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James Manderson
We made an early investment in customer success, which is also why, you know, a lot of the other postales functions sort of span out of the department over time, because it’s succeeding in doing customer engagement, well, obviously requires tremendous technology. But it also requires, you know, help and guidance. And I think one of the things that that we’ve succeeded in doing over the years is really helping our customers sort of shape what their internal teams look like, how they how they actually work together, as well as how they use the technology.

Josh Schachter
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this episode of [Un]churned. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and host of [Un]churned. And joining me today, I’m especially excited to be speaking to James Maderson. James is the Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success at Braze. Braze is helping to power customer centric interactions between consumers and brands in real time, one of the leading marketing platforms out there in SAS, and James is going to tell us a little bit more about braze. James, thank you so much for being on this episode. Thanks, Josh.

James Manderson
Great to be here.

Josh Schachter
Great to have you. What are the key use cases of brace for for the minor few that may not know about brace already? Sure. So

James Manderson
you know, as I say, we do help our customers understand how their customers are interacting with their digital products, their websites, their apps, and so on. And then we help them communicate with them using messaging, both inside those communicate inside those owned properties, but also using things like email, SMS, push messaging, etc. And we help them automate all of that in a very personal very real time fashion.

Josh Schachter
Great. So we’re talking about triggers, behavioral triggers, monitoring and then being able to push out corresponding messages across omni channel platforms is that basically,

James Manderson
exactly, exactly right. Exactly why and and importantly, understand whether those are working or not experiment, test iterate.

Josh Schachter
Now praise is a public company. I didn’t know that until you and I were prepping for this call. You’ve got 100 1500 employees there abouts about 180 in the Customer Success department if I’m getting that correct. And it wasn’t always the case you’ve been embraced for just over six and a half years. And so we’ll talk about some of that history. We’ll go more into into Brady’s into the setup of CSF braise. First I want to get into the segment that I love to warm up the relationship a little bit, go unsure and go raw, authentic for a second. I have two questions for you. The first is James, where were you born? And where do you live now?

James Manderson
Sure. I was I was born in in Hammersmith, in London, for those who are familiar with London. And I grew up around them and around Southeast London. I now live on the coast in Bryson about 40 miles outside of London, beautiful. And who

Josh Schachter
is someone in your career? Because you’ve got a lot of people that look up to you, you’ve got a big domain at braze. Who is someone that you’ve looked up to whether or not you’ve known them?

James Manderson
Yeah, it’s a great question. And the list is long of people I admire and look up through both both people I’ve worked with people who I work with today. And in the past. And as you say others, I think someone who was really transformational for me is one of my first ever bosses, when I worked for a charity that that helped fundraise for the National Health Service over here in the UK, doing doing similar sort of CRM, customer engagement stuff. And I was dude. And I really think she helped me understand, you know, what I wanted from my career, but also, you know, where my skills lay, and where they didn’t, and to become sort of a little bit more comfortable than I previously had been with the areas where my skills don’t lie.

Josh Schachter
Well, then let me just say, hey, Jude, I couldn’t resist, I won’t, I won’t go, I won’t go start at 999. So that’s, that’s wonderful. James, you’ve been with brace for for six years and eight months at the time of our recording this episode and early q1 2023. And you’ve gone in that time from from being a lead to General Manager to VP, GM and VP of Customer Success to global VP and now your Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success. And so I want to talk a little bit about that evolution. Tell us a little bit about what braze looked like and what the setup of customer success look like when you first joined back in 2016, I

James Manderson
believe? Oh, yeah. It’s, it feels like both a tremendously short and a tremendously long time ago. At braze, you know, back back then, the company in total was I’m not quite sure exactly how many but probably around 150, somewhere between 150 and 200 people. Customer Success was a pretty undifferentiated post sales role at the time covering technical support, Customer Success documentation, sorts of other bits and bobs. There was probably about 15 to 20 people in the team mostly based in the US and there were there were two people outside the US when when I joined as as the third A non US based post sales member of the breeze team. I should also add that back then we were called App boy, which I think we’re all very glad is no longer the case.

Josh Schachter
Agreed. Okay, cool. So and then were tell us about, like where you are today? What does what does that same setup look like?

James Manderson
Yeah, that’s right. So so as he, as you mentioned, we’re north of 1500 people, globally now that the CS team is is about 180 people we have over that time become a much more sort of specialized post sales teaming in general, what what happened over that time is, as we started to gain expertise gained scale, we started to sort of specialize our roles a little bit. So we spun up an onboarding team to work specifically with our our newer customers, help them get integrated up up and running, and spun that out of CES. And we did similar things with other other post sales functions. What that means is that today, we’re able to wholly focus on ensuring that our customers get a good return on their on their investment embrace, obviously, they’re their financial investment, but also their investment of time. So we’re really there to help understand their business case, understand what it is they need to achieve workers as really a sort of add on to their business, help them understand their place in the market, and really how to develop their strategies, development, use cases, execute them embrace and get a good return on on that investment.

