The Jasons Take On...
The Jasons Take On...
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The Jasons Take On... is a customer success collaboration that advances the thinking and practices of customer success professionals. We challenge customer success professionals to take bold action to advance the field and practices of the customer success industry.
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Aug 21, 2023
Guest: Jay Nathan- Playing for the long game
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Jay Nathan. Jay’s the CCO for Higher Logic and one of the co-founders of Gain Grow Retain.
In this episode, Jay is going to talk to us his recent blog post and newsletter on long term value and growth. Guest: Jay Nathan
Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain) Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today! Transcript
Jason Nobel: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble, here in London, and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Hi. We've not done a podcast for a good couple of, a couple of months now, Jason. I know but we've been hard at work. There's a lot of stuff going on in the background and I have had to cancel a couple that we had in the works. Not cancel, postpone. And one of those that we've had to cancel, sorry, postpone is the one that we've got on today. We've got the one and only Jay Nathan back with us. Massive. Welcome back, Jay. You've been writing some incredible blogs and articles. Newsletters recently. And there was one that really made me think and resonated with some great conversations I was having in London with some peers, some friends about. About the long game with customer success and it really resonated. And I think, I would love, as I said at the time, [00:01:00] love to get you on. It's only taken me six weeks to actually manage to find a slot that works with all. Jay, welcome back sir. How have you been?
jay nathan: I've been great. Thanks Jason. It's been a busy summer and so you know, it, the timing has worked out perfectly as we talked about before the show glad to be back. Thanks for having me. I always enjoy talking to the Jason's.
Jason Nobel: I, so you said both. Super, super excited and this is gonna be a great one for those of you that don't know Jay, and I don't think there are many people out there who listen, I know him. Jay's the chief customer officer at High Logic. He's one of the founders of Gain, grow, retain. A phenomenal community out there around commer commercial customer success, leadership around customer success. And if you're not already part of that community, do join. Jay's worked in leadership roles. I think in all of the post-sales, the traditional post-sales, customer facing part of the business.
A and you have built up a really phenomenal way of, I think thinking is the only way to describe it thinking and [00:02:00] how to do. Business and drive customer outcomes. And you've got some really superb experience. And you did a podcast where us, Matt, it's six months ago. It's ridiculous. The beginning of the year, which seems like yesterday, a again, in response to one of your newsletters, but talking about strategic behavior I don't know how that six months ago, But what have you been up to so far for 2023? Jay? We're we're now in, in H two. What, how's the year been so far for you?
jay nathan: Yeah, it's it really is crazy how quick the year's flown by. I don't know if many people know this about my job, but I'm the chief customer officer at Higher Logic, but I also, I. For one of, we have two business units and for one of those business units I run sales product our entire go-to market around, around that as well, including customer success and the backend of the customer relationship after the sale. And I've been getting a lot of, a lot, just a lot more exposure to what it looks like to run a full business, right? Not just thinking [00:03:00] about the customer experience and the customer success part of it, but also the, how do we go win in the market and how do we compete with those that we're competing with?
How do we make a name for ourselves? And so that's been a big part of my focus this year. I started doing that. Early last year, maybe April, q2, early Q2 of last year, calendar, q2. And it's just been a pleasure. I came from running my own business. I sold the company to Higher Logic, so I like to have, I like to have my hands in a little bit more than just customer success, which I think, A lot of the things that I'm writing about these days are way beyond the scope of customer success. You probably see that it's really more how to think about SaaS, how to think about, the type of businesses that we're running within this bigger world of business. So I'm just having a lot of fun exploring that. But that's been keeping me busy along with family and friends and all that kind of stuff.
Jason Nobel: It's like you, you weren't doing enough previously, so you've now expanded at all.
jay nathan: I always tell people, if you wanna learn about customer success, don't read about customer [00:04:00] success. Go read about everything else. Learn about finance, learn about sales, learn about marketing. Cuz you have to understand. A business to really understand customer success because you don't deliver customer success unless you have a successful business. Anyway, we maybe didn't,
Jason Nobel: I think you, you're so right, and Jason and I with some great guests on our own, we've had conversations around this and we all know there's a, I think it's a period of change for what we've called customer success over the last five, 10, even 15 years. And it is it's that wider commercial revenue responsibility, visibility. What is it really? And we've said, but I think that breadth across all the different roles, how it interacts with them, what it's really about, and what it means to this other functions is so critical. I think. Jay what prompted me back in June to reach out to you was the post that you did written about playing the long game. And how Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, how they invest as part of Bashi Hathaway and they're I think they [00:05:00] called it their sit on your ass investing approach. And it was surreal cuz only the day before I'd been talking to someone about just this need to think longer term about not just about investing, but about customers, about growth. And it's something that I think. In SaaS and particularly in the startup world, we're challenged with, we've got short term, quarter to quarter approaches, much shorter, short term focused on roi and particularly for those early stage businesses it's. You can't just say, Hey, I think about it for 35 years. When Warren Buffet was talking about how long has he had Coca-Cola as a company, an investment, 35 plus years. Yeah. So that there's a disconnect, but I think we've got to introduce that way of thinking and that business philosophy approach that how do we change, how do we think about things differently? And I don't think there's a switch that we can all flip. To make that change. But I'd love to hear your thinking. What made you write the article? What [00:06:00] was drew you into that?
jay nathan: Yeah. Like I said, I, so I just, I'm gonna put in a plug for another podcast that I love. It's called Founders. And this guy, David Sra is his name. He, I don't know him, he doesn't know me, but this guy's amazing. He actually had dinner with Charlie Munger as part of what he's been able to do with his podcast. He's a young…
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Jul 21, 2023
Guest: Vanessa Neurohr- Scaling CS via Customer Education
Episode Description
Many CS organizations need to move from delivering high-touch services to every customer, to a more scalable approach. Developing a high-impact customer education program that enables customers to achieve success on their own is one approach for reducing the need for high-touch CS. In this episode, we sit down with Vanessa Neurohr, Vice President of Customer Success at MuckRack to learn how she has transformed and scaled her CS team by building out their customer education program.
Guest: Vanessa Neurohr
Vice President of Customer Success at Muck Rack Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain) Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today! Transcript
Jason Whitehead: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone, and welcome from sunny Washington DC to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast. I'm here with my partner in crime, Mr. Noble, over in the uk. Say hello, Jason. Hello,
Jason Noble: Jason. Hello everyone.
Jason Whitehead: There you go. And today we're really excited. We've got Vanessa Nero here and Vanessa is the VP of Customer Success at Muck Rack, which is a great PR related technology space that she'll be telling us about.
And I'm very fortunate I've had the chance to get to know Vanessa over the past year or so, and I've learned a lot about what she's been doing with her CS team at MuckRack. And they've seen some amazing growth as a. But also within the CS team, they've made some great strides in scaling and changing and she is going to tell us about her journey there.
