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Episode #30 Why Treating Customers “Like Gold” Is Essential ft. Brian LaFaille (Google)

Taking a company from 50 customers to 3,500 customers is easier said than done; the same goes for growing ARR from $2 million to $250 million in a year. And it certainly goes for helping lead a startup to a $2.6 billion acquisition from Google

Thankfully, Brian LaFaille has hands-on experience with all of that – and he’s here to tell us how he did it. Brian – who now oversees global CS programs at Google after his last company, Looker, was acquired by the tech giant in 2020 – is the latest guest on Unchurned with UpdateAI CEO Josh Schachter. 

Brian shared a number of great insights during his 30 minute conversation with Josh. Some of the topics they touched on include:

– Why treating customers “like gold” is imperative, especially for startups 

– Why scalability should not be a major concern for young companies

– The importance of fostering your first 100 customer “champions”

– Brian’s journey from the Bay Area to living in Joshua Tree 

This is another jam-packed episode, so be sure to check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube! 

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Listening to Unchurned will lower your churn and increase your conversions.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to [Un]churned. I’m Josh Schachter. I’m the founder and CEO of UpdateAI. And I’m really happy to be here today with Brian ile. Brian is the global lead of SAS Customer Success programs at Google. That’s a long and really impressive title. And we’re gonna talk more about that. Brian was previously leading customer success at Looker before they were acquired by Google. And he’s also a very active member of the CS community is an advisor to many startups and has a wealth of experience. So Brian, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it. Yeah, Josh, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.

I want to start things off. Before we get into the real meat of the conversation in the segment, I call the unchained segment unchained. The name of our podcast is in homage to, of course, churn and retention as a key metric for customer relationship building companies. And so let’s go raw and authentic here with this. First of all, where were you born? And where do you live now, I was born in Berkeley, California. So born and raised in the Bay Area in Northern California. And I currently reside in Joshua Tree, California, down in Southern California. So my wife and I moved down here, after about 10 plus years in San Francisco, decided to get into real estate and specifically in short term rentals, and Airbnb, Bs. Before we move down here, basically, we’re watching every episode of Property Brothers and fixer upper and everything like that. And, yeah, we decided to kind of make the jump and move out of the Bay Area. And both she and I work remotely. So we were able to make it work with our jobs. And here we are, what’s the most stark difference between the tech scene in San Francisco and Joshua Tree desert, oh, they couldn’t be more different. You know, you’re you’re moving, you’re moving from, you know, totally urban city life with amazing restaurants and nightlife and community and things like that to like rural California. I think the population in Joshua Tree is something like 8000 people. But given where we are in life, we have two dogs, we actually rescued a second dog when we were we were down here. We had an Australian Shepherd, we’d spent over 10 years in San Francisco, you know, we’re getting a little bit older. And we’re like, you know, hey, the appeal of city living, you know, isn’t as high anymore, right? We’re not going to the restaurants, we’re not going to the clubs anymore. Right. And so, having having some land and being able to work on some, you know, home projects on the weekends was really fulfilling. And so I think it was a good opportunity for us to, you know, try out a different type of life that wasn’t just, you know, honed in on San Francisco. And I’m sure the tech scene differs. I’m sure there’s not quite as many meetup happy hours in Joshua Tree. Yeah, no, I mean, that was also one of the differences. I mean, in San Francisco, the light was so busy, right, because like, we were doing customer success meetups and work happy hours. And it was just this constant, that carousel of activities every day. And you come down here, and what we’re finding is that it’s a much more vibrant and colorful community of creators in one form or another. There’s a lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of people in the medium production space, there’s a few people in tech, you know, there’s some bitcoin millionaires that are out here floating around in the desert.

But it’s a really a eclectic group of people. And I think there’s a very homogenous group in San Francisco, when we were there in San Francisco, it was tech and only tech and all tech. And so to come here and be, you know, in a little bit more colorful community has been really rewarded. Cool. I know you’re active in the community, you like to share insights, you’ve had a lot of insights to share. I’m interested in knowing what is a book that you are reading or have read recently that you’d recommend for other listeners on the call, that would be helpful to them. I’ve been a little bit of a productivity kick in. So there’s two books range by David Epstein that talks about how generalists can succeed in a world of specialization, and so never over indexing and going so far deep into a topic, but actually having a much broader range of experience across different types of topics can help lead to better connections and productivity. And the second one is atomic habits. And I think that one’s like a tried and true, you know, book about productivity. And so both of those are, you know, what I’m reading right now and they’ve had a really, you know, positive impact as to how I lead my day to day, perfect range and atomic habits. Productivity matters right now, we all know that. Let’s get into the core conversation. So you’ve got some really amazing experience having been at Looker for for just over five years before they were acquired. Now you’re

At Google, actually, before we get into your liquor experience, we want to talk about that we want to talk about, you know, the the progression of what ces looked like throughout the different lifecycle stages of looker. What do you exactly do at Google now as the head of SAS ces programs? Yeah. So when we came into or when the looker team came into Google Cloud, we realized as a post sales SAS organization that we were going to be exposed to a much larger sales organization. And so to give you a sense of context of scale, the looker sales team, when we were acquired was about 800 people is seven 800 people. The Google Cloud sales organization, just sales. So like that, that’s it was about 25,000 people.

