How to Build a World-Class Customer Success Org: Lessons from Notion's CRO and GitHub's VP of CS

How much should we spend? And so I get asked a question all the time. I actually have a very specific number. So I tell companies all the time, 10%. That's the number. You have 10% of your revenue that you can spend on all things post sales. And I can debate what's in there or not in terms of the menu we talk about, but ultimately, if you're going to run a business that can raise money effectively, that is rule of 40 that can go public, whatever scale you're looking at, if you're spending more than 10%, you better have a damn good reason for why you're doing it. You have to be growing much faster than your peers. The quality of what you're generating as leads from CS to drive sales has to be strong. All the things have to be better if you're above that number.

Hello.

Hi, everyone. It's exciting to have everyone here. I see we have a big crowd. I see a lot of familiar faces in the room as well. Erica, it's great, Great to see you here. I figured we probably should start with a little bit of an introduction around how we know each other. We're from two different companies, but actually, Erica hired me at GitHub and we had a unique first day experience, I would say. So a couple of fun facts I want to share. So, first of all, Erica did hire me at GitHub, but we've never met in real life. This is actually the first time that we're meeting here on stage, which is very strange. Also, we had a very unique first day. I'll provide my take on it, then I'll let her provide her take. I started it at GitHub in January of last year. Very excited to join the team. This is just after co founder announced it's logged AI hive. I was super psyched. On my first day of my very first meeting with Erica, Erica said, bas, I have some news. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Let's start with some news. And she said, Boss, I'm leaving GitHub. So that was my very first day at GitHub. And it went from there. Erica, does that sound right to you?

It sounds very right. I was in a very long search for a boss and was very excited to bring him to GitHub. Um, but yes, that is definitely what happened on his very first day, which I'd never had that happen before. I'd been at GitHub for 10 years, so that was very unique. But look at us. We're very well bonded today.

We're Good enough. Now I will say there was a temptation my part. Safe. I've been playing the long games and my goal was to get her on stage here and I was just going to get up and walk away and be like, let's see how you like it. That was part of the original plan. We did decide that. However we resolved those particular challenges and now we're friends, we can hang out and have a conversation around all things customer success. And that's really what we wanted to do today is really have a pretty open conversation around a few different customer success topics, starting with some really easy ones. Like what are all the teams that go into a customer success organization from your standpoint?

Yes, there's many and I think it evolves over time as your company's growing in your circumstances. But across my most recent company journeys, obviously you have customer success proper like the customer success managers, professional services, your customer experience team. You can have more technical roles, renewals, account managers, but definitely an evolution. For example, at GitHub from a customer success perspective, we started with professional services actually and support and then evolved from there. At Notion, it's a relatively we've gotten built out teams and more roles than like the GitHub journey, which has been interesting.

Yeah, I think it is an interesting choice of options that you have when you're building your team. And actually a fun story here is around the origin of a customer success organization. So I think for companies at earlier stages, I think it's really important to write those things down somewhere because at some point someone's going to ask you, saying how did customer success start on your team? And it'll be like we started with support OR services or CSMs. Just depending on what your business needs. It can vary and actually it's a pretty long list and in fact I try to keep this list in my head as I go through and talk to different CS leaders. I've probably had this conversation with a number of you on here and so there's like a menu and it's you get on support services you talked about. Some people think about training as a separate function. You have tams, you have renewals, account managers, customer experience, engineering, and the scope determines the leaders you need, the functions you have, the roes. It just varies based on business and the complexity of the product. That is certainly a very common pattern to look at that. It also is a pattern of growth over CS over time. Right. Your CS fork. I'm sure if you saw it evolve over GitHub. Right. Like said, started small, grew from There and you're seeing it evolve right now with Notion.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think you want to match it to what you're literally trying to do for customers. And obviously that be the starting point at GitHub As I mentioned, the big need was how do you get people onto a software development platform. And that's why professional services was the orientation at the start at Notion Support obviously like technical support was an underpinning but customer success was early because Notion is a wonderful product but there is a learning curve and how you onboard customers the product and actually hands on support from a customer success management perspective was really important. And now Notion we're in the journey of now layering on professional services, layering on renewals and that's like the present day journey that we're on and that's all an evolution of what do we need to meet the needs of customers plus what the business is doing from a performance perspective.