So Vanessa has built a high-impact team and they've really taken some status to transform how they deliver customer success. And one key area has been, Evolving customer education and programs and [00:01:00] reducing the need for one-to-one customer engagements to really help all their customers be successful.
So today, Vanessa, we're looking forward to your experiences, your tips, any advice that you have, and just learning from you. So thank you so much for
joining us.
Vanessa: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited.
Jason Whitehead: Absolutely.
Why don't you just take us all off, just tell us a little bit about your background and your experience at MuckRack and about the company itself and just give us some context.
Vanessa: Yeah, a hundred percent. I joined Muck Rack in December of 2016 when we had about 15 employees at the company total, and at the time I was the second customer success hire at the company. So definitely doing a lot of tasks back then, wearing a lot of hats, everything from support. To onboarding, to helping with renewals and value selling there.
So I got to learn a lot about our product, our customer base, and the other functions within the company at the time too. And as the company's grown, I've been able to take on a growing list of responsibilities as well. And now leading the customer success department, which includes [00:02:00] over 50 employees. So went from essentially a.
Two to now 50 plus and growing. We're actually hiring for five more people this quarter within my department, so I'm really excited to be part of a growing company and a growing team, and I really enjoy the different functions that are now represented in the department. Two, which include customer support.
So we have a dedicated support team. We have a customer onboarding team that's really engaging in the higher touch, one-to-one facilitated trainings. And then we have our C S M team. They do own renewals. I know that's a hot topic too within the customer success world, but our C S M team does own the full cycle post onboarding.
And then last but not least, we have our newest function in the department, which is customer education. So really excited to chat more about that too.
Jason Noble: Vanessa. I've always enjoyed.
I was gonna say the growth in that team is quite incredible. What kind of spearheaded that, as you join as person number two, to see that growth over quite a short timeframe what kind of was the [00:03:00] catalyst to getting the growth and how has the team found it and what have the biggest challenges been to you growing that quickly?
Vanessa: Yeah, that's a great question. I give a lot of credit to the product itself. We have great product market fit, and that's ultimately the catalyst for growing my team. We have so many more customers that we ultimately wanna support, enable, train, and make sure they're getting value out of the product. So that's really been the catalyst for growing my team and specializing the team as well, so that we don't have.
Someone one role if, for example, trying to do everything under the sun, we really wanna specialize so that we're bringing the best of ourselves based on functional areas to our customer base. So our product has expanded definitely since I joined in 2016, but the core of our product has been the same. So we've really been able to maintain a lot of strong customer relationships for at least as long as I've been here.
But I know some of those predate me to joining the company. .
Jason Whitehead: That's great.
When, we've talked a lot before and it sounds like there's some customers that really do need a high touch, one-to-one model, but you've got a lot of smaller customers where either they [00:04:00] don't have the same needs or they're, or it's cost-prohibitive to do that.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your vision is for the customer education program and how you're switching the model in months working?
Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely. We decided to invest in customer education. 21. And I had the idea because we have such a fast growing small business customer base, and when I joined in 2016, it actually was realistic for me to talk to every single customer of ours, one-to-one.
But at the size and scale that we're at today, it's no longer possible. So how do we still bring a premium experience to small business customers knowing that we cannot. Communicate with them one-to-one when they come in the door. So that's where customer education comes into play. And I started out by hiring an instructional designer because that's really the foundation for strong customer education.
You wanna make sure you're bringing in if this is something that you want to invest in, that you're bringing in. Someone who understands all of the ins and outs around instructional design, knows [00:05:00] how to train adult learners, knows how to keep them engaged, knows how to structure curriculum or content in a way.
Keeps people wanting more. So that's where we started. I started by hiring our first ever instructional designer at M Rack. And then since then, that same individual has really expanded the function within my department and is now leading our customer education team as our manager of customer education.
And so now, We have another instructional designer on the team that reports into him. And then we also have an L m S administrator too, who's ensuring that all of our content within Skill Jar, which is the L M S platform that we use, is staying up to date, that our customers can continue to rely on all of our academy materials that our education team has developed.
Jason Noble: How did…
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Apr 12, 2023
Guest: Pat Phelan – The Journey to Becoming A Chief Customer Officer
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Pat Phelan. Pat is the Chief Customer Office for GoCardLess, where he's responsible for building and scaling a best in class customer success organisation with leadership of Customer Onboarding, Support, Experience, CS management and Account Management disciplines globally.
In this episode, Pat is going to talk to us about his journey to becoming a Chief Customer Officer.
Guest: Pat Phelan
Pat is a seasoned CCO in the fintech space and has held a multitude of leadership roles in different GTM and commercial functions with some very fast-growing tech companies. Pat was the CCO at Brandwatch before GoCardless where in addition to the usual CS functions he also led a global account management team.
Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.
Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)
Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today!
Transcript
Jason Noble: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take Home podcast. With myself, Jason Noble here in a very cold and chilly London minus four degrees in real temperature and my partnering crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.
Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason,
Jason Noble: We have another super exciting guest to welcome today talking all about the journey to becoming a Chief Customer Officer.
I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Pat Felan Pat's the Chief Customer Officer at Go Cardless an organization I know well, I've worked with previously Pat's a, I'd like to say a season Chief Customer Officer in FinTech in a number of other spaces, and has held a multitude of leadership roles across all sorts of d.
Go to market functions, commercial functions in some of the, I think, fastest growing tech businesses that there are. And as C O at GoCardless, he's responsible for building and scaling what he says is the best in class customer success organization. And looking after leadership from boarding [00:01:00] support, experience, csm, your traditional customer success management and account management disciplines globally.
So all of. Traditional post sales functions, which is really good to see. It was previously that the c o at a brandwatch before go cardless, where we built all of the functions up all of the traditional CS functions. But also I you led a global account management function again. So seeing that come under that commercial element, cut under the remit of customer success is really exciting.
And I think if I'm right, you started off way back, it was in marketing and I think that's, A, a really phenomenal way to come into customer success and understanding everything about engagement, advocacy and it's just a route that I've not seen many other people come in. And, I'd love to hear more about that.
Pat. Welcome. Yeah. Amazing to have you with us, sir. Thank you.
Pat: Yeah, thanks for asking. This'll be an easy one. I won't get anyone's name wrong, , hopefully throughout the process, so I'll just have to. Not at the individual I'm talking to here. But no, I appreciate you coming on.
I've I've followed and seen your podcast in the past, so Yeah. [00:02:00] Excited to start.
Jason Noble: Love it. Pat, look,
I've given a little intro there, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your own journey a and what you're doing now, and your plans for the next year or so. As we've started.
Pat: Yeah.
Jason Noble: Started the
new year.
Pat: I'm not so much sure about the plans for the next year or two , but everything that's gone on in the last two years, it could be ranging anything from another global pandemic to God knows what else climate. But yeah, we're yeah so yeah. Gosh, it's been a, it's been a hell of a journey really.
