Customer Success

“And the folks with the highest usage may actually have the most incentive to leave. It's not a clear correlation to success, right?”

“Even when a company says they have FDs, a lot of times, a lot of them aren't up to that aren't up to the bar. They're just CS people repurposed. Or whatever the title is, they're not good enough to help you manage the agent, right?”

“Customers will prefer, prefer a great eye to a mediocre human. They'll prefer a great eye that solves their problem today, that knows the answer, to someone that has to get an engineer and an appointment to you next week, that doesn't know, that says I'm just …”

“View FDs as one of your most important assets to getting renewals, retention, NPS, word of mouth, virality. Don't look at FDs as a cost center. This was the mistake we made in customer success a generation ago. And this is why customer success was cut to zero …”

“Customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business.”

“This is why customer success is dead because all these B to B companies are trying to convert their CS teams to FDs. And I don't think even 10% of them can do it.”

“What I don't agree with is the rep does the land deal and walks away, and they, the customer success rep is responsible for expansion. Expansion is sales.”

“I think the need for a lot of product managers is probably going to go down. If you hire really product oriented for deployed software engineers, then they're going to be increasingly making the decisions on what makes sense to build for the max Some number of…”

“Customer success and marketing are the, are two unexpectedly complex things to hire for.”

“I think in a lot of cases, the role of CS is really much thinner than you would otherwise have. I think you really do want a team who's deeply embedded in the success of the company, but most CS folks on the label Aren't doing enough to justify that.”

“Many of you might work in organizations where you have a customer success team. That's like the high touch customer success team. And then oftentimes what happens is there's a marketing organization or a product organization that is doing customer touches to y…”

“And it seems like everything that's quote unquote agentic right now is basically doing that, you know, across customer success and code. And you go through every domain that has like a specialized Approach and they always have this sort of orchestration layer …”

“I think CS should be comped on net dollar retention. They've got a role to play in the process. And I think it's important that there's overlap between how they're compensated and how the AE is compensated.”

“Most of the vendors we work with customer success has turned into upsells and account managements, and they're just there to get us to buy more stuff.”

“I think that's a huge differentiator even these days is there's, it's getting easier and easier to build software. So where a lot of the differentiation could come in is how do you make your users and your clients successful with that software?”

“If you need customer success for your product to be Appealing, then you need to get back to that product market fit. Then you probably don't have good product market fit and you need to enhance that as opposed to supplementing it with people.”

“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 custome…”

“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 rear view mirror, you have the right set…”

“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 rest. And if there's no yellow or red, I, it makes me really uncomfortable. I g…”

“There's no sales framework that's Pre and post sale. If you decide qualification is med pick, everyone speaks the language of method, whatever you pick, it's common.”

“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 sales leader, can you run a risk review me…”

“Anytime customer success is part of sales, customer success is just weaponized to do upsell. It's literally just weaponized to upsell.”

“I also didn't want customer success to report to CRO, but I lost that battle, right? That, that ship has sailed. I think it's terrible”

“So the like simple framework here is that the product owns success. So this means that It should be so aligned and so good with your verticals needs that it doesn't need translation and it doesn't need somebody to come back in and say, Hey, we noticed you're n…”

“It's never going to solve your problem to just plug in this new team and think that they can smooth out whatever that is. So I'm all about killing off the CS team. I'm happy to share how we did that. It's been over three years now and it's worked quite well.”

“And I don't think this is true of most CS professionals these days. Unfortunately, I think it's a paint by numbers profession”

“CS cannot come in and fix product gaps. That will not happen.”

“Realistically, there are different gradients of complexity with products, and not all customer success approaches work for each of them. And so you can be naive if you're going to build a really complicated slash powerful product and think that, ah, everyone's…”

“Almost all ills can be, you know, filled in by really great distribution. Like, if you have a really good ground game, really good marketing, a really good ground game, and kind of jamming your product into the channel, like you're jamming your product in fron…”

“Startups. We know how to like build products. I mean, we know how to raise money, hire people, build products. We know how to sell it. Sometimes we know how to market them, but I don't believe we know how to take care of our customers, especially in the B to B…”

“Gave them when they broke into a new account, whether it was inbound or outbound, doesn't matter. They had four months to sell more products, to take advantage of some of the growth that they might have because of a consumption model. And then after that point…”

“And so the CAC was incredible because the growth was non-commissioned because CS did not have commission, right?”

