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Jon Johnson:

Welcome to CS and BS. Another wonderful

Kristi Faltorusso:

Kristi Faltorusso. I’m currently the chief customer officer at Client Success and have spent the past decade of my career building, scaling, and transforming customer success organizations and b to b hyper growth companies.

Jon Johnson:

Amazing. Mickey. What you got.

Mickey Powell:

I’m Mickey Powell. I’m the head of go to market at UpdateAI. I spent the last 10 years in customer success, Now, thankfully, building tools for customer success

Jon Johnson:

teams. I love it.

Kristi Faltorusso:

And I thank you for doing so.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah. And we got Josh Schacter who’s literally driving a EPICAR right now. So, you know, what exit are you looking at, Josh?

Josh Schachter:

I don’t know the exit. I’m on the Jersey Turnpike, which is coincidentally where make where sorry. Where Christy met her husband. And,

Mickey Powell:

This is true. This is true. We did

Kristi Faltorusso:

meet at the Jersey Shore. We fell in love in a hopeless place.

Jon Johnson:

Oh my god.

Kristi Faltorusso:

As the song suggests. Yep. Yep. That’s amazing. That did

Jon Johnson:

happen. And, we have Oh, go ahead.

Josh Schachter:

Yeah. Well, And I’m I’m gonna be in and out of this conversation. I’m more here for super supervisory type of role today.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Okay. So I’ll anticipate you’ll be more out than in. You’re good.

Jon Johnson:

More out than in. And and we have a wonderful guest today. I’d love to introduce, Stevie Case. If you wanna tell all of our wonderful listeners, who you are and and what you’re doing right now.

Stevie Case:

Epi Yeah. You got it. Thanks for having me. So, Stevie Case, I’m the chief revenue officer at Vanta. Vanta is a episode. Series b growth stage company in the security compliance space. And I’ve been here about 18 months, and I’ve got most Things go to market including customer success and account

Jon Johnson:

management. I love it. So Mickey’s question about SOC 2, we’re just gonna cover that. Right? We got an hour of compliance. Right? It’s gonna be a a nail biting episode.

Stevie Case:

Yeah. I’ve been good riveting. Yeah. I have I’ve learned this domain, so Happy to talk audits and all of the sexy things I know you’re really excited about.

Jon Johnson:

We are so excited. Awesome. Well, it’s it’s so wonderful to have you, Stevie. You know, we usually kinda start off with the BS, if you will. So, you know, we’re just kinda, you know, opening up the conversation around, eps this year for c r o role. Correct?

Stevie Case:

That’s correct.

Jon Johnson:

What’s, what’s the thing that surprised you the most?

Stevie Case:

Episode. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It I mean, what a learning experience, number 1. I think that one thing I’ve learned is that the CRO role means So many different things at different organizations. Everybody does it a little bit differently. It is not a standard role. There are a couple of archetypes that have emerged.

Stevie Case:

There’s sort of the VP sales plus CRO type role, And I think a lot of folks go out to hire that, somebody who’s very sales centric and has a revenue first mindset. Then there’s a little bit more of the multidisciplinary CRO role, and, you know, people call that different things whether that’s CRO 2.0 or Just, you know, owning more than just the revenue driving functions and just sales. And I started at Vanta with just sales and have expanded. Over time, I’ve had, customer success. I had for a bit growth marketing. I’ve got operations, And it is just, incredibly dynamic. I feel like I’m learning something new every other day. I I don’t think anybody comes into this role knowing exactly how to do it because, frankly, I think it’s different at every company, and you gotta think very first principles.

Jon Johnson:

And this is your 1st time overseeing CS. Correct?

Stevie Case:

It is. It is. I’ve had CS in smaller forms, but I not in forms that I would say would epi. So I’ve done a bunch of 0 to 1, startups and been prerevenue to, like, the first million at a couple of startups. So I’ve had CS, like, nascent CS teams, but this is certainly my 1st CS work at this scale.

