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Episode #126 Enabling Excellence by Transforming CSM Roles ft. Christine Boermeester (Deltek)

#updateai #customersuccess #saas #business

Christine Boremeester, Senior Director of Strategy & Enablement at Deltek, joins Kristi Faltorusso, CCO at ClientSuccess, and Josh Schachter, Co-Founder & CEO of UpdateAI, to share invaluable insights into how Deltek continues to innovate and serve its global customer base.


Tune in to explore Deltek’s ambitious initiatives, including the creation of specialized customer success roles and the challenges of standardizing processes across a diverse range of products and customers.


Christine also highlights her team’s excitement and anticipation as they prepare to launch these transformative changes, aimed at elevating customer relationships and driving business growth.


Timestamps
0:00 – Preview & Intros
3:00 – Christine’s Career Evolution
4:15 – Formation of the Strategy and Enablement Group
11:00 – Team Structure & Implementation
12: 19 – Hiring Plans & Profiles
13:40 – Expectations from CSMs
17:40 – Diverse challenges due to multiple products and systems
20:51 – Team Sentiment and Engagement

 

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👉 Follow the podcast
Youtube: https://youtu.be/JprAz-o-dWk
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3dfWXmD
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3KD3Ehl 

 

👉 Connect with guest

Christine Boermeester: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-boermeester-9315472/

 

 

👉 Connect with hosts
Jon Johnson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonwilliamjohnson/
Kristi Faltorusso: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiserrano/
Josh Schachter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/

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Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI

About UpdateAI
At UpdateAI our mission is to empower CS teams to build great customer relationships. We work with early & growth-stage B2B SaaS companies to help them scale CS outcomes. Everything we do is devoted to removing the overwhelm of back-to-back customer meetings so that CSMs can focus on the bigger picture: building relationships.

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Josh Schachter:
Welcome to Unchurned, a show about the leaders and innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, bormeester.

Christine Boremeester:
Stories you can use to improve your own career.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Bormeester. Okay. I’m glad.

Josh Schachter:
Josh Schechter.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Echter here with Christi Falterusso. John is pretending to be under the weather, and we’re very excited to have our guest today. She is the senior director of strategy and enablement at Deltek, Christine Boermeester. Oh, jeez. I fumbled a little bit. Did I get it right, your last name?

Christine Boremeester:
Yes. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Perfect. So welcome. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you.

Christine Boremeester:
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve you just started working with with with Deltek, just like 6 months ago, right?

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. 6 months and 20 plus years. I think

John:
it’s 2021 years. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Oh, Christy, you’re still you’re killing my eardrums. You’re killing me today. Goodness.

John:
You know

Kristi Faltorusso:
what? Your voice is usually so so melodical, if that’s a word. But, in any case, I’m just bantering with you.

John:
I’m gonna just sit further back and pray

Kristi Faltorusso:
that it’s better. Yeah. Yeah. Christine, so, yeah. So 22 years you’ve been there, which is amazing, and I mean that genuinely, especially in the world we’re in today and and SaaS and everything. You guys have been in business for over 40 years. So, you know, an up and coming startup, if you will. Tell us a little bit about the company, about what you guys do just to kick things off.

Christine Boremeester:
Sure. Most people, unless they’re in our industry, you know, we’re we’re a best kept secret. So for those of you that are not familiar, your Deltek is a leading provider of enterprise software information solutions, specifically for project based businesses, like architects, engineers, marketing agencies, government contractors. Yeah. As you said, over 40 years, you know, helping our customers optimize their businesses.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You you have over 4,000 employees, people that work with you. Okay. You have over 30,000 customers. You have 99% of the top 500, like, that with firms that are architectural or engineering, government contractors, marketing agencies, they’re all working with you. So like you said, it’s it’s one of the you know, if you don’t know, now you know. You guys really are having your way with the industry. So, I mean, very quickly, like, how has your role changed in 22 years?

