By Evan Rich
Going back into an early stage startup after scaling a Global Customer Success organization to 25 people at a Series D company for nearly 7 years has been a great reminder that not all businesses are ready to make an investment in Customer Success. This may seem paradoxical when considering how important retaining early users and converting them into long-term, referenceable customers is at this stage. Churn can kill a business before it has the chance to take off. Navigating this paradox becomes a team effort. If no one has a Customer Success title, then in reality everyone owns a piece of it. In my first few months, I’ve seen how folks across the Product and Sales organizations can contribute to delivering a high quality customer experience. Though this situation certainly creates additional work for these teams, I believe the upside of each function having direct access to customers far outweighs the costs. Ultimately, the insights and feedback gathered through customer conversations is critical to building a great product and a go-to-market engine that can tap into demand. Let’s take a closer look at how each department can contribute to Customer Success and how their primary function might benefit from these opportunities.
Product
I was initially surprised to learn Product owned the bulk of the Customer Success duties. Though I’m somewhat removed from being an operator in a business of this size, I have consulted for a number of early-stage startups and generally observed Sales taking the lead on customer engagement responsibilities. Now that I’ve seen this playbook in action, I can say there’s much to like about Product shepherding the company’s CS efforts. As the primary onboarding resource, Product gets a front row seat to watch customers engage with the solution. It quickly becomes evident when and where a customer is struggling to engage with the product, and there is ample opportunity to correct course and deliver value well ahead of renewal. I’ve already observed several instances of customers providing real-time feedback in onboarding sessions that, informed by ongoing internal discussions, led to engineering tickets being created and resolved in a matter of days. Early customers should feel like they’re getting special attention relative to how they engage with other vendors. For customers, seeing their feedback result in quick action not only enhances their experience working with the product, it also signals that you are committed to a long-term partnership.
This all serves as a stark contrast to the challenges I’ve seen other Product teams experience when trying to obtain customer feedback on new feature releases. It’s easy to envision the relationship built between Product and customers in the early days laying the foundation for many transparent, substantive conversations down the road. Of course, this high touch model with Product at the center will not sustain forever, and eventually it will come time to hire CSMs to lead customer engagements. We have already seen how owning business reviews and other account maintenance-type work can distract from core Product responsibilities, and we took action to shift Product into more of a supporting role for post-onboarding responsibilities. However, Product continues to take an active role in handling support inquiries, as this real-time feedback remains invaluable to product strategy discussions.
Sales
I have often railed against Sales and Customer Success being grouped together. It is all too common for early stage companies making their first investment in CS to place the department underneath a Sales leader who is goaled on new bookings. There is a natural conflict between bookings objectives and the central mission of Customer Success: to satisfy and retain existing accounts. All that said, the Sales team still has an important role to play in helping CS achieve its goals. I’ve worked with many Sales leaders and individual contributors who have been tremendous partners in cultivating customer relationships, securing renewals, and generating upsell opportunities. In fact, my most referenceable, dependable customers have consistently been those who maintained close relationships with the account executive that closed the initial deal. In the absence of a CS team, Sales becomes all the more important to building and maintaining the type of relationship you would aspire to have with an early customer. In the past, I’ve helped smooth out the post-sales hand-off by pulling CSMs into conversations with prospects before deal closure. Without the luxury of those CSMs, we pulled in the opposite direction, keeping the Sales team involved as supporting cast members throughout the onboarding process. CSMs are also great at leading the internal knowledge transfer, knowing what questions to ask so that customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Keeping the Sales team engaged, without asking them to run the onboarding calls, allows account executives to highlight valuable deal information when called upon without having to divert complete focus away from building pipeline and driving new deals to completion.
As a reward for the additional time invested in customers who have already signed on, Sales gains invaluable insight into how those customers are actually using the product. Which of the use cases identified during the sales process are resonating most now that the customer has its hands on the product? What is the biggest problem you are solving for the customer? How does the customer measure the value of your solution to the business? Remaining engaged with customers helps Sales refine their answers to these questions and deploy what they learn to close the next deal.
I look forward to one day bringing on our first CSM and building out a Customer Success team, but for now I’m enjoying the journey of learning from our customers alongside my Product and Sales peers.
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Evan Rich Evan is VP of Operations at Base Operations, an innovator in corporate security delivering street level threat intelligence to help enterprises keep their people and assets safe around the world. Evan previously led Customer Success and Operations at NS1, a leading provider of internet infrastructure software and services. He holds a BS from Cornell University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.