Customer success pipeline stages for Sport organisations

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all right so welcome to tsw and you're getting ready for this i was looking at your linkedin profile and your background and you know you uh started right let's see you started in product management then you went to support services then customer success but then left customer success over 12 years ago went into partner management then industry solutions right so basically your career you have been in roles that touch the whole life cycle from designing the products selling the products supporting the product driving adoption so you have a very broad perspective and the first question i have is how does that broad experience shape your beliefs and what makes a customer success organization successful well i i have to echo john's comment that customer success is not a department it's a philosophy right so i'm you know i'm from salesforce we're like the granddaddy of sas companies and customer success is a value in fact if you listen to our ceo mark benioff he likes to say he was the very first csm at salesforce now with mark as the csm you want to operationalize a little bit so then we think about customer success as a team sport and what i was able to do is really see how custom what's customer success meant to different teams as i went um on my kind of tour of duty around the company and what's really key i mean if you think about sales for example for us sales customer success starts first of all it's through the entire lifecycle customer starts with sales writing a good contract having the right resources right the right services um you know partner services the right we have something called success plans so the right offers being written into the contract setting the right customer expectation and very importantly for us trying to write a contract of longer length because as many of you will know in customer success a longer contract link means you don't have to renew for a while which means you know it's just another well one less potential event where something could change so for us working with sales we say set up for success from day one and that's the entire con contract construction so for us when i review my customer success metrics it's very clear to my audience that it's a team sport so i'm going to click into a very tactical question but this is one that we get all the time at tsia and that is how early do customer success managers get involved in that sales cycle so if you want to make sure you have the right contract set up for success where do you try to engage the csm's into the into the sales cycle i mean theoretically it's as early as possible but obviously from a resourcing standpoint that may not balance that may not work out so we have a methodology we call it success 360. has four quadrants and 27 000 sellers at salesforce have been trained on it and so we go through what it means to set up the deal from success for success what it means if you are a business value consultant in the pre-sales world how we capture the key value metrics that you use to sell the deal and do a warm handshake into the success resources to understand well this is what success means to this customer right every customer has has different outcomes in mind and so for us we try to use the methodology to push ourselves earlier in the cycle and then depending on the size of the deal in the customer the team would engage sooner or later so i'm going to give you another tactical question because these are ones that we get all the time i knew it was going to go this way here in this conversation the um so we had published a while ago this what we call checklist for success in and the things that the sales organization should basically identify codify right document before you hand it over to customer success to make sure the customer is is going to be successful and since publishing that some of the feedback we get is we just can't get the attention of sales they look at that checklist and go i don't have any time for that so this training of methodology and sort of how how do you incent salespeople to make sure they're following the methodology and getting you what you need well i'd be lying to say we had it mastered i think we have the framework for this right so the methodology is espoused by our cro chief revenue officer it is essentially designed to train on the entire life cycle so um when i say 20 7 000 sellers have taken it i'm not sure that all of them really wanted to but they all have right so so it's back to that point about customer success being a philosophy and for us it is a core value for the company which i use as a cudgel when needed um and you know it this is this is actually a question from my own customer success team it's like they always ask me but why doesn't sales understand why don't they solve for the long term and and what i tell them is look we're a growth organization this tension between sales and success is it's a feature it's not a bug it is how we're set up as a company we have people who go out and sell and we have people whose job is to make successful and we have a methodology that ties them together and everyone at the end of the day understands the financial metrics and the stock price goes up and everybody's happy but it is a constant tension yeah and i'll just make a comment and i'll get i'll get back to a regularly scheduled programming here but this is good good discussion what you just said is powerful that the tension between land versus expand and renew is is a feature not a bug and and we we know there's a lot of companies are still struggling with this you know should i have sales people really care about the expansion do i really need cs and sales but but we believe strong point of view that you need that tension because you want the focus on land to your point to have that growth engine and a different group really focused on making sure they stay you know on the platform and expand so i think i completely agree and i think we're getting a little bit more sophisticated in our journey to think about it depends on the customer right and where is the customer on the cycle right and you could mix it up and that's what we're starting to play with yeah interesting interesting okay so so the other really neat thing about your career is you did have this 12-year gap in customer success and and you know this is a function that's been evolving and maturing etc so what are the biggest differences you see from your first stint 12 years ago in customer success and then when you came back well 12 years ago when i joined salesforce in an organization called customers for life we reported into sales at at the regional level not even at the top level so you can all imagine what the role was like it wasn't uh it wasn't consistent you know i don't have anyone do a demo you go do a demo right csm is like is it my job to do demos so you know that happened