Kristi Faltorusso:

So, Stevie, when did you take over customer success? Because it sounds like when you started, you just started overseeing the the sales team and then you kind of expanded that footprint. So when did when did customer success

Stevie Case:

roll up under you? I took that over about a year ago. So about a year into the journey at this point.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Okay. What was the biggest I’m gonna ask from from your standpoint then also from your team standpoint. Right? Because they didn’t have a revenue leader prior to you taking them over, And you weren’t overseeing them. So from your standpoint, what was the biggest, I think, learning experience, we’ll call it, taking over the customer success functions, from your

Stevie Case:

standpoint. Yeah. One of the biggest eye openers was realizing just how much we were asking our CSMs to do. You know, we had the classic like, we had built this CS team. We had early product market bit. I don’t think that we had really fully thought through the implications of onboarding customers in the product to the extent that we should have. We just sort of started hiring CSMs and and threw them at the problem. And at the time I took the team on, They were responsible for everything, really.

Stevie Case:

It was adoption and customer health and renewals and expansion, And every CSM had to be a little bit of everything. Everybody there’s also a unique nuance in our business, which is we’re in security compliance. Epsi. Many of our sort of bread and butter customers are founders who are going through the SOC 2 process for the first time. They’re having to engage an auditor who is not at Vanta, a third party auditor. There’s a lot of subject matter expertise. And in addition to all of that work we were asking our CSMs to do, we were also asking them to be subject matter experts on Audit and SOC 2 and HIPAA and GDPR and all these regulations. And it was just a massive undertaking.

Stevie Case:

And I think not being close to it, I had underestimated the context switching, the level of effort, and how hard that was, especially at the scale at which we were operating.

Jon Johnson:

So how did, I’m gonna ask a question, Christy. How did the perspective shift from prior to you taking on CS to where they’re at now. Like, were there, like, hard lefts that you made, or what did that kinda transition look like? And how happy part is the team now that, you know, a CRO understands Yeah. The code switching is very difficult.

Stevie Case:

Yeah. We have gone through a variety of shifts, s. And I would say, honestly, we’re we’re not quite done. There’s more to do. The the biggest of those was a change that we made to the structure of the team 2 months ago now. And at that point, what we did was really bifurcate the team. We now have a a CS team that is broken into a strategic org and scaled team, and then we created an account management function for the 1st time. And our account managers are now responsible for, renewal and expansion and driving that motion.

Stevie Case:

So really creating 2 different arms of the team that work together in tandem and then putting more structure around the way they each operate is where we are now. We’ve added to that a third arm, And I think this is one thing that I hope, as a CRO, I’ve been able to bring to the table is really creating a lot of that subject matter expertise and an SE organization That our CS team can leverage. So we’ve got this great team that is a combination of, sales engineers, solution engineers, but also Subject matter experts in governance, risk, and compliance, which is sort of the domain expertise within which we work. And those folks are full spectrum. So they work with presales, and they also work with all of our post sales teams because we wanna be able to leverage that in the customer relationship.

Josh Schachter:

Maybe I actually wanna ask you a question here. This is Josh. So I’ve experienced that firsthand. We’re we are UpdateAI is a happy Fanta customer, And we’re actually going through our SOC compliance SOC compliance right now. You know, we’re looking forward to having all that done very, very soon. One of the interesting things about like, your CS team is very engaged for us. They have been from the beginning, which is really impressive. And epsi.

Josh Schachter:

A unique thing is that they’ve brought together I think Stephanie is our our CSM. I forget her last name. But she’s brought together all, like, the internal subject experts from your organization. She’s also brought together the SEs from your third party partners, from all your auditors. Episode. We even have a Slack channel that is a combination. Half the splits, a third, a third, a third. A third of the people are from Buffet AI, a 3rd from Vanta and a 3rd from our auditors.

Josh Schachter:

And they’ve kind of, like they they’ve spearheaded that relationship too. App. So I guess my question is, is there any type of playbook or specific type of guidance that you give on how a CSM Em can orchestrate across multiple parties because you guys have a very high engagement model when it comes to that.

Stevie Case:

Epi I I that’s so great to hear, and thank you for being a customer. I am thrilled you’ve had that experience. I think that, You know, one of the things that I learned along the way this past year is I think the CRO mindset would typically be Drive lots of revenue control costs. Right? And there was an initial inclination to really reject this idea of ebb. Bringing subject matter expertise because I think coming into this process, a lot of the thinking across the business was, yeah, our customers want subject matter expertise. They wanna know about audit, but our job is to push them to other people to learn those things. And we’re about the software, not about that level of service, and I have completely, reverse course on that. My opinion has done a 1 80, and I think, really, a lot of the value we can bring to our customers is that So we’re really leaning into it.