That's great. Speaking of onboarding onto Notion, I think there's probably a few people here maybe who are Notion users. Yeah, we should do it as a quick fold. Here is a Notion user.

Okay, thank you.

There you go.

Afterwards, I will take any customer feedback. I love to chat with users. I actually do that a couple user chats every week which is so insightful for my role in particular.

That's right. Ultimate. I guess the CRO is the ultimate cs. Is that a fair statement? That's true. It all comes down that way. Another common question that comes up all the time. I'm sure you hear about it from people reaching out to you, seeking your expertise as well as in your operator role itself. What is the right level of investment into cs?

From investment you can look at it purely like the dollars you want to spend Sometimes you can look at it as percentage of ARR professional services. You've got different ways you want to look at fat investment. So that's one way I can talk about. I know if OS has got good insights on the percentage of investment and how he thinks about that. I then also think about it in terms of investment in the different areas of how we want to support customers. What's the like dedicated hands on support that we need to provide to customers. What's like the way in which we can cool resources and investment and a way to reach customers and then how are we investing digitally? So that's the other way I also think about it and that's dependent on different areas of the business and what's the level of touch and experience. So I look at the two vectors like the pure numbers way and then what's the models we need to have to support the business across all the different functions you saw earlier slide of the different roles you can have as far customer success.

I think the functional piece is really interesting, right? Because you can think about the customer journey is really driving us forget the numbers, right? Ultimately if our business, if we're not, if we're not doing great job making our customers successful, like the numbers stop to matter, right? You don't have a business essentially, right? Like having the customer journey to math out and really thinking about the functional things that you need is really important, right? This is something that you saw at GitHub with adding in the layers. It's something they're choosing to add into on the notion side as well. From my standpoint, I very commonly get asked a question I'm sure a number of you do here as well is like how much should we spend? Ultimately a lot of folks who are here at this event are business leaders within their organizations. And so I get asked a question all the time. And so for those who've interacted with me before, you'll know that I have no shortage of opinions and I'm also not shy about sharing them. I actually have a very specific number so I tell companies all the time, 10%, that's the number. You have 10% of your revenue that you can spend on all things post sales. And I can debate what's in there or not in terms of the menu we talked about. But ultimately if you're going to run a business that can raise money effectively, that is rule of 40 that can go public. Whatever scale you're looking at, if you're spending more than 10%, you better have a damn good reason for why you're doing it. You have to be growing much faster than your peers. Your the quality of what you're generating as leads from CS to drive sales has to be strong. All the things have to be better if you're above that number and the more you can monetize the conversation. We talk about professional services, you monetize and lose a little money but then eventually start catching up. That protects that 10% for new things that you want to do so you can pull functions in and generally build a more sustainable business. And actually for CS leaders, this is a number that you should have on your T shirt. So actually I'll ask this as a question if on the spot if someone came to you and said how much do you spend of your revenue? Fun customer success how many of you have that number right at the tip of your. Right at your fingertips with raise of hands. So taking a look around, that was about 15 hands maybe at fast. And I know there's way more customer success leaders here in this room. And so as business leaders, as you look to mature from growing in the customer success discipline, that's a number that you have to know inside out and you have to really strong perspective on the ROI of that. So going back to the pieces we've talked about before, you have to know what is actually going to. What are you actually delivering for?

I don't. I'd also add know it by the breakdown of your different functions. Right. Customer experience. For example, at Notion, which is the support organization, we track that month by month. Right. And right now our goal is 3.9% of ARR, for example. And that's. And I encourage exactly what a boss was saying, but even for every function. So you've know the breakdown and you know where you're getting your optimizations and then where you're redeploying those dollars.

Yeah. Speaking of since you gave the number and you're tracking it.

Yeah.

I am curious, what are your thoughts on measuring customer success? Right. How do you, what are the KPIs, how do you actually measure that customer success is working?

