The Top Five Most Controversial Topics in Customer Success

thank you very much for all of you attending our session uh we hope that it's going to be a little bit of fun for the end of the day uh we are going to talk about the five potentially six if we get there the most controversial topics in customer success today I'm going to introduce my panel but in a moment uh before I get there I do want to lay some ground rules no no yeah totally there are ground rules um and basically what this means is not our panel cannot use the following terms to answer the questions they cannot use it depends yes they cannot use no and they cannot use go ahead it depends and we cannot swear no sorry intentionally kids are intentional okay okay and in all seriousness you will be assigning points for the best answers uh to these questions so go ahead and do that in the app um I'm going to go ahead and get started now and I'm going to introduce uh our our phenomenal panel I'm really excited that these folks agreed to do this so first off we have to my left Stephanie burner she is the global head of customer success at LinkedIn she is the head of customer success at Asana Andrew Fink is the head of customer success at six river systems customer and a proud customers and uh no plug there yeah and Jeff kushmerick he is the CEO of infinite renewals so we wanted to put together a panel of Cs experts to talk about these questions so before we get started a little bit of a softball question not the one you're expecting um this is when we didn't go over this is when we didn't rehearse as we discussed uh though at the top of the day 44 of the people surveyed in our CS leadership survey have been working in CS for less than five years how long have you been working in CS 14 years I started my career right over there in Courthouse my CS career not my own 14 years 14 years okay archana about 15 years yeah 28 20 years total and 15. yes Andrew yeah you gotta answer your questions thank you thank you feel free to move I'll go with 15. you're gonna get really really I don't know change somewhere around here you were my boss all right 06 so thank you okay doing this since 99 working on Y2K Solutions so there you go all right I'm not doing that does anyone know why Tim Perry Solutions are the world was gonna really all right all right so we're gonna as I said we're gonna try to get through five questions we may get through six however if any of you have a burning question that you absolutely have to have someone on this panel answer please feel free at the end to raise your hand and we will go ahead and answer that question so let's hit it let me attempt to hit it was did you introduce yourself Alex yeah I am Ali Temple this morning and I'm the two that she's her hair it turns out all right so our first question most controversial question is NPS a customer success metric Stephanie how do you feel about this particular topic who here does not know what NPS is okay wow just to be clear it is a calculation on two questions likelihood to recommend a friend or colleague and why who here uses NPS as their core customer success metric so CS only oh my gosh I have an audience of friends my answer is unequivocally No it should not be a CS metric I am sorry I said no yesterday yeah it add to the answer I'm gonna have to say like now no all right yeah yeah how well it didn't break the ground here's why it's a loan for a CS team is far too narrow it's really easy to game and it lacks context and so many CEOs and so many cross are just searching for the one number because they're used to managing sales teams they're like What's your one number and of course all of us here know that it's far more complex than that a lot of it depends in that conversation um and so oftentimes you know the c-suite thinks will CS is just about customer happiness and CS is all about customer happiness so there you go match and we all know that CS is far more it's not customer happiness it's about value value is very hard to measure I we're not going to talk about how to measure CS in this conversation but NPS is not the answer there are some times when MPS is fantastic I'm a huge fan even though I don't like it as just NPS does anybody remember Gabby Wong's conversation this morning she she had a slide that mentioned all the places where NPS is measured multiple types of end respondents multiple moments in the customer Journey multiple teams who are looking at this number and as a CEO she's able to look across the business and the customer journey to understand how does it all play together so for example if you get an end user response or like a pattern and end user feedback in your product that says we hate this product and then and the same customer you get decision makers or those who are signing your checks are saying we love this product that's a problem and so in context you can say what's going on here for a CS team it's opportunity to look at wait a second maybe we need some more end user enablement for a CEO maybe it's an opportunity to think about how do we better tell a more holistic story three so lots lots of goodness there but NPS is always done well when put in context Beyond just those two questions all right I was just going to say Jeff you are our resident contrarian do you have a counter opinion that guy but like you're kind of that guy so very well love the explanation I I just feel sometimes you do need to use it and um there can be extraneous circumstances where you're just glad you're measuring something right so there's you know if your board wants you to measure MPS guess what you're measuring MPS right because you can come in and be like Seaside everything they're like no we measure across our portfolio of companies this and you're like great now you can go do csat as well or something like that but sometimes you get forced and you know MPS is that drunk uncle that shows up at Thanksgiving you just have to talk to sometimes right so that's my thought