“Sales, marketing, customer success are becoming go-to-market and you're thinking more holistically about The different sales marketing and success basically align with the different stages that a prospective customer can be in, right? It's almost like a pros…”

“By the way, for whatever it's worth, I don't actually think customer success should report to sales. I think that's a stress reaction to save money. I think the company hits a downturn. There's too much sales expense, which customer success is usually classifi…”

“I believe every CS team should be a revenue producing team. You want to structure their comp plan in the form of some kind of a basic variable.”

“So we got rid of customer success because quite honestly, it was a, just a make believe organization that didn't need to exist.”

“They don't have a customer success organization at Snowflake, or at least they didn't. Maybe they've created one out, but they didn't. The feeling was everybody's in customer success.”

“What I don't agree with is the rep does the land deal and walks away, and they, the customer success rep is responsible for expansion. Expansion is sales, right?”

“We share an upgrade number across sales and customer success as well. So we've created a team who sells into our existing customer base, working closely alongside CS, who's responsible for strategy and identifying additional value add within the product.”

“I think the worst of all of this, what has made it the worst is when we've all decided that customer success should be part of sales. The worst of all of these trends, because what we've done is weaponized customer success. We've taken the one person in the co…”

“Churn zero did a survey gains. I did a survey. They're both on Saster. I'm sure hook would give you similar data. The majority of SAS teams have moved CS into sales, the majority.”

“You kind of need to go unpack titles versus roles, I think, and some of the companies that say, we don't need customer success. Someone Is playing that role and call them whatever you want.”

“In the old days, sometimes your VP of customer success could do this, but unfortunately, and I know this is going to trigger some people, I don't see customer success stepping up for this pseudo product role anymore, and I see them shrinking more and more into…”

“In my, one of my first principles is focus on the anti-charter of that hiring. So oftentimes when you're hiring a role, a lot of this happens in marketing. You mentioned customer success. So that's another one as well, where you have clarity on what you think …”

“Now that CS became part of sales, CS became weaponized. CS became weaponized. CS's goal was to get blood out of the base last year. And it destroyed the relationship.”

“I just don't think that there's any great generalist role. There's no great role for, hey, I'm a generalist. I'm going to go into CS or support and just make customers happy. I'm worried this is gone. I'm worried the era of this generalist making customers hap…”

“When you have a meaningful volume of customers, you end up Spending, say, more than half your day just resolving problems or getting them going in your product, then that's the time that it makes sense to consolidate that work into a couple of individuals.”

“And if people continue to opt in to odd jobs or part-time jobs or even career modes that Include a customer oriented experience. Then that tells me that they are a customer oriented person. I've hired people who've never done anything customer facing into cust…”

“Oftentimes we talk about jobs to be done in the world of product, but it's very similar in the world of Customer delivery and all the teams in the customer success organization, because there are jobs that we need to build teams to deliver.”

“The second place where you need to start to build some processes with implementation and onboarding. And this is actually a mistake that I see companies make. Is that they don't codify the 10, 15 step process of getting a customer onboarded. If you don't have …”

“As you start to scale up, you need to think about role specialization. Those are the two places where it makes sense to start specializing your roles, support or implementation, because those are the things that are very high volume and highly repeatable.”

“If renewals are primarily just that, a renewal conversation, where there's a quick, you know, exchange of papers, a quick conversation, if there's a change in price, but there isn't a detailed negotiation or any complexity with that transaction, that renewal p…”

“And so if you have accountability for all the leading indicators, things like adoption, customer satisfaction, and accountability for the outcome, which is renewal, then that creates the right combination of incentives for the entire team to be doing the right…”

“From my perspective, I think that's challenging because customer success is core to the go-to-market motion and aligning CS at minimum to the revenue team and putting it in line with marketing creates a flywheel for your go-to-market team in a way that I think…”

“Rather than saying open-ended, why did you churn? Or why did you not renew? You can say, here are all the things you've told us. What am I missing? And, ok, if I were in your shoes, these are all the things that I was experiencing as a customer. This is the co…”

“Most of the value is created, or at least the seeds of value are created in the first 30 to 60 days. Now, if you have an implementation that takes much longer than that, that's understandable, but it's the beginning. It's the implementation and onboarding beca…”

“If I'm a founder right now, I would think about combining those roles a bit within CS and account management, but separate that from your new logo hunters, make sure that separate it.”

“The job is realistically is 70% CS, 30% sales.”

“I think that having CS report to revenue is a terrible idea. It's too late, but when CS reports to sales, all CS does is try to get more money out of you.”

“And so we launch this and that feature flag to 100%. It's done, but it's not. And the teams don't know about this. They can sell it. They don't know, like, how it works and all those things. So this is very important to kind of, like, close the loop and Capita…”