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Intro  

[Un]churned as presented by update AI.

Ariel  

Customer Success if it’s not being done right, and it’s not following the right playbook ends up becoming basically level two tech support.

Intro  

Welcome to [Un]churned a show about the leaders and innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships and stories you can use to advance your own career. Here’s your host, Josh Schachter, everybody and welcome back to

Josh Schachter  

[Un]churned our podcast on the stories behind the movement into customer led growth. Really excited about our episode today. I’m here with the VP of Customer Success at flosum. Ariel Benzakein. Ariel, thank you so much for being on the show, by the way, for anybody you know who’s new to flosum is the only native Salesforce DevOps platform in existence. And Ariel, maybe we start there just quickly off the bat. Because that might be a little bit abstract for some of our listeners. What do you do? Yeah,

Ariel  

absolutely. So what we do we work with people that are developing applications on top of Salesforce, which is a lot of companies, right? We tend to work with more enterprise focused companies, and it’s release management. So we really help companies that have a lot of developers, help them merge their code and deploy new versions of their software. So the the fact that we’re Salesforce native is very unique, because we inherit all the security from Salesforce so we can be used by the federal government, by financial services, companies and everybody else. So that’s great. That’s great.

Josh Schachter  

One of the more important things for me as a founder, it wasn’t a fun facts of flow some is that you guys have bootstrapped, which is incredibly impressive and I envy and I would say aspire to but I think it’s too late for me for that.

And then we’ll get into that later on.

I don’t know. But that’s that’s one of the cool things that that I noted in our pre conversation about flows. Let’s start out to get to know, Arielle, so you’re unsure and this is all about, obviously, [Un]churned is is in respect to retention and retaining customers and not churning them. But it also means raw and uncut. So let’s learn about you. Where are you from? Where do you live now?

Ariel  

Right. So I’m from Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s where I grew up. I lived in Boston for about 13 years. And then three years ago, moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is where I currently live,

Josh Schachter  

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the the hub of eastern central customer success in Pennsylvania.

Ariel  

Well, you know, there is a very large tech company out here called list track that I used to work for, which is why I came out here in the first place. We’re in the email marketing space. Perfect. What was your first job? That’s a great question. So my first job I was 16 years old, I worked in a retail store called software, etc, which was owned by Barnes and Noble, actually, and we sold software and some hardware.

Josh Schachter  

And what’s your favorite customer success metric? As a leader?

Ariel  

Oh, that’s a tough one. So you know, I think there’s really two key metrics. But if I had to choose just one, I would say it’s not retention, because Customer Success should be the growth driver for for any SAS business.

Josh Schachter  

Yeah, makes sense. Let’s talk a little bit about how you got into customer success. You’ve got a laundry list of a background and leadership positions, a lot of that started and experienced, and I think we’ll go there. So tell us a little bit. You mentioned to me earlier that you stumbled into it. What’s your story of getting into ces as a function?