And it’s it. It’s since grown it since double. So if you actually look at the headcount, that was back in 2019. Today, Google Cloud, headcount is the largest organization are largest department within Google. And that’s because of things like they’ve got infrastructure, the infrastructure team that’s keeping up all the servers for YouTube and all the other services to run right. But you also have the the large go to market org. And so I moved out of you know, spending a long and really fulfilling career growing the entire ces motion, managing the CSM, segmentation comp planning, you name it, we kind of did it over the course of five to six years, we realized that like our model for supporting customers was going to break if we expose Looker to being sold to 25,000 people, we were used to like seven 800 people. And so if that customer volume started to increase, we needed to figure out proactively what are the cracks in our process that if we were to say 10x, the number of new logos that came in, or 20x? How would we do that at scale? And so I stepped out of a day to day CSM management role and more into a program management more kind of cross functional programs later, that worked with the various departments, our sales engineering, Team sales, product support and CS obviously, and how do we support customers at that scale. And our hypothesis turned to be true, right. So after we had been acquired, and we got integrated into the Google Cloud sales, or the number of new logos that we brought on per quarter jumped from about 100 to 120, up to about four to 600, somewhere in there. And so you can imagine that that’s a pretty substantial difference in terms of new logos and how many customers we have to onboard and services that have to be delivered and new renewals that need to be managed. And so that was that’s kind of the the bridge that got me over into programs. And specifically what I focus on is supporting our CSM, that being effective and impactful in the field, digital success strategies, and then all of the things that go into customer journey lifecycle mapping, etc. And coming to Google, that was a an emphasis and focus on the liquor division. But as we honed and refined that process, we realized there was another big opportunity within Cloud security operations, which is another SAS portfolio of products. And that encompasses about five different security SAS solutions. And I’ve since moved over in the last 12 months or so to take a lot of the experience and the things that we did well at Looker, and apply some that same learnings and methodologies to the security portfolio team. It’s known that you helped take Looker, which for those that don’t know, is a data intelligence platform, right that’s used fairly ubiquitously. These days, it’s known that you took Looker from, you know, in your CS involvement there, from 2 million to 350 million Arr, you know, average average revenue rate and from 50 customers to 3500 customers. So, what I want to do is I want to kind of talk through the different phases of the lifecycle on the maturity curve of what customer success looks like, at Looker through the different phases. You know, and trying to do that in the framework of people product process. So, what did ces look like? Let’s talk about you were there 2 million arr. Okay, fine. So you weren’t zero to one. So you you know, it wasn’t the very infancy. It was you probably around your your Series A, you know, type of phase. What did what did the org look like? How did you guys how do you guys manage customers as far as customer success goes at those earliest days? So we didn’t have a CRM, if that tells you anything.

So, yeah, when I came in, this is circa mid 2014. You know, Looker was getting some substantial traction in the market. But this was still the phases of the company in which we had our founder, like getting on with customers and doing demos and trials and things like that. You know, I think that there were a couple of things that students up for success very, very early on. Customer Success was came in a little bit later, but what was formed at the very, very beginning was a dedicated sales engineering organization. So how can we prove and stand up value and train our customers to get value out of Looker very early on the dedicated SAE team. A dedicate

IT services team, I can get into get into that, and dedicated support team. And so I think often, like just having that foundation there, when I came in in 2014, all of those three teams had already been operating for about six to nine months. And they were small, for sure. They were only, you know, maybe three, five people. But at least having that that sort of specialization, kind of help right off the bat, so that when ces came in, and we started to form this, this division that was responsible for renewals, and expansion and product adoption, and things like that, we had strong partners to develop a good foundation and support our customers best.

And you know that there was a lot of conversation back in the day that I was always a part of, you know, do we have dedicated services? Do we not? Do we include an implementation package for free? Do we have customers pay for it? These were a lot of the questions that we were kind of grappling with in the early days. And we determined after doing a couple of AP tests that actually having customers that pay for services, they were more likely to engage, because they had some skin in the game, they paid some money to get some sort of, you know, if you just gave them some sort of, hey, we’re gonna give you a CSM and you know, we’re going to try to get you on boarded in 90 days, and there’s no skin in the game. Customer wasn’t showing up. They weren’t engaged. Right.