constantly so we've evolved a lot from then and um i'm lucky enough to you know have a ceo and an exec management team who really care about this and so we have a seat at the table and that's that's the separated out of sales and reporting yes yes and the other the other funny thing is and you know back in 2009 nobody knew what a csm was so we created a whole job family like what are the what are the competencies you need to be a csm and then we have to go explain to people well well it's like a like a sales engineer or sales consultant but post sales like we had all these analogies to roles that existed that people really understood and and you look at this role now i mean it's a huge thing the entire economy has moved much more towards subscription much more to having customer retention and loyalty actually be a ceo top of mind not just top line right so with that i think we've again we've come a long way if you look at the job listings for csms it's it's tremendous now and that that's probably been the biggest change so and i i promised the audience here we are not colluding on these answers but uh but i would just want to round out i mean this this concept of where does customer success report and we do org structure surveys every year and i and what we look for is number one where is it typically reporting and the number two we do some correlation analysis in terms of what's your best chance of basically making that a profitable endeavor versus a really expensive endeavor and i can and i say this all the time the data is definitive here customer success does not do well when it reports uh under sales for some of the all the reasons you articulate it ends up being used as you kind of throw it in there do demos do this we never we never try to monetize it right and it's very very difficult to scale it in that structure so again we're not colluding on this but the data supports exactly what you're doing and you guys i'm sure through the school of hard knocks figured figured it out so okay so i another question i was very curious because of your background you you were in this vertical solutions team right figuring out how to verticalize again tsi point of view we we believe that mit you know pretty much all tech companies are going to have to have some vertical muscle it's very hard to just have a generic horizontal solution and going to market because you have to understand the business your customers are you know their outcomes what's important to them so now turn that lens on customer success how important is you know vertical expertise in the world of customer success now uh you know and the answer is bottom line it is very important so we turned the clock back four years ago i was running the industries go to market team at salesforce that that basically brought in people with deep industry experience into salesforce to help create the strategy help create industry products and help really create blueprints that we could train our entire you know largely horizontal organization into thinking more um uh like their customers and really speaking the language of the customers so that has been a huge um leverage point for our sales growth and anything that we do in sales we think about how we mirror in success so first of all i do want to give a shout out i think we have one of our industry teams actually here our salesforce.org team is somewhere here in the audience and up there hello um and they are focused on non-profit and higher education it is an industry team that goes deep in understanding the key challenges the key processes everything to do with their customer base and then we have similar teams for our biggest industries for financial services for healthcare for retail etc and it is if you're thinking about working with a customer to help them realize value you need to understand what value means for that customer so we are obviously kind of retraining our organic teams some who have industry experience just from working at salesforce in a particular industry but we are also hiring people people from those industries yeah i mean i you know there's just a lot of i think still resistant for resistance within a lot of technology companies say look you know vertical's tough it takes extra work it's extra investment and do i really have to do that and i just think as again our industry matures and it's really about outcomes and values i don't see how you avoid that let me tell you verticalizing and having industry solutions industry products makes it sticky yeah it makes you go deeper in your customers key business process absolutely absolutely so um so let's talk scalability because this is this is such um you know an important topic to the customer success function i can tell you jb used the term yesterday in his opening keynote we use it all the time at tsia is it many customer success organizations are financial art projects it's like hey i've got you know some resources at the tippy tv top of for my largest accounts i'm fun to get maybe out of sales and marketing expense or cogs i'm not sure how i'm going to scale this thing so so what do you believe are some of the key levers to actually scale this and obviously you know you have customer success at scale at salesforce what are some of those levers i mean we can always do better this organization our customer success team was built um you know csm to top account right that that is how we fund we have the classic pyramids this is top of the pyramid and this is where actually it used to be practically the whole pyramid we would try to fund csms and for those of you in the customer success world i i am sure many of you have been in the same position as i was 12 years ago when you're manipulating some spreadsheet try to get your coverage ratios to actually have your math tie out with the number of resources you have right and then you end up with one csm to 40 accounts 60 accounts 80 accounts i mean something that's really honestly kind of pointless because you don't have that customer intimacy which is what you really want from that csm to customer relationship so we are um trying to break that and i and it's a journey um but the other side of the coin for salesforce is again 12 years ago we had essentially one product maybe 1.5 if you were being really generous and now we've got i'm losing track 25 30 products so the expertise needed if you're working with a customer who's running your multi-product set goes beyond b2b sales it's b2c marketing it's e-commerce it's whatever else you're selling so having that one csm be kind of the uber person is really hard to have that one person actually understand at a deep level what's going on in all these products so we still do have that pure play csm to strategic top account whatever you want to call it model but we are gradually mixing in more of a skills-based engagement model so the idea that we have shared success resources that specialize it could be in a product it could be in you know a