I've often been asked the question and I've often, I've probably, the older I've gotten, the more I've actually reflected on it. Definitely more so than I ever did when. Idiot, if that makes sense. So I, came from Ireland way back. Moved to England. First chance I got, couldn't get out of the country fast enough.
Love it. Very proud to be Irish. But the Ireland that I knew is very different to the Ireland that is now in terms of opportunity and. The landscape for employment. So I did a post-grad and, it was never a given that you got an opportunity. It was too small basically.
So I went through the marketing route really, because I couldn't really figure out anything else at the time. And I felt like it was something that might work, it might work for me. [00:03:00] And, I never was, I, yeah, it was one of those kind of weird scenarios where having grown up in, in a hospitality environ always knew that, I got my energy from people.
And engaging with people and being able to, service people to some degree. I grew up in a hotel and, we had bars and bed and breakfasts and, grocery shop in the building. So we were always around people. We were always trading in some way, shape or form.
And we were always obsessed about really the quality of what was delivered and repeatability and people coming back to you. So always knew it was gonna land there but, When I first got into software it was an interesting path. So I started in marketing, moved back to London from Dubai, got into recruitment for a while because it was a wild industry in the sort of early two thousands, late nineties, early two thousands.
It was just amazing the energy around recruitment and the buzz around a contract versus permanent and I loved it, absolutely loved it, but I knew it was never gonna be a long term thing, it was very much a here and. And after about two years of that, myself and a very good friend of mine from [00:04:00] home went out on our own.
We set up our own company and it was really gonna be focused on initially risk management recruiting, but that morphed very quickly into technology because he was a bit of a tech head. Himself self thought. And we both were interested in that area. So we built up a small business.
It wasn't anything spectacular. And, again, it was the days before VCs or before kind of investment capital, and you you were, everything was was what's the phrase they have for it now? Shoestring or, you profitability drove expansion basically.
I think there's still a lot of that today though, isn't there? There is. It's more it's more acceptable today, I think, given our profitability at the time. If that was today, we'd be a unicorn. We literally made money every month from the beginning but we started getting into technology and it was really interesting because, th this was a time when, particularly on-prem was still a big thing.
Sass was unheard of. We built a. A really fantastic piece of technology focused at the recruitment sector. That was it was effectively sas. It was to live on external servers and, it was gonna solve lots of problems that a lot of our customers had at the time.
But it was just phenomenal. Looking back [00:05:00] on it, the. The the lack of willingness to trust data that lived physically lived somewhere else, not take, the architecture was immaterial. Nobody cared. Nobody cared about the security. Nobody cared about the scale. They just felt safer when the box was.
In their office. And I remember going to pitch…
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Mar 23, 2023
Guest: Jay Nathan – Strategic Behaviour As It Relates To Customer Success
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Jay Nathan. Jay’s the CCO for Higher Logic and one of the co-founders of Gain Grow Retain.
In this episode, Jay is going to talk to us about strategic behaviour and how it relates to customer success. Guest: Jay Nathan - Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic
Jay is a world renowned CS leader and has worked in exec roles across pretty much all the post sales customer facing parts of the business and has built up a methodology and approach for building, leading, and scaling SaaS companies serving a wide range of end-markets and customer sizes. He founded Customer Imperative, a company focused on helping B2B SaaS retain customers, grow revenue and scale customer success which he sold to HigherLogic and then in 2020 co-founded Gain Grow Retain, a community for customer success leaders. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain) Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today! Transcript
Jason Noble: [00:00:00] Excellent. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble in London, a and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.
Jason Whitehead: Hello Jason.
Jason Noble: This is our third recording of the year. We are super, super excited to have yet another amazing guest with us on today.
I will give a quick introduction, but we're gonna talk. Strategic behavior and how that relates to customer success. And I think it's something that's very topical at the moment. How do you really bring customer success to the table to help be part of those transformational changes we're looking to do?
So a quick intro to our guest. A very warm welcome. He's another, a-list guest that we've got in 2023. It's the one and only Jay Nathan. Jay is the chief customer officer and e v P at Higher. He's of course one of the co-founders of Gain, grow, retain. He's a fellow podcaster with the podcast over at Gain, grow, retain and he's also a several times over CS thought leader executive.
He's worked in multiple [00:01:00] exec roles across I think pretty much all of the post sales, customer facing parts of the business. So he is got that tenure, that experience. He was doing this before it was called customer. He's built up an approach and a methodology for really how you help SaaS companies scale.
Really about, irrespective of what the markets are, what their sizes are. He founded customer imperative before coming into gain, grow, retaining higher logic, and they really were focused on about how you go about retaining SaaS customers and growing revenue, scaling customer success.
Which he ultimately sold to Higher Logic. And then as we know, get, I think this is where most people know from JE founded Gain, grow. Retain, which is a, yeah, nothing short of, I think it's the community for customer success leaders and practitioners. A and the growth you've seen there. It has been amazing over the last few years.
You're also a fellow runner. I'm a runner myself, getting back into it now after hip surgery recently, and a big guitar player. So Jay, a huge welcome to you. We [00:02:00] both are super, super excited to have you here.
Jay: Thank you very much and I got the pleasure to meet Jason. I guess it was. Was it last year or two years ago?
Jason Whitehead: I think it was two Big rig.
Jay: Yeah, at big rig. Yeah. So g got the opportunity to meet Mr. Whitehead in person. But glad to finally get to meet you as well, Jason Noble.
Jason Noble: Actually this is awesome. I love this for us lot the podcasts are, these are the people that you know so well and you feel that you know each other.
But it's great to have you on Jay. Look. Just go ahead and give our listeners a bit of an intro into your own journey and I think it's a phenomenal one and kind. What your own plans are for the year.
Jay: Yeah, sure. A lot of the things you mentioned in the intro I won't repeat a lot of that, but somebody did ask me there's a guy named Mohammed Ock who is, who started customer Success Middle East.
I don't know if you know of him. Another great community.
Jason Noble: I've
had conversations with him recently. Great.
Jay: Good. I actually hope I pronounced his name correctly, but great guy and he's done great stuff and he asked me the same, he asked me this question which is like, what was your path to get into customer success?
And I think the cool thing that you find, [00:03:00] and you all undoubtedly have your own stories as well of how you got into this. Part of the industry is, it's different for everybody, almost for everybody, unless you really started out, fresh outta college, going right into customer success. I was in professional services for a long time.
Actually, I started out as a, so a software engineer. So I got a business degree in college, but I was super hands-on in the technology programming, doing a lot of data work, analytics which all ends up paring pretty well into the things. Have to do Now in my roles as a leader at Higher Logic and other companies I've been in, you gotta know how to work with data.
Also spent, my, my first software company, I was telling you in the pre-show, we moved down to Charleston, South Carolina in 2005 when I worked, went to work for Black bod and that was my first software company being in, I was there for almost nine years. Ran built and ran a large professional services team there, which I think is a good foundation for customer success and we could maybe talk about that.