on don't you think that I don't even I don't know where to go with that one yeah sorry don't you ever think though that some type game yes companies will game that metric correct right I mean depending on the way you cut the data the way you look at it yeah I'm glad you're there's so many companies you know especially when you know you work with a lot of startups you're just glad they're measuring something right and sometimes NPS can be a baby step to be like great we got you doing that great now let's let's move up to the big leagues and start doing the real stuff here all right so we are going to agree that we want to measure this metric we don't want to comp people correct on this metric okay look we've got all agreement on the first question look at that fantastic maybe not so controversial NPS at turn zero oh was it run by you or was it yeah [Applause] nice nice play thank you a nice follow-up on The NPS by the way I did get a note back asking why I gave a one I didn't give an explanation three of us launched like some of the biggest e-commerce sites in the early 2000s and like MBS was the rage back then I think like yeah you're an e-commerce store yeah come back some some of us may have worked for an NPS company so yeah there we go all right let's go on to question number two in terms of controversial questions in our recent customer success leadership survey we saw a year over year decline in CS owning renewal right the renewal number why is owning renewals and upsells still controversial for customer success I'm gonna look at you immediately because I know you're dying to answer this why is this controversial this should not be controversial for anybody in this room unless you like being laid off right so it's like I mean like literally this is controversial if I'm at a sales conference yeah we need that we need that extra money so we don't have to go get more deals and things like that but anyways is that a delayed is there something funny a little juggler over there but anyways um sorry I apologize I told her I would do this but I am so but anyways this leads into a larger conversation which I think we're going to go over is that owning renewals as a CS team gives you gives you Revenue which gives you acceptability in the boardroom it gives you a leg to stand on it doesn't make you a cost center which is the worst in finding when Financial stuff is a little shaky which it is right now so uh you'll get into the conversations with sales and sometimes you may have to say Okay like just take that expansion but you're working so hard on the renewal stuff and then it's like having that jerk that you hate pull up and like hey thanks for getting me all the way to the goal line I'm going to take this in now you're doing that work you might as well get comped on it the thing that pisses me off is that everybody says like no it's about the relationship and we're Huggers and we don't want to bring contractual stuff into that conversation and then like your team your sales people went out they sold a deal they made a financial transaction you didn't meet these people at the farmers market and you hit it off because you like each other's sneakers it's like you're helping them get to where they need to be and you know their business goals better and how you're going to make them accomplish that with your software so damn straight you should get the credit and the cash for that so go ahead hello yeah all right we can apply we can applaud but I do think there's a bit of a counter point to this yeah take it away I can't wait all right here we go all right well I don't think it's a Counterpoint I agree that we should own a number the owning the number gives us power right owning the number actually helps us go to the CFO and say hey right we need X number of resources because this is the amount of Revenue my team owns so that it definitely gives us power but it's about finding the balance do we have any CEOs in this room other than Jeff other than Jeff yeah a couple okay a few more yeah I just I for okay she said I cannot swear so for God's sake right someone someone in the company needs to worry about and think about the customer right the customer first mentality needs to exist so it's for me it's about finding a balance it's about making sure that yes we own the number but we need to watch out for the language changing if the language is pipeline if the language is like all sales language then we need we need to start worrying about yeah right the I worry about the LTD what's the best thing for the customer in the long run what's the best thing for your company in the long run so I think that if we forget that suddenly the conversation you're creating another sales team why even call it customer success what I'm going to say is you have to be really thoughtful about the point of where you are in your business what do you how what is your sales motion and how many people do you have so the times where I see a CS team like literally a CSM owning renewals as problematic that's different from a CS organization owning renewals which could be like a CCO having responsibility for both that I'm a giant fan of but when a CSM owns it they're two times when this becomes really problematic one is um when you it's your product is so complex and the depth of the relationship and the consultative motion with that customer has to be all about the program and the technology it's really hard to find individuals who can do both who can do that and have a commercial conversation and negotiate something especially in this environment so Talent can become a real bottleneck like skills and your talent the second thing is if you are in a moment I was at a previous company where we were in a moment where we thought we had churn down and so we pivoted to saying oh we're going to comp our csms on CS identified upsell and so we everybody started looking at the dollars and every renewal was a dive in catch and everybody was focused on these