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Josh Schachter:

Hi everybody. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of Update AI and host of unchurned. And I’m incredibly excited to be here with Ahmed Quadri. Ahmed is the Chief Customer officer of Heap, Heap Analytics that is one of the major providers of well, usage and customer analytics out there. I’ll let Ahmed Ahmed tell us a little bit more about that. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Ahmed Quadri:

Great. Thanks, Josh. Great to be here.

Josh Schachter:

So I didn’t do Heap full justice, and I don’t like to describe the companies necessarily of my guests because they can do a better job than I can. So tell us about Heap, what you.

Ahmed Quadri:

Guys are up to. Absolutely. So at Heap here, we’re really focused on helping organizations improve the digital experiences they provide to their end customers. And we do that through a combination of providing analytics for what customers are doing on their digital presences, whether it’s a website, whether it’s a mobile device, and bringing together both the quantitative components of analytics, as well as the qualitative aspects of it in terms of not only understanding how customers are moving through the different digital presences they have, but also give them real life examples of it so that they can focus in on it.

Josh Schachter:

So it’s all about understanding the customer journey, understanding what they’re doing, who they are. You are the chief customer officer. Tell us a little bit about your mandate, your purview within the organization, what you oversee, maybe what you can share as far as the structure of the underneath you as well?

Ahmed Quadri:

Yeah, absolutely. So in a nutshell, when I think of my role and when I think of my mandate, my mandate is essentially to ensure that Heap customers are navigating our value journey and maximizing the value they get out of both Heap, the product and the relationship with the organization. And with that, in terms of the way my organization is structured, I’ve got what you would call the traditional or conventional post sales organizations customer success services, training, education, and support, as well as our community efforts. But we’ve also incorporated into my organization two other parts of the broader organization that don’t typically sit within a CCO organization. First is our customer marketing organization. So that’s more around our scaled efforts for how we drive marketing to our customers and drive scaled customer success. And the other one is our presales organization. So the solution consultants, solution engineers that we have, or solution architects as well, that’s also a key part of my.

Josh Schachter:

Organization too, and that includes the sales folks.

Ahmed Quadri:

Also, it includes the technical presales folks.

Josh Schachter:

The technical pre sales, yeah.

Ahmed Quadri:

The AES and the account managers are part of our CRO’s organization. But the sales consultant sales engineers are a part of my organization.

Josh Schachter:

And out of the three parts, which is your favorite? No, I’m just joking. So I’m sure they’re all like children, right? So it sounds a little unique to me that some of that sits the presales and the marketing sale sits underneath you rather than do you guys have SVP of sales CRO, something of that nature? What led into that decision making behind that organizational layout?

Ahmed Quadri:

So luckily, that decision was made before I got here. And so it was part of one of the reasons why I came here as well is to really pull all those organizations together. But at the end of the day, like I said, the mandate is to ensure our customers are getting value throughout the value journey. And that value journey really starts in sales. It starts in the presales motions where it’s all about helping the customer understand what’s the perception of value, what are all the different areas of value. And so having all of these organizations under one umbrella helps me and helps us orchestrate that journey more closely. So that when we’re talking about handoffs and we’re talking about transitions, it’s not necessarily an.org to transition, but it’s really about which part of the organization, which team is driving what part of the value journey and tying all of those outcomes together. It naturally fits together regardless of where those teams sit. But when they sit together, it builds that cohesion, it builds that connectivity and continuity.

Josh Schachter:

I’m picturing in my mind almost like a map of the customer’s journey. And you’ve got like sectioned off, okay, you guys have this starting point, then we’re in the middle, then post sales you’re the rest of the lifecycle there. Tactically speaking, you said that they sit together. Now of course, in this remote environment, that’s a little bit figurative, but what are some of the ceremonies, rituals, tactics, practices that you do to bring together these groups so that you can offer more cohesive, end to end experience?

Ahmed Quadri:

Yeah, great question. So there’s both process driven activities that we do that time together and then also management and oversight kind of activities at a process level. We’ve built some key touch points in the journey itself that tie these organizations together. One I’ll talk about predominantly here is what we call deal readiness. We do a deal readiness assessment during the presale cycle, which brings together the presales team, the services team, and the customer success team to, one assess what are the dynamics of what the customer is asking for, what are the requirements, how closely can we meet them, are there any red flags? So that helps us tie that together before the deal closes. And what we’re doing now is we’re evolving that to also make it a customer readiness. How ready is the customer in terms of organizationally ready? Where do they fit in the analytics maturity model? How much effort is customer success going to have to put in? So we’ve built those types of steps into the value journey, into the process itself, where we highlight it, where we identify it, and then at an overall operating cadence level, we review on a weekly basis, which opportunities, which deals are red flagged through that deal readiness process. And so we’ve got the insight into it, we can problem solve for it right away without having to wait for the deal to close and then solve it. So that’s just one example of how we’ve built that.

