“Driving Growth Through Customer Happiness” with Asana, PagerDuty, Miro, Sapphire Ventures

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program is about to begin.

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As a courtesy to our speakers and fellow attendees, we ask that you please silence your cell phones. Please welcome to the stage nirasha tayshakunavud, global head of customer experience at asana, manjula talaraja, svp and chief customer officer at pagerduty. Sangeeta chakraborty, CRO at miro and kathy gow, partner at sapphire vent.

Hi everyone. It's so amazing to be here. Thank you all for coming. So the aim of this panel is really to help redefine how people think about customer success, right? Gone are the days when customer success is just pure firefighting, pure churn mitigation. And these days companies are actually using customer success to drive growth. Right? Today we're so lucky to have an amazing panel of experts from Asana, Pagerduty and Miro to bestow their wisdom upon how you can turn customer success into a growth engine. So in this panel we're going to cover a lot of things. We're going to cover why customer success oftentimes look very different in every company. And then we're going to dive in and really talk about best practices and tactical ways you can turn customer success into a growth organization, into a growth engine for your organization. But I'd love to turn it over to my panel and just have them briefly introduce themselves.

Yep.

Hi everybody. First of all, it is such a pleasure to be here with all of you and to join such as teamed thought leaders in the space of Customer Success and SaaS. My name is Sangeeta Chakraborty. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Miro and I'm responsible both for revenue and customer success.

Hi, I'm Anjula Thalreja, Chief Customer Officer at Pagerduty. Real pleasure to be an outdoor stage. Love it. Beautiful weather. I run a customer success organization and have six organizations under me and think about it as all of post sales with data science at the foundation of it. So including data science, six organizations all part of post sales.

And I'm Niracha Tejakunavud and I get the longest name on the board winner. It's Ty, in case you were wondering. And I am at Asana where I run all of post sales globally and I actually started my customer success journey in 2009 at Salesforce when nobody actually knew what a CSM was. So just think back. Yes, yes, that was actually the case back then. So now look at us now. Amazing, amazing. Part of the Growth engine of so many companies.

And I'm Kathy Gow. I'm a partner at Sapphire Ventures. We are a B2B focused venture capital firm based here in San Francisco. So let's dive right in. We have so much to talk about. First I want to turn it over to our panelists and say, hey, you guys all have very different titles, yet you're all responsible for customer success. Tell us a little bit about how customer success is run at your organizations and who actually manages customer success. And I would love to start with Sangeeta because you recently transitioned from the title of Chief Customer Officer to CRO. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, it would be my pleasure. So a little bit about perhaps some grounding of how I got to where I am. I started off with some systems thinking, learning as a computer science engineer. And as I started to build software, I found I am the person that actually always wanted to understand what is the purpose of what I'm building and why is anybody asking me to build it and if they're buying it from me, why are they buying it? And I found very few answers that satisfied me. And it felt like people really didn't seem to care. It was about making the deal. And we have set up a system that for the last 20 years has simply rewarded getting the deal done and not really thinking about the person that is putting their reputation, their dollar, sometimes their career into making that decision. Buying software from you. The other thing that I felt this questioning led me to was the pursuit of value. And I think it's ultimately, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the value that we are providing to our customers. And so that has been the grounding on my go to market journey. I used that grounding to keep figuring out how do I drive more value and actually eventually that would lead to more sales if I did it right. And so I found myself running what was used to be account management and then it became customer success. Like Neeraja said at one point, there was no such term. And I was really excited because that was the beginning of SaaS. There were three things that were happening that made me happy about it. One was people. The users finally had power. They had the decision making power at the end of every year whether to keep you or not. The second thing was valuations were based on that number, how much was recurring. And finally I felt somebody had the place to make those things happen to ensure that the revenue is recurring and that you're growing in the right way. With the customer in mind. So I always drove my business with a number, I always carried a number and I feel like that is critical when you think of customer success. It isn't about making a customer happy, it's about the outcome you're driving. And so how can you be always thinking about giving value that allows your business to expand? I made my way into the CCO role quite a few years ago and at many companies, depending on the type of company, I either held the expansion number or the renewals number. At Miro I had the opportunity to work with a very collaborative team and so I found many opportunities to get really close to the expansion part of the business. Obviously I owned the retention part of the business and what I think is the most important thing at Miro is it is all about the user and the customer value at the end of the day. So I had an opportunity to lead the entire business and it has been really sort of a natural transition because that is the way the company thinks. And very fortunate here to partner with the company. And I see some colleagues here in the crowd as well.