Stevie Case:

And a big part of our evolution from here is going to be about defining those higher levels of service. And what does that look like? Like, we provide that for free to everybody today. And, you know, we’ve got 6,000 customers, and we’re leaning in heavily with lots of app. And support. So we do think there is a big element of partner network. The auditors are 1 piece. We also work with managed service providers. We’re getting them to lean in with us.

Stevie Case:

But we think we can build a a much higher level of service in house as well that our customers were will really value and appreciate. And that’s been a big shift for us. It’s we wanna be that subject matter expert for our customers.

Josh Schachter:

Love that. So get in now get in now, folks, because, You’ve been giving us a lot of professional services. Yeah. I think it’s Matt who’s who’s he’s he’s he’s commented. We we’ve through Google Docs with him back and forth and leaving comments and helping us totally understand the ins and outs of compliance because I knew nothing going into our SOC 2. Ep And it’s it’s really been very yeah. Oh, I mean, it’s a huge segment. Right? Is is is founders, this is their 1st time going through it.

Josh Schachter:

You guys have been very, very hand holding for us, which I appreciate. But I can imagine, like, that is challenging to scale. Right? That is a it is a pretty intense cost structure episode too. Something probably you wanna convert to professional services to some extent.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah.

Stevie Case:

Yeah. I agree. And I think there’s also ep A a role for AI here. I know that’s the the buzzword of the hour, but I am very bullish On our ability to leverage AI for some of this stuff, one example of that is, I’m and I’ve I’m a big fan of launching things out of rev ops. So I’m trying to treat my rev ops team like an innovation team. We’ve actually just launched an AI powered bot. Epi Right now, our our folks in prospects and trial have access. Soon, all our customers will have access.

Stevie Case:

And our goal was to democratize access to that level of and expertise that you experience from humans. We believe we can make that available in real time to all of our customers in an AI powered experience. So we launched the spot, and there are all these nuanced questions people have. It’s not just about Manta Software. It’s like, epi What’s in scope for SOC 2? How do I think about scoping things in and out? What really matters? What are best practices? Details of system integrations. Epi And we actually took all of the intelligence from our SMEs and those folks you’ve been interacting with, and we, use that as the dataset episode. Power the bot. And we’re finding that the bot’s answers are just as good as our human expert answers.

Stevie Case:

So, You know, not only is that a great way to control costs, but we actually find it’s a better customer experience because everybody has access to it, and you have access to it in real time 247. So we’re trying to find ways like that, not to remove humans from the process, but to continue to up level humans so they don’t have to give the same answers over and over. This was a big complaint of our CSMs over time. They’re like, look, I’m answering the same questions over and over on a 1 to 1 phone call every day. And that’s not great for anybody. It doesn’t scale. And, honestly, it’s not great quality of life or very rewarding for the CSM as well. So we wanna get them out of that and put them to better use on higher order

Jon Johnson:

stuff. Yep. One of the things that I’m seeing and, Christy, I’d love your perspective on this too. Eps. This this seems to be a regular or or pretty normal shift right now where, folks are realizing, you know what? Your CSMs probably don’t need to be a an SME right now on, the customer’s business. Just because it’s so complex. Right? There’s obviously opportunities where there are CSMs that are expected to be as, you know, subject matter experts. But I’m seeing this maturity curve pretty often, within the enterprise and the kind of the global experience where their job truly is platform based,

Josh Schachter:

you

Jon Johnson:

know, coaching and strategy and and things like that, which may seem obvious. But up until 2 years ago, CSMs were doing everything. I mean, literally, we’re just kind of the dumpster of what needs to be done. Epsi. Was that, something that you came to natively on your own when you took it on from the feedback, or was this something that, you kinda saw in the industry and took some leadership from, outside of the company, or what kind of brought you to this perspective outside of, you you know, hearing from your CSMs.

Stevie Case:

It’s really been, Nate. It’s been in house, and, you know, our our CSMs have done a fantastic job, really. Like, holding it up and doing all that stuff will really advocating for pushing us to a better place. I think that the message that I got loud and clear from the ep team was, it it’s not realistic, everything you have asked us to do. So we’ve gotta find ways ep To make this more sustainable and more realistic and achievable and set us up so we can have these really high value interactions with the customer. Because every time I would push them for more high value interaction, the feedback was, yeah, but I’ve got this, like, laundry list of a 1,000 things that I have to do episode. So which of those should I not do? So it really has evolved quite natively inside of our business, and, you know, we’re really lucky in a way You know, we’re the market leader. Our CEO came up with the concept that is automated compliance.