Ariel  

Yeah, I came into it from a very roundabout way. I mean, I’ve been doing this working for software companies back to the on premise days for the last 25 years or so. Lots of professional services and implementation Technical Services type experience. Experian originally hired me for one of their SAS business units. And I think what people don’t realize is that Experian actually has quite a few of those, everybody thinks credit reporting, but there’s quite a bit of SAS and on prem type of software there. So they hired me for professional services and tech support to one those two teams initially. And one of the really interesting things that happened when I first got there is they decided to eliminate the account management function. And they combined the hunter and farmer sales roles into one they called it one sales. Well, you can imagine what happened as a result of that very, very poor decision, actually. So the obvious thing that happened gross retention went way down. So now they’re selling out of a hole, right? But the thing that’s not so obvious that happened and is the catalyst for me getting into customer success, is I started having my project managers on the implementation team coming to me saying, Hey, we’re so busy, you know, we need to hire more people. We can’t get our work done. And I started to think and we nice staff this team to the world workload that we’ve got that I make, you know, this terrible error, or it’s something else going on. So I started to look into the numbers and found pretty quickly that they were spending about 40% of their time doing essentially Customer Success work. So stuff that wasn’t going to the support team or like trainings, how do I do this? How can I get more value out of the tool, because they’re not going back to their sales guy for that, because the sales guy is just going to try to upsell them something. So I thought about this problem. I had run account management teams before, I was very familiar with that. But I was also aware of this new profession of customer success, but had never really want a team. And it’s so I started to think, well, maybe that’s what we need here. And I started to do a lot of research. So I reached out to other leaders in the CS space, I started going to conferences, like I went to Gainsight, Paul’s, I went to CS 100, did a lot of networking did a lot of learning, then realize, yeah, this is really what we need, we need to create a customer success function to solve this problem of retention that we’ve got, and my selfish problem of my my PMS can’t get their work done, right. So put a proposal together, went around to all my peers in the business unit ended up selling it to our general manager to create a team, we started focused just on our enterprise clients. So we were looking at like the top 200 out of about 2000 clients that we had, at the time, made a team of eight plus a manager. So you know, quite a few clients per person, but not not so many that they couldn’t handle it. You know, one of the things I realized early on is that we had to kind of segment even those enterprise clients, we had to segment them because the ARR range and those clients was pretty, pretty broad. It was anywhere from somebody spending about 90 grand a year to people spending a million dollars a year, right. So those million dollar clients, we’re going to treat much differently than the $90,000 clients. So we put a lot of like tech touch, not actually not so much tech touch but lower touch things using email sequences and less frequent meetings and for those lower clients, and we did the white glove thing for the clients like 500k of ARR. And up while the the team proved itself out, I developed a whole process, which I’m sure we’ll get into at some point. But I developed the customer success process, it was very successful, we shot the gross retention back up into the low 90s for that segment of customers, then the next task was how do we expand this right? Well, there was no customer success function anywhere else inside of experience. So this was really kind of the Wild West. So I was thinking about what do we do for the rest of the clients, I can’t hire another 50 people in Boston to run a customer success team. It just doesn’t make sense economically. But I did have a team down in Costa Rica that was doing tech support for me. So I was able to hire a few people down there to do customer success for the rest of the client base. And that turned out to be very successful, we did pure tech touch with those clients. So the smaller like medium size and small clients. So the tech touch, we set up elaborate email sequences, we had a tool called bolster, which is unfortunately no longer around. But it was kind of a like a gain site type of tool for customer success. And we set up these elaborate email sequences, we set up things in the system where certain triggers would alert the CSM that they had to do something so like usage would drop CSM would get a notice right away. So we had kind of like real time intervention. We didn’t do health scoring, we had some more sophisticated things. And then the health scoring we had all these triggers and and playbooks that we use. So somebody on the lower end of the CES world there that we built, as long as they could talk to a customer, they could just use the system and follow the playbooks prescriptions that we had for various problems to deliver what seemed like a white glove service to those smaller clients, even though the interaction level was actually generally fairly, fairly low unless something was going wrong. So that’s what we did a lot more detail to it, obviously, but that from a 50,000 foot view, that’s what we built. And the result was we ended up shooting the gross retention up for the whole client base pretty quickly within a few quarters.

Josh Schachter  

That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. So now you’re at Folsom and yourself, what is your what is your team makeup look like over there?

Ariel  

Yeah, I’ve got basically four teams. So I’ve got customer success, which is a pure CS team. I’ve got technical account management, so they do all the implementations. And they’re also people that we can bring on calls to be technical experts, they can function that sales engineers if needed. Then I’ve got the tech support team which just answers tickets essentially. And then the account management team which I just created, they handle all the cross sell upsell and renewals in conjunction with the CS team.

Josh Schachter  

And what have you taken over from your experiences at Experian how you set up to get to that net retention? That was so high? And then you’ve worked at other you know, you’ve lived? Yes at other places subsequently. But what’s your setup at flows? From? What? Yeah, what’s making you guys successful over there?

Ariel  

Yeah, I’ll tell you the formula. And I’ve used this at multiple companies. Now there’s really not it’s really not rocket science, but it’s hard for companies to do. And before I get into the formula, let me tell you why it’s hard for companies to do.

Intro  

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Josh Schachter  

Hey, guys, it’s Josh quick interlude here, if you’re like me, you buy the doggie poop bags on Amazon that have the most ratings and reviews. So please smash those rating stars for the entrepreneur podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Just like update AI. This podcast is a startup in its own right. And it’ll help others to discover it. Go ahead. And right now we’ll be here when you get back.