Anjula.

Yeah, let's talk about customer success. I am the chief customer officer at Customer Success and like I said, I run six organizations. The customer success management, renewals, professional services, paid to duty, university and support. And at the foundation of it is data science, which is super important. But I think about all of you who are at different stages of pre IPO, post IPO companies, young startups and typically a young SaaS company will start focusing outside of sales on support and what I call customer service. And so let's go through that journey. Customer service is a reactive organization that is responding to customers on what technical demands they may have, answer questions and provide support which is very different than a customer success organization. So if you think about the maturity curve, you think about it in, in terms of moving from customer service to customer retention where renewal business. In the SaaS business, the CAC, the customer acquisition cost is high. So retaining overall a customer starts becoming super important. And that is core to making sure that your churn numbers are low. And most companies don't think about it that way, they're thinking about new logos only as a young company and you want to think about both what is your base that you don't want to drop and yet grow and that's your growth engine. And then moving over to expansion and think about your customer success managers who are helping with adoption, who are driving business value and looking for the next opportunity in order to go sell either an additional product or additional licenses, whether you're product led growth or whatever you are evolving to currently in the current economy. So my journey at pagerduty when I left Salesforce was I inherited an organization that was more customer service and I grew them to becoming more focused on retention and then now we are expanding very rapidly into becoming the expansion engine of the company and have been and that's why our dollar based net retention and our revenue growth has been stellar over the last few years. So very powerful for customer success to play a very important role within the SaaS companies.

Neeracha.

Well, I mentioned earlier that I started at Salesforce in 2009. 2008 was a little bit of a financial crisis and all of a sudden Salesforce like many companies woke up to the fact that the leaky bucket analogy, there was a lot going out the bottom and ultimately as Manjula said, it's cheaper to save a dollar than to go acquire a new dollar. And this was kind of the beginning of Salesforce's focus on customer success. Prior to this mini crisis, customer success had reported up into sales around the world and it was all pulled out as a single post sales organization which actually is common in many companies. And back then again it was very nascent. There was no where do you hire a CSM for what is a csm? You know, Nick Mehta and Gainsight, he was just like an idea in his head. He hadn't actually formed the company yet. And so I got to be in the ground floor of kind of this function. What does it mean? How do you move from reactive to proactive? How do you take account value? Right. You may say okay, well you know, here's a potential for expansion at this customer, but is the customer getting value? And the value realization needs to be what the customer is looking for, not your own decision. Well, we think they're getting value because of X. It's what did they buy your software for? So that was the beginning of my journey and then I moved around in various go to market roles at Salesforce Partners which is a big part of the success motion and industries which is also, you know, when you verticalize, you get stickier. So I saw the whole cycle and then I came back at the end of my Salesforce career running a 4,000 person customer success team. But then I wanted to build, I just wanted to build it from scratch. It was a little, you know, it's a little bit like steering the Titanic if you have a really big team. And so I joined Asana about six Months ago. And it's been such a joy in learning and thinking about how you build from a PLG base, which I know we're going to talk a little bit about, into an enterprise focused company pulling together all the same post sales function, the ones that Manjula listed and how we think about go to market as this flywheel between sales and post sales versus just a simple funnel.

Thanks Neeracha. Before we jump to the next question in the audience, please raise your hand if you're part of an organization that has a product led growth strategy. PLG strategy. Okay. Quite a few people, so I want to stick with you. Naracha. Right. Because you came from spending 14 years at Salesforce to joining a PLG led company like Asana and customer success might look very, very different for a core enterprise sales go to market versus a plg. Tell us a little bit about that transition and some of the differences.