I spent three years in product management, which is another helpful thing if you're gonna be in customer success. And then went to smaller company after [00:04:00] that. As you mentioned, I started a consulting firm after we sold that last company. Got to learn so much that was really cata. Part of my career is customer Imperative, was a consulting firm, but we just got to speak with hundreds of software companies trying to go through and transform into true subscription SAS businesses, customer oriented businesses.
Got to learn what their pitfalls were, what their problems were. Got to work with a lot of them, not just talk with 'em, but actually help them design their strategies. It was really informative to what we ended up doing over the past few years, which was then Launch Gang. Yes, we sold that to Higher Logic and now it's part how we basically engage and go to market from a Higher Logic, which is a customer community platform company.
It's been a goat path, I guess from a career per perspective. But some really fun stuff in there over the years, and I'm sure you all have similar stories that you would share if we talked about your backgrounds as well.
Jason Noble: I love that. And it is, I love your point there about that. We all come, the journeys are very different unless you just started out in this.
Yeah. So there's this guy that I actually had an [00:05:00] intro to yesterday who's come from the cruise business and you think, okay but there's a lot of similar. And it's quite an amazing transformation to go through that. And I love it. It is, I think that background in other types of organization, other roles really brings somethin…
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Mar 14, 2023
Guest: Maranda Dziekonski – What does the future customer success manager look like?
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Maranda Dziekonski. Maranda is the SVP of Customer Success at HourWork. She is seasoned customer success executive and leader and with extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies who have all seen successful exits.
In this episode, Maranda is going to talk to us about the future of the customer success manager role. Guest: Maranda Dziekonski - Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly
Maranda Dziekonski was until very recently the Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. For those that don’t know Swiftly is helping us make our cities more efficient, and helping to improve service reliability, passenger information, and operational efficiency. But she joined the team at HourWork as their new SVP of Customer Success.
Maranda is a vey well respected and well known leader in the customer success space and has extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies who have all seen successful exits. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain) Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today! Transcript
Jason Noble: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast series with myself, Jason Noble, here in a very dark and wet London, and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.
Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason.
Jason Noble: We are really thrilled today that we've got our, it's our second podcast of the year and our second guest podcast, and today we have a, another amazing guest with us and a great conversation we're gonna talk about, all about the.
The csm, what does the future of the customer success manager look like? And I think it's a really topical topic. There's lots of challenges between, in the industry, lots of changes, and I'm sure it's one that a lot of our listeners are really gonna be keen on this conversation. And I'd like to give a very big welcome to Miranda Dsky.
Miranda, welcome. Miranda until very recently, I think until yesterday was the Chief Customer Officer at swiftly. This has taken us about 10 different chances to get this reorganized. [00:01:00] Predominantly down to me, my fault of other things coming up, but I'm thrilled to bits that we've got Miranda here. Miranda spent a lot of time at swiftly as their C O.
Helping build their processes up swiftly if you don't know, help us make cities more efficient. So it's a pretty big task that they're undertaking, but she's done some amazing work there, building out their customer success function, their customer success team there. And if you're not connected with her already, and I'll let her talk more about this, but she's departed and she's gonna be joining the team at our work in the US as the s VP of customer Success.
I think beginning of next month. So really excited about this. And Miranda, she's very well respected in the customer success community, a very well-known leader, extensive experience building teams, scaling teams in early startups, early to mid-stage startups. She's also been part of a number of companies that have seen a number of successful exits, so she's.
A lot to bring to the table. She's also a repeat rep recipient of the much acclaimed top 25 and top [00:02:00] 50 customer success influencer awards. Huge achievements. Miranda, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here and to be actually doing this conversation at last.
Maranda: I know finally I'm on the Adjacents. I can't believe it.
I've made it. I'm talking to the Jasons on the Jasons podcast
Jason Noble: all that day.
You can sit back and relax a bit and enjoy the conversation, but
Maranda: yeah, you know me, I love to chit chat, so this is gonna be great.
Jason Noble: Absolutely.
Could you just start us off, I've given a little intro there, but in your own words, give us a quick intro to who you are, who Miranda is, and really your own journeys to where's got you to, where you've got to and your upcoming role with our.
Maranda: Yeah. I think you did a fantastic job introducing me. I don't know if I have a ton to add. But I did start out in customer success, some 20 odds something years ago, working at a very large organization that had, 30,000 plus employees globally. We were. 50 billion a year in revenue. I spent nine years there learning how to do [00:03:00] customer success.
I managed some very large strategic portfolios and that was in Michigan and then made the journey to Silicon Valley and now have been part of seven startups. Some have had. Successful exits. Some have exited in a different manner. . Yeah, they've all exited one way or another. . I've been really fortunate though.
I've landed at, lending Club, which had a unicorn, I p o Hello Sign, which had an, a successful acquisition by Dropbox. I had, Castlight Health. I was there short. before their I P O and then of course recently swiftly, which had an acquisition by J M I equity. So that's for equity events, I guess is what I could call it.
Jason Noble: In my four F seven. That's a good hit, right?
Maranda: Not bad. Yeah. Now I'm starting my eighth which I'm really excited about and I shared a lot about, why I chose this location and I did talk to a total of 39. When I was going through this journey and I ta I spoke more seriously [00:04:00] with 14.
But I was very fortunate to be in a ton of conversations, to have an idea of what's out there, figure out what type of leader I wanna work with, what kind of team, the mission. And definitely I, I po I, I chose, Our work because the mission just really spoke to me as somebody who grew up with a blue collar family and poverty and, understanding needing to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck.
I've been there, so this is the community I'm gonna serve at our work and I'm really excited.
Jason Noble: I think that mission behind a, an organization it's not a vision. It's a mission. And they're very different, aren't they? And I think that's something where you can see the fundamental difference it can make in, not just in, in the city you live in the country, but in society.
It's a huge thing. I think in the, it's a great intro that, and I think you've, You know that, that experience from large organizations to seven startups, eight, now, y you've seen it all. You really have you've seen the good, the bad, the ugly. How, in [00:05:00] your timing, customer success, how have you seen it change and grow?
What are some, particularly when we look at the roles in it and we'll get onto the role of the csm, but how have you seen the industry and the roles changing it?
Maranda: Now I think investors. Finally, I think in the last five years or so, I've started noticing that investors really get what, customer success is and the value that it can bring to an organization That has not always been the case, which means that the leader of the customer success organization had to fight to sit, to have that seat at the table.
That's no longer the case. I believe in, at least in most organizations that I've spoken with the investors seem to understand that whether it's a PE firm or a v…
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Mar 7, 2023
Guest: Ryan Johansen – The Impact of Burnout to our Mental Well-Being
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Ryan Johansen. Ryan is customer success leader based in Boston who has been an IC, Manager and Director of CS.
In this episode, Ryan is going to talk to us about mental health as it relates to CSM's and their workloads. Guest: Ryan Johansen - Senior Customer Success Manager
As a first time manager at a startup, Ryan ended up in a hospital because of a mental breakdown caused by workplace stress. After going to a dark place with mental health, he discovered putting your mental health first can actually have major career benefits.