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. You know, that’s part of why I’ve stayed at Deltek as long as I have. You know, started as a customer care support analyst. And after quite a lot of time in support, including on the operations side, you know, eventually moved over to customer success. And I’ve now been on that side of the house, still under the customer umbrella, but for about 10 years now. And even in customer success, you know, I get to keep growing my career and evolving, which is really exciting to me. So gone from individual contributor, working on customer engagement and onboarding to leading my own team and growing that team and the number of products, over the years and global reach. And now over these last few months pivoted into starting up a new function on our customer success team to have strategy and enablement.

Christine Boremeester:
So that Yeah. That’s the newest for me.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s great. That’s great. So, yeah, we had spoken in in in September. It’s now mid January. And when we we, or we spoke a little later, but I think you you you changed your role in September. Right? Yes. And and it had just been not too long ago. So now it’s been a little bit more time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Tell us a little bit about maybe, you know, what what precipitated the creation of this role and the group that’s gonna go within it, and then, you know, we tell a little bit how things are going.

Christine Boremeester:
Sure. So part of it was 2024 was a big leadership change on the customer success side for Deltek with new chief customer officer, new head of customer success, and all of that leadership change was a good opportunity to take a look at our business and say, hey. We’re doing really well. What kind of business do we wanna be? How are we gonna modernize and and grow? And one of the things we looked at was, you know, we have over 250 people in our customer success organization, but we are onboarding them 1 by 1. Each person each manager is training them and we didn’t have ongoing enablement and upskilling and and development of people skills. So we weren’t necessarily providing a customer a consistent customer experience over that time as well because everyone’s doing things a little bit differently. So looking at that, we said, okay, this this is the time, you know, to build out this new team, to take the best of all the learnings across our group and across the industry and then really roll this out foundationally and and be able to grow our team and, have an umbrella as well for our strategic initiatives. So that was also something, you know, sort of group by group, manager by manager.

Christine Boremeester:
And now to say, we spend all this time goal setting, working on what we want our strategy to be, and then let’s carry that through everything that we do from our customer success kickoff at the beginning of the year through our all hands and our communications and, the trainings that we’re doing so that we really can make a difference, you know, achieve our goals and and continue to grow our organization to be the best that we can be and serve our customers as well as we can be.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. I I wanna hear more about, like, how it’s going building out this, you know, strategy enablement group because, there’s probably a lot of people out there that are maybe smaller companies or at a stage where they’re thinking about these things or they’re or they did build it out, but, you know, it’s been spaghetti. It’s been a little messy. So I’d love to hear, like, the good, the bad, the ugly, and and kinda where you guys are through the, like, the the inception of this right now. But I also wanna give my cohost an opportunity to ask some of

John:
her questions. Very gig loaded meaty questions, Josh. So I’m gonna give Christine a chance to answer that. And then I’ve got my No. No. No. No. No.

John:
You go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And also also her

John:
answer is gonna be a good lead in to other questions that I might have. I’m gonna have more clarifying questions. Since you’ve never done customer success, Josh. I’ll get into the nitty gritty.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. But but before she answers that question, for those that are listening and not watching, you just pulled out, like, the biggest cup of coffee I’ve ever seen. Was it a 711, like, a big gulp of coffee? How many ounces is that cup of coffee, Christy?

John:
You know, you’re I think that, objects appear larger in in on the camera. I think the camera adds 10 ounces to this cup. It’s only 20 something ounces, I think.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. I mean, it does say extra large on the bottom of the side. It does say

John:
extra large. Yeah. And I can’t afford fancy coffee, so I just get 7:11.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, I know.

John:
So Yeah. I don’t have time

Kristi Faltorusso:
for life.