Yeah, it's definitely been a learning journey like you read about plg, you understand it and then it's very different experiencing it. I mean PLG growth typically happens with viral adoption. It typically happens bottoms up and I was used to very much a top down motion. Let's understand the actual value metrics that the customer is buying for. Well, if you're dealing with four different departments that ended up with credit cards with a whole bunch of users, their goals are not the same and they're very different across functions. So I think that was one how do you adapt? How do you figure out what the most valuable outcomes are for the customer when the customer often started without having those defined? So that was definitely one thing. I think it's interesting combining a bottoms up viral adoption which gives you amazing champions, but maybe not C level buy in versus a top down where you're going in. You are talking about Asana. We do collaborative work management. That's the category and it really matters. You get more benefit from collaboration when it's multiple departments, not just one department. You don't get the same benefit because you're just collaborating within a department instead of across the company. And so that has led to very different plays, if you call it and kinds of motions that our success team does. And how do you marry the best of everything you've learned from this PLG motion into kind of a different combined world. And the best thing about it for me is just the close partnership with product. I did not have that before and you know, the idea of using the product, putting banners in the product, having help modals, everything just built into that real estate that very valuable product, real estate. There is a willingness to do that in a PLG company that doesn't exist in an slg, a sales led company. And that has been a joy because that's where your users are, that's where you can touch them, that's where you can help them. So yeah, so that's a little bit of what I've learned in the last six months.

I love what she's saying because when I joined PagerDuty, it was product led growth. We grew through engineers in the DevOps space and it was all about the charge card and how it went viral. The following is amazing. And then one engineer moves to another company and brings in PagerDuty. But the economy has changed folks. It's all about tools, consolidation. Now it's a top down sale. It's the CIOs, the CFOs, the CTOs, the CCOs that are making the decision. So this is a very interesting point. Customer success group at Pay to Duty, when I moved them from customer service to becoming a customer success organization, we were very focused on adoption. If it was plg, we were driving adoption and the faster we deployed and the speed of deployment, which you can see on the slide mattered because as soon as they ran out of licenses, they bought more and it was all PLG. But if overall decisions are now being made by CXOs, the role of CSG has changed. And that's why expansion and becoming the growth engine is so critical for the customer success group. And I'm calling it CSG because it's the acronym for customer success group. And therefore a key point is as the market is changing, you should all evaluate your companies on where is your customer success group and how is it driving the growth engine. As you're moving from a product led growth company to a product assisted growth company, PLG to pag and what's the role of customer success and how is that evolving or even what's the role of sales?

Yeah, it's interesting. You actually got three people facing very similar interesting build challenges in a product led growth world. Samiro's also grew up in a product led growth as an entity that very clearly led from the product and product was the first salesperson, it was the first customer success person. It was everything to you until we realized that you needed to do more. What I think is most interesting right now is the concept of post sales is really taking a back seat and I have made it a mission not to even think about it in the company. People say post sales and they look at me because they know that I'm going to interrupt them. Because I think you cannot in a SaaS world think about post sales anymore. You're always selling.

It's early pre sales.

Yes, it is still early sales. And so I think that becomes even more complex to Manjula's point, when you are in a PLD motion because now you have to marry the beauty that is product led growth with the deliberate intended science of the top down motion. And you have to make sure you don't destroy any of the goodness in both of these motions. That's a really complex challenge. And at the same time you want the user experience to be stellar. You want the user not to feel like they're talking to many different parts of the company. The user should not have to learn your organization chart to figure out how to get value from your software. So that I think is the crux of the challenge that we have in customer success right now.

The focus should be customer life cycle, not how you're organized or what is pre sales and what is post sales. If the company moves to customer centricity and what is the customer life cycle that will help you especially through this transition that's happening in the market right now.

So one interesting proxy around customer success rising in importance for many companies is the fact that CCO's chief customer officers are increasingly being asked to join boards of public companies and private equity backed companies as well. I want to throw this to Manjula who is on the board of several of these companies. Tell us a little bit about what value a CCO can bring to the table in the boardroom.

Yeah, I love that question because I'm on a board of Sun Run, the number one solar company of the world as well as Proofpoint, one of the leading security companies of the world. And it is interesting if you look at public companies, typically on the board were CFOs, it was more of a governance function. But what are companies looking for growth? So they're starting to get more and more CCOs who understand the customer and understand dollar based net retention, who understand how do you drive growth and how customer experience are intermingled. So I'll just give you a little bit of a stat here. Bain and some other consulting firms have shown us that those companies that are focused on customers experience and have very strong customer success organizations have revenue 4 to 8 times higher than their peer group and 11% more dollar based net retention. So more and more boards are looking for CCOs to get on their boards to Give that customer centricity and drive the growth engine which every board is looking for right now to influence every company in this economy.

You know, driving customer value, making sure that customers are served and delighted. These all sound like very basic, common things, but in practice, it's not always as easy. So let's talk about metrics, right? In your organizations, what metrics are you really, really focused on from a customer success perspective? Maybe we'll kick it off with Sangeeta.