Stevie Case:

She was the 1st to market. Epi she built the the concept from scratch. We now have 40 copycat competitors, and that has also really forced us to get disciplined about the way we operate. I think if this was a different market and we didn’t have a bunch of copycat competitors coming just with cost cutting offers And aggressively coming after our customer base, and we were you know, we’re not in a growth at all cost market anymore. Like, all of these things Alright. It’s interesting. You know, so I’m I’m in a I’m in a

Jon Johnson:

Alright.

Josh Schachter:

It’s interesting. You know, so I’m I’m in a I’m in a founders group here. WhatsApp founders group in New York City is about 300 of us founders. And probably of all software compliance, SOC 2 compliance is the number one that comes up when people ask me for referrals. And I remember being at the 1st and only SaaS driver I went to 2 years ago and seeing more SOC 2 companies than any other category. And at that point, I didn’t even know what SOC 2 was. I’m like, what is this? You know? But, like so it it sounds as though you guys are obviously a big part of creating this entire category.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah. That’s exactly

Josh Schachter:

right. Yeah. And, like but but from a from the perspective of of episode. Being on the sales side, now the CS side, what is that like, I don’t know. Do you want any insight into what that’s looked like from from that vantage point of being a a market Category creator?

Stevie Case:

Absolutely. Yeah. It, you know, it is wonderful and also creates its own challenges. So our CEO, Christina Cacioppo, She felt this pain. She was a product manager, at Dropbox, actually, and she was trying to launch Dropbox Paper as a product. And she actually was in the same position you’re describing, which is she had no idea what SOC 2 was. She hit this roadblock trying to launch her product, and legal came to her and said, hey. Have you thought about security and compliance? Like, have you gotten your SOC 2 done? She’s, like, googling SOC 2 on the side.

Stevie Case:

Like, what is this? And it blocked her ability to take the product to market, and so she felt that pain firsthand. So when she went out to found the company, she wanted to solve that. And what she did first was literally, like, read the SOC two standard and create a spreadsheet to help founders understand what does it even mean. And she started shopping that around and saying, like, does this have value? And they’re like, oh my gosh. Other founders were like, we’ll pay you for the spreadsheet, like, anything. And she realized there was something there. So she built a category and launched the product and the company, and it was the only solution for this in the market that does what we do. So for the 1st couple of years, it was just Vanta.

Stevie Case:

And that’s part of why we started with this, like, everything to everybody approach both in sales and CS because I think everybody was shocked by the demand. The product market fit was just off the charts. And so it was really just about how can we serve this immense demand in the market, and it didn’t leave room or the of a lot of discipline in that. So the company was built just rocket ship. And so when I joined about 18 months ago, ep We had not only had some competitors enter the market, but we had a couple of very aggressive competitors coming directly after us. Basically, coming to market and saying, we’re here epi as the replacement for Vanta and directly coming after our customers, trying to, churn them, and, like, really came with a, like, We’re just like Vanta, but cheaper as the message. And, it’s been really interesting to see now with 40 plus of those companies on the market. Everybody’s a little bit different flavor.

Stevie Case:

And I think, honestly, in a way, it just forced us to up our game. We had to suddenly get much, much better epi at how we sell, about how we talk about customer value, about how we onboard customers. One of the first things we did in that journey from, epi 18 months ago to now to when I first took on customer success, we launched an implementation team for the first time to really focus on getting customers successful at the very beginning of their journey, getting the that time to value down and getting that first kind of magic moment of using Vanta to happen earlier. So it’s made us better, but it has changed everything. And we are still the market leader by far. We’re more than 2 x Bigger than anybody else in the market. They try to look bigger, but they’re actually not. Got more than 6,000 customers.

Stevie Case:

But that also comes with its own unique challenges. You know? We’re trying to sell We’re trying to serve a customer base that’s more than 2 x bigger than our competitors. And in some cases, they’ve got similar sized teams, epi So they’re able to do things with less discipline, but still have great coverage, whereas we’re trying to really be thoughtful and efficient We’re trying to build a generational company. It’s a different approach than if you’re just attempting to look big.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Do you guys have technical support, implementation, onboarding, professional service? Do you have all those? And did those sit under you as well?