Driven by a desire to help people avoid what happened to him, he started doing presentations on managing stress as a csm. This quickly took off and he has helped thousands of individuals at dozens of companies. He provides live training programs on how to manage stress, improve productivity, and change work for the better. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
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The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources
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* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain) Subscribe
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We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today! Transcript
Jason Noble: Welcome everyone, a very warm welcome to our first podcast episode of 2023 and our first guest Ryan Hansen.
Ryan is a customer success leader based in Boston, who's, He's gone through the full customer success journey. So Ryan started off as an individual contributor. As a C S M. He's moved up to a manager, to a director and then some more leadership roles. And as a first time manager at a startup in customer success, Ryan actually ended up in hospital because of a mental breakdown caused by workplace stress.
And after this, what he did was he put a renewed focus on mental health and really found that by putting your mental health. Can actually have some fundamental career benefits for you. So we're really excited to have Ryan here today to talk about this and the impact of mental wellbeing, a burnout of workload stress here, and Ryan's [00:01:00] what he is done.
Since then, he is been driven by the desire to help people avoid this situation, and he started doing some presentations around how he stress as a csm, but found that this took off really quickly and he's gone on to. I think you said Ryan, it's thousands of customer, people, of individuals literally dozens, yeah, if not hundreds of organizations.
And you now help provide training programs on how to manage stress, improve productivity, and really change work in the workplace for the better. So a big, a huge undertaking. And today, Ryan's gonna share some of his story with us today that I think starting 2023, we know there are some challenge.
There's a lot of organizations going through huge layoffs. Now we know there are economic challenges still, so I think it's gonna be a really cool conversation. Welcome, Ryan. We're really excited to have you with us.
Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me. I love talking about this topic and I'm super excited to dive in today.
Jason Noble: Ryan look I've given a brief intro there, but I'm sure you can do a better job there, so please go ahead. Tell us a bit about your own journeys that brought you into customer. Then what got you down [00:02:00] the road you're in now and what you're doing now and what your plans off 2023?
Ryan: Yeah, definitely I got started out in my career in sales in the pharmaceutical industry interestingly enough, and ended up moving into tech about 11 years ago. And from there, like mostly was a sales guy and ended up getting in a customer success. I was working at a company called RapidMiner, where a data science machine learning platform, and got really interested in some of the use cases we were solving.
It was, the forefront of AI a couple years ago. and I loved talking with our customers and figuring out like how they were using it, how they were changing their business. I've always been a really curious guy. So I ended up making the switch over to CS and haven't looked back. It's worked out very well for me.
I always did fairly well at sales, but I feel like I felt my calling and always someone that. Really wanted to, grow and work hard. And that's something that I definitely grew up with. And from there, I worked really hard to get a management job at that company and, did whatever it takes, worked the long hours, [00:03:00] as we all know.
And from there, got that management position. My, my CEO came up to me and I think it was February, 2018, he said, Hey you're doing a great job. We want you to lead the team and I feel like I had made it. It was a great experience for myself. And the thing no one tells you when you become a manager is that everyone else's problems are now your problems.
And it was just this sudden heap of responsibility. It's a small company. I tend to take, I, at that time, tended to take things very personally, have a lot of passion, but definitely brought a lot of that home with me. And about six to eight months in, started to really struggle with things like, things don't always go your way in management or in general in life.
And from there I started working even longer hours that we had some really high goals to the point where, I'm starting to get really negative about things. I am having trouble sleeping and really all of these typical signs that you should probably take the foot off the gas and set back a little bit just made me kept pushing harder and harder.
Because I thought that, hey, [00:04:00] maybe I'll come out of this and I'm sure we can all deal with it. And as you. Feel that pressure. You want to keep pushing yourself, and that's something that I really identified. Because it's it was really your fight or flight, which is really the whole key of stress.
So I, I kept pushing myself and the last thing I wanted to tell is how I was doing to anyone especially my leaders, because they had taken a chance on me. I wanted to make them look good. I wanted to make myself look good, but then it started to affect my health. I started having panic attacks all the time.
I'm having trouble sleeping. I'm really irritable. I withdraw from a lot of my, social activities, things that I actually like doing because I was so afraid of failing. So I keep pushing myself. , and then it hits about the 11 month mark and it's our q4. We have some, a couple big renewals coming in really close to the target.
And then I walked in and it was like almost an out-of-body experience. I walk into the office and I feel my whole body start to almost break down. I'm having a massive panic attack as soon as [00:05:00] I walked into the threshold. So I just grabbed my boss. I told him what was going on. And what he, something amazing happened, he said he's listen, take as much time as you need.
There's nothing more important than you feeling better cuz you're very important to this company. So that gave me a little permission. And from there I had no idea what to do. There's not a standard playbook for this. When you're struggling with mental health things, You tend to feel all alone and that you're the only one dealing with it, but and you don't know how to deal with it you're probably your least resourceful when you're going through something like this.
So what I ended up doing was called my therapist that I wasn't seeing anymore because I was s…
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Dec 20, 2022
Guest: Jamie Bertasi – Customer Success Predictions for 2023
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Jamie Bertasi. Jamie is the President and COO of Totango. Previously she was also the company's Chief Customer Officer.
In this episode, Jamie is going to share her predictions for Customer Success in 2023!
Guest: Jamie Bertasi - President and COO of Totango
She is responsible for the go-to-market, onboarding and customer success teams at Totango. A proven and trusted leader, Jamie has a demonstrated track record for building high-value experiences for customers and partners, delivering strong business results and building teams with a positive culture.
Jamie is a recognized expert in go-to-market and customer success strategies. Before joining Totango, Jamie was the COO of HomeSuite and previously led TellMe to a successful acquisition by Microsoft."
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Sponsors
The Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.
Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow Jamie Bertasi on LinkedIn
* Visit Totango's official website
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)
Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today!
Transcript
Jason Whitehead: [00:00:00] All right. Hello and thank you everyone for joining us for another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast. My name is Jason Whitehead, coming to you from sunny Washington, DC area. I'm here with my partner in crime, Mr. Noble, say hello, Jason.
Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Hello everybody. Good evening. Good morning, good afternoon from a very dark and cold London.
Jason Whitehead: Yep. And today we're excited to extend a very warm welcome to Jamie Bertasi. Did I pronounce that anywhere close to correct? I'm sorry.
Jamie Bertasi: Close enough. No problem. Jason.
Jason Whitehead: Jamie is the president and COO of Totango, and previously she was also the Chief Customer Officer at Totango. And Jamie's going to share her predictions for customer success in 2023. So we're excited to hear about this. Just a little background on Jamie. She is responsible for the go to market onboarding and customer success teams over at to Tango, and she's a proven, a trusted leader. Jamie has a demonstrated track record for building high value experiences for customers and partner.