Yeah. So we look at metrics very, very carefully and regularly because that is how we drive the scale of our business. We are on a constant search for how do we get absolutely impeccable in how we run our business by this. We look at metrics in several different ways. One is what are the metrics the customer cares about? And the customer is looking at metrics that may be different from what you care about as the company. For our customers, they're looking to understand what is the adoption of the product, how deep is the adoption, what are the different teams using it for. And they're trying to determine what is the value of that product led growth usage that they're seeing. So there's customer metrics that we stay on top of. On the internal side, we look at retention as a big important metric for us to constantly drive both at net dollar retention as well as gross dollar retention. We look at expansion numbers as a key indicator of different growth segments. And we look at the net new year. Are we landing new businesses? Are we looking at new companies that we can grow our business in? Those are some of the standard metrics. We also look at the loyalty of our customers. Do we see them getting deeper and deeper on the adoption curve or are they staying stagnant at one point? So those are the key metrics that we're looking at for our business.

I'll add a couple of key points. Remember in the beginning of the conversation I talked about data science. That is all of our power as SaaS companies. We know everything that's happening with our customers. And using data science to drive metrics is super critical. So make sure your customer success group has data science there because it isn't about just adding more people. It's about how you drive the reduced cost to serve and yet drive growth. And data science gives you a lot of pulse in terms of your customer. I'll put something that is controversial here. I think NPS and CSAT is old world. And the reason it's old world is think about NPS and csat. It's survey based. The customer's filling out survey. You don't have a pulse of 100% of your customers, maybe 50%, maybe 20%, maybe 10%. But you need to know everything about every customer. So the points that Sangeetha brought up, very critical in terms of driving churn, driving retention, but also expansion. So here is what we do internally in terms of our organization. Myself and the head of sales have the exact same comp model, net new ARR, which is ARR minus churn, my directs. And we've really built this into an art and actually we optimize it every year. My directs are on expansion and percentage and churn, but the individual contributors under them are on basically churn and downgrade speed of deployment. And number three is adoption. So what we've done is we have done the checks and balances and really created a healthy tension to really drive all aspects of the business. And we continue to fine tune it at the beginning of every fiscal year.

I totally agree that the teams need to be aligned. So if you have a sales team that just focuses on new bookings and a success team and renewals team that just focuses on renewals, you get a lot of tension. So having all the teams be on, let's say nrr, which has both those components, is a great way to go. The one thing I will caution you about, which, you know, maybe was true a couple years ago, when the macro is a little bit better, is that your nrr, your growth, can hide your loss because you're growing so well that as you, as your negative rate grows, it's kind of masked. So looking NRR is a great metric, but looking at the components is really important as well.

Yeah, yeah.

And just to share my perspective as a investor, when I'm looking at a company, top three metrics I'm typically looking at from a financial profile perspective, growth, efficiency and ndr. Right. NDR is so important and there's such a big role that customer success, or whatever term you want to use plays a role in it. Because it's 2023 and I can't go more than an hour without mentioning AI, I want to ask about the ways AI and automation more broadly can be incorporated into customer success. And if there are any caveats. And I also want to ask the audience, in about five minutes, we're going to open it up to questions. So start brainstorming any questions you might want to ask our panelists.

So I think first of all, this is the third wave of AI, and I was part of the second wave of AI. Maybe five or six years ago. And AI like any other tool is what we make of it and we have to be very careful. So first of all, massive disclaimers that if we are not using the right data to look at our the conclusions we're driving, we could take AI and go drive off a cliff with it. So I would say treat it with extreme caution. But on the other hand it has taken away the monotony of a lot of the work that the customer success team has to do. So the areas that I think we can do a lot more to supplement the work that they're doing, we still want to have the human being be the one driving the decisions is to understand the intelligence of the usage because there's so many now factors that you can bring into to understand. To Manjula's point, NPS is no longer relevant but they're still giving you signals in how satisfied they are by the signals that you see in the usage. There's monotonous work that the CSM has to do. Constantly writing the same emails, gathering the same data that can be condensed and brought into communication that they don't have to author from scratch saves them enormous amount of time. The qbr, the business reviews people don't go to these reviews anymore. They're endless, monotonous, boring things because there's nothing new. You can use data insights differently with the help of AI to give them insights that they've never had before. So I think it's both labor saving, it's more insight driving but we have to be careful about how we use it.

