 90 but those 90 spend 30 percent more so you're roughly 120 it's going from 100 to 120 which is the key metric that investors look at and we have time for one more question over here i'm sorry for the people who are are waiting in line you can try to get us afterwards we'll uh we'll be back in the room back there yes yeah so i think that it's been spoken about in a couple different sessions but obviously there's a lot of competition in terms of actually hiring so when you start to think about the compensation plan um what do you guys think in terms of just like minimum base salaries for uh new york or san francisco uh to meet that minimum threshold of living to start as like an associate or that that first level into the customer success world so the question is about minimum based salaries and chris i think you're going to advise everyone to open up an office in detroit where you are down to motown chief housing um yeah i mean we also have um a group of our team that's based in waltham massachusetts which is also pretty pretty expensive you know i think you have to work with your recruiter recruiting agencies to understand what the market bears but in these hot markets right um it is what it is um we do have a number of people in detroit and that's helped a lot in in terms of and nick talked about this too in terms of building the customer base i should say building the recruiting base what's worked for us really well is we do a couple different things with regards to university recruiting getting kids out of school training them up giving them some customer facing experience and then matriculating them into different roles that's worked splendidly and as a as a graduate of uh accenture at the time anderson consulting who had a similar program i find that an invaluable source of people because not only you know you're getting a cost that's realistic but it's not just what you're paying the people you want people who are motivated that's worked really well so i don't know if that helps but that might be something to look at too so chris in waltham for instance do you have a number what's your starting compensation for your customers yeah so i think we when we're looking at waltham we're somewhere close to six digits right for the associates for for for the customer service manager for the entry level you were you asked for the manager or the entry level entry level yeah yeah and so 11 000 for the manager yeah i mean for an experienced person it's about 100k for an entry-level person and we really haven't gone out and hired somebody who's not done the job before right if we're gonna bring somebody who's entry level we've matriculated in them in through our professional development program and they're paid anywhere from 70 to 80 in base salary and what about in the bay area um 50 to 70 for the entry level depending on their experience but we do the same thing we are big believers and because this is a new space i'll contradict myself a little bit because it was different functions in the future in the past because it is a new space you can get college grads smart kids that you can that are malleable and you put them in that role and you can start them in those ranges and it's it's a it's worked really well for us right and i think gainsight has statistics on this so you can ask your gain site contact for you know for uh benchmarks uh last question for both panelists uh if there's one thing you want people to remember when they go back to the office about customer success and optimal compensation chris what would it be what would you recommend mine would just be for those of you who know stephen covey begin with the end in mind right make sure that your objectives your business objectives are or that your comp setup is in direct alignment with your business objectives that's the key thing if you're centered there you'll do fine hey bernie you probably appreciate this answer since you were previously a cfo i would think a lot of people have this view of customer success as being a purist that you're on the field for the customer i would say go back and make sure your comp plan has some sort of revenue metric whether it's renewals whether it's add-ons because it makes it a lot easier to justify to cfos why you need more headcount so take a little bit of that sales piece of it and add it to your plan because this is becoming a critical role for sas companies specifically or subscription-based companies and make it make it closer to sales but not sales but you have a component and a metric that the cfo can appreciate for the amount of revenue that you're saving the company because the cost to go acquire those dollars are high so that that would be my suggestion terrific chris and bernie thank you very much uh please uh join me in welcoming and thanking our panelists here