We're delivering strong business [00:01:00] results and building teams with a positive culture. And many of you will recognize that Jamie is an expert in Go to market customer success strategies. And before joining to Tango, she was at Home Suite and previously tell me to a successful acquisition by Microsoft. So Jamie, thank you so much for being here. We're excited to have you.
Jamie Bertasi: Thank you guys both for having me. The Jason.
Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. We love it. Before we jump into your thoughts on 2023, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about your background and your experience in customer success and how you came to be where you are.
Jamie Bertasi: Sure. In terms of my background, I've been in high tech my whole career. Started grew up on the East coast. Went to Tufts University, graduated, went right into a software company and have been pretty entrepreneurial. I've had the opportunity to build three companies from the ground up and have very successful.
About five years or so ago now, I was introduced to Guy Niaz, the CEO and founder of To Tango through a board. Guy had built this amazing product and company, but he really needed his go-to-market partner. [00:02:00] And I spent about four months getting to know guy, making sure it was gonna be a great fit, and and then joined to Tango and it's just been, up until the right since.
Super fun. Have really sold all the customers that we have and implemented all the customers that we have and just built everything from the ground up with Guy. It's been just a great ride and super fun to work in customer success.
Jason Whitehead: Wow, that's exciting. And I'm sure over that time you've seen a lot of changes in the the industry and in the space. Before we jump into predictions for 2023, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what have you seen as the biggest changes in CS over the last five or 10 years as of as a launching ground for where we're going next?
Jamie Bertasi: I think it's become very mainstream. Early on, I used to spend a lot of time meeting with senior executives at, corporations explaining to them what customer success was. What is this thing? A lot of people would really, I would say, confuse it with customer support. Many, support organizations rebranded themselves as customer success. Like doing nobody any favors with that one . And yeah. [00:03:00] And I think early on it just a little to tango history, which I think also I.
Guy started the company in Tel Aviv where our engineering and RT still is, and but what he quickly realized was that all the companies that were buying customer success technology right outta the gate were these small SAS software companies. Because of course they realized that they couldn't hire people.
They really couldn't afford to hire people and throw it at this customer success thing, or basically their post-sale functions, right? They had to use technology to scale that maybe one person in some technology as opposed to say five people. So really I think CS got started in that space.
But what we've seen happen really since then is it's become much more mainstream, is people really understand the value of really focusing on delivering those customer outcomes in that post sales world in terms of holding onto your arr. And now customer success has really become also something that applies to all recurring revenue businesses. No longer is it just SAS software companies?
Jason Noble: do you see kinda things as they stand now, we've. It's very [00:04:00] challenging year. This year. We've had economic situations, there's geopolitical situations, there's all kind of tech layoffs and things. Yeah, I think we're, we've seen, our organizations seem to be still wanting to make investment in customers and customer success, but really interesting how have you seen the last 12 months and how do you think that's positioning us up for changing and progressing into 2020?
Jamie Bertasi: Yeah, so I think as we started into 20 22, 1 of the things that I saw as a trend was, really the, what I would call the pace setter customer success leaders, those who are the real visionaries moving the industry forward, really leaning into digital customer success, across all their segments, not just, the tech touch segment, but really using digital as what's called the baseline, and then layering some human in, human touch in for the higher. Higher ARR areas or segments. So I think what happened, as, folks got more and more comfortable with that type of an approach. And as the economy worsened, as they realized that, frankly they could use the [00:05:00] technology, lean on the technology more and more, and humans less and less.
So what I've seen is that a lot of times now people are basically saying, first of all, If I could even get the head count to add the CSMs, I would, but I'm not getting it. So I have no choice but to lean on the technology for automation and so forth. Or if I, even if I had the head count, I can't hire them because there's so many open heads for CSMs, right? As we all know on LinkedIn and so forth.…
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Dec 6, 2022
Guest: Deborah Andrews – The Acceleration of Customer Success Operations
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Deborah Andrews. Deborah (aka "Debs") currently works across all post-sales functions at Unit4, alongside leading the Customer Success Operations and Digital teams.
In this episode, Debs is going to talk about the world of customer success operations and why it's critical to businesses today.
Guest: Deborah Andrews - Director of Customer Office Operations, Unit 4
Having a varied background in IT, Support, Operations and Customer Success Management for companies such as Sage, Gainsight and Salesforce, Debs actively collaborates to drive the awareness and implementation of customer centric initiatives that are intentionally designed to drive a seamless, leading-edge and sustainable customer experience. Success for All is her favorite mantra.
Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.
Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)
Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, all in the wrong order. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble here in London the 1st of December, and my partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead, over in the us Say hello, Jason.
[00:00:14] Jason Noble: We are today talking about the world of customer success operations or customer operations and why it’s critical to businesses and why we've seen I think in the, for the right reason, the right shift and priority given to it. And we're really lucky. We've got another guest with us today.
[00:00:30] Jason Noble: We've got Deborah or Debs Andrews. Deb's is the director of the customer office operations over at Unit four, where she works across all the post-sales functions alongside leading customer success operations and the digital team. She's a customer success leader that I'm sure lots of our listeners will.
[00:00:47] Jason Noble: She's been got around 15 years or so, experience building out customer centric corporations, management, innovation and customer success, performance management. She's also worked with some really big names in the world of customer success, the [00:01:00] likes of gain sites, which we all know. And Salesforce, her mantra and I love this cuz this really aligns with my way of thinking is success for all.
[00:01:09] Jason Noble: And her approach is really focused about enabling others to be successful and. That just aligns with my way of thinking about us being responsible for someone else's success as CS leaders. So Deb's a big welcome fan to see you again. It was great to catch up a few weeks back. How are you doing?
[00:01:26] Deborah Andrews: I'm very good. Thank you. Really excited to be talking to you today.
[00:01:30] Jason Noble: Excellent. Well, could you just tell our listeners a little bit about your own journey in CS operations, why you've made that move and the different areas that you are focusing on today?
[00:01:38] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, no, definitely. I'll give you a little bit of background into how I've evolved along my career, because as we know, CSMs and now CS Ops, you can come from a varied background and that, that explains how I've gotten to where I am today. I think, my career history to date, I started my career in sales management, moved on to support management, then operations [00:02:00] management. So it was already, all encompassing. It was around about 2007.
[00:02:04] Deborah Andrews: I actually stumbled across this seemingly unknown company. I dunno if salesforce, right? So they were a bit smaller back in 2007 than they are today. But I say that was pretty much when everything changed for me. So I went from being very function specific to becoming a hands on techie, analyst, administrator, project manager, literally everything.
[00:02:25] Deborah Andrews: Self. Yeah. Self developed every skill that I could under the sun to be able to implement a CRM system across an organization single handed. It was quite a small organization, but such a varied, expansive role that actually, I think that experience spoiled me in a little way. I basically find it now quite challenging to operate just within a specific function.