The age old question. I can share how we measure it at Notion right now in terms of adoption metrics and revenue expansion and I'm a believer in both and I can talk about that. But I'd also say that I'm very tuned to metrics at the very beginning of a customer's journey. And that's something at Notion that we've spent a lot of time working on for the product itself and what we need to make customer successful. Like the onboarding is a really critical piece of the customer journey, especially at Notion. And so that's a place where we spend a lot of time coming up with those metrics. And that to me is a really important indicator of what's working and that's the earliest part of the journey. So for example, for Notion, a metric is integrations that a customer's enabled, for example. So it's not just the usage and what you're seeing, but it's some of these other tangibles that you understand that someone's getting off on the right foot and they're going to be successful long term with your product. So integrations is an example we've also been looking at. How do you define even in the first 90 days, the onboarding journey how someone becomes a more advanced user. Right. So for notion it's can you see their database usage in editing? And so I'm super interested in the earliest part of the journey to understand how we're predicting the longer term success. Ultimately the KPIs kind of at the far end. We look at what's the monthly actives right in terms of next quarter renewals. That's the vantage point we take. So in the next quarter what's monthly actives, we want to see that at a certain percentage and then also what's our in our effectively how are we contributing to the growth of a customer overall?

Yeah, I think that's great and I think you hit on a couple of key points there. First of all being that you just focus on the lagging indicators. I think very commonly when people talk about KPIs for customer success teams, people quickly throw up. Grr nrr. Like those are my numbers. I'm like that's cool. But that's, you know, if you're driving by looking in the rearview mirror, you do have the right set of leading indicators looking for activity, onboarding velocity, those durable usage over time, you know, increasing level of depth of, of adoption. Those are the things that tell you that you're doing all the right stuff. And I think that's the right way to think about it in terms of KPIs on the GitHub side. I remember when I joined it was funny, I was like I joined Erica said she was leaving. I guess I'm not totally over it. I'll keep bringing it up every little while throbbing it just a little bit. So basically I joined, I was like hey like where are my like KPIs and actually like a lot of organizations of majority of them were focused on the look back, the lagging indicators. And so one of my first activities as joining a new team was going through and sitting down with the leaders in customer Success which at GitHub is professional services support. CSMs have an engineering team that reports to me a strategy organization and sitting down and saying what are all of the KPIs how do we know that we're okay based on we've done historically that's our lagging indicators and what tells us we're going to be okay next month, next quarter, for the next year and actually doing that is an interesting exercise. If you join GitHub today in the customer success team, one of the things you get access to is a document that I started in my first 30 days. I describe it as my fever dream document of 30 pages of KPIs. And I was like, we should pick something out of this. And now it's a contributed document from everybody. It's 50 pages of missions, unique values, KPIs, leading and lagging indicators for every single function that we review on a monthly basis. And I think that's really important. You mentioned you look at it every single week. It's not KPIs for the sake of vanity. Right. I love to sit up there and be like, look at all these great numbers. I'm so excited. But that's not the point, actually. In the business reviews we commonly. And I think you've done something similar, is I don't want to talk about the green. Right. The green means that we put the right targets in place and we're happy with them. I only actually want to talk about the yellow and the red. And if there's no yellow or red, it makes me really uncomfortable. I get super paranoid because we should be like doing. We should be pushing enough where some things are hovering in the danger zone. Right. And if we're not being aggressive enough in all things in our business, whether it's customer acquisition, pipeline revenue, and customer success, like all the things have to actually be slightly, slightly on the edge. Otherwise you're just not trying hard enough. The other topic I did want to talk a little bit about here was there is always a little tension between cheap customer offers and CROs, especially when they leave them hanging on their first day. That tension definitely exists on those things. And as we talk about those sorts of friction points, what are the opposite sides of those? Right. What's a signal that tells you that magic is happening between the organizations? And really, how is what's magic happening in the broadest picture of customer success?