upsells and all of a sudden these dive and catch renewals caught up with us because nobody was paying attention to the ongoing engagement and health of the customer base so it can become a real distraction because naturally people we were all leaders a lot of us are leaders in this room naturally people just go to the money like where are the incentives so you have to get your incentive structure right to make sure you're focused on your ongoing engagement and your being thoughtful about how you engage on that renewable yeah absolutely uh I'm a moderator so I was told I'm not allowed to have an opinion here so I won't inject my opinion but Andrew we didn't hear for you on this one so yeah you told them what to say is that what's going on for free me personally my team reports to the cro we own a renewal and a growth Target now they don't renew every year they renew three four five years into a relationship so our relationship are with the folks that operate our technology and then two three years down the road there's a renewal so it's less transactional for us the growth part is controversial that's the part where there's a lot of push pull between the sales organization and us um but being part of a you know go to market organization we got to pay the bill so that's how we're aligned if we're under the CEO or directly to CEO I think it would be different is it fair to say though we should not be afraid of csm's negotiating contracts we have talented individuals out there correct but I think when it gets to the transactional aspects of like DocuSign and procurement like you need somebody to take on those elements and it does remove some of that transactional feel to it like oh great we're agreed you're going to renew go talk to this person in our renewals our renewals managers LinkedIn we're negotiating between 201.5 to 5 million dollar deals and that is a different skill set than what I hire for and my even my even my tops it's the size of the renewal for sure like ideally everything below a certain threshold needs to be like automate the out of it and then sorry deduct two points [Laughter] okay anyhow I will take that okay but everything above right ideally for Enterprise customers let's say we have an opera renewal operations team so they can help the csms and the AES go close on the renewals but you don't want to introduce too many folks right exactly right yeah because that becomes complicated exactly yeah exactly okay just a quick on that point like sometimes you're a series A and A series b or maybe even series C coming you don't have the luxury of having that infrastructure yeah so you kind of have to make do with what you have two yeah two people five people ten people right it is going to depend on the size of the company the size the moderator broke her own oh let's move on to the question um all right so why do so many people want to declare qvr's debt have we heard about this in the LinkedIn atmosphere right have we talked about this a lot I'm not saying qbrs are dead are qbr is dead really Arch tell us I don't know please don't kill it it's my humble request maybe you call it ebrs business reviews right so that you know who needs to be in the room maybe you don't do it on a quarterly basis so what's the gist of qbrs the ITR initially during the sales cycle you're collecting okay why are you bringing this tool in Auto platform in whatever you want to call it like what are the business reasons what what are the business reasons that you're looking to solve for right here is the business objectives and this is how we fit in and this is how we are measuring the ROI right it's not one and done like business objectives change through the life cycle of a customer especially right now with everything that is going on the macro Econo economic conditions I cannot say that word but I hear it constantly and I did not want to use it but here I am but yeah like everything that's going on in the world there are things happening at your on your customers side that can be like today it is something to model the priorities are different so you want to make sure that you're still fitting in and it's about making sure that you're still fitting in for me ebrs qbrs that's where you're having those conversations off okay it still makes sense for us to um partner together we are still making sure that we are helping you with these specific business objectives and this is how you are measuring those business objectives so it's all about tying the ROI back to why they brought us and in the first place so that's the reason for me especially I would maybe you don't do this quarterly but you have to do it at least a couple of times a year to make sure that you're aligned and you're still a partner versus vendor like I know you've heard that a million times but again like it's critical for us to do that um in order to be aligned yeah exactly yeah I was just going to say Jeff and Andrew are dying to get in on those conversations so yeah we've talked about this I mean I think the reason why people write these terrible articles that the qbr has did is that is that they um did anybody write that article all the influencers out there is that the the object what they're trying to say is good which is stop bringing and requiring people to come to these crappy meetings where you're providing no value right yes that's what's going on is you've seen tons of people going about the wrong way maybe they did some training or something but essentially let's go and vomit these statistics out to my peer relationship person and then I've checked the box in my system and I've done that and I've moved along there you can do so much more of like hey remember that thing we talked about last week or two weeks ago do record a quick Loom videos and the end of the day you need to show that you're providing value and you can provide value in other ways besides just being this 45 minute Death March through statistics and everything right I prefer