I think at PagerDuty we are pioneers in this whole space of gen AI and automation and I'll tell you why, because that's our product and when we are in the automation and gen AI space we have to showcase to customers how we are using it in the customer success group. So here are two or three factors how we are using it and actually to Sangeeta's point, saving millions of dollars. So let me give you a couple of examples. When a disruption happens on our digital platform, all of the status page that goes to our executives as well as to customers is generated with Gen AI. Think about in seconds the customers finding out there's a disruption and status page and we are providing that not only internally but we're doing it with our customers. Automation within my organization, if you're thinking about removing silos and really creating cross functional work and putting the customer in the middle, imagine if a new customer is onboarded and the professional services Organizations had the first meeting through automation. The rest of the organization is getting communicated to in terms of what is happening with the customer. And this isn't about yet another meeting that they're pulling together. If you've got customers that have white glove service from Premium Support, they want to know how is it? How are you meeting your SLAs? Are you not meeting your SLAs? We have saved hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on creating those reports for customers automatically through automation versus human. So think about CSMs in the future and concierge CSMs and moving them to becoming more, doing more work that is very valuable versus the mundane work they do because automation's going to take all that away. I've read so many articles lately that the tip of the spear for Genai and automation is actually the customer success group. And I think there's huge opportunity here. The journey has just begun.

I would just add that from our standpoint, it's twofold. One is individual team member productivity, which I concur completely with what Manjula and Sangeeta have said. And then the second is how are you going to present it to your customer and why do you need a CSM to convey something to a customer. So something, you know, you could say every customer gets a personalized success plan based upon all the data. Completely agree with your data science points because of all the metadata we have. And there should always be a next best action for every single customer, big or small. Maybe the bigger next best action is a little more complicated. You need a CSM working in there, but there needs to be a path and there is so much available through AI to actually provide very personalized guidance. You have got to get your data clean. You've got to get a single source of truth and that stuff is hard. So if you don't get that right, what it spits out is not going to be great either. So there's a lot of work that we're doing around cleansing and evaluating and looking at data models kind of over and over again. And it's a fair amount of work. But the promise, the promise of what AI can do excites everyone. And that's the fun part. That's why we're in tech, right?

Yeah, absolutely. For anyone in the audience who have questions, feel free to come up to the mic. I see one back there. We'll go with this gentleman first. Please feel free to ask her question.

Okay.

Hi, Mike Edelstein, I'm Angela, former Salesforce employee. I would love to to hear From Sanjita Manjula. Sanjita, you are CRO and essentially CCO and at pager duty your CCO and there is a separate CRO. What's the when is the right time to have the roles separated?

The role separated in terms of when.

Is the right time to have a CRO and a CCO versus just one handling both functions.

I see. Well, to be clear, I am just stepping into the CRO role now for the last six months. So this is a temporary blend of two roles. Cause I was the CCO at Miro before I came to the CRO role. I believe you need to hire a CCO when you are ready to scale. So when you know that the challenge is not the product market fit, you figure that out. You know what the motion needs to be. But you need to scale very efficiently, intelligently and smartly all of your business. I would say you need to bring in a CCO depending on the dollar that you're driving. And the CRO does a different but very, very connected job. So it's hard to do both those jobs in one. And I think this is quite. It's a temporary situation. Like I said, there's benefits to doing it together. But I do think that they're entirely different but connected problems that you have to bring together effectively in an organization. So I would say whenever you're ready to scale up to those dollar values that need that role, you would have both of those roles.

Lovely to see you again. My point of view is very similar to Sunita. It's about scale. So when did pager duty hire a CCO? Really? When they went IPO, about $150 million. And now we are a half a billion dollar company in three years because that scale was required. But I do want to amplify a point. Customer success needs to start from the very beginning. Don't wait when scaling because to Neeraj's point, you need to be collecting data and having the pulse of your customer from day one. Otherwise you'll be busy cleaning data. In the long run you got to understand what is the business outcomes your customers achieving because that's how you're going to drive your expansion. If you're getting ready to grow as a company and ultimately go ipo, you got to lay those seeds now, otherwise those trees are not going to grow.

Thank you.

All right, let's take a question from the middle.

Thank you guys.

Manjula, you had mentioned when you were talking about metrics at the individual contributor level, how you were measuring speed to deployment and adoption, how do you measure those in the system or what is your kind of protocol to actually measure success there?