[00:02:48] Deborah Andrews: So this whole philosophy surrounding, customer success management not just being a function actually resonates really strongly with me. And it's an opportunity for me to go, yes, I wanna have all of my fingers in all of [00:03:00] the pies and help consolidate and transform organizations. Yeah. So I think that was the changing point for me.
[00:03:06] Deborah Andrews: But I transitioned from working in that capacity in end users to the ISV space, as you mentioned working with gain site, Salesforce and SAGE within customer success management. So progression into CS Ops just felt it was perfectly natural to me to go back to my operational roots and combine that with, experience on the ground of being a CSM.
[00:03:27] Deborah Andrews: It just added value behind being able to focus on operations and digitization, but with a degree of empathy, having engaged from an end user, from a vendor perspective, and a broad spectrum of function.
[00:03:41] Jason Noble: I love that story and that natural evolution into role. I think a lot of us that have got a bit of experience here, that's how we've come into it.
[00:03:47] Jason Noble: But it, you get that particularly with organizations like Salesforce and joining there. Wow, you must have seen some growth to where they are now. The same with Gainsight, but that broader experience and like you say with your sales hat on as [00:04:00] well, seeing everything and then seeing the value that, that the world of customer success can bring to a business.
[00:04:06] Jason Noble: But also this newer area around customer success ops. Absolutely phenomenal. If we take a step back and going back to basics what do you define customer success ops as and how do you see us having come about over recent years and how do you think it fits the wider revenue ops and commercial
[00:04:23] Deborah Andrews: ops?
[00:04:24] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, I think, CS ops really for me answers the question that most businesses raised when customer success management functions were formed, CSMs were performing one to one activities and driving value for each customer on a case by case basis. And I think businesses generally asked at that point as it was gaining traction, how on earth can we scale?
[00:04:45] Deborah Andrews: And how can I measure, how do I know if it's actually working? It seems to be doing a good job. But, I think most companies at that point actually decided rightly or wrongly, that investing into a CS tool was the solution to all of their problems, right? They needed to [00:05:00] scale things so the technology will do it.
[00:05:01] Deborah Andrews: And I had again, like the privilege of partnering with some customers as a cs. On that basis back in 2018 I remember thinking back then that most of the customers that I was engaging with would actually benefit from having someone in place, helping them make the changes needed to be able to take full advantage of the tools.
[00:05:21] Deborah Andrews: Turns out I wasn't the only one thinking that at th…
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Nov 29, 2022
Guest: Alan Fecamp – The World of Recruitment in Customer Success
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Alan Fecamp. Alan is a Director in Zeren’s Commercial team and has 20+ years of experience in senior level recruitment and Executive Search, and has worked extensively across the UK, EMEA, and US.
In this episode, Alan is going to share his journey as the head of Customer Success at Zeren, an executive recruitment and head-hunting firm that works with innovative businesses to really help accelerate their growth.
Guest: Alan Fecamp - Director of CS, Zeren
In more recent years, Alan has operated extensively in the post-sale arena, and has developed deep levels of expertise and networks within Customer Success.
Prior to joining Zeren, Alan founded Just Digital in 2009 who built an exceptional reputation for helping Seed through Series C B2B SaaS companies hire for specialist commercial roles. This success led to Just Digital being Acquired by PIE Recruitment in 2019.
His core strengths are working with investor backed high growth tech businesses who are looking to build exceptional go-to-market teams across the globe, with a particular focus on Sales, Customer Success, and Operations.
Scroll Down for Episode Transcript
Sponsors
The Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!
Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.
Additional Resources
Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful:
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
* Read Jason Noble's Blog
* Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)
Subscribe
Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.
We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.
Don't miss out - subscriber today!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episodes of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble here in a very cold and dark London in the UK and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Today we have another very special guest with us today, a very warm welcome to the head of Customer Success and the commercial practice at Zeren executive recruitment and head-hunting firm that work with innovative businesses to really help accelerate their growth.
[00:00:32] Jason Noble: And Alan, I think we, I've known you for a couple years now. You are, I think, one of the few recruiters out there, the exec recruiters with a real focus on customer success and commercial growth. And I know you've been driving this focus and change for a number of years, so really excited to have you.
[00:00:46] Jason Noble: I think when we were first, first met, you were back at PI recruitment, which I believe you'd come from your own business, just digital and just acquired that. So, a great journey you've been through. Yeah. I think your expertise is all around as scale up [00:01:00] startups and that really accelerated growth journey, and I think what a journey it's been over the last couple years, particularly coming into where we are now at the end of 2022.
[00:01:10] Jason Noble: The emphasis has always been on the post-sale side of it, and I think you've worked. If I'm correct, some like 150 companies now helping them
[00:01:17] Alan Fecamp: build teams. So probably got up now. Jason. Thanks for having me. But I think it's
[00:01:22] Jason Noble: awesome. I think you've, you're also massively involved in CS community and we just missed catching up a pulse, so really warm welcome
[00:01:29] Jason Noble: Super excited to have you here. Please, in your own words, could you just tell our listeners a bit about your own journey, ton to Pie and then your own business and what's been your motivation
[00:01:39] Alan Fecamp: in customer success? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me on both of you. Much appreciate it. So yeah, I suppose that the voice will stop to is Career recruiter 23 years?
[00:01:51] Alan Fecamp: I think it is. All in commercial recruitment. Going through scale up journeys with those particular companies ventured into the SaaS world. Back in 2009 when I formed just [00:02:00] digital by accident and truth. So just digital was set up to be a digital marketing and e-commerce recruitment company.
[00:02:06] Alan Fecamp: And by a I suppose by associations being in a digital world, we attracted lots of MarTech businesses to us who didn't have a home to go to from a recruitment perspective. So that digital marketing, e-commerce recruitment company very quickly pivoted to coin a startup. Expression to becoming a B2B SaaS specialist within a few months.
[00:02:26] Alan Fecamp: And we never look back. We, it was only a boutiquey small specialist agency, never more than 10 heads but really carved out on each working with C through series B, high growth businesses that had some investor capital put in. Whether they be US founded, UK founded really wanted to go on that scaling journey and.
[00:02:44] Alan Fecamp: Our role within that was helping them build out the gtm the pathway into CS came about halfway through that time, and that was really when customer success was taking off. And, I can remember now the conversations being, we need, is it an account management role? Those account management roles suddenly became customer success roles [00:03:00] and alongside the business growth journey I spent most of my personal time as a recruiter.
[00:03:05] Alan Fecamp: Figuring out what this CS thing was and it just took off and started to build year on year. Going back about three and a half years now, I exited that business to Pie. And that was born out of wanting to go on a scaling journey moving away from what was a lifestyle business. So we, we did a jv and that went very well for a few years.
[00:03:23] Alan Fecamp: And then fast forward to where I am now I'm in Zeren doing more of the same, but on bigger scale. Yeah, that's the whistle stop tour. So really like the, I suppose the takeaways, the last seven. Plus, years has all been in customer success for me. Certainly, majority of my personal building time has been helping scale CS teams.