you you get implementation hands off like this is the customer goals right type it out in front of them validate that you're doing okay let's go hit these for 90 days let's go back and report to the people who signed the contract not just like oh we're now we're working together and then some of the relationships not with a contractual person so all of those factors are leading into this revolution about why qbrs aren't dead it's more about you need to always be providing this value so that the renewal is easy because people are like yeah we should be using you everywhere or more stuff right I just from my point of view Stephanie um engagement model so if you're an Enterprise versus a tech touch right absolutely yeah Enterprise I want to do a couple times a year I want to show insights for actual insights right through the reporting or analytics maybe not as much on the tech talks like maybe it's just you know we push reports but data is still important data is still important to showing that yeah maybe not even in your Tech touch yes yeah so what if you show the value not on your qbr but in like some sort of like health check absolutely automated it says hey take a look at this and if this is not what you're expecting let's have a conversation there you go then it's not a qbr one minute video hey look at this thing exactly right find a way to automate it as well yeah yeah it should not be dead the most instructive thing you can do is sit in the qbr as a recipient of that qbr from one of your company's vendors that will teach you a lot about what feels great and a good use of time and what is terrible yes yes it will all right let's move on to question number four uh so why do we feel like represented in the boardroom talked a little bit about this this morning Andrew you want to take a shot at this one how many people in this room have been to a board meeting sometimes it's okay not to be represented before it is a lot of work to have a lot of effort and a little bit of a dog and pony so I I agree we want to be invited I do think it depends on who you report to as well like so in my experience small organization direct the CEO pulled in once a quarter I was involved in the process show us what's going on reporting to the go to market lead I'm not involved in the board meeting now I don't necessarily want to be in a large company but again it depends but you know reality is we should be represented somewhere if your boss isn't representing your information in that boardroom then we're not doing our jobs right if you don't own that if you don't own Revenue you're not in the boardroom I was just going to say if you are if you are numbers you won't be in it well you'll be sitting outside and you'll be like like Matt Damon on the gym oh sorry we didn't have time for you know right exactly Matt Damon once again yeah yeah not as white invited I I do you know uh art Stephanie I know you wanted to say something here but um I think it's important like that it is I know I'm trying to not I'm trying to nuts I mean the guests but but the only way you are going to have a voice in The Boardroom is if there is a number attached to it so so I recently had a conversation with a guy who has a has a VC firm and I was asking him this question and he said more and more especially in the in the current environment um investors board members they want to know who is going to be fueling your growth two three years from now and we all know that 80 of your Revenue comes from existing customers as you grow and so that's the question that more and more board directors are going to be asking what is your well we're going to talk about this on that but like what's your retention what's your logo retention what's your retention of your existing Revenue not just what's what's the Top Line doing um so it's coming no it's not super pleasantly surprised at the number of VCS that are forcing these especially like your Tech CEO Bill I know you need to focus on this number right now because we care about if your product is actually good and that's we can tell that by if it's getting renewed or not and it's big it's become a big swing in the last three or four years that my next question about what oh sorry wait wait now is time where we have to calculate customer acquisition costs so we're going to get up because uh those workshops underneath yeah no we are going to move on to one of my favorite topics um and especially as we talk about what our investors actually interested in I think we talked about this at the top the top of our session right we talked about if nrr is the only metric that matters should you even pay attention or compensate your teams on GR and yeah yeah actually uh yeah this is your Chef is it really oh my god um okay enter our net retention net revenue retention grrr gross regular attention everybody knows that okay so um so as we just discussed historically net retention was the only thing that mattered because that's what drives your multiple and so that's what um that's what investors always cared about um and these days there's more and more questions about gross retention like how much of your existing Revenue are you retaining for all the reasons we just discussed so like we checked that box here's an elegant solution to this question I I don't think NR is the only metric that matters I we've run two we we're in the world of B2B relationships it is way more complex than one number I don't care what number you pick so um one thing that I find really interesting is if you say look nrr is actually the responsibility of all of the teams so if you have let's say sales has an nrr number and uh CS has nrr and then you give each of them an extra one where sales gets an expansion number and CS gets the gross retention number and then right in the middle you have this nice overlap where everybody cares about Revenue so if it's like a Venn diagram where it's a It's actually an a co-ownership of Revenue but you're each driving