Josh Schachter:

I want to double click into that example because I love that example. Is this more of a qualitative measurement or is it there is actual quantitative measures and a score as well.

Ahmed Quadri:

It’s both. So we’ve gotten better at the quantitative measure from a technical readiness perspective in terms of the key requirements and how close we are or which ones are out of zone, which ones are in zone. The customer readiness portion of it right now is still very qualitative because we’re assessing the customer. We haven’t really formalized it into a scorecard, but that’s the goal. The goal would be to get that into a scorecard. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:

As far as the customer readiness, this is you evaluating them or they are evaluating themselves.

Ahmed Quadri:

It’s starting with us evaluating them, but we want it to be a mutual alignment so that the customer also understands what’s their starting point and what are some organizational barriers or organizational improvements they’re going to have to make to become data driven, to be more mature in their analytics and how we can help with that. So it’s kind of setting the stage for both.

Josh Schachter:

Has there ever been a scenario where red lights go off that this customer is absolutely not ready? And the contract might be very seductive, but it’s not really a good fit for us at this time we have.

Ahmed Quadri:

And so we do that assessment, then, depending on where that flag is coming from, is it a particular capability that we’re not quite ready for? We’d bring product management into the organization, into the conversation as well, bring in sales as well and we’ll work through that and if we can identify a risk mitigation strategy, we’ll do it and in most cases we can and we’ll formulate it. But what this also does is it actually also then helps feed into our sales process and our qualification process up front so our AES can start to identify some of those red flags earlier in the conversation.

Josh Schachter:

Speaking cross functionally, let’s segue your role is obviously very senior at a very fast growing company. You’ve got a lot of mandate underneath you. What do your interactions look like with the leadership of the other functions at the organization?

Ahmed Quadri:

We have a very well established both operating cadence in terms of where we as an executive team align on what are the key outcomes that we’re driving towards in a given quarter and driven year. So that’s a built in cadence that we have that helps us stay on track and identify issues. But at the same time I’ve got a very close relationship, definitely our head of sales and our product those two are relationships that in the world of slack. They’re probably my highest volume slack interactions right now because we’re dealing with situations as they come up. And then at an overall planning level, especially with our head of product, we align very closely on our quarterly targets as well. So understanding what’s coming from Product, what do we need to get ready for, both from a presales and a post sales perspective. So drawing that closely together as well. And it’s a closed loop process where as we complete a quarter, we give the feedback. We’ve got monthly check ins with Product as well in terms of field feedback to the product organization. And then from a sales process, we’re in deal reviews, we’re handling quarterly QBR cadence as well. So we’ve got some pretty tight end a lot.

Josh Schachter:

We’re already into quite a large chunk of 2023. But what are some of your top priorities for your organization based on what you’re seeing out there for us this year?

Ahmed Quadri:

Particularly especially now that Heap has we’ve extended our platform, we’ve got additional exciting capabilities that are out there that help drive more value to our customers. Our main focus right now as a success organization is driving attachment, driving expansion of both value and expansion of how much of the platform they’re leveraging. And also, like other organizations, it’s what we’re doing to help drive retention as well. So you could say it’s retention through.

Josh Schachter:

Expansion, but it’s not just retention. I mean, you’re not just protecting the base, you’re talking about attachment, you’re talking about selling additional products, units and to more seats.

Ahmed Quadri:

Exactly. We’re looking to expand the usage of the platform across the base. And again, given the challenges, the macroeconomic challenges, working out the best way to do that within our existing customer base, but we’re also obviously focused on retaining that customer base too.

Josh Schachter:

Your platform, Heap, has some very advanced analytics, and you can maybe talk a little bit about that, but you can literally see what your customers are doing. And of course, there’s just copious amounts of data that are able to be sifted through. How are you working with your organization, instructing them to get the most out of using product data in order to help prevent churn and help with that attachment?