Stevie Case:

Episode. We do not have all of those today. So we don’t have professional services yet. I suspect before the end of the year, we will introduce professional services in some form. Think it makes a lot of sense with our business. We do have a technical support team that has very recently evolved to be more holistic support. We’re expecting them to really become, you know, the front door for all things inbound at Vanta. So now their mandate is technical support, epi product support and expert support.

Stevie Case:

So if anyone writes in understand. Questions about any of those things, support is becoming that front door to answer those including questions about audit, some of those subject matter expert questions that come in. That team lives in our engineering group today. Epi So support lives under engineering, and then CS lives with me. So, you know, we’re really seeking to be thoughtful in how we tie these groups together. But even though support does not live in my org, we all work very closely together.

Kristi Faltorusso:

So How did that evolve? Right? Because I’m I’m sure at some point in its infancy, it it was groomed from folks that had more technical expertise and experience, But you are also covering expert support. So you talked about subject matter expertise and having, like, kinda, like, this professional network internally of all these folks that that know this space. Does that team then support the support team? Are you hiring subject matter experts in support? Like, what’s the evolution there?

Stevie Case:

Yeah. It does, actually. So our internal subject matter expert Team also supports support. So we really are, you know, in this in this transition that we have recently made to break CS out from app. Account management. At that same time, that’s when we expanded the scope of support, to say you’re gonna be the front door for all things at Vanta. And a lot of the way that we’re designing the organization now has to do with how do we deliver the highest quality customer experience possible. And one of the things we learned in support was that when they were just a technical support support org, their metrics were great, but they had to hand off a lot of tickets And they had to bring in lots of folks.

Stevie Case:

So they had to go to the subject matter expertise team, and they would pass tickets to them or they would pass tickets back to CS who would pass it to to this team. That was not it was not a great experience internally for anybody involved, but it definitely wasn’t for a customer as well. So, like, really having episode. The sub the, support team become the expert so they can resolve tickets on First Touch as often as humanly possible has been the mission. And we’ve created some great, ways for them to escalate tickets internally that are much more efficient. So, again, we’re exploring AI here. We’re also like, we’ve got them piped into different Slack channels with all our SMEs so they can get real time answers. So we’re trying to empower every group to have full ownership end to end of what they own.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Alright. So my next question then would be

Jon Johnson:

This is great.

Kristi Faltorusso:

For the CSMs that you transitioned over to account managers, did they already have some commercial before, or did you have to go through, like, intensive training with them? Because I find that that is the biggest I don’t wanna say, like, gap. But So many times customer success is tasked with owning revenue, but they’ve never been trained or enabled. They don’t have experience in doing that. So given what your model looked like before, Moving some of those folks into account management, how did you ensure that they were set up to succeed in this new

Stevie Case:

infrastructure? Yeah. I mean, part of that was absolutely Selecting the CSMs that either had experience with a more commercial relationship managing the commercials or folks who had indicated an interest in that as a career path. So we tried to select the people that were gonna be, most likely to succeed and enjoy the role. We also had laid a lot of base for the company over the last 18 months for what it looks like to manage commercial relationships at Vanta. So we implemented a value based selling framework. You know, we really had defined it, and we now have great training. That wasn’t true 18 months ago. So, yes, we’ve essentially taken them through, epi all of the similar training that we have with salespeople in the past.

Stevie Case:

So they are coming to that baseline of what it means to sell at Vanta, And they’ve taken the same trainings and learned the same value based framework. There’s some extra nuance there. And, you know, we did to help kinda blend the DNA, This AM team became a combination of CSMs that came over a few new hires, and then we did actually transition some salespeople over as well. So it’s been a great combo, and we’re really finding like, we’ve got 2 leaders on that team. 1 is a sales leader, and 1 is a former CSM leader. So we’re really trying to blend the DNA and get them to, you know, cross pollinate the those different approaches.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Okay. Now you mentioned earlier sorry. I I could do this all day, Stevie. So you you you’ve opened Pandora’s Box with a lot of very interesting episode. Unusual ways of doing things that seem to be working for you all. This is just super interesting to hear how you structured this because I think so many organizations are trying to rethink How they’re managing a a post sales organization, and I think it’s always really interesting when you hear somebody who’s doing something completely different. Right? Like and I think your approach here is unlike What you commonly hear for customer success orgs or just post sales teams?