something that only unique you uniquely can do actually I think I didn't explain that quite right on the on the Cs side you own things like engagement if you have a value metric Etc everybody cares about that but the overlap is the gross is the gross retention where everybody cares a little bit even if you're still owning the things you can uniquely Drive it's sort of like you still need to go through the activity that you need to do as a good CSM team to get to those numbers and so I really more focus on yeah fine grrrcar whatever you want to call it are you gonna only stop the Cadence of what you're doing with your customers to get them so I just kind of apply a little bit more of a practical approach to it but that's that was my point on that so in every board meeting that I've attended and I've attended several I have always been asked my grr number I've never actually only been asked the nrr number it's interesting that I've also been asked to unpack the grr number more so in board meetings by investors than I have with with the NR true indication customers because it really is about your customers and ten years ago we weren't saying that that's true it's true I think I I think that it is very important for us to be paying attention to both of those numbers I even think if you can also just a note on that if if you're having problems getting product and development to getting customer issues do the whole company on retention are one of those factors as well so you'll suddenly see bugs get fixed a lot faster I'll tell you that absolutely absolutely all right we do have a couple minutes left so I am going to go to the bonus round question are you ready okay and this actually is that you did say that you would volunteer for the bonus round question are we ready which ones are you ready for this all right that's right I actually like this is the Dixon CS good I can't wait for this no I think CX is a great thing I just think in general like uh the the customer success just dealt with like some some very JV branding issues like first of all like hey why do we keep getting confused with customer service I don't know you named everything CS maybe we could have thought about that a little bit but like but in general um it helps I mean I believe all post sale things activities need to be under one organization and CS is confusing because that's usually one you've got implementation you've got support you've got customer marketing you've got Education and Training and all those things so if you line those all up well CS is just one of those things and so that's why I think this move to CX is great I just think you know somebody needs to spend some ad dollars or something to get it out there a couple companies have tried and it just doesn't I know it's like no we're not making that a thing and I'm like come on I'm like it's it feels like it's taking off a little bit more but then you get the you always get from the executive team I feel like you get this conversation around oh but that's only B to C right and it's only related X like is that ux must be like a meeting with like people in a room with like big pencils and notepads and just fresh I think we should all agree that customer success is customer success implementation or onboarding is onboarding support is in fact support we need to make that distinction and we are all part of the post sales are you saying that several board meetings right right what is your title when you walk in there and you say that uh I've been the chief customer officer overseeing CX organizations ah so when you so when you say CS is it something are you talking about CSM I I believe exactly is customer success customer success managers that everybody everybody owns customer success then it's an umbrella and you have CSM like that yeah you want to make those distinctions though yeah this is my orange structure we like there's the development team and they own the front end in the back whatever they want to structure it by right you've got your CX team and here's my different organizations within there exactly CS would be like using the description in the title or whatever that thing is right right right and I think too many times support organizations and implementation or onboarding teams are very much like Hey we're part of the picture we're the important part I don't know there was a guy that said that like retention starts at implementation I can't remember what it is a pretty smart guy right so you want to make sure that you're being inclusive of those teams it is a customer experience post sale so are you saying that CX solves that checks that box I'm not supposed to have an opinion as the moderator but that is my very very strong opinion that it is customer experience yeah cut off all right we are um almost at time um panel thank you very very much for all of I was just gonna hold hold on she's the moderator here yeah hold on thank you for the the uh the questions that we had maybe prepped a little bit in advance I want to open it now to the audience if you would like to ask questions yes please [Laughter] who wants to take the first pass at that I'm the moderator though I'm not pointing at you oh okay uh so there's a difference between Performance Management here with the question is repeat the question yes oh repeat the question was what if if there always a long list of things not to compensate on what do you compensate on in terms of metrics so I think of this in terms of Performance Management and compensation those are two different things so Performance Management you can have as many metrics as you want as far as I'm concerned it's much better if you have a smaller list that really are like what are the inputs to drive the outputs that you want so in my world it's we call them leverage metrics it's I mean it's activity tracking you'd be it's um uh deployed seats it's how engaged are those seats it's our what Integrations are in place those kinds of things and then from a