key competency like like integration or or security or compliance like key i.t concerns and we deploy these experts who are in a shared success um set up into outcome-based engagements that have a beginning and an end so it looks a little bit more like little custom consulting engagements and that's what we're looking at in terms of scale it's it's it's a work in working progress we're also rebuilding our digital foundation we've got a whole new digital tech stack all around salesforce for all our properties that we are um actually have started deploying so both those are are are our avenues to scale well so two things uh number one i think salesforce org has spoken at previous conference conferences about that sort of dynamic engagement models where based on what the customer needs right now apply more resource but if there's somewhere else you can pull some of that resource off so it creates more flexibility so that is a lever for scaling um and what about monetizing in terms of when you can and you're adding value and you can charge the customer for that that value to basically feed the engine of resource what's your perspective on that that that is also key it's a little bit setting up for success for day one right making sure customers understand what they're entitled to and if they're expecting more to sell that delta yeah uh so we have offers we call them success plans so they include enhanced support when you get up in the higher levels you've got technical account managers that really help and then you have proactive monitoring that our product team does so we we can instrument a lot more the key for us is selling the right plan that helps us it doesn't fully take us out of the financial gyrations um but it helps us a lot and it's it's a huge business for us now and one of the key things again our perspective is is being prescriptive with that customer as you're going through that sales cycle and saying look based on where you are your complexity your size what you're trying to achieve here's the right prescription for you that is going to involve some of these value-add services which you should pay for but you're going to be more successful if you follow this as opposed to you know a different plan yeah absolutely and the prescription isn't you know necessary to buy stuff from us it could be you need these skills how are you going to get these skills are you going to get them from a partner do you have internal people that you want to skill up let us help you you need an integration architect because of the complexity of what you're doing and we don't want to be kind of the sos call all the time when you realize you know your architecture isn't performing for example absolutely we benchmark customer success organizations we look at the tracking some are very focused on you know uh health scores adoption metrics others are very focused on commercial metrics you know renewal rates expansion rates your perspective what what metrics matter the most to your organization well we do we we have that we face that same um that that that same set of you know which metrics are our key well we we look at metrics in two big buckets one of them is what we owe the company in terms of financials and that is the attrition rate slash renewal rate depending on which way um you like to look at it and also grow growing the business right so that is kind of the land and expand motion so what is the expand based upon the fact that the landing actually created a lot of value for the customer so we have we have our but our biggest metric that that finance tracks with um an incredible amount of precision is our is is our attrition rate and that's the number one that's the one that i will get calls about what does it look like we forecast against it um you know like a business but beyond that i mean because that's you know it's a trailing 12 month that's how we look at it so it's a little bit after the fact um so so the other metrics we look at are more you know traditional right we have an early warning system based upon adoption and usage that really is an early warning for potential renewal risks risk and we like to engage early we like to engage nine to 12 months before the renewal date if it looks like these adoption and usage metrics are not good but we also have a metric around just technical health of the customer's instance of sales force so that would be um how many lines of custom code are written in there uh how how is how are their key business processes performing at peak loads it actually includes human uh you know human knowledge like well you know do we have the um do we have buy-in from the executives do we see huge amount of tech debts sitting there that's uh preventing a customer from actually taking advantage of the latest innovation because even in a cloud-based world this does happen so that is kind of our health our health rating and we look at that as well and really try to formulate how are we actually going to attack that it's interesting you said you know we like to engage nine to 12 months before the renewal i love it you know we buy sas products like everybody else and i love it when when you buy the product and you get this call from the csm and they want to introduce themselves and the next time you hear from them is about you know 30 days before the renewal is due and i go that i didn't meet the csm i met the renewal manager that's who i met that was not the csm but anyway so yeah so let let's talk about futures here so um because again customer success is not a static concept it keeps evolving so that's what makes it fun yeah absolutely so what do you think the future of customer success looks like is it is it more ai is it more personalized more you know digital experience for the customer what what what do you think it looks like yeah we didn't have the plethora of digital tools that you know 10-12 years ago so i do think that the personalization and the idea of targeted engagements because the customer wants a particular outcome as we understand better and understanding better doesn't just mean deploying people to go sit at the customer site and attend all the steer codes yes that's nice but there are other ways of kind of gathering that intelligence loading it into a system and making sure everyone has that data i think that data-driven insight and personalization and targeted outcomes will be will be the secret sauce of the future that will also help us scale and for more road tasks um there is obviously a an amazing amount of self-service that's available um our slack counterparts as you many of you know sales stack is now part of the salesforce family and i sit down with their success team and i'm like so how do you do this and they're like oh we slackify everything okay what does that mean um but they you know they have bots they have a lot of automation just built into slack channels and we're looking at that thinking well what can we learn from it and i do think that