John:
No. Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks is too inconvenient, in the morning because I don’t wanna go more than, like, a quarter mile from my house.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s too bougie too. Like, you’re Why

John:
don’t you lines? Like, I don’t wanna wait on a line. So there’s no lines at 7:11 at 6 AM when I order my coffee. So Yeah. And this is still the same cup from 6 AM. So you can imagine how warm and delicious it is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, 711 is the PLG of coffee. Okay.

John:
That is true.

Kristi Faltorusso:
For anybody who gets that. Christine, tell us about the the, how it’s going, in the earliest days, like, where things are are where should how do I break that down? What were you like, what’s the gaps and, like, what’s the delta between what you were expecting going into this and kind of how things are going so far?

Christine Boremeester:
Sure. You know, I think if anything, it’s been a fast start. I I think in an ideal world, we would have had maybe more time to, okay, what kind of tool do we wanna use? What’s the, you know, makeup of the team gonna look like? Build out a list of trainings and, you know, evaluate what we already have. And instead, we started getting really excited and looking ahead to our customer success kickoff, in January and saying, we wanna announce this to the team in January. So, you know, how much can we get done between, now and, you know, September and January so that we are off to this really fast start. We can get everyone excited about it. As we’re announcing this, you know, huge business transformation to our team to say, don’t worry. We’ve got you.

Christine Boremeester:
We’re gonna have enablement. We’ve got tools, you know, to give them that security. So it’s it’s been, like I said, very accelerated, and a little bit of building the plane as as we’re flying it. So looking at, okay, how what kind of organization do we wanna be? What is the ideal customer success manager? What are we doing well today? And at the same time, we’re rolling out specializing the customer success manager roles. So carving off the renewals piece from what our CSMs were doing previously so that they had more time to focus on the customer relationship and growing value and adoption with our customers. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
so are you have you guys rolled out the enablement yet? Are you it’s I mean, it’s only been 4 months. So have you just been spending the 4 months, like, really kind of planning and getting ready for the big showcase in 2025?

Christine Boremeester:
Which is tomorrow. So Which is tomorrow.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Amazing. January 14th.

John:
She showed up for the recording when that’s tomorrow.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh my god. Would you want us to end now? We can we can stop the recording and let you get back.

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. So I have to come back and let you know how it goes. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Uh-oh. I’m sure it’ll go amazing. Okay. So so tomorrow, this whole thing takes off?

Christine Boremeester:
Yes. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. I may I so many follow-up questions, but, Christy, over to you.

John:
Okay. So I I’m curious. So, you know, I built out something similar in other organizations where I was spearheading practice development and enablement for customer success. And so I mean, it’s not the exact same title, but it feels similar in kind of what the intention is in the design. So first, I’m curious, how is your team built out? Is it built off of CSMs who excel in their roles and these were people that you want to emulate and so we want to bring them into the fold? Do you hire external people? Like tell me about the makeup of the team that you’ve kind of assembled.

Christine Boremeester:
Sure. So right now, we’re looking at 3 pillars underneath me or 3 functions. 1 would be the enablement, which will be the largest group. And we have a senior manager on our team who was running our customer engagement, onboarding and upgrading teams. And now she’s gonna move over under me and run enablement. We’ll be opening, roles to hire some people to fill in the rest of the enablement team. And then also hiring for the other two functions, which will be around digital content management and internal communications and and event planning. So it’s mostly gonna be outside of Deltek because we’re looking for skill sets that we haven’t been using internally before.

Christine Boremeester:
We have a sales enablement team, but I can’t I can’t steal their whole team, unfortunately.

John:
So what’s the profile for the folks that you’re envisioning for these roles? Like, are you gonna tap into marketing? So when I hear, like, the digital content management or if I hear the event component, it seems like this would lean heavy into a marketing background, but I could be wrong. So what are you thinking about for the profiles for those folks?