um from a monetary perspective like actual like payments like what do you call it compensation um it's it's uh we look at what we call we have a value metric that's sort of an internal how is the customer getting value and sure and there's multiple layers to that but that's um and we do it a little differently at the IC level versus the manager level but those are the two that contribute to the bonus payout now I will say in our world like the companies have been part of bonuses a very small part of your overall compensation package in the world of Cs so and we're not comping on the on renewal quotas so our world's a little bit different all right well I'm going to say uh it depends I know I'm not supposed to say that but again there are two kinds of metrics one is like Stephanie said the performance base which is high value activities like all the the soft aspects of things adoption side of things and then the variable comp it's actually where the company is like Asana for example we tend to have really small deals coming in and a lot sits on the customers the csm's shoulders to grow that to find the opportunity so we tend to do variable compound nrr and it's a number that both the sales and the csms tend to own right they are closing the opportunities but nrr targets are set for the csms so again it depends on the kind of product it is too sometimes we need to take a look at the kind of product like where exactly how exactly the product maturity is to to a certain extent and that is what drives the compensation I think too often um we look for the one number you know we look for like what are the two things that I that's going to solve this for me and sales comp plans are really complex you know there's different skus and different Riders and different accelerators and I think the more we can think about comp in our world as like we just sort of allow the complexity to come in and figure out how do we simplify something that's sort of a complex problem to solve it's sort of like it's sort of like giving ourselves a little bit of like wiggle room to figure out something that works right in your own business context um so I and I like everything else there's no one size that's all was that somewhat helpful no yes okay um or don't don't do variable yeah pay them more yeah which is you could yeah because it really changed the behavior that much will you not focus on the customer you'd be surprised yeah or it's a team match ing versus individual yeah yes yeah participation trophies on yeah okay I I personally like drr and NR okay uh what other questions yes please have you guys month to month as in uh you wrap it up at the end of the month or do you mean for your renewals yeah your renewals by the month yeah yeah so the question was related to are you Greenfield do you do monthly renewals versus annual renewals have any of us had experience my real no one wants that yeah that's brutal yeah so we should talk about low touch versus high touch and things like that but we don't have time for that but um I I wish I would try really if you didn't attend Christian sessions you really did an amazing job on that about if you've got these compensation structures in place um don't wait a year um quarterly is great if you can do monthly and people are charging on the month it's great but that being said it needs to be sustainable and not being like 800 like so I do believe in things that keep people engaged and incentivize to do their job and uh I like quarterly you know we're having quarterly Target also if it's monthly then if you've got a bad month then it kind of doesn't get super outweighed by the other ones you're talking about renewals having money correct yeah wow that's so hard oh my God yearly's hard enough right I mean that's called whatever renew every month yeah it is a different business talk to the your CEO and your CFO about the benefits of moving away from at least quarters and to be honest there's companies out there doing great stuff on this like you can check out danatmonday.com who's on the scale team over there they're doing some really cool stuff around that and with this high volume High transaction scale there's another new role that's going out there called scale csms and that's a whole thing to Google search and find out I'm sorry I don't have the exact answers on that so all right uh any other questions oh yeah so uh so I'm a CEO of a of a growing startup a really good one and then I just hired a CCO she bullied me to renaming the customer team to a CX team did I was okay it was it was a customer the customer team is isn't that the like a great nomenclature right the customer team what what do you all think I think it's all groups responsibility to have a good customer experience what about product don't they have an experience with the customer I just find it so funny that none of the other organs in the company go through this like what we should call ourselves this week are we development are we the coding group now like it's just it drives me insane it's crazy pill time foreign I like customer team by the way it's sort of just to be a little Smarter on the thing like it's like if you're if you're introducing teams right don't have some crazy whacking in the customers like listen I buy a million dollars of SAS per year I don't know what the hell these people are is that the team I talk to at this point in the relationship as a customer you don't have to call them customer experience right to me it's I if you're the the person I'm interacting with have a relationship with turn zero you're my customer Advocate whatever you want to call it I don't they don't care as long as they understand good I know we are keeping you from a networking happy hour we are keeping you from your cocktails so please go uh go enjoy the channel thank you all right thank you

Channel: ChurnZero

Views: 2,510

Keywords:

Id: M_Yxzq5KWl8

Length: 39min 48sec (2388 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022