Josh Schachter
At first, it was one one cluster of a post sales group, right. And now, like you said, you’ve started to segment out, of course, your customer base, but also the specialized the team as well. And I’m sure there’s other sales leaders that are listening right now that wants to under like, they’re gonna go through that they’re going through that now or in the future, they hope to go through that, right, that growth and the need to start to branch out. So what what would that look like? What were some of the initial signals, if you can recall, that said, oh, you know, what we need to start to branch out,

James Manderson
I think one of the things that we spotted was the sort of the increasing pain of context switching. So in a fairly undifferentiated role, you know, there are times of and this will always be the case when you’re when you’re working with a book of businesses as we do in customer success. But you know, there are times when some of your customers are going to have high peaks of demand on your time and need your support and times when they’ll have sort of lower expectations and needs. If you’re working very sort of, you know, cross functionally, as a single person doing lots of post sales things, what you’ll find is that those peaks and troughs become pretty unmanageable. And context switching between the customer who’s getting up and running needs a tremendous amount of your time, so that they can understand what they need to do troubleshoot, get integrated, etc. is going to unfortunately, detract from the experience of somebody who’s more established, but you know, has equally important needs and things they need to do. So that first sort of context switching pain, and I think we felt it in the team, I’m glad to say before our customers felt it or at least before they told us about it in a meaningful way. But yeah, certainly that was that was a real flag. And then I think what we found as well, as you know, as the team got a little bit bigger, we were able to better understand the range of sort of natural aptitudes and skills that folks had within the group and start to move towards giving people the opportunity to make the most of those of those sort of natural aptitudes, whether you’d maybe a little bit more technical or better, stronger on the sort of stakeholder management side or perhaps stronger on the marketing strategy side, and start to kind of, you know, place time and effort in a way that was a bit more aligned to those to those skills.

Josh Schachter
And what is the so you mentioned onboarding specialists? What’s the competition right now of the different functions that you have within your overall purview of customer success?

James Manderson
Yeah, sure. So So in CES, we are actually all CSMs. And ces apart from apart from an operations team, and a and a small consulting group, what we do is we structure ourselves around the size of our customers, starting from our smaller sort of small to medium business customers, were CSMs, we’ll have a book of more customers going right up to our sort of global strategic accounts where, you know, actually, the ratio is going to flip and one customer will have several CSMs working for them around the world. In terms of the other functions, we actually put those into a group we refer to that services. I know that’s organized differently in lots of places. And that consists of our onboarding team, our technical support team, and a couple of other specializations we have there on the on the sort of technical account management side of the house.

Josh Schachter
Any any key tips in terms of keeping those different functions aligned and all operating on the same page? Yeah,

James Manderson
I mean, I think, you know, it’s it’s really important to establish sort of roles and responsibilities and make it clear who’s accountable to who and that includes he’s accountable to the customer. and who owns that, that accountability to the customer, I also think it’s really important to think about incentivization. And consider how you’re incentivizing those different groups in terms of their the makeup of their of their, you know, PPC or comport or however you organize that as a business to ensure that whilst people are focused on the thing that’s most important to their role, they also have that broader view, and are incentivized to work collaboratively. I also think, you know, thirdly, culture is incredibly important in ensuring that that people are pulling together in the same direction,

Josh Schachter
would you be able to elaborate on what you just mentioned around the different incentive plans that you have there? Yeah, I

James Manderson
can do a little bit. Yeah, sure. So I mean, I think, you know, there are some components of incentive plans that are, you know, quite particular to certain roles. So, for example, in in onboarding, something like time to value, you know, what, how short can we get the time between when the customer commences with us, and when we get them up and running in whatever that meaningful milestone might be for your business. At the same time, you know, broadly, it’s important to also incentivize on things like retention, so gross net retention, whatever is right for your business, which helps to balance having this sort of short view and the long view, you know, we employ some mechanisms like company score to translate that thing across groups. But I think that makes it important, we also think it’s quite important in in some, but not all roles, to have a have an OKR component there to account for, you know, not day job kind of project work that that folks might be getting deeper into.

Josh Schachter
You mean, there’s stuff on the side, that’s that, that are exploring to enrich their own career development.