Ahmed Quadri:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Like most CS organizations, we do have a concept of a health score that’s data driven, and that’s really where we look to drive not just all of the data that we can, but how do we make that data actionable based on where the customer is in that particular journey, in the particular stages of the journey. So we leverage our health score, which brings together not just how many weekly users we have in the platform or how much consumption they’re doing, but it also ties in what kind of engagement we’re having with the customer. Do we have the right executive engagement? And now we’ve extended it out to include. We know what specific capabilities in our product drive the most value. We know which parts of the product drive highest retention. And so as we’ve built that into our health score, we’re formulating and we drive plays, if you would, based off of the opportunity presented by those different attach rates or different capabilities that customers either are or aren’t leveraging. And so that’s really a big way in which we’re using data now to understand both retention in terms of where are we at risk because high value capabilities aren’t being leveraged or aren’t being leveraged as fully, and where do we have white space, where can we extend the value for customers and then being very targeted in how we approach those customers? So that it’s. Taking the guesswork out of a CSM’s day to day interactions.

Josh Schachter:

So I guess this is where there’s a constant feedback loop between you and the product owners that you’re saying, okay, these are the new features. These are the features that are getting the most usage that do lead to the most retention, and then let’s create plays and processes around promoting their usage and making sure that they’re well understood.

Ahmed Quadri:

Exactly. And this is also where our customer marketing efforts come into play. How do we market these at a scaled level, at a broader level, to key customers leveraging what we’re doing at the top of the funnel in terms of prospect or overall marketing, product marketing, but how do we leverage that into our existing customers?

Josh Schachter:

So let’s talk about that. What does your customer marketing group look mean? Not appearance wise, but what’s the layout of it and how does it differ from the CS functions of building relationships with customers?

Ahmed Quadri:

So the key difference is that the primary channel of engagement for what we call our scaled CS organization is through email or in app engagement. And the way we do that is we identify particular areas that whether we’re trying to get more usage out of a particular feature of the product, whether we’re trying to get additional adoption or additional users in, they will execute campaigns targeted at that customer base. While on our traditional CS side, it’s more of a high touch model, it’s more about a CSM engaging with a person or engaging with a customer. So that’s the primary difference. And now what we’re also doing, and what we also do with it is we take that scaled model and not just apply it where it’s traditionally applied at the lower end of the segment, where it’s one to 200, 300 customers per CSM. But we’re applying that more broadly across all of our segments so that we have a baseline level of engagement that we drive through email, in, app, et cetera, with all of our customers. And then we layer on top of that actions that the CSMS can take.

Josh Schachter:

So you’ve got your scaled segment, your scaled CS, and then am I right in hearing you correctly. Am I hearing correctly that your higher touch CS, that’s actually your customer marketing or is that separate?

Ahmed Quadri:

The higher touch is the customer success Manager. It’s the actual CS organization. The scaled CS is more of the one to many touch and then separate.

Josh Schachter:

From that are customer marketers.

Ahmed Quadri:

They perform the same function. Our scaled CS performs that function of customer marketing as well.

Josh Schachter:

I see. Okay.

Ahmed Quadri:

Got it.

Josh Schachter:

So it’s not split up functionally or it’s the overall function and then it’s kind of maintained within the same roles.

Ahmed Quadri:

Exactly. And whether you call it customer marketing or sale or scale CS, it’s the type of campaigns, it’s the type of outcomes they’re trying to drive. Some outcomes are more awareness outcomes which would fall into a marketing bucket. Then there’s other that are driving adoption, driving feature adoption, et cetera. So depending on which kind of campaigns they’re running, you could bucket it into different functions.

Josh Schachter:

And are your teams using Heap in their day to day as well?

Ahmed Quadri:

Absolutely. That’s how we identify both at a scaled perspective and a CSM perspective. Not just the white space, but overall. What are the key parts of the platform the customers are using? How are they using it? What do we need to get them to use more for? That’s all what we call Heap on Heap.

Josh Schachter:

I like it. I’m going to start figure out something to call update on update for my company. Last question for you. Looking at the latter half of 2023, what’s most exciting for you? Whether it’s within your domain of customer experience or whether it’s just Heap in general, or it could just be CS trends, macroeconomic trends.

Ahmed Quadri:

I think what’s really exciting to me, and it’s both a CS trend and something that we’re focused on is over the last twelve months or so, I think there has been an overall shift and most B, two B SaaS organizations have realized they really do need to focus in on expanding the existing customer base. That opportunity is there for a lot of organizations. So it’s really exciting to me that not only is my success organization focused on that, but Heap is also focused on that. Right now we’re all focused on how do we ensure that as we’ve developed the platform, introduced additional capabilities, how do we get those into the hands of our customers and how do we get them using and leveraging that for value? That’s really exciting to me. It’s not just the use more of what you have, but it’s additional ways to unlock value for our customers and how do we help drive that and overall increase the maturity of our customers across the platform.

Josh Schachter:

Ahmed Quadri, thank you so much for being on the show.

Ahmed Quadri:

This was great.