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[Music] hi everybody Ben from nutshell here and joining me now in person for the boundless 20/20 after show is nutshells own customer success manager kristen gray Kristen as always it's great to see you Kristen joined nutshell as a customer support specialist about three years ago and why not to essentially self create the role of customer success manager at nutshell which is that a tremendous impact on retention and revenue at the company and so today I want to take a deep dive into exactly how you pull this off and how other growing companies can follow in your footsteps particularly subscription-based companies like ours so take us back to the beginning what made you first realize that we needed a formal customer success function at nutshell was it a problem you identified or an opportunity you spotted what sent it all into motion yeah well thank you so much for having me so I was working in a support capacity at the time I was having a lot of conversations with customers on the phone via email by chat about you know issues they were running into I was facilitating a lot of product he'd back to my developers and one of my roles at the time was to process cancellation forms and that's not a process that we automate at nutshell so I had my eyes on all of these cancellation forms from hundreds of customers who could have been good great product fits for nutshell but we're choosing to leave because they were failing to see ROI what's natural and while the support team is highly skilled they failed to provide the level of care that it took for these customers to receive ROI with with our CRM there was one conversation in particular that I can remember a customer reached out and let us know about their deadline they said hey we have two weeks to decide whether or not nutshell is going to be the CRM platform that we take up with us into the into the future and I was so grateful for that opportunity to have the conversation and begin to turn turn it around so we were able to keep them so that was two years ago and they just hit the twenty thousand dollar lifetime value benchmark which is a little huge so I started to brainstorm about how many other customers were out there who weren't vocal and weren't reaching out and I know how hard it is to turn the conversation around as soon as they submit the form so that was really kinda what set it into motion and was understanding that these issues these cancellations were preventable so what was your starting hypothesis how did you feel you can best take this opportunity yeah so we had tried a customer success initiative at nutshell in the past before my time and it was a bit of a copy and paste approach that we have learned from competitors right selling onboarding in units of time and not whether or not actual value was delivered so I had the advantage of learning from this false start but I also knew that I had my work cut out for me I had to determine which engagement points to impact as well as the correct metrics to measure all while working in the full time queue my hypothesis was that I could fix our retention problem by proactively reaching out to customers and not waiting until they were in my inbox telling me it was too late to turn it around so what is your initial success conversation so that the new signups look like who are you reaching out to what were the kinds of questions you're asking before I could prescribe a fix I really needed to expand my level of understanding of the kinds of concerns our customers were facing so I started by reaching out to new customer signups 3 seats and above right because that indicates that they are a team and documenting the kinds of concerns that they were vocalizing and right at the time so much of the input that I was receiving receiving was qualitative it was you know paired with human emotion so it took some time to really get to the heart of what our customers were telling us right so it deserved my patience it deserved my time and I really let the customers drive the conversation for some time before some themes began emerging your initial conclusions from that first wave of conversations what did you learn yeah so other than learning how much I love working with national customers to help them solve their problems I learned that no matter the team size the company type or the industry all new customers at nutshell needed about the same things right they need early and expert guidance with their data migration and to nutshell bringing all their contacts into the system they need help configuring their pipelines that's a work shopping session or just helping them understand exactly how I college II can help automate their workflow I also learned that they need assistance with integration set up data restrictions so that you know folks are seeing what they need to see and nothing more and then also team training so that their teams could continue using the system long after I helped them and you know use the platform for years to come so you wrote about this a little bit on the nutshell blog last summer and I'll drop the link to that in the description of this video so I know what you did next which was build a custom and pipeline within nutshell to track all this and that's a success in itself because he managed to prove out a brand new way that nutshell can be used within a sales organization so tell us a little about the customer success pipeline that you've built within nutshell so looking back one of the best decisions that I made was to use the system that I was aiming to support I used our pipeline automation tool to save a lot of time and really focus my efforts on new customers who were interested in receiving our help so that a custom pipeline that I created a nutshell had several stages so those stages were interested planning meeting follow-up nurture and then funneled towards support so it's a pretty slick process I still recommend it to a lot of the customers I help who are using nutshell for account management in the first stage I used nut shells email sequencing tools so that I'm top of customers inbox for about 20 days if they don't respond in that time their lead auto closes right they're not on my plate anymore because they're getting the answers that they need through you know kind of a self-service pipeline but those who do raise their hand and book an appointment with me nutshell automatically progresses those customers forward into the next bucket so I'm able to invest all of my time with engaged customers who are really excited to receive support so how did you measure the success of your CSF Ertz what metrics tissues in the beginning and did those change over time yeah so I love this question because I think a lot of organizations can pin the churn number on customer success managers in addition to that customer success can be used as this band-aid fix for a lot of larger issues within the organization such as you know unmet sales expectations poor service experiences even just bad product fits right so I all that things that I did use the churn rate as a metric that I measured early on because it was easy to track month over month and kind of track along with that progress in addition to that it was a good metric to use to compare the turn rate of the cohort of customers I worked with with the turn rate of the customers I didn't so even though the churn rate helped me at that time I still kind of view churn as the dark side of customer success right it's easy to lose focus on growth when you're all of your time is kind of sunk into this cohort of customers who weren't able to solve their problem using your tool so it's still kind of it's a metric that I pay attention to but I've lifted my gaze just a little bit to you know kind of expand my understanding of who's successful and focus my attention there right so all of this to say that I'm trying to put my name on on revenue absolutely so along the way your customer success efforts evolved from just part of your role as a customer success specialist into this full-time job where you now have ownership over this really critical piece of nutshells business what was that transition like did it take some convincing of company leadership or did