Christine Boremeester:
For those 2, yes. And, you know, you’re it’s like you were in the room with HR when they were asking me and saying, isn’t this really marketing? And I was saying, well, certainly, there’s there’s competencies and and skill sets in common. But because I want them focusing on building customer success type content and and very customer marketing focus, customer, and specifically focusing on our digital customer segment, which is, also a new band we’re rolling out this year. So it’s a big year. And internal comms and events, I could see that being somewhat like an internal marketing position, but we’re gonna have it be, emails from leadership and team building and, networking and, lunch and learns and, you know, our customer success kickoff, but also like virtual events throughout the year. So it will go beyond maybe, some of those roles traditionally. You know, at least that’s the that’s the vision right now. As we build it out, these could certainly change as we live it.

John:
And now with the assemblance of this this new organization, are the roles and kind of or the criteria for your CSMs going to evolve? Like, are there new expectations for them given the fact that you’re making all these investments in their training enablement? So are KPIs changing? Is how their performance being measured? Is that being augmented at all?

Christine Boremeester:
To a certain extent, yes. As we looked through it, we’re not largely changing like the job descriptions or what was expected of them. But the reality was they didn’t have time to focus as much on strong relationship building, learning about our products, and and being trusted advisers for our customers and driving those outcomes because their account in loads kept increasing, and they had to spend a lot of time transacting renewals and doing commercial application and escalating support cases and things like that. So even though the role isn’t aspirationally changing, it would their day to day will look differently because the idea is that they should have more time to be able to focus on these, aspects of the role that we want them to, and we’re going to enable them. We’re gonna clarify what those KPIs and the expectations are. That it’s not just get your renewals in and retain customers. You know, that it’s going to be much more on are the customers adopting our product? Are they growing our usage? Are they becoming referenceable? You know, things like that.

John:
So from a capacity standpoint, you mentioned that you’re taking the renewals away from them. Right? So that’s one aspect of their role that’s evolving. What other changes are you making to, I guess, adjust their capacity? Because it seems like the renewals was one aspect of it, but I don’t know how much time they’re spending on all of the other tasks that our customer success. So what else is evolving to give them more capacity? Or are you thinking about is it hiring or is it we’re we’re scaling and there’s digitization of things? So what else are you doing to take the work off their plate to to give them the capacity to do the great things that you want them to?

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. The scaling. Exactly. So we took a hard look at the number of accounts that each of the customer success managers was handling at each of our different customer segments and created a new digital segment. So by having that new band of customers, that freed up capacity in the other segments of our customers, and to be able to take existing CSMs and turn them into the renewals and growth specialists. So that digital band, you know, those accounts will there’ll be much more accounts per CSM, and and that freed up capacity.

John:
It did make sense. Alright, Josh. I’m done with my interrogation for now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I I

John:
kinda felt like Josh, you were just referring to me. I’m like, okay. Yeah. Like, I literally have my little pad here of all of my notes, but I’m like, at some point, we should make Josh feel like he’s a part of the conversation.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. That’s fine. That’s fine. What was your biggest takeaway, Christy, from from what Christine shared?

John:
I mean, it sounds like she’s making all the right changes. I think that that’s a big part of it. Right? We’re gonna enable this team. But from a capacity standpoint, I was curious to hear what are the things that we’re taking away? Because it’s it’s helpful to do more for the customers through the digitization and it’s helpful to uplevel skills, but at the end of the day, the work is still the work. So I was really interested in understanding how they’re augmenting their team and their structure and the delivery model across the segments. But, I mean, the the big answer was very much embedded in the we’re creating a digital segment and we’re taking off their roles. Like, those two things, I think, are huge depending on how you segmented the portfolio of customers beforehand.

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. Yeah. So previously, at the small medium business level, you know, those CSMs are handling about a 100, 150 accounts, you know. So now that grows to 500, a 1000 accounts. Right? And and that’s the smallest. So that frees up quite a bit of capacity at at the other levels.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What what’s been the biggest challenge that you faced so far in standing up this new group? And as you prepare for the kickoff of it, you’re not quite in the full implementation of it yet, so that’ll bear its own unique set of of interesting speed bumps. But what’s what’s been the biggest one so far?