Our data science tracks it all. So between our data science system and our salesforce, which is what everything sits on. So I'll give an example. On speed to deployment, we have done enough research that if the customer is 90% deployant, they will get they'll buy more licenses. So it's a speed to getting to 90%. So we literally have weekly meetings where we are looking at what other customers that have reached 90% which are the ones that are not, what do we need to do to get them to 90%. And our CSMs and our services organization is comped on reaching 90% as an organization at an aggregate level.

Excellent. Thank you.

Yeah, let's go over there.

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for the time. This was a fantastic panel. My name is Cassie and I lead customer success teams@Monday.com. my question is for those of you who are speaking about metrics of success as it relates to the customer's objectives, which I totally agree with, and blending that with adoption, I think it can be tough to bridge the gap between those two things. So for example, we can say to customers that increasing adoption or increasing usage of a particular product, product or features should lead to particular customer outcomes. But if your customers don't have the foundations of measuring those outcomes themselves, it can be very difficult to show them that that correlation exists. So I'm curious how some of you have been able to bridge that gap with your customers.

Well, if I can take that asana, it's kind of same world. We look at obviously collecting what the customer wanted to accomplish, but we also have enough data to be able to show a collaborative work score that says these departments are working. You can actually have this graph that shows who's working with who, who is collaborating with whom. And there is a baseline assumption that that collaboration generates value. Now you have to make a little bit of a leap there, but you can show the actual collaboration patterns. You can show, you know, beyond utilization, which is kind of a baseline of adoption, what bundles of features are being used together, what integrations or what apps like. For us, very commonly a JIRA integration is very common. So how often that JIRA two way sync is happening and that all it comes in, we do a quarterly readout to every single customer on these are the patterns we've seen. I know your question. It's hard to know what the value is and you can capture the value metrics for enterprise customers much more easily. But that's the baseline we would use for all customers.

Yeah, agreed. And very similar to how we do it, obviously, because we're in the same space. But I think that assumption these days with the current economy is getting challenged a little bit more. People are dissecting each of those purchasing decisions and wanting to know, you know, are you just giving me something to directionally be confident in or how do I truly take this into an ROI discussion internally? So. Yeah, exactly. I totally agree.

It's a familiar problem for us as well. I will say that Miro grew up in the collaboration space, but what we eventually saw from the data is that people are actually driving their product and development services on Miro. And so we helped the customer understand how to look at the value of Miro differently. So for us it was education of the customer to understand that you're actually building products faster, hence you're getting revenue faster. You're driving team productivity that is giving you efficiency with the expensive engineering team. So it's sometimes taking what you're doing and understanding what is the outcome that the customer needs to think about versus the customer, the outcome they're thinking when they're coming to you first. It's reeducating and showing them what they're ending up doing. And that to us has been critical in how we have conveyed the value. Because you're right, it's getting questioned and we should expect the questioning to even get harder because we brought up consolidation before as something that has started. I think this is going to get even more wings as we go forward. So your question as a CSM is the heart of what we have to solve.

I'd add one more point. Work with your product team. Here is what's super important. The relationship between the customer success team and the product team is critical, especially if you're a product led growth or a product assisted growth. Some of the roadmap in their overall prioritization should be related to customer outcomes versus feature functionality that may be required. So a deep partnership there would be really, really important. For us at PagerDuty, it's actually easier because we reduce disruptions in a digital platform. So it's meantime to resolution. Meantime basically that you're up in the meantime to solving an uptime and that drives our what are the key three or four factors that are related to adoption and those are key metrics that we go into every QBR and share with them. These are the outcomes that you've got and you've increased your availability time. But every company is different But I would highly encourage you to work with your product team because what's in the product can really define and drive the value for the customer.

Amazing.

Thank you.

These are great questions. Guys, let's go over to the right microphone.

How's it going? My name is Jeff Matthews and we're a company that's been around for about 24 months. We did 20 million ARR already, so we've had some pretty massive expansion. We're currently hiring for a VP of CX role and one of the things you mentioned earlier was about the value of data analytics and using data to make important decisions. How do we hire someone for success in that role when we have a massive data issue? It seems like we're setting them up for failure coming in and that's not necessarily something they have control over fixing.

It's really a partnership between you, the product team and the customer success team. So being 24 months old, maybe it isn't something that you want to build within the customer success team, but within the product team. And I think you should heavily invest into capturing what data is important for the ultimate outcome for your customer. And how do you want to manage on the product side.

