The Wisdom Wall

“In later stages, you can start to look at other metrics like NPS, CSAT, time to launch, and your implementation. Those, uh, can be great metrics. Those sometimes can be, you know, easily gamed, so they don't necessarily provide the right insight for leadership or, or even in individual CSMs on what actions they should…”

“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 process should at minimum sit under the CS leader. It can…”

“I am a big fan of, say, the CS organization reporting right into the CEO, because in those cases, the CEO is really close to the customer experience, no matter what phase the business is in, super early or operating at scale.”

“The thing that I think companies get tripped up by is when you put a significant amount of comp against a renewals or expansion quota, that is going to drive behavior. And if you want your teams only focused on getting the renewal across the line, that is where they will focus. If instead it's really important that…”

“The problem with that is CSM Brett does an implementation and onboarding process once, maybe twice a year. Because that's how many net new customers you get in your portfolio. Versus if you have a group of implementation specialists, they do it all day, every day, and they get really efficient, and they feed…”

“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.”

“The second thing you need in those early days is you need people who communicate exceptionally well because they're the ones who are going to be your feedback loop to product, engineering, and even leadership to help you understand what is it that you need to be doing with customers, um, what do we need to build next,…”

“I am biased toward hiring ICs first. Ideally, you can find somebody who either has been a manager before, or has aspirations to be a manager, or, you know, if you can assess for leadership qualities in your early interview processes, somebody who has the potential to be a manager. The reason is because you need people…”

“I think you need at least one of the founders on the loop. Uh, I think you need the head of product and or the head of engineering, and you need somebody from a go-to-market function. And I'm assuming that all of these are filled. I bias in the, in the early days, if we're talking like Sub-twenty people at the company,…”

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

“The second is People who have a hard time balancing customer interest with business interest, who get really bogged down in the volume or the pain that's coming in from customers. And one of the big roles that the customer facing teams play is funneling all their issues into the, into the organization, helping them get…”

“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.”

“a very strong commercial mindset, which is hard to find in people who also have some of these other skills around customer curiosity, deep Customer empathy, bias for action, where people who like to help customers build their programs alongside our software, sometimes they have a commercial mindset, and sometimes they…”

“The first hire does need to be that firefighter bias for action. I think by about your third or fourth, you need to make sure you have that skill set somewhere in your team.”

“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 that mindset early of let's templatize this, let's create a…”

“as you start to scale up, you need to think about role specialization. Those, 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.”

“The number one most important metric is some measure of customer health. That can be a really complex answer in a late stage business, but in the beginning, it's about product usage. And product usage alone is never sufficient. But it is an, a critically important starting point because if a customer isn't using your…”

“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 thing for the customer.”

“If you know that you're a nice-to-have, then that upfront long-term value conversation and those relationships are critical because that is what is going to keep you in play with that business. Versus if you are a must-have platform solution, it's actually a lot harder to Rip you out and replace you or just decide not…”

“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 conclusion that I would make. Is that accurate? Is there…”

“As the team grows, you sort of end up with sort of a coordination problem where not every product manager can speak with every CS rep, especially when you, you know, you have a dozen, maybe 15, you know, reps on the CS side and only a handful of product managers. And so, and though, when that starts to happen, you need…”

“So for support, real technical support, which is break-fix, managing high volume tickets or, you know, inquiries, uh, and implementations, which is basically repeatable processes, it's a lot easier to figure out how many people you need. That is like, honestly, it's a math problem. You look at what's your capacity in a…”

“My rule of thumb, like my starting point for thinking about ratios, is in your most strategic accounts, which are usually more than 500 K, you don't want to load up a person more than between five and 10 accounts. For enterprise, it's somewhere around 20 to 25 accounts per CSM. In mid-market, it's around 40 to 50. And…”

“And so I do think that consumption-based businesses are a lot closer to solving that problem because everybody is incentivized on owning and really understanding that adoption path and solving for that up front rather than as an afterthought, which is what I see often in the sort of classic, um, SaaS business.”

“I find that, you know, when we're selling to enterprises, they want to take care of that themselves. They want to write the copy. They want to do the email campaigns. They want to actually run the trainings, but in smaller companies, they actually expect us to take that on training their end users.”

“If the value is accruing to the end user that is about maybe a better user experience or a better buying experience, then I do think it's important to try and quantify what is the value that your end consumer is getting and how is that different before and after working with us.”

“Most of the value is created, or at least the, 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 because you have a captive audience who is very motivated.…”

“you have to be good at data. Even if you don't like it, you will not progress in your career unless you can go, go deep on the data, understand what metrics matter to your business and how to move those metrics and how to talk to the rest of the organization about your performance as a team.”