Customer Success Lessons from Cisco’s Maria Martinez

hi there my name's Nick Maeda and I'm the CEO of gainsay I'm so excited to host you and and many other folks in this virtual fireside chat with Maria Martinez Maria doesn't need an introduction but I'm gonna do one anyway just to flatter her a little bit Maria is probably one of the most longest and distinguished careers in the world of customer support customer services and customer success Maria started her career at Microsoft where she ran a big chunk of all services at Microsoft then she was at Salesforce through a lot of the kind of high-growth years where she was president of the customer success group at Salesforce it really helped scale the world's largest customer success organization and then she joined Cisco as part of this huge transformation Cisco's going to through to become a full-fledged subscription business and she became the EVP and chief customer experience officer at Cisco beyond all that Maria's been an amazing contributor to the community of customer success she helped us way back when in the early days of the industry she's spoken at the pulse conference before she I know she's an inspiration to many of you as leaders and she's an inspiration to me welcome Maria Martinez well thank you Nick thank you for the kind words it's great to be here again with you talking about this very important topic what we do we definitely both have said customer success that the phrase pride more than any two people and we've got actually this is a kind of thank you to Maria Maria wrote the foreword to the original book on customer since that's the probably many of you have read and she's actually kindly written the forward to the new book that's coming out in May called customer success economy about how customer success is taking over industries and going across functions across companies and we're going to talk a lot more about that but before we do that just to start with some fun if customer success was a song if you had to pick one song to represent it what song would it be Maria well that's a hard one because you know I like music and I actually have a whole playlist you know about customer success so I have that in here but I guess if I had to pick one song about a big believer imagine dragons right that's good that's the one I found yeah awesome and I would pick I've certainly done some fun music videos about customer success in the past I'd say it's either a Taylor Swift song about relationship challenges which is there's many of those or it's a country music side you know country music you lose your dog your pickup truck brakes you go to jail and you get drunk and that's a lot like managing customers so but I'm really excited to dive into the forefront of customer experience and customer success with somebody who's kind of practicing at a huge scale at Cisco and sombrio I wanna kick it off with a question that kind of actually came up in my mind when you took the job at Cisco obviously you've done amazing things at Salesforce transition to Cisco and and I it was curious to see your title change so at Salesforce you're president of the customer success group at Cisco you embraced the title of customer experience officer talk a little bit about the choice of that phrase well when I came to Cisco you know Chuck our CEO and I talked a lot about the mission that that he wanted for the company and he was about transformation for sure which is a key part of that right and transformation to a new business model a new customer engagement model and now we realized of course that it was much more than the traditional customer success right that we need to look at the end-to-end experience from the customer that starts from the very beginning from the moment that we market to customers when we sell them and then when we on board them and so on so we still have have to retain the name customer success for the function but we're thinking about the experience overall that's wonderful because I think a lot of people struggle with what's the name of the umbrella you know some people the function is customer success and the umbrella is also customer success which can sometimes be confusing you're saying the umbrella across the whole lifecycle is customer experience and customer success teams are a part of that journey overall yeah that's great and one of the things I think you know you you've answered many times over the years but just for the audience you know some people get confused between customer success and the phrase that sounds almost the same customer support and so you since you've explained this a million times I'll ask you millionth in one time give you the definition of how you think of those two is different well I mean I think about customers really is it's it's mainly the post sales experience for which support is a piece of it right and it is I think about it more as a continuum where you know where you need to really bring the customer and long at every step of their lifecycle right all the way from rewarding them a lot of people talk about adoption but I've actually really put a lot more energy now and things like on boarding for example which I know you you do too right and just thinking about I think Bo if I was gonna differentiate the most it's a subset right but more important than anything is about being proactive versus reactive I think that's probably the one key element that differentiates both so what I'm hearing a little bit then is it's almost like nested nested rush and also the biggest dollars customer experience that's the whole thing customer success is that post sale experience and you're onboarding adoption etc supports part of that customer supports one piece of that customer success is more proactive support traditionally is a little bit more reactive might capture incorrectly yes do you see make customer success as a simplification agent for organizations yeah it's a really good question I think in