Christine Boremeester:
Sure. You know, Deltek has so many products, and each one, the customer looks a little bit different. The tool set is a little bit different. The way that the CSM interacts with those customers is a little bit different. We’re not all on, you know, the same CRM platform. We’re not all using Salesforce or Gainsight at this point, as we’ve acquired so many companies over the years. So that was one of our biggest challenges was saying, we’re trying to be as consistent as possible, but can we really do that when every team’s on different tools and there’s varying sizes of customers and, needs and they’re global, they speak different languages, you know, all these different things. So that that’s definitely been a challenge to say, as much as possible to be able to standardize, make this consistent with a goal to roll everyone on to the same, methods over time as well.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow. That sounds like a big lift. I mean, obviously, it’ll be a huge benefit to the company. But if I’m hearing you correctly, one of your one of your goals here in mandates is to get everybody on the same tech stack in or thereabouts in the organization across 250 CSMs.

John:
I think I I have to imagine that this isn’t just your responsibility. Right?

Christine Boremeester:
Oh, no. No. No. I’m one of, you know, there’s there’s my boss, the group vice president, you know, our chief customer officer, and then, you know, there’s there’s 4 of us at that senior leadership level and many leaders and and managers and team leads and CSMs below that as well. So absolutely a group effort, you know, coming together on what the vision is for the new organization and then how we’re gonna make that happen.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I mean, honestly, Christine, that answers the questions that I have. Christine, unless you have anything else or, Christine, if you wanna share anything else. I mean, I was just really excited to come here today and and listen to this new role that you stepped in that, you know, honestly is is great that you guys have it. It sounds like it took a little bit of growth and a little bit to get there, but, I think that’s super exciting. And what I actually love to do is to come back in 6 months and see how things are going. Right? Because Right.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s gonna be a busy year, as you know. Would you be open to coming back onto the show later in the year?

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I think as I’ve been trying to learn a lot about customer enablement and and build out this new function, you know, I think it’s something that’s relatively new in the industry. So I haven’t really been able to find a blueprint for it and, you know, happy to come back and talk about our lessons learned, what went well, what didn’t, you know, and and then what we’re thinking about as as we move into the rest of the year and beyond. Wonderful.

John:
Well, Josh, before you wrap us up, I do have one more question. Christine, I’m interested in understanding what is the sentiment of the team? How does everyone feel about this change? Because this isn’t a small change.

Christine Boremeester:
Yes. As, as various people have been, I guess, read in on on all the initiatives that are that are going on, there there’s usually a sense of, I I guess, stunned silence maybe at first. Right? Trying to digest everything. But, I think how excited we all are about it and the positivity, it that has absolutely, brought everyone on board. So every new person, you know, they’ll have questions. They they’re trying to figure out if this is the right thing for our organization. And but as then as we get there, they’re jumping in. They’re they’re suggesting things and, so far going really, really, really well.

Christine Boremeester:
So we’ll see as as we launch it to the entire team. But right now, we’re we’re excited for them to finally know what we’ve been working on for all these months and be able to roll them all out and have them start to embrace it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, what I like about your story is you guys are, you know, again, you’re more of a legacy company. Right? A blue chip, older school company that has naturally evolved into the times, right, the SaaS times. And, you’re continuing that evolution. It’s like a part of the overall journey for you guys. So like I said, it’d be very interesting to see how things shake up this year, and we wish you the absolute very best in that journey.

Christine Boremeester:
Thank you so much. Yeah.

John:
And good luck tomorrow would kick off.

Christine Boremeester:
Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. That’ll be that’ll definitely be interesting. Can’t wait to see all the reactions from the team. And then a week later when we’re on-site for our customer success kickoff, you know, we’ll be able to talk even more with the team about it and and get their reactions face to face too.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Good luck.