Yeah, I think internally magic is happening. I think it's around. Does everybody know where they fit in the customer journey in terms of there's a lot of people that interact with customers and deliver customer experience? And does everybody have an understanding of what they're doing and is that aligned across the organization? Are you building on that momentum versus overlapping on how you're helping drive that journey? And then how do you share the success of what's happening across those teams and where you're improving and where you have opportunity to do more, to push the envelope? So I'd say those are things that stick out internally, I think externally. About a month ago, we had like a magic experience from an external perspective where a customer of notion that was recently onboarded to using the product wall to wall at their company. The CEO of the company went on LinkedIn and just posted, this has nothing to do with notion. I just want to share how amazing this journey has been to get on this product. And the adoption at the company has been so amazing to see and wall to wall and people are so highly engaged. And that will probably be a memory that never leaves me that like externally we made magic happen because there was no conversation that happened with us at all. Someone, a CEO, took the time to write that up and to recognize the company and the team. So that to me is magic from an external perspective.

There's no validation like customer validation when it comes to these things. And definitely that little screenshot from LinkedIn goes into that CSM's brag document for a forever review season, right? It's like, definitely remember this, Erica, for 20 years. That's right.

If I was a CSM, I'd use that.

That definitely shows up every time you have an interview question or all of those things. But there's lots of elements, right? You talked about the clarity of roles, accountability for the team, the joint recognition that the team show up together. I think a little bit of this is also about the mutual respect of everyone knowing that you trust each other in the game. One analogy I use, like we don't always talk about customer obsession. That's a big part of every organization that is really focused on delivering value. But sometimes customer obsession can turn creepy is how I think about it, right? Imagine your entire revenue organization. You're always in everything in front of the customer at the same time. It's like one of them and four of you in every meeting, that is creepy, right? That is the wrong side of obsession on the customer side. So having those lines set up where you know what you're all doing and then you have a common language by which you talk about different stages of the customer life cycle. There's no sales framework that's pre and post sale. If you decide qualification is medpic, everyone speaks a language of medpic. Whatever you pick, it's common. And then the thing that I've always loved is this idea of like leadership interchangeability. Can you walk in the shoes of your revenue peers? Right? So as a CS leader, can you actually drive a sales forecast call? If you're a, if you're a sales leader, can you run a risk review meeting as well as your peers? If you do, that sends an incredible signal for magic happening within the organization itself. So those are some of the things that I look at and of course, the ultimate one is always the customer stories. Right. I, I every time a customer posts about GitHub on LinkedIn and someone likes it, I'm like, yep, that's a screenshot that's going in this view. Unsolicited public, public praise from a customer. Nothing quite beats that. Let's switch your lightning round. Is that right? So some hot takes. All right, here we go. First one. Customer success. Monetize or not? Monetize. Yes or no? That's all you got?

There's different parts of that. Okay, yeah. Yes. Yes. Monetize. Yes.

Monetize. Yes. That's good. It maximizes that 10% investment you brought. Right. What about professional services? Positive margin contribution. Yes or no?

Yes and no. It shifts over time. Ultimately, I would love that to be yes.

Okay. No to a yes. Okay. I'll take that as a journey.

No to a yes.

That's good.

It's a journey.

I'm going to keep asking the weird questions that require 10 minutes to answer.

Support.

Monetize, yes or no?

Yes.

I like that one. Very good. Customers always are willing to pay to be front of line for support. So that always no one wants. If someone says vip, will you pay for the path? Of course you'll pay for the VIP path. That's always how it works. This is an interesting one. Teams go through model customer success. Teams have this mode where you're offering a GM mode where different geos and stuff are grouped together as a pod of all the revenue functions, sort of pod structure versus a functional structure where if all of CS is together, all sales is together. Which way do you like it?

I like both. It's dependent on what you're trying to do. So, you know, for example, at GitHub, it was a functional structure.

Yep, still is.

Still. It still is. Yes. At notion or in a pod structure and a GM structure. I think it's dependent on your. Where you're at in terms of growth, what are you trying to accomplish?

So I think that's right. I also think it's sensitive pendulum just go from one to the other.

Yeah, that's true.

Last question. Right at the right at time. Pretty much. So obviously we had a fun first day. We never got to meet in real life until today. Do we call and text More Host GitHub or while we actually had overlapping.

Host kid host.

A valuable life lesson. Safe traumatic experiences still can allow friendships to be formed. And so that's basically, I think that wraps up topics that I wanted to cover to make sure we stay on track from a scheduling perspective. Erica, thank you so much for joining the CRO CCO relationship. Super important to make a business scale. Thank you for coming out here and thank you all for joining us for the session.

Thank you.