James Manderson
Exactly. Right. But also to push push us forward as a group. You know, there’s, we’re lucky in such a large group, we’ve got a tremendous amount of knowledgeable individuals and obviously want to make sure we’re sort of capturing, capturing all their great, great ideas and moving on the ones that that are right to move on. So how do you do that? So we kind of create a structure where we have company OKRs, and department OKRs, those roll down to teams. And then at that point, it’s a manager’s discretion, how they decide individuals within their group are going to are going to contribute to those, we then do our level best. And it’s hard to capture that good work through things like showcases, making sure our ops team are keeping an eye on things. We also, you know, as people build sort of content, collateral, things like that, we tried to keep an eye on analytics, how much is being used? How much is it being read? Do we then want to scale it to the group, but I won’t pretend that that’s something that I believe we do perfectly?

It sounds like I still regularly come. Yeah, exactly. I

still regularly come across things that I’ve not heard of that the team are doing. And I think Wow, that’s great. Why is everybody not?

Josh Schachter
Sometimes it’s the loudest voices. Let’s talk about your own growth. Personally, in the past nearly seven years, I know you were managing fairly large teams prior to braise, but but your domain did go from managing to around 180. And I suppose you you kind of stepped down in some sense, right of what your management size was when you went to braise for what you had previously. So first, what like why you must have seen something bigger plans and will be able to braise. So that’s the first question. And the follow up is yeah, like what is? What have you learned from going from two to one at average?

James Manderson
Yeah. I mean, to take the first question. First of all, I was really genuinely impressed with the technology. Having worked kind of client side as user technologies, you know, in the same space as Brees, you know, going going back quite a long time to far before anything, even remotely as technologically advanced as brace was available. And databases came on floppy disks. But yeah, I was tremendously impressed by the technology. I also had some personal relationships with some of the some of the folks who had joined the business and you know, through through getting a deeper look at the technology and through signs and meet some of the people who I knew were going to be involved in the leadership or were already involved in the leadership in the business I thought you know, this is really worth worth a go and I think I felt I even if it had not panned out the way it had I think I would have really you know, always regretted not not making the choice to try and you know, have a go prior to Brexit was most recently universal musics. Obviously a very large, very stable business. But yeah, I would have regretted not making the move. And I think that was a big part of the calculus. So that

Josh Schachter
are a bit more dynamic. You know, you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna you’re gonna learn, you know, it’s gonna be there’s gonna be you’re gonna bite off more than you can chew at certain points in time. So what did you process? What have you processed in the last seven years?

James Manderson
Yeah. I mean, a lot. I think, you know, the thing that that that I would say has been has been most important has been You know, being in this lucky position where there’s tremendous talent around me, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve really I’ve got a tremendously strong leadership team, there are people in the department who have who have been appraised as long and longer than me, and have, you know, a real wealth of, of knowledge and, and are a great sort of, you know, trusted kind of support network for that for the department. In addition to that, obviously, one of the great things about the pace of growth we had is that constant inflow of new talent and new ideas, and I think sort of harnessing those things is really important, sort of, generally speaking, I’m a big believer in, you know, that sort of leader servant approach, we all know what’s gonna get done. And it’s important that it does. But you know, there’s, there’s just a tremendous amount of talent and knowledge around and I think, if you can, if you can identify the people and the ideas, and help them flourish, that generally results in at least some level of success,

Josh Schachter
raises President miles Kleeger is also the CCO the chief customer officer. And so what I’d like to know is, presumably, that means that CES, through yourself and through miles, has a seat at the table all the way up to the most senior ranks of the company. And I’d like to understand how that’s helped.

James Manderson
That’s exactly right. You know, we we made, actually, as a business, and certainly I think this has been really helpful in our success, we made an early investment in customer success, which is also why, you know, a lot of the other post sales functions sort of span out of the department over time, because it’s succeeding in doing customer engagement, well, obviously requires tremendous technology. But it also requires, you know, help and guidance. And I think one of the things that that we’ve succeeded in doing over the years is really helping our customers sort of shaped what their internal teams look like, how they, how they actually work together, as well as how they use technology. And that’s something that the leadership of the company believed really, really early, it was actually called out in our, in a lot of our, you know, the materials that were written about us when we when we went public that that early investment, and I think, you know, that’s paid dividends for us, because having some body or some group of people that care deeply about your customers and spend time with them and really understand what they’re trying to achieve, I think is sort of beneficial for the organization at large. And that’s definitely something that, you know, I think we have benefited from

Josh Schachter
being was Manderson we’ll keep it there. Thank you so much for being on this episode of unchained.

James Manderson
Thanks very much for having me. Just great pleasure.