Stevie Case:

Yeah. We’re really trying to approach it from first principles, And, you know, we we don’t wanna reinvent the wheel. There’s clearly there are models out there that work, but we have tried to create something that is unique And uniquely suited to this moment in our business as well.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Yeah. That makes sense.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah. So one of the things and my goal is from for Mickey not to speak this entire episode.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I mean, we are crushing it, by the way, John.

Jon Johnson:

We’re crushing. My KPIs are maxed right now. Ebb. What does alright. So we talked about kind of the the format of of the way that you’re running CS both historically and then where you’re looking at in the future. Right? What does growth look like for CSMs? Like, what is what is the career path, and what does you know, maturity look like for you when you’re looking at okay, man. We’ve got these people, and they did a. Now they need to do b, but you also are talking about scale.

Jon Johnson:

I’d love to kinda hear your thoughts around how people find growth in in environment and an industry that actually is is going to continue to change. We used to be able to have a target, and in 3 years, I’m gonna be here, and it’s gonna be the same, and you move 1 block to the next block. That doesn’t exist anymore. Right? So talk to me about how you as a leader view the importance of growth and what growth means for individual contributors wanting to increase their impact and increase their income.

Stevie Case:

Epi I love this question. And I think, honestly, this is such a a cool moment on that front in that epi The options are kind of unlimited for growth. What can be, I think, a little scary about it is I think it’d be easy as an Especially in orgs as dynamic as ours to look around and say, gosh. I’m not even sure where, like, this is all going and, like, what does the role even look like 20 direction where Expertise on the product, expertise talking to customers is excessively valuable. So I think there are several paths from here as as a CSM for advancement. One is obviously to move up markets, have richer conversations, and have more strategic conversations. Episode. So one thing we’re doing right now is we’re historically, our bread and butter kind of business was in SMB.

Stevie Case:

We’ve moved heavily into the mid market, So we’re already having more strategic conversations. We’re also, we’ve launched an enterprise team. So there’s this opportunity to just get better and better and have higher quality conversations and deeper engagements as you move up the segment. So that’s 1 path. Epi. I think the 2nd path is to really become an expert on the transformation happening in the industry.

Jon Johnson:

Epi

Stevie Case:

You know, an example I see in our business is that we did not even have a CS platform in place. We have we had very little infrastructure around anything. We recently bought Catalyst, we are implementing Catalyst. And one of the things we knew going in, but now it’s just like episode. Apparent is you can’t just have part time owners or partial owners of implementing that brain inside your platform. Somebody’s gotta have the vision for how we get the customer experience as it is today ebb. Really fully and meaningfully reflected in the technology you’re using to drive decision making. You gotta have a point of view on the data.

Stevie Case:

You gotta have a point of view on the customer experience. You gotta understand the workflows, and I’m about to put somebody on that full time. Yep. At least 1 person, probably multiple. And I think there’s a real opportunity there. I have found it extremely hard to find people with that expertise. So I think there’s a path there for ICs to say, hey, I’m gonna be the person that’s gonna define what the customer journey looks like in a world where we can leverage AI and we’ve got these CS platforms we’ve got new technology. And then I think there are other there are many other paths.

Stevie Case:

I think in a world where support becomes the front door, to the organization. There are opportunities there. There are opportunities to move to a slightly more commercial centric role like an AM role. Epi there are even opportunities here as you move towards that digital kind of brain creation path to move towards, like, self-service growth and product. You know, we’re looking at the marriage of self-service and success and, like, that partnership and nailing that is gonna be key to our success over the coming several years. So there are a lot of paths. I think people need to get really creative and challenge themselves to learn. And if you’re willing to do that, The opportunities are unlimited.

Josh Schachter:

I love that.

Jon Johnson:

I know Christie’s gonna have opinions about owning platform implementation.

Stevie Case:

Please. I wanna hear

Jon Johnson:

The CCO of a platform.

Stevie Case:

Yes. Time. Okay.

Mickey Powell:

I’m No. Not not to

Jon Johnson:

put you

Kristi Faltorusso:

on this spot.

