90 Day Plan for the First VP of Customer Success

how are you guys good good good morning everybody that's what I normally say to my team no matter what the time of the day if so when I was preparing for this talk there were a couple of options how I could structure this presentation right I could go with the traditional 30 60 90 day plan which is actually a very important concept for you to build and maintain before you take a role such as VP of customer success a concept that you need to build at the beginning and then constantly update as you're in this role and by the way Omar wrote a great blog post about the topic I highly recommend everybody in the room to read that I decided to go about this presentation differently I thought about what are the three main topics that everybody needs to think about in order to be really successful in a row like VP of customer success the three main topics that are crucial to your career when you take over a role like this but first of all who am i my name is Stephanie shots I've been spent the last 15 years in sales success business development for enterprise software companies in between a couple of startups I took some time off to travel people always ask me what was your most interesting day of your life probably that was a diving experience with about 150 sharks I was terrifying to be quite honest I don't never forget that day I also had a little bit of time to go after a hobby that normally gets terribly neglected which is photography some of you might recognize that spot has anybody in the room been there recognizes the picture the famous temples of Pagani and Beyond Mar anyway I took that picture from another from a second hot-air balloon also terrifying I'm scared of heights so when I'm not working I spend my time with one horse that lives in Sonoma and that's a lot of fun now I work for xamarin salmon is a really cool company I was the first non-engineering hire of the company about three years ago and we've seen amazing growth Zaman is a platform for mobile development mobile analytics mobile testing obviously Mobile is a hot space and it's a lot of fun to work that we almost have a million developers with xamarin our customers our users our mobile developers mobile engineers that is important for the concept of zero for the rest of the talk we have currently a number of about 40,000 that we're adding every single month so very very strong growth and we have paying customers in 150 countries so from the get-go it was a very international company very international set up and you might have noticed at the beginning of the talk that my title has both sales and customer success I own both functions for xamarin which is a concept that has been very successful for us and you will notice that everybody in the company not only me everybody constantly talks about the success of our customers this is a picture of our CTO Miguel de Icaza speaking at a conference two years ago and the mission of the company is delight developers that's the clearly stated goal of the organization now let's talk about you let's say you're taking over as the new VP of customer success may be the first VP of customers success for that particular company who in the room already has the title VP customer success that's up very nice very nice very nice who in the room would want that title beep you have customer hands up my it's nice I like it I like it very good very good so let's assume it's your first day first of all congratulations right that's that's amazing but what really matters now what do you really focus on now in my opinion customer success really starts with sales in order for you to understand which type of customer can be successful with your solution with your technology you need to really understand the profile of your ideal customer you need to spend a lot of time defining exactly who it is that you want to sell to to the very detail what does your ideal customer look like and as a consequence more importantly who do you not want to sell to secondly you need to understand do you have the right sales team when you walk over to sales do you find yourself surrounded by loud unpleasant brash people who really are not very interested in learning anything and really don't want to listen to you at all you are you might be working for a company whose sales management is stuck in the 1990s very dangerous in the new world of SAS software really successful salespeople are smart they are highly knowledgeable in their field and they're very very sensitive to the requirements of their customers that is really important the old-fashioned way of selling does not make a company successful anymore and then last but not least in order for those first two concepts to work your sales team your sales people need to be able to walk away from a conversation it's it's very difficult when you sell to a customer when there's pressure in the company to sell to a customer at any price now specific organizations will derive more value from the software that you're selling you need to know who that is and if that is not the case maybe you don't want to sell to that customer in the first place admittedly in the early stages of a start-up that might be a luxury that you cannot afford you know it's your first year sermon was bootstrap in the beginning you really have to make your money where you can get it that said that it's ok as long as it is a conscious decision you need to be aware that these customers will be at risk for churn in year 2 in year 3 and not be surprised by that as the company matures you want to be aware that you're spending a lot of money to make that first deal and therefore a new customer is very expensive to the company I always ask my team I need you to think like a CEO we are all here to make money yes but in order for the company to be successful in the long run we need to really think about who we sell to and how much energy we