that is the future that the simple things can be automated and then the high value things you've got enough data to make it targeted so it's not quite so much you know spray and play spray and pray in terms of how you want how you want something to land yeah absolutely i mean we were on this topic yesterday jb was on the square with really data driven you know sales motions and and those analytics helping you be much more targeted when on the sales side same true than after they're on the platform much more targeted in your efforts based on where they're at what they need and if you can unfold some of that capability digitally instead of having to have a person intervene that's definitely going to be key yeah and if i can just riff a little bit on what lisa was talking about on partners right 90 of the work in the salesforce world is done by partners so that's something we spend a lot of time thinking about like we have csms we have our own success resources we have this motion but how then do you make that motion inclusive of this 90 of the world that's sitting in partners who aren't salesforce badge employees how do you make sure the knowledge your best practices etc are all shared so however we would train our own success managers uh and our own consultants in our services organization making that available to partners is is incredibly important and then we've got you know some technical logistics and so we spend a lot of time with our partner team trying to figure out how we can make this as seamless as possible because again setting everything up from success from day one as i talked about includes partners right but partners you know may have slightly differing incentives so you want to spend time making sure that at least the information and the knowledge sharing and whatever we're seeing in terms of our early warning metrics or health metrics are shared with partners so we can all be as aligned as possible okay so i'm going to riff now based on what you put on the table so on the partner side of this so we see if you look at the industry and you look at um you know people have been in this industry a long time selling traditional products whether it was a microsoft or a cisco wherever they usually had very robust channel partner ecosystems because that was really important for how they went to market with that product then you have this next generation sas companies come along and a lot of them because it was direct right they they're they didn't have as a robust a channel partner ecosystem i mean but it sounds you know it's salesforce how is that thing involved in terms of the role of the partners and how important they are do you think that's changing for for sort of the born and cloud companies i i do i think earlier on in our journey um partners helped us get bookings right they they knew the market better especially outside of what we consider our core markets where we had a lot of um employees and expertise but that that philosophy has changed because of the whole idea of of being set up for success which can't involve just salesforce people yeah and so that that whole philosophy is permeating our partner team as well um because we are aligned on making that customer successful and we can't do it without our partners so it's how i play that i mean so the channel is being pretty much a sales channel hey you know almost an agent if you can point me now i got it i think you know they're on the platform too hey the channel is really not only sales but helping with that delivery motion helping drive expansion help very different role for them yes exactly okay great thank you for taking that one so i'm gonna switch gears on you uh again here and so tomorrow we have a keynote from eva helen and she is a longtime tech exec and she's publishing a book titled women in tech a book for guys and so i had an opportunity to interview her for we were doing a podcast now and i had a great conversation and in that conversation we were talking about the fact that only 28 of employees in the tech workforce are women i mean very low and so we as we were talking about that this concept that you know diversity and inclusion is not the responsibility of hr or just a diversity and inclusion you know task force that it's really the responsibility of every frontline manager and i'd just love to know you know your perspective on what you believe frontline managers can do to help recruit more diverse talent into our industry absolutely and just to do a little horn tooting um we we look at i look at my team's um metrics all the time and we're at forty forty seven percent female and i'm very very happy about that that's pretty um so uh yeah that's awesome we have work to do we have work to do in a whole bunch of other fronts but i have i have that one statistic that warms my heart um look it is it is everyone's business and it kind of comes back to you know the statement earlier it's it's a philosophy right and as we need to have teams that mirror the diversity at our customers this seems kind of obvious um so for a front line manager i would say open your aperture if you're you know trying to staff um a role that that helps manufacturing customers you should look at someone who maybe is a shop floor supervisor who really understands the business processes really well like the whole industry approach actually gives us more access to non-traditional backgrounds meaning non-traditional tech backgrounds right don't just go for you know a tech person who's worked at all these you know enterprise software star wars and think that that person is going to be the best person for the job and that i think is a big it it is a mindset change it's an attitude change that needs to be supported by the culture of the company yeah so everyone feels that you know they should be doing this um and uh and and at the end of the day think about the person who can deliver the outcomes that you're looking for all right when i was speaking to eva in this podcast we talked about the concept of you know when safety became a big thing in manufacturing plants and people created safety departments but if everybody working on the front line felt that you know it's not my safety is not my job they're supposed to worry about that the safety of the plants usually not that great but if they all feel that they own safety you know safety improves i think it's the same exact issue here with diversity inclusion everybody's got to feel that that's their responsibility not somebody else's yeah and everybody can have some impact on that absolutely absolutely so so i really appreciate the time here today and we went through our our time like that and i appreciate your your insights um and and salesforce continues to be a great role model i think for a lot of companies to look at in terms of you know what does customer success look like at a much larger scale so really appreciate the insights thank you for having me this is great conversation [Applause]