Ariel  

I think and I’ve seen this now at a few different companies, including flow, some customer success, if it’s not being done, right. And it’s not following the right playbook ends up becoming basically level two tech support. I see this all the time. So it becomes very focused on tickets, it becomes focused on feature requests and regular meetings turn into that or they turn into you know, check in meetings, which, you know, I’ve eliminated that word check in from my team’s vocabulary completely, you know, we have business meetings with an agenda, we don’t have check in meetings for No, no reason. So there is a formula, it’s it’s very simple. So customer success, particularly on the enterprise side of things really needs to start at the end of the sales cycle. So on bigger deals, the sales folks should be bringing the customer success manager into that deal. As we’re getting to the stage where we’re going to send a proposal out, the customer success manager can create a success plan with that prospect and say, hey, you know, when you sign the proposal, here’s your actual time to value kind of like a project plan. But also building a formal success plan with all the value drivers, all the reasons why the client is purchasing the software,

Josh Schachter  

then that’s when I want to, I want to pause there for a second, and kind of break this down. Because I think this is important to get into the details of it. This formula, we’re gonna we’re gonna label this, we’re going to brand This orielles formula for premium customer success, consistently delivering value. So what’s your what’s your hit rate, I’ll say, of sales bringing you in at the right time and how it gets high. How do you accomplish that? Yeah, I

Ariel  

mean, it can always improve, right? Because they’re trying to close deals quickly. And they don’t always do it. Right. So and a lot of times, it’s not appropriate to do it. Certainly on smaller deals, it would make sense to do it. But on those really big complex deals, it actually helps them increase their close rates. So the the hit rate is pretty high on those deals, because you know, you come in with that providing that value upfront to a client. It’s very powerful. It’s very powerful. It helps close a deal. Yeah. Okay, especially when they’re getting CS for free. Right, we’re not charging for CES, right, they’re getting this extra service and a dedicated resource for free.

Josh Schachter  

That’s a good point. It’s one more service that they’re they’re offering out there. Okay. And then you go into this disjoint success planning, what are you started listing out help us visual visualize that for us? What are the components in detail of the success plan that you create?

Ariel  

So I follow success hackers, very simple template for a success plan, you know, you can download it, if you Google it, you can find it. It’s just like a one page document. So what we’re trying to do is just capture the why buys, right? So you know, a client, they’re kind of sold the dream during the sales process, there’s all these things are told they’re gonna get out of the tool, there’s an ROI, probably that’s attached to it. So we want to document that right. We want to capture, what are those value drivers? What does the customer actually want to achieve? What does success look like to them? And we actually do that with the client. We don’t do it for them. So we sit down with them, we kind of brainstorm through it, we document it and we share that success plan with the client. That’s very important. So we’re all on the same page about what the success look like this year, you know, so it’s very important not to do it for them to let them tell you what should be on that plan and the CSM should really be facilitating that process. So if we don’t do it at the end of the sales cycle, we do it really before implementation begins. I think there should be only one handoff ever. And that’s from sales to customer success, we shouldn’t be doing multiple handoffs, because if you do that, you end up getting pushed down in the organization. So then CS ends up being only plugged into, you know, to the doer, right, the person that’s the end user, the product, they never have those executive relationships, they lose the why buys at some point, because that gets lost in implementation, right? Because then you’re focused, you got a different set of people, you’re focused on getting the thing up and running, their agenda is much different than the person that actually bought the software a lot of a lot of the time. So really important to have only one one hand off

Josh Schachter  

there, that’s really interesting as well, that you part of the reason to come in early is that you’re upstream in the stakeholder ship of your clientele. And it’s not just the end users, but it’s the decision makers that are involved and, and you’re able to build a relationship from the very beginning with as well. So we’re at the point now, where we’ve coordinated with sales, we have come up with a success plan for this new customer. What’s next in RLS, premium customer success formula.

