In Depth (podcast summary)

A Customer Success Masterclass | How to Design, Build, and Scale as CS Org | Stephanie Berner (Linkedin) [2024-02-01

• I seek to hire CSMs who show a history of opting-in to customer service based jobs. This demonstrates empathy.
• As you grow, hire a mix of people who are industry-savvy and who are tech-savvy.
• To identify drive, I look for people who saw a problem and fixed it on their own.
• Interview questions:
  • You walk into your office in the morning and your phone is blowing up. Customers are saying there are bugs and they cannot log in. Then you hear from the sales rep. Then the support team. What do you do? – I’m looking for someone to break down the problem. What is going on? Get on the phone with the customer to get clear. Escalate to people who are part of the solution. Build a plan to help the customer.
  • Think of a brand you know that delivers excellent customer service. What does it feel like when you get great customer service? What does it feel like when it breaks?
  • Tell me about the most impactful piece of feedback you got during performance reviews with your manager in the last 2 years? How about positive feedback?
  • Your boss’s boss comes to you and says that your boss just won the lottery and I want you to take over this team. Come to me in a week and tell me what you are going to do the same and what you change? For those that need to change, why has that change not happened yet? – I’m looking for people who think system (across the business) rather than sub-system (one’s own team).
• Even early on, you need to templatize the processes for (a) handling support tickets (b) implementation
• The number one most important metric is some measure of customer health. That can get really complex in a late stage business but in the beginning it is about product usage. For instance, active seats vs. assigned seats vs. purchased seats. The second thing is renewals.
• If renewals are a quick exchange of paper, then it should live in the world of CS. However, if that moment of renewal is a really important moment for expansion, then it should live in the world of Sales.
• If you have a nice to have product, then up-front. long-term value conversations and relationship building are critical since that is what is going to keep you in play with that business.
• When you experience churn, ask:
  • Why did you chose some other solution? Was it because of features? Usage? Did we not do a successful deployment? Did we not train users properly? Did the workflows not make sense? You are trying to figure out if it is due to: product, sales process, delivery team, or price.
  • How did they get to their decision? Who was the decision maker? How did they assess value? This is reverse MEDDICC.
  • What alternatives did you consider?
• To do loss interviews build trust by:
  • Going in with people they know
  • Going in prepared to be honest about what went wrong. Here are all the things you told us.
• Find customer success moments to celebrate across your organization.
• Larger companies want to train their own end users with the vendor behind the scenes to support their enablement team.
• Key places to focus
  • Onboarding
  • Support

Inside Figma’s Early Days: How to Build a World Class Sales Org | Kyle Parrish (VP of Sales) [2024-01-11]

• Sales motion experience is more relevant than domain experience. [12:38-13:29]
• Two pillars to be able to convert users to Enterprise: security & admin.
• Early on, we decided that we would have no discounting. [37:32-38:02]
• Everyone has to do a demo of Figma as part of the interview process. [49:38]

The New PLG Playbook | Arming the Next Generation of Product-Led Companies | Oliver Jay (Asana, Dropbox) [2024-01-04]

• Champion tree to connect the dots to the target executive [38:01-40:43]
  • Intel agents (aka coaches; often user buyers)
  • Change agents (influence without authority)
  • Centralizer agents (aka technical buyers; ex: procurement)
  • Executive agents
• We ran for years with a small Enterprise team who cherry-picked opportunities across our existing customer base
• Phase one is online sales. Phase two is expansion sales. Phase three is (enterprise) value sales. Start Phase three at the same time as Phase 2 because it takes that much time to identify the path and execute that play. [43:20-44:28]