a lot of companies customer success is created because there's this big gap just like you did Salesforce a long time ago you and your colleagues right where you have this gap after the sale before the renewal who's proactively driving that customer to value and there was a different kind of gap to which is the customer on the outside was confused by the vendors organization I know a lot of customers where they feel like to work with a vendor and they need to know the org chart of the vendor they need to know how different people are paying so they know who the right person is to go to for what and what the business unit structure is and what product groups are there and what their incentives are and that's not really what any of us want our customers to be focused on is learning our org chart and so I think in the early days of a lot of companies customer success becomes this navigator right that's helping you understand where to go to etc what we found is if you if you get stuck there the problem is you're not adding enough value for the customer if you're just like a phone tree or an email router eventually you've got to be able to add value is a customer success person on your own around outcomes and value and ROI but as a starting helping to simplify the organization of the vendors is a good way to start yeah I mean that's that's a really great point as a matter of fact that's one of the first things that we did at Cisco you know to try to really integrate you know a lot more than experience because it's about experience you know for our customers can you give us some examples yeah what we found in general is like companies that are getting started in a multi product portfolio they're actually really they have to kind of have that customer success person be that point of contact to help figure out how to navigate as example you know company you and I both know well I think Splunk has done a really good job of sort of managing this kind of post customer purchase how do I get the customer to value and how do I actually help that customer navigate support versus renewals versus services versus Tam these things there's obvious to us but to the customer they're not I think it's Salesforce you put a lot of work in I noticed around you know your the the work you did to help customers be put through a journey end to end and kind of helping them at particularly low touch space I'm helping automate some of that in one too many fashions and lots of other examples out there so one of the things I was going to ask you is you know you you have run three huge organizations three of the biggest in the world so that means you've dealt with org charts and rewards more times than you can possibly imagine how do you think about the org chart for customer success and where it should fit in and how you thought about that at Cisco specifically you know it's very important that customer success you know becomes a function that it really reports are pretty pretty high levels in the organization many times it gets buried so deep and honest who becomes tactical you know many times a lot of companies just just say it's adoption you know we're here so I mean I am a big believer that if you believe that because the customers have focused on their customer experience right I'm making that the best that they can be this becomes a pretty important function that needs to report pretty high up you know in the organization right it's great that cisco chose to put in directly reporting to him that doesn't necessarily always have to be the case but you have to make sure that it becomes a peer function to other functions that are very important like sales right key you know to the organization to value that I'm wondering Nick you know what do you think about you know that where are we at you know today in achieving that status you know from customer success in companies well you said it well that it's not just about the org chart it's about how they the philosophy I probably think about it and actually I remember meeting speaking to a CEO chief revenue officer about a year ago and he said he had customers success put underneath him but it wasn't the focus of the company so he spent maybe one hour a week on that and fifty five hours a week on sales right and and so I think that's the mistake if you have customer success reporting to somebody who's not able to put the time into it that doesn't have the the passion and the strategic thinking around it I think it's gonna be a failure I know some chief revenue officers who really value customer success and they think it's an equal part of their strategy to new business and I think that's great I think in some cases because the organization's history is so different they need that C s leader that chief customer officer to report to the CEO to help drive that change so one of the things I think is it's a point in time situation if you need to turn the ship a lot the CEO should be hearing that feedback every day I'm sure you talked to chuck about the customer experience every single day and that means he's able to really steer the ship better with your partnership but if you're in a world where you've already got it going I can see it reporting one level lower under a president or something else as long as that person takes it really seriously yeah and I think it's important that that person has a right title to do because you know for example if you're a chief customer officer they're not to be right if you are on the whole customer go-to-market right but many times when that person carries the title sales right or sales up marketing if you put that function on their need you are you're not really valuing the function I fully agree yeah it's like the title says what it's about the mission right and so you need that title to be something different and I've seen I've even seen some chief revenue officers kind of rethink their mission to actually be about customers and so they're