Ariel  

Right? So now it’s implementation, right? So now we’re actually turning it over in a way to another team, but the critical thing that we have to do? Well, it’s really it’s a few things, right. So customer success needs to be on that kickoff call. And they need to be setting up calls during the implementation. Now it flows, some our implementations are very quick, they’re just a couple of weeks because the tool is very easy to use. Typically, we don’t have to do complex month, multi month implementations. So there’s probably only going to be one meeting in there between CES and the the client. But you know, we need to see how implementations going, we need to head off any problems that are arising very important to remain the primary point of contact. So we’re never really doing a handoff to implementation, even though we’re kind of turning over the the responsibility for doing the implementation CS is still there on the top, how

Josh Schachter  

will you measure it? How are you measuring the success and implementation while it’s in progress? Or monitoring it? So

Ariel  

this is a really interesting question. So we are using an AI tool to predict our churn and give us some insights into what’s going on. It’s an off the shelf product, I’ll plug them because we love them. They’re called involved on AI. So we just purchased a tool. And one of the things we found is that our unsuccessful customers don’t see a lot of engagement with the tool during or right after implementation. So our successful customers are, you know, they have this spike during implementation. And right after that using the tool a lot, they have a lot of users in there, there’s a lot of engagement, then it kind of tapers off and it goes into more of a like a regular use. But for our customers that ended up not being successful. Most of the time, there was never that spike of engagement, not saying they’re not using it, they’re going through the implementation, but the engagement level is very low. So we need to watch out for that during our implementations, if we see that during the implementation, we need to really find out why that is, you know, jump in there and really help that client a lot of times it’s because they need extra training, right? They’re not getting, they’re not getting it during implementation. So it’s definitely an early warning system. So that’s the biggest thing I would say.

Josh Schachter  

So we have sales, handoff and over success planning implementation. Where are we going from here?

Ariel  

So implementation ends, then then what do we do? Right? So a lot of it’s going to depend on the customer. So what we want to do is set up a regular cadence of meetings with them. Now, these meetings should never be as we discussed, check in meetings, right? They should be meetings that are business related, that have a formal agenda, and they should be related to those that customers goal. Now, that’s not to say, we’re not going to have some times where we’re talking about support tickets or issues that the client is having, right? I mean, that stuff is going to come up. And that’s okay. As long as it’s not like every meeting. So regular cadence of meetings for some clients that might be weekly, you know, if I’ve got a we do have a million dollar household name clients that, you know, we meet with them more than once a week, it flows them. So they need that level of support. Other clients, it’s every month, or it could be every couple of months. Or if they’re really small, they’re going to be in a tech touch program where we’re only meeting with them on demand, right? So. So that regular cadence of meetings is important, always have a business reason, we should always be talking to them about new features that are in the system, right? We should train people if they need it, if they bring new people on, that’s a great use of the meeting time to train new folks, you know, all of these things should be related to their use and engagement with our tool and track back to that success plan to make sure that they’re going to hit those goals, right. We always have to focus on that.

Josh Schachter  

How are you measuring and monitoring the meetings that you’re having with your customers? Well, that’s

Ariel  

what the manager is for, to kind of go back and listen to those calls. So I have a senior director that runs the customer success team. He’s looking at those meeting agendas, he’s going back and listening to the record We’re getting into those calls and making sure that we’re following the plan, right, that we’re not falling back into those old habits of check ins, you know, meetings that really should have been canceled, right, or things that, you know, have support ticket Focus

Josh Schachter  

Week after week after week. So he’s listening to the calls, looking out for keywords in the calls, reading the agendas that were sent out. Is he reading notes of outcomes of the calls as well?

Ariel  

Yeah, absolutely. And we store all of that in Salesforce. And it goes into our involved system involve actually is great because it uses machine learning and natural language processing to find things that are going on with clients and give them an automatic health score. So that those notes are really important, not just for manual review, but review by the automated

Josh Schachter  

signature. So interesting. Are there templates that you’re using and playbooks that you’re using for those meetings? You mentioned all the different variety of those meetings? How do you make sure that the entire team is on the same page of what they’re delivering?

Ariel  

Yeah, we have a lot of that documented. So unfortunately, we’re using a lot of Google Docs to track that stuff. But you know, it’s interesting, because flow some actually doubled in size last year. And you can imagine what happens at the startup, when that happens, a lot of these processes didn’t follow. So when I got here, we didn’t have a lot of these scalable processes we do now. It’s all documented in Google, Google Doc, some spreadsheets, you know, so all these playbooks are, are listed there available to the team, we train the team on them.