Mickey Powell:

No. No. I’m gonna be nice. I’m gonna be nice.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I’m gonna be nice. Epi I’m always I I what I always say to everybody is, like, listen. My most successful customers are the ones that come in with a very clear strategy and understand what they’re looking to get out of it. They’re the folks that have already tested and tried out their their processes and their programs, and they’re looking for technology to scale it. Where customers fail often is where they are Implementing this and designing things at the

Mickey Powell:

same

Kristi Faltorusso:

time, it just doesn’t work. You end up doing things piecemeal and you never get the real value from the solution. You’re gonna run into challenges like what you’re describing. These software should not require a full time or multiple full time people. If you kinda go into the onboarding and you take that seriously and make the investment upfront, You should be able to get it up and running in a meaningful way with your full strategy reflected with with, because there’s a caveat here, With someone or someones who will be part of the evolution of that. Because your point earlier, right, change is the only constant. You’re gonna be evolving things, but epi To have I I always, like, question. I’m like, what are we doing if we’re just staffing full time people on technology? That seems seems a little it seems a little batty.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Now when I think about customer success ops, I think that there’s a full scope of work that that individual and that that entire function should be doing where technology is, like, a tenth of it. Right. Like, it is not it’s not even 50%. So I would say, like, that’s what I see the most. And and like I said, customers that come in very clear on the what and flexible on the how, they’re the ones that Make more of an investment. I would say before you do that, maybe just pump the brakes a little bit and reflect in kinda where you’re at, how you got there, and where you want to go because they think throwing just bodies at Technology isn’t isn’t necessarily

Stevie Case:

the answer. Yeah. No. I don’t disagree with you there. I think there’s very much something of value in that, and I think that epi. That we are defining and redefining in real time, and, you know, there’s a lot of infrastructure to build that we’re building in epi. So, it is a reality of where we’re at as a business, and I think part of the challenge we’ve got today is that eppi. Iteration and refining on that journey is happening so quickly that having that be a bunch of people’s part time jobs ep.

Stevie Case:

Just is not delivering the result. So that point of view, like, I think that’s the piece that I really value in a lot of folks on the team, and what we’re seeing on folks who are stepping up is, like, that strong point of view on what is the the At the core of that customer journey, especially as it evolves and we ship new products, and we become a multi product company from a 1 product We double the size of the team. So piece of change is one of those things that’s really driven us to resource things the way that we have.

Jon Johnson:

It’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Stevie. This this has been, like, truly, truly wonderful. I’m gonna cut you off, Christy,

Mickey Powell:

because Yeah.

Stevie Case:

I know.

Kristi Faltorusso:

You’re just like Josh.

Jon Johnson:

And that’s all the questions we have today, Miki. I’m so sorry that you didn’t get in there as he leans towards the microphone. We can edit that out. Shh. Yeah. Stevie, this has been this has been so wonderful. I I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you’re busy.

Jon Johnson:

Eps again, I’m gonna go back and listen to this episode too because I feel like there’s some notes that I need, I need to kinda jot down. But I really appreciate, the perspective that you take on maturing your CS organization, and it seems like something that you have taken on very recently and have made significant changes since you brought on. So I love when, an individual gets to kinda place a stamp on major changes within an organization, and I think that’s something that you should and I hope that you’re proud of. And, I’m looking forward to checking in with you, you know, in a couple months to see how things are going as well with Catalyst.

Kristi Faltorusso:

We will have Mickey do the check-in. We’ll have Mickey do the check-in. Yeah.

Stevie Case:

There you go.

Jon Johnson:

There you go. Totally.

Stevie Case:

I look forward

Jon Johnson:

to it. Yeah. Awesome. Well, like I said, you’re you’re you’re welcome to to kinda hang out with us for for a couple more minutes. One of the last segments that we kinda wanted to talk about, if if you’ve been online on the Internet and LinkedIn, you know the client success. Recently last week had their big, impactful CS 100 event in Utah. Christy, was, you know, obviously out there. Ep.

Jon Johnson:

And I really just kinda wanted to take a few, maybe 5 or 6 minutes just to kinda hear first, you know, your first experience. What was it like? How you know, what was a big key takeaway? The reviews online were stupendous as always. But just kinda wanted to give you a little platform to talk about, what came out of that.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Well, I appreciate you. Yeah. So CS 100 is our annual summit that we that we lead every year. It’s 4 leaders. And so I’m always very saddened when I see the community being like, I’m coming next year, only for me to be like, oh, that’s gonna be a little tricky. If you’re leading a team, yay. If you’re not, because this really is designed and intended to be a leadership event. And we do keep it at a100.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Right? There’s a reason why it’s called CS 100. It is Intended to be and designed to be an intimate and immersive experience. This year, a little bit different than last year, and then even previous years. So Dave and I, when we when we were redesigning the event for this year, we obviously took last year’s feedback into consideration. And a few piece of feedback that we heard is, 1, folks wanted more opportunity to network in small groups And really ideate on things and problem solve together. So one of the things that we hadn’t done before that we did this year is that we did these small, breakout groups, on day 1 in the afternoon right before the activities, and we gave folks, like, here’s 3 different problems or challenges or opportunities, however you wanna phrase it, that CS leaders are tasked to solve. And in your small groups, like, here’s 30 minutes, ideate on it and kinda present your ideas. And so we did things like comp plans, which that one was interesting.