actually taking on that chief customer officer title and having sales and CS underneath that so a lot of creativity is happening overall I think people are just realizing I better pay attention to this area but one of the things I think that's really interesting is it's not just about the organization it's actually about as you said upfront the experience it's about how you're making people feel and I know you study experience at I'm not just b2b experience but also consumer experience when you think about building a concierge like experience at Cisco what do you think the keys are to making your customers feel like they're at the Four Seasons are at their some kind of high-end service it's very important that every company puts the deep thinking into what do they want during their experience to be right they may have an experience today but when they are transforming it's like what do we want to be right that leverages your strengths but also has has the aspiration about what do you want to be so for example we have chosen you know for us to be simple agile and innovative right so we put a lot of thought and we said that that is what we want to do so then what you do is you build that experience you know around that and you're as you build concierge functions or you know contact centers or any anything like that you've got to make sure that you live the values that you have set yourself you know for your company and I really like how you came up with our mission statement you know just three words very simple because I'm guessing that that gives marching orders to all of the people designing your experience from this customer support leaders to the people designing new service offerings to your customer success management team as well so that's like really great to have that mission statement if you're watching I encourage you to say what's the mission statement for your experience do you have something as clear as what Maria just articulated overall so one of the things we talked about in customer success the thing that is the most most obvious elephant in the room is always turned you know in turn is probably a bigger thing now because the economy is going through a lot of challenges all of us as humans are going through challenges so a lot of customers are trying to make sure that they're only spending money on what they need and in enterprise it's quite challenging to think about shirin because I know it's a churn today might be the result of things that happened a long time ago I'm sure you saw that at Salesforce as well so how do you think about sure differently in the world of a big enterprise organization with big contracts and big customers yeah well you know I discuss you know we have all the way from small customers to very large customers and it's quite different actually when you think about it you know in the smoke customers you have a lot of point products you have you know you really turn is about you wanna return and adopt more than a possible sense when you go to enterprise right we measured churn by by not not necessarily we lose the customer because you hardly ever lose a customer but it's really more about the overall footprint that you have with the customer and making sure that you know that you it's we look at it journeys up as loss of revenue you you know rather than necessarily losing the customer or something like that right so just think about what are the right measures that you want to have you may loosen something but you may gain or another one because at the end of the day when you you have to put yourself in the customers shoes and make sure that you are thinking about them one of the the new things that we're doing in that area by the way is a lot of focus on use cases right versus products you know because we have customers just think about them you know for the use cases that companies trying to implement are we helping them advance that use case to value versus just thinking products and that's a hot topic right now in customer success kind of building out that use case taxonomy and how did that map to different offers are you is your team taking the lead on building that are you working with product management or product marketing how does that come together at Cisco so we are you know we're directly working very very closely with marketing as a matter of fact you know it's it's it's very hard to work let's just say that a lot because you know we're trying to unify use cases between marketing engineering and and customer experience right to be the same so that you can tie the way that you market to customers so how you sell them and how you deliver so we you know we are like have come up with two levels of use cases where we have they are completely related but one are a lot a little bit level which is the selling value proposition and the other one is more they add this acute level but for the execution level which is really how we run the business now we are we actually have taken the lead and believe that together for the company but for the company right so not going on our own in our own way I love that so that and that prevalence falling a lot this is definitely one of the hottest topics in enterprise is getting your sales and delivery motions to be aligned more on use cases and outcomes versus products and features and in that world the question is who builds that mapping and it sounds like if I replay to you there's a high level mapping which ties to come to your sales value propositions something that's play done with marketing and other groups but then there's taking those down to a level how you execute and your team is taking the lead on that and kind of but including everyone in the company so it's not just a customer experience initiative Nick what are their trends like that what can we learn from you what other trends are you seeing in the industry yeah so that we hit on one which is this idea of going from adoption to outcomes because