Josh Schachter  

So now we’ve had our recurring engagement with the customer, we’re building the relationship, what comes next in the formula, we talking about renewal? Well, before renewals,

Ariel  

we need to have business reviews, right. So that’s where we, and I hate the term QBR. Because it’s not going to necessarily be Quarterly, we might do it less for certain smaller clients where we might not do it. And we might do it ad hoc for some of the really small clients. But it’s a business review, we want to get the executive into that meeting, not just the doer, we want to make the doer look good in the meeting, right. So the CSM, and the doer should be collaborating to create that meeting together, our account manager should be involved in that as well to help create the meeting agenda. But it’s got to be something that’s going to attract the executive. So meeting should be about 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of question no more than that. I mean, I think about myself, as a VP, I’m not going to sit in a two hour long meeting with a vendor, right? It’s just not going to happen. I’ve got too much going on. But I will sit in at least you know, 30 minutes to an hour meeting to see what kind of ROI I’m getting out of this tool that I’m paying for. Right. So that’ll attract the executive, we’re going to show him the ROI. We’re going to review that success criteria. How are we tracking back to that? If we’re not tracking back to that? Why do we need to course correct? Did we capture the wrong agenda, right? Or some of these items no longer relevant that does happen, right. So let’s document what we should be looking at. So it’s a great time to course correct before the renewal. We don’t want to be doing all this at renewal time. We don’t want any surprises at renewals.

Josh Schachter  

Something you said there also suddenly resonated with me. I speak to a lot of CST leaders and I ask them often, what’s a moment in time in your career that you really felt great about your work? And most of the time they respond that it was a moment where they made one of their customers, one of the end user stakeholders shine? And you mentioned that as well. It’s about making them look good in these meetings, which I think is an important point. Yeah.

Ariel  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re collaborating with somebody on a day to day, week to week or month to month basis, right, a customer, they become a partner where their advisor, you know, where their consultants, I think, you know, we want them to look good, we want them to be our champion, right. So I mean, there’s some selfish reason in there, too. We want them to be our champion internally at that company, and making them look good as a way to do that to make them more stable.

Josh Schachter  

Are we on to renewal yet? Yeah, now

Ariel  

we’re on to renewal. So I’m all about the money here. Yeah, it’s all about the money, right? So, you know, we want to make sure we’re not getting surprises at renewal time. I think, you know, surprise turn is the worst thing we need to know in advance when somebody is going to churn so we can forecast it, we can let the board of directors know we can let the CEO know so we’re not getting surprise big Enterprise Client churning when they’re when they get to renewal. So if we’re doing our job properly, we’re doing these business reviews. We’re held scoring properly, we’re doing all that we should know well in advance if somebody is going to renew or not, you know, 90 days plus out it least.

Josh Schachter  

And then we’ve closed the circle of life. I suppose

Ariel  

we have then we start the success planning all over again, right, because it’s going to change from year to year. Arielle, this

Josh Schachter  

was a really good primer in the end to end flow that circle of life of customer success. I’m gonna let Todd ABI is an advisor of ours that update AI know how how well you’ve done in some of the lessons from success hacker. And because this was a really good, really good download for everybody. I want to thank you very much. Go ahead.

Ariel  

No, I would say there’s two people that I follow if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you. So, success hacker success coaching is one of them. I think their training program is really good for customer success. And they have a lot of thought leadership. I think the other one is a guy named Greg Danes. I’ve actually learned a lot by following him too. He’s got a YouTube channel really kind of ahead of, I think a lot of leaders in the CES space, you know what to focus on in CES. So you know, between those two, I’ve, I’ve learned a lot and they kind of inform the processes, and I feel awesome.

Josh Schachter  

Thank you so much, Arielle. We’ll leave it at that. And thank you again for being on the show.

Ariel  

My pleasure. Thank you.

Josh Schachter  

Hey, guys, it’s Josh. Don’t hang up. If you enjoyed this episode, you know, even if you didn’t, I’d love for you to give us a rating in iTunes or Spotify. And after you do, email me, Josh at update that AI with the name of your favorite charity, and my company update AI will make a donation on your behalf. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. Send me a LinkedIn request and I’ll accept it immediately. Just go to www.blog.update.ai/linkedin and it’ll redirect my profile. Thanks