[00:03:39] Jason Noble: I think you seeing someone like yourself that's got that industry experience and you've seen cs. Come into its own being and then move to that focus is, it's quite unique. There are lots of organizations around recruitment that say they're doing it, but a lot of struggling with it. And I know in the couple of years that I've known you, we've seen some big changes in the industry, marketplace and the economy, as we said. [00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Jason Noble: How do you see the world of recruitment today and customer success? I see.
[00:04:04] Alan Fecamp: What are founders, CEOs and investors looking for
[00:04:07] Jason Noble: in leaders, and the highest that you're.
[00:04:09] Alan Fecamp: So the recruitment world is interesting. So I suppose from a me and competition standpoint, I think, what you'll find as a candidate is lots of sales recruitment companies trying to hire for CSMs, assuming it's an extension of sales.
[00:04:21] Alan Fecamp: So I think that's the, that's the difficult challenge to navigate as a candidate. I think what we tend to walk into is, an educational play. We're often dealing with a founder or perhaps a CRO that has come up through the sales route and is probably less well versed in customer success.
[00:04:39] Alan Fecamp: And quite often when we're going in to talk about, the brief and what they want to do, what they're understanding is if CS is quite apparent quite quickly that there's, know, there's a lot of education required from us around. What type of CS leader t…
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Nov 25, 2022
Guest: Rupesh Rao – Managing Complexity during On-boarding and Implementation
Episode Description
Join us when we speak with Rupesh Rao. Rupesh is the CEO and founder of CogniSaaS. CogniSaaS helps enterprise SaaS companies deliver customer-centric onboarding and implementation at scale.
In this episode, Rupesh is going to share his experiences and insights in how to best help companies manage complexity during the onboarding and implementation process.
Guest: Rupesh Rao - CEO and Founder of CogniSaaS
Rupesh has over 20 year’s experience globally (including US, EMEA and APAC) in leading multi-national companies as well as fast growing SaaS companies in multiple industry verticals. These roles include software engineer, account manager, Chief Customer Officer, and now CEO of CogniSaaS.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us for another episode of the Jason's take on podcast. I am Jason Whitehead, based in Washington, DC here with my partner in crime. Mr. Noble, say hello, Jason.
[00:00:09] Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody.
[00:00:14] Jason Whitehead: Well done. And we're excited today to have a very special guest for us. Rupesh Rao who is the CEO and founder of CogniSaaS. CogniSaaS helps enterprise SaaS companies deliver customer centric onboarding and implementation and. And Rupesh has over 20 years’ experience in a wide range of roles, including software engineer, account manager, a couple roles as chief customer officer, and now as CEO.
[00:00:40] Jason Whitehead: So today Rupesh is going to share his experience and insights on how to best help companies manage complexity during the onboarding implementation process. And Rupesh, thank you so much for joining us today. If you could, just to get us started, please go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be an expert on complexity and onboarding.
[00:00:59] Rupesh Rao: Great. First of all, thank you Jason and Jason for having me here. Very honored to be here and yeah, very excited. We've been talking for a while, so it's great to finally be having a conversion with you both, so thank you for the opportunity. Absolutely. So yeah, so quickly about me. Obviously started cogs as three years back, early 2020 and before that, spent about two decades in the industry in various roles.
[00:01:19] Rupesh Rao: Had a chance to see the full customer journey, life cycle, so to speak, from all the way to acquiring the customer, delivering value and account management, customer success, and so forth. And yeah, so it's been a great journey for me so far. All in all. And yeah, that's good about myself.
[00:01:36] Jason Whitehead: Great. Thank you so much. And it was such a pleasure. We got to meet in person the other day when we were, all the three of us were at the conference and it was nice to, after all these years, put a face to a name and really just connect. It was great to see. So, let's jump in. There, there are a wide range of application types out there and obviously a lot of us are very familiar where you can sign up on the fly and the freemium models and jump in and just get started instantly.
[00:01:58] Jason Whitehead: But that's not really what you do and where you focus. You're more the other extreme, if I understand correctly, where it's a complex, either complex product or complex organization, may take weeks or months to actually. Get folks up and running and implement it. Yeah. What do you see as the biggest challenges when you do have a complex implementation that need to be managed and how is it different than more of the sign up and go?
[00:02:19] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, weird question. Great question Jason. And this is a challenge I think we are seeing a lot of companies face this is a challenge. I face myself before I started Cognos, and that was actually the motivation why Cognos came into being, right? So, the fundamental challenge, Jason, this whole notion of customers buys from you to achieve certain outcomes customer business outcomes, and then how does that translate to your product and your implementation process, onboarding and the way you get them live.
[00:02:47] Rupesh Rao: And we all have been there seeing that, hey, the moment you go live the next day, you have a bunch of escalations and tickets and expectation mismatch and all that reactive firefighting starts. I think that's fundamentally a problem that we are seeing. And fundamentally the problem we are trying to solve for our customers is that how do you go back to the basics of truly customer success by tracking the customer outcomes, right from the sales and pre-sales side, all the way implementation and then, Go beyond go live as well, right?
[00:03:14] Rupesh Rao: So that's the fundamental I would say the complexity and the challenge. It sounds very simple, but it's really still a lot of companies are struggling with because, this is a phase where a lot of teams are involved, number one, right? So, you got the sales team closing the deal and handing it over to the implementation team, and you have the product team involved.
[00:03:32] Rupesh Rao: You have the solution team, you have engineering team, QA team, and so on, right? So, a lot of players, and then you also have the. We're trying to collaborate with them as well. So, a lot of moving parts, a lot of themes and a lot of silos, right? You have the CRM system where the sales opportunity was tracked, and you have the implementation side.
[00:03:50] Rupesh Rao: You people are tracking it in JIRAs of the world, or Microsoft Project, or Asana or Excel trackers. Then you have the picketing system. Then you have the product roadmap tools. So many silos and it's getting worse with the whole more SaaS tools coming into picture. I think that's the fundamental complexity we are seeing across a lot of our customers and the industry that how do we alignment, right?
[00:04:11] Rupesh Rao: Internal alignment between different cross-functional teams that hey, this is what not metric, and then how do we drive that alignment using technology because our technology sometimes is, becomes a roadblock. We have so many silos of tools, so that's in the complexity we are seeing in the.
[00:04:27] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:04:28] Jason Whitehead: It's out there. I spent many years of my career doing CRM, enterprise-wide CRM implementations, and, most of them were multi-year efforts. And remember one client, I was there for a few years. And they were doing a 10-year program. That was everything from redefining all their stuff, moving their systems in, consolidating 72 call centers in the amount of effort it took to just manage that internal complexity and to get all the different teams that were, hundreds of people over, a 10-year period.
[00:04:56] Jason Whitehead: It, the struggle was real. It's, it can be real in there. And I think most folks who have never experienced something like that really can't even fathom just how many moving parts there are. And the stress. You need to keep it all together.
[00:05:08] Jason Noble: Absolutely. It's an area…
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