they see the value of this right away totally yeah even when you work for really smart people like I do they still need to see proof that your idea is going to pay off so I'm a calculated risk taker I get that it took me about 12 months to deliver some metrics and some proof that I could really hang my hat on I exhibited a lot of curiosity and flexibility on the how and then really crossed my T's and dotted my eyes when it came on which metrics I needed to deliver upon and the timeline that I had to deliver so after about 10 to 12 months of you know religious data logging I had this you know proof that my hypothesis was not only going to prevent customers from churning but we were actually seeing customers grow right it was going to be a lucrative decision for the organization so yeah I mean I think it was a big a big shift but overall it was you know very much worth the time that I invested and proving that it was going to be lucrative because today I get to come into work every day and know I serve this really critical role and that feels good so let's move on to the really exciting stuff which is the impact of your reference so from the beginning of your customer success journey and until today what have been some of those key results absolutely so first and foremost prospects convert more easily knowing that as soon as they sign up there's someone on the other side who is accountable for their success secondly the cohort of customers that I continue to work with actually has a negative turn rate meaning that they're expanding faster than they are turning out and then finally I'm I have seen the average lifetime value of customers expand by hundreds of dollars just in the nine months that I've been doing this work full-time one thing you told me recently is that getting the job is different from having the job so how about your role as CS manager evolved over the last year or so or how have you had to adapt it yeah I did say that uh yeah I mean hey I think what this experiment has really taught me is that I come to life when I'm in deep problem-solving mode right there was this retention issue and I've really kind of activated during that time today right I get to do this every day but for our customers when I was learning how to you know kind of make this experiment successful what really changed in me is I adopted this mentality that nutshell was my business and I operated under this integrity the you know this level of integrity that was really unique to a business owner so that's what made me successful kind of carrying through this experiment and it's the mentality that I now adopt with every customer facing interaction that I have right just because you know someone is kind of coming to the conversation with a different level of knowledge or understanding of tack doesn't make them any less brilliant or capable so you know one thing that I like to do before my calls with customers is I'll look at their about Us pages online learn about their mission statement and the problems that they're really passionate about solving that's impossible to lack empathy after all of that right because you know it's it's so great to be supporting you know really inspirational entrepreneurs out there doing incredible things so I love that and you know it was really exciting for me to build the department but it's still exciting every time I get to have a conversation with the business on who really wants to use nutshell to help get them to the next level how often do you revisit your own process whether that's the size of the companies you're reaching out to the metrics you use even the stages in your pipeline yeah a great question so it's no secret that I'm trying to scale my department at nutshell so for the time being it's just me check back with me into here yeah um but yeah I mean that that means that during a really high sales season for example I might need to stay in really tight communication with the sales team just so that we're not disappointing new customers if they are expecting onboarding support right away right so I say in really close communication with them I would say like daily communication as far as the pipeline goes I revisit that about once a month that gives me the timeframe I need to kind of adapt to adapt my process to reflect seasonality so during our seasonal dip in sales in this summer I decided to pivot away from new customer onboarding which wasn't going to take a lot of my time and instead focus on the cord of customers who had been with us for a long time right so I was able to check in with them see how they were doing make sure they were on track to you know stay successful using nutshell and continue to grow in addition to that I launched an initiative called that I call it the shipping news right it's a monthly video that talks about product releases over the past 30 days right the pros are calling this continued onboarding these days but ya know I'm I started doing just like quick two-minute videos to talk about what was new in nutshell and I still do it today because customers seem to really like it uh-huh but ya know I think about it once a month helps keep me in tune with customer need and seasonality so we've spoken a lot about what you did at nutshell to stand up a customer success department that reduces churn that increases expansion revenue so for anyone watching this you know before I let you go are there any advice or pro tips you can give to someone else who might be thinking about creating customer success program in their own company yeah thank you so first of all please add me on LinkedIn if you are starting a customer success initiative at your organization I would absolutely love to live vicariously through you and learn about some of the problems that you're trying to solve I do have some advice on how to start something new within a company first of all you know be vocal share a lot of excitement about your ideas and what you think is possible be flexible and then creative on the how but you know really make sure that you're agreeing on the measurables so that you have something to you know deliver upon as you're doing your monthly check-ins and so on in addition to that it can get really lonely when you're stuck or starting something on your own so I've found it really successful to kind of loop in the team and talk about what I was excited about so that I was sharing updates and you know all-hands meetings and I created a slack channel so that people could cheer on our success you know and really make it about the team and you know driving all of us forward on the CS specific side I think it is really easy and time-saving to automate cancellation forms but if you can try to avoid it or at least you know do quarterly cancellation report check-ins just so that you're understanding why your customers are leaving if you are finding that in their forums they're saying that your product is too difficult to implement or they're not saying ROI with your with your solution you already have built a case for customer success at your organization anecdotally so much of what I learned about the work I do today I've learned in brick-and-mortar right I come from a retail management background and you know if you can imagine a customer comes to the register and they have an item with them they want to be validated and told that they've made the right choice right even a simple styling suggestion or compliment goes such a long way because they can tell that you care beyond that interaction at the register you want them to be successful long-term and ultimately get their loyalty right get their customer loyalty and bring them back so that is you know so so little has really changed about the work that I do people still want to be told they've found the right product fit and the right product they want to be trusted and they want to trust you I think that if you can get that balance right you will drive company grabbing their excellence well that's my last new card thank you so much for sharing all these wonderful insights and for all the hard work you put in a nutshell and for our customers yeah thank you thank you for having me of course crisp and gray everybody and thank you for watching take care everybody see you next time