adoption is great using your products important that's not why people buy they don't you buy a product to log into it they buy it to get value so that's a big one and we lost here actually you were kind enough to speak at our pulse event and we talked about this trying to operationalizing outcomes idea that once you built that use case mapping how do you make sure that the use cases that are bought are the use cases that are on-boarded are the use cases that you're managing in customer success are the use cases that you're delivering more services to are the reuse cases you're renewing expanding right and you have that common thread that kind of success plan to use kind of a generic word across that and Den's i that's one really big trend another one that we saw coming and i'll describe one that we didn't see coming by the way to the one that i think you saw way back at salesforce that we've seen for a long time is customer success is really part of a bigger picture as you said of customer experience so if i had to simplify it i think the core kind of elements are is like a triangle so you've got the customer success kind of post sale experience as one vertex of the triangle and then you've got the sales team as one vertex just like sales and marketing just like you talked about and that third vertex which i think is the last there has been a big trend is product right so product needs to be involved in designing the offers and use cases as you talked about so they map to delivery in telemetry around how your understanding how the deployment of a product in consumption maps to those use cases in how you use the product to kind of better enable an onboard customer so you don't have to do it in a very much a hand-to-hand fashion but it can be done in the product so that idea of kind of customer success sales and product in a virtuous triangle is a really really big area right now for the industry and then the third one that I think is probably it's it's something that I think we should have known coming seen coming but I think it's a really really important especially today today's world which is we have to remember that despite that we have all this great technology and we can measure all these things that are happening we still have human relationships right that really really matter I know you're really passionate about this those relationships are both with your team so your team isn't just a task tat you don't can't just be a taskmaster to your team and give them a bunch of tasks Dave themselves want to grow they won't have creativity and what they do they need flexibility and to your customers right it's not just a relationship around a technology and installing something they themselves have professional goals they're trying to move ahead and and those are things salespeople have always known sales has always been very good at relationships and so to be bringing the human element into customer success training our teams on relationship management and kind of getting deeper in accounts just like salespeople do that's been a third big trend yeah I mean that that is a really top of mind by the way all those things that you talked about are really top of mind so we look forward to continuing to collaborate with your team and any of the they are the ecosystem that you've built you know these areas because those are those are all really really important trends right now and speaking of trends one unfortunate trend we're all dealing with and as human beings were going through together is Kovan 19 and you know it's something that's much much bigger than technology or customer success and we all start the conversation by saying we're so thankful to all the people taking care of us in hospitals we're empathetic for the people affected and sick the people that lost their jobs and we feel very privileged to be in situations like we're in where we can look at this at a little bit of a higher level but we also have businesses to run employees to take care of customers to serve and how does Kovan 19 the priorities for the customer experience team at Cisco in this new world well it's certainly changing you know things for for all of us right now and I think it's it's a you know I like to I'm using a lot of this phrase right now which says which is a phrase that I heard a lot throughout the years but has never meant so much to me that now which is don't waste a crisis right and what it is is you know really you know we ought to be agile we got to be fast and we're gonna have to adjust to what a customer needs for us in Cisco right now has been of course about you know all they they are the needs then for web conference or web conferencing is on WebEx product secure connectivity even those technologies like VPN that do you know that are in big demand so the shift of the work that we're doing so that agility and really listening to our customers more than ever and being there for them by the way in a way that it's not at all a commercial relationship right so a big shift to that customer success function having a much more important you know play than ever before like I say don't waste the crisis so this crisis allows us to elevate things to a higher value in a customer's eyes and our job now is to capture that so then we can make that as an ongoing motion so I use that same phrase too because I do think it creates an opportunity for us to move forward you know it's a silver lining to another device dark situation is we can move forward and I just as an anecdote I was on a call with a number of CEOs of public software companies and a research analyst was kind of hosting the call and talking about what CEO should think about and he opened the call by saying everyone knows that right now for CEOs in software and SAS the number one issue is churn and customer success now I didn't say that I always say that but he said that and it's interesting because I do think that this crisis is causing us to remember that