Makes sense. Thank you. By the way, we are hiring. Come find me if you're interested.

What's the name of the company?

Repeat md.

Repeat md. Okay, there we go, right here in the middle please.

Thank you very much for sharing all the great knowledge to us. My name is George. I'm a founder for 247 Pro. We build software for contractors, we model contractors. My question is what are the most of the three most important things or routine being a CSM should be doing in a daily basis?

I couldn't quite hear the three most important things the CSM should think about.

Should do on a daily basis. CSM should be doing in a daily basis.

You want to answer?

Sure, I can take it the first. So I think about the CSM's job as in some sense a portfolio management job. You have customers that you need to take care of in certain ways that day and then you have long term plans for your customers and then there's longer terms than that. So first of all, as a CSM, I expect you to have data that is telling you where you spend your time and you have a plan for your portfolio and you understand these are customers that are going through implementation. And for any business, time to value is critical. So how do you ensure that time to value is taken care of and you're working with your services team or you might be the person that is helping them get there, that's critical. Where do you get the customers going? Getting off to a great start. Then you have to look at customers that you may be doing a plan with. So for us, we expect our customers, success managers to have a joint success plan with the customer and based on that, you're driving activity with their accounts on different levels of intensity. So that is the second thing that I'm expecting them to be driving and you're maturing your customers from one stage to the other. And then you have the long term plans where you're looking at customers that have been asking you to help them on longer term implementations or longer term relationships and you work with that as well. So on a daily basis I will say there's some triage, but then you have to have a plan for your portfolio and look at the data to see how you're constantly making that portfolio healthier and achieving the outcomes that you're expecting it to take.

And on a daily basis to exactly her point, they should spend maybe a third of their time understanding the business imperatives that their customers are driving and why they bought their product. Number two is it is super important to do quarterly business reviews or more often with a customer so that you're aligned. They may have bought the product for something and you may be on a different path. Those two points are super important. And number three is being the voice of the customer within the company. They are the voice of the customer to product, to support, to all the various organizations in terms of really knowing what the customer's doing. So a third of the time internally, two thirds of the time externally, and.

There'S a little bit of a trap with csm. Sometimes they're just kind of a front for support because that's just what the customer wants to talk about. And that is a little bit of a trap. And you need to figure out how to alleviate that or at least help a customer out and then move onto the bigger goals, the bigger strategic goals around delivering value. Because that support thing is like it's a total trap. It's happened to every single CSM I know.

That's the difference between a customer service manager and a customer support success manager. You're driving the customer's success versus just dealing with support and answering questions for them, which is really, do you want your customer success manager to be doing that versus a support organization or organization that would be of a different caliber.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sometimes I think there's a nomenclature issue because success is so ambiguous. Maybe you Guys can come up with a better label for this over here please.

Hi. Thanks for the session. It's been great. I am harsh. I lead operations for upguard. We are in the cyber security space and we do about $30 million in revenue. So as we've scaled, we've realized that the compensation structure that's worked for the CS team so far is not working. Like we have to change that as we move towards the 100 million. So what you said, Manjula, about how it's done at your company was really, really insightful. So my question is more for Sangeeta and Iraja is like if you could give us some insight into how the success teams are. Like the compensation structure is built there or someone said that it'll be really helpful.

Yeah, it is. As Manjula said, it's something that we are looking at almost all the time and we reset it every year to make sure we're doing it right. So we started off with customer success being incentivized on equal parts retention and adoption. And we feel that that was not sufficient because it was forcing the CSM team to almost turn a blind eye towards growth. It was, let's make sure I have the customer. They've adopted and they've retained. And we felt that it was doing a disservice to the ultimate outcome that we are trying to drive. So now the customer success teams and the sales teams have the same metrics but with different weight. So the sales team also cares about retention, which we did not have before. But it's a far smaller weight compared to the new business that they're driving. And we did the mirror image to that for the CSM team. So we gave them incentives to retain. Adoption is going to automatically be part of this because you cannot do retention without it. But they also have to think about how are you growing the customer, what you need to do to grow the customer. So now incentives are aligned and have removed friction, which has been amazing to see.

Same what she said.

Ok, thank you so much.

Unfortunately guys, we are out of time. Thank you so much. This wonderful panel. Obviously this is a very, very, very important strategic topic. There's a lot of uncertainty around it. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.

Thank you, thank you, thank.

You.