Kristi Faltorusso:

We did board decks and and kinda navigating that conversation, And we did redesigning health scores. Right? Like, how do you think about customer health? And what I loved about that session of the event is every single group Presented very different ideas. Like comp plans, there were no comp plans that looked the same. I mean, 1 folks were like, nope. We have no variable or bonus component, and here’s why Other folks, like, heavily loaded on the variable and and built in all of these different elements to it that changed every quarter, and it was, like, super complex, but They they really loved it. And so I just thought that was really great, a new element of that. We also focused our content on leadership development, not just customer episode. So if you’re a CS leader joining us, you know, we know that a lot of organizations aren’t making heavy investments in professional development right now.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Right? It’s probably cut with HR budgets and all these other things. So we wanted this to be more than just a customer success event. We wanted it to be a customer success and leadership event. And so our opening keynote, we found somebody who, is referred to as the job doctor Tessa White. And she actually talked about, like, you know, building your career and the career of those that report to you and how do you manage, these new generations, like, how do you manage Gen x? Right? If you’re a boomer, if you’re a millennial, like, how do you speak the same language? And I’m like, tell me more. So really interesting content from that perspective. Listen. We couldn’t have asked for better weather, so let’s just talk about it.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Right? We we planned this intentionally to be in one of the most majestic places, I think, in our country. I swear. Sundance in Utah, which you’re just at the you’re in the mountains. We had Beautiful weather, like, low seventies. The foliage is all changing. I mean, it looked like a Bob Ross photo. We’ve never had better weather, and so for folks to be able to go and zipline and Climb mountains and, do pottery and make journals. Like, it was like it’s a customer success camp for adults.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Like, that’s that’s really what this is. So it was 3 days of, I think, just a lot of fun, a lot of learning, a lot of laughter, real relationship building. And I think, you know, every year, I’m I’m more impressed with what Dave I magically pull off in the amount of time that we actually spend planning this, and how it comes together. But the feedback has just been tremendous, and I am super excited for next year, honestly.

Jon Johnson:

It’s awesome. Well, we’re gonna have to get Stevie out there next year Would love to. For the ropes

Kristi Faltorusso:

course specifically. Yeah. The ropes course. Ziplining is amazing, but mountain biking, all the things that I don’t do while everyone else is doing activities, I go to my room and nap. I’m like a 3 hour window. Don’t mind if I do, so I don’t take advantage of the the picturesque mountains, but, the photos are, you know, amazing. So yes. Stevie, next year, put it in your budget.

Kristi Faltorusso:

CS 100. It’s every September we do it, and it’s just it’s amazing opportunity to just connect with other leaders, ideate solve problems. Listen. We did we did panels. We did presentations, the breakout sessions. So it was just really, I think, fantastic all around.

Stevie Case:

Count me in. It sounds amazing.

Jon Johnson:

Yay. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. We’re gonna we’ll we’ll link to, Stevie’s LinkedIn in the the show notes, if you’d like to connect with her and continue to learn how they’re changing, SOC 2 compliance, and and staying ahead of all of gosh. So many competitors. But that shows obviously that there’s a need. Everybody’s gotta go through it. Right? So, I’m really looking forward to seeing, how your, you know, product line changes.

Jon Johnson:

Epsi. And thank you so much, for for Mickey for being here. I really appreciate, all of the input. And this is actually He’s not even laughing

Kristi Faltorusso:

at the noise. Did

Jon Johnson:

you mute him? He’s

Kristi Faltorusso:

not. Even his laugh is silent. It’s so sad.

Jon Johnson:

I know. Episode. This was a very heavily CS episode and very light BS episode, which which is a nice, refresher. Yeah. Micky, is there anything that you wanna say before we sign off?

Stevie Case:

You know

Jon Johnson:

Well, unfortunately, that’s all the time we have, ep epsi. Yeah. I love you guys.