spend with every single customer very important now secondly everybody in your organization needs to care about the success of your existing customers I think that is very very important an interesting example on how that is implemented at xamarin is the way our support is set up so we have a an official support team obviously that is that's that's a great team but a lot of the court support requests are actually being routed directly to the core software engineers more difficult more specific requests are routed directly to the poor support organization that has a couple of advantages first of all it really accelerates the way in which these requests are being answered because what might take a regular support engineer you know eight hours to figure out the core engineer probably looks at it and has the answer in four minutes that is a fantastic custom experience but more importantly your support organization and your engineers will know exactly what customers are struggling with that is very important and then in addition to that it's a great way to make sure that customer requests and customer issues actually directly influence your product roadmap which is another really really important aspect to make you successful as as the VP pretty quickly you also want to figure out how other departments can help you be successful often there are incredible shortcuts to customer success it can be a specific document or an FAQ that has to be written by somebody but that can be linked to the relevant part of the website that can be very helpful for your customers what are these things that other departments other Department leads can do for you and for your customers to make you more successful and then last but not least I talked about this a lot but this is very dear to my heart is if you come in as a new VP of customer success it's probably your job to completely change the cadence of the company to completely change the metrics that the executive team looks at on a regular basis most organizations celebrate big time a new customer win new logo that's that's just that is great that's a good thing to celebrate but you need to the other executives to celebrate just as much when you have customers that expand certain metrics for customer happiness and customer retention very very important and in order to do that you need an interesting and sharp and insightful executive dashboard that manages all of that for you and you need to make sure that the entire management team looks at the dashboard on a regular basis I think that is that is very important now one of my other favorite topics is segmentation documentation and with that it goes team structure Omar also alluded to that earlier that is a topic that will evolve over time very simple and straightforward in a beginning but it needs to become more sophisticated and more nuanced as your organization evolves so first of all you need to understand what those segments are there's different ways to segment it can be based on how mission-critical your solution your technology is for your customer makes a huge difference in the usage it can be based on the use case of how they are using your software it can be based on customer size it could be based on location and geography so there's probably a combination of these factors that are relevant for your customer base that needs to be at the heart of everything you do I've found personally interesting for me a matrix creating a matrix that basically looks at how important our technology is for our customer and then compares that with the size of the company if you put together a matrix like that highly likely you will find the customers that you can create most value for and in return those are probably the accounts that have the most the highest lifetime potential in dollars for your company it is very important to be very aware of who these companies are and make sure you spend the most time on these on these accounts and then in an ideal world your success team is structured around that segmentation and your sales team should follow that organization as well very good now what if you start you're in there for the first 30 60 90 days right all of these conversation topics are probably work in progress new to the new to the organization a lot of change a lot of different awareness that you bring into the organization but if you find yourself in an organization where you don't find support for these topics you're working for the wrong company get out of there I think that is very important to keep in mind customer success is the hottest space in the industry be aware of your value every single organization wants to hire somebody like you so find an organization find a place where you're being set up for success not only for the success of your customers but the success of your company and therefore in the long term the success you know for your personal career I think that is that is very important now not at all related we're hiring I happen to be looking for a stellar VP of customer success to join my team director of customer success we're hiring across the entire success and sales organization zaman is a fun company to work for this was my team two years ago we were eight this is us now were 16 will be double that size by the end of the year so if you know somebody that would be interested in working for xamarin talk to me find me on Twitter connect with me on LinkedIn I would love to talk to you I'll be at the conference for a little bit longer so maybe we can talk then and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day at the conference thank you very much you

Channel: Everything Customer Success

Views: 23,121

Rating: 4.7969542 out of 5

Keywords: customer success, software as a service, saas, customer retention, Customer Relationship Management (Industry), customer success summit

Id: Ixa1lLnLylE

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2015