the core of our customers in a recurring revenue business the core of our business the recurring revenue model is our customers right and that should be obvious but I think it becomes more obvious when other things kind of get slowed down so I know preaching to the choir for the two of us but I think a lot of people are feeling that and whatnot yeah it's I mean it is that it is the time but you know we talked about earlier right this is this sees the opportunity to make customer success that priority you know for all of our companies right this is the time to do that totally agree I honestly I tell the customer success leaders out there price the folks watching your job has never been more important literally in history it's never been more important it's existential to your company your work is what's gonna keep your company going now switching gears a little bit cisco doesn't exist in a vacuum you've got your customers you got your employees you got your community investors but you also have this amazing partner network and everyone asked me how do you do customer success when you have a big partner channel and I all say well I don't know if anyone's figured out but Cisco's a few steps ahead of most people how are you thinking about your partners as part of customer success and customer experience well when you think about customers experience for us you know the partners are a big part of it because a partner you know we we have a most of our business goes through partners right so the partner is the one they're with the customer all the time so the model that we're designing that we design and implement it and hard updating as we learn with them is completely integrated with a partner right and it is actually a lot of these designs for the partners to lead but for us not to not to let the partners do it by themselves right so we kind of you know still take ownership for it and depending on the partners capabilities or interest you know we are there to support the partner also many customers have worked with multiple partners right so the unifying force has to be us so in a lot of our play books and our content and our approach partners are just a real integral part of that experience and I'm seeing that you're actually training your partners on customers and asking them to have technology and data you're kind of expecting things similar to what you expect of your team is that a good way to talk about it right so every content that we have we have we are make it available to partners but also we're certifying partners we have we launched our first two certifications one for customer success managers and another one for real managers we're gonna do more and that then you know how we I'm sure every company that works with partners tears they're they're partners right and in our in Cisco words we call them specializations the same way that we do technologies your network you know have specialization you have collaboration specialization now we created customer success in specialization and for that as a partner you're required to have certain number of certifications and certain criteria to make sure that you can tell to our customers that you are certified to deliver customer success wonderful great well Nick I mean you're coming up with a very exciting book the customer success economy so what does that mean to you and then tell us about the book what's interesting cuz you wrote the first forward to the book that's right here the original one and when we did this actually it was honestly customer success as you remember five years ago was not a a widespread thing Salesforce was doing it amazingly well other SAS companies were doing it but it was it was still pretty small I think if you talk to your friends I'm sure most people didn't really even know what it was right and I'm sure there's a lot more education to do but we've come a long way in the last five years as you said in the forward to the new book it's not just about churn anymore right companies are ongoing from defense to offense the realizing customer success and customer experience are all about changing your growth strategy to be about your customers and so in this book we talk about how customer success is a company-wide thing right kind of like you talked about with customer experience it's not just post sales and we talked about what that means for marketing sales finance services product you know kind of how do they all get affected we also talked about how it's not just a software in SAS thing it's hardware companies it's medical device companies its services companies all kind of rethinking their and mission to be about driving customer success and going from reactive to proactive and so what's really cool is we sure dozens and dozens of stories of lots of companies that have gone through this huge transition and really come out the other side and you know kind of making a big impact just like Cisco is and I know you feel like you're probably on the beginning of your journey and you are but it's really inspiring for the audience here to hear the story of how far you've come and and where you're going and honestly the fact that you want to do it again a third time after Microsoft and Salesforce you must really like this customer success stuff uh I do I do for sure but you know I do want to help you for all that you do for our community for all of us that are believers and really thank you thank you for your thought leadership and for for the all the activities that you put together in the book and all that I I don't know how the community could do it without you so thank you well thank you so much to you Maria for being such an inspiration to all of us and to all of you watching from Maria and I both please be well - best to you your families your friends your companies and well I'll get through this together

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Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020