And so I think that that’s, that’s some pretty mature things that we had that were stood up on the org design, or like, on the people design front, on the process, it was still very nascent. You know, like I said, we had SES that were, you know, getting involved and stayed on with customers for like, 12 to 15 months. So we hadn’t clearly defined like, what the handoff and the process was going to look like. And that’s because it was still all hands on deck to close every deal. Like, you know, we, if it had been the SES to be involved all the way through or the renewal like, great, we’re gonna make it happen. And, you know, I think that comes down from our founder, Lloyd tab, and he was like, you know, Brian, we will be successful when we have like, 100 big champions. And so we were striving to get those 100 champions, you know, from our first customers, you know, people that would go out and tell our story about how liquor had changed their organization and things like that. So we were scrapping for every logo, and every customer that came on board, we were treating like gold, was that a hard objective for you 100 Customer champions across the client book. So that was the rallying cry, we did not have like metrics or definitions as to what constituted a champion. But when you saw when you knew what it looked like, right? This is the kind of person that like, they were on G to crowds, and they were writing us an amazing review. They were the ones that always wanted to meet with product, because they were so involved with, you know, trying to make the product better, they started to get involved with our community, they were asking about, like, how can I do more with Looker, you know, they were always pushing the boundaries. And so we knew it when we saw it. But it was the rallying cry that I think that we all kind of rallied behind. But no, we didn’t have like an OKR. That was like, we need to measure, you know, these 100 champions, and they’ve got to look like this. And they’ve got to contribute these things. But rather, it was just a way for us to really think about, you know, let’s make sure that we’re building that groundswell of people talking about us in the market, and over delivering for every one of our first customers. And if that means getting our chief product officer on a plane to go visit even the smallest of customers, let’s do it, because we can do that now. You know, we’re funded, we’ve got the runway, let’s make that investment to get these champions. And you know, then we can figure out how to, like make this more systematized on the line. And I’ll come back to my original point, which is, you know, you mentioned that third pillar, which is like kind of product and kind of what of our tech stack look like, when we were managing to everyday got a spreadsheet, right from Bill, we had one master customer spreadsheet. And because we had so few customers, we only had 50 rows in this spreadsheet, right. And, you know, right around when I came on, and kind of mid to late 2014 is when we were going to pilot with with Salesforce. And so we were just bringing on a CRM, we were just bringing on a support tool to manage all of our ticket communications and things like that. But it was still back the wild west of like, what customers are coming up for renewal and everything was being fat fingered into this spreadsheet, right. And we had one person that was kind of like doing all the data of a new deals that closed they were entering everything in. So I mean, it was not a pretty beginning. And I think this is like very startup. But very quickly, we realized that we kind of had had the need to grow out of that. And, you know, bring an actual formal tooling in the form of you know, Zendesk for support and then JIRA for project management. And then we started to build the looker dashboards and insights on top of that as well. So how long did it take you roughly to get to those first 100 Customer champions?

I want to say from when I joined, it probably took us about 12 months. And we we we basically we wanted to have enough champions that we ran a very early version of a customer advisory board. And we didn’t even know what to call it at the time. But you know, in retrospect, this would have been in mid 2015. So I’ve been in the role for about a year. And in that year, we had gone to visit every single customer so I remember in the early days, I dragged our chief product officer and our co founder along and we did 20 customer visits in the span of a week.

He could business weeks and five days we’re doing four meetings a day in the middle of a snowstorm in New York. That person in person. Yeah. Oh, yeah, this is like an in person day. So we lined up 20 meetings with every one of our New York customers. And we would do these like mini meeting blitzes, and we would go to Austin, and when we were in an Austin, we’re gonna meet with everybody. And so we’d like lined every one of them up. We knew that that we could that was that could never scale. Come on, you’re bringing like an executive along to every one of these customers didn’t matter no matter how much they were paying. But that was some of the things that we did in the early days to make sure that we were really investing in the customer experience and that customers felt like they were being seen and heard. And some of those meetings, man, I went to a honky tonk in Austin, Texas was one of our clients. And like, we went out to karaoke, like, there were memories for a lifetime. But you know, I think that was a huge jumpstart to fostering a very solidified relationship with our clients early on. Well, I mean, they say that Honky Tonk builds bridges. So I think that was a great approach that you guys took, but was really interest me, I have this personal thesis, that a lot of that art has been lost, you know, post pandemic, and now in this remote working world, that we used to, you know, go as the small groups to visit customers, or they would even come to us. And you’ve got like, the walk in the hallway, down the hallway to the conference room with your peer, and you’re kind of prepping last minute during that conversation, then you’re, you know, you’re waiting for them to come. And you’re, you’re, you’re rehearsing things, customer leaves, or you leave, right. And then you’re debriefing, and you’re internalizing, oh, what do you hear? What do you hear? And you’re you because you each hear different things as well, especially from different perspectives and different functions are coming from, I think a lot of that actually has been lost. So it’s really interesting to hear you say that that was an effective strategy going along with your your product officer, I’m with you, I feel like the conversation around supporting customers has over indexed and the element of how can we do more at scale with digital success and things like that. But at the end of the day, you’re dealing with people, right, people that don’t have families and friends and motivations and fears and drive and, and when we were in the early days, we wanted to index on building those really strong connections with these individuals, because these were going to be the future champions and evangelists to go and sell the looker product. And I’m so glad that we did that. Because again, a lot of companies and a lot of leadership would be like, Oh, no, we can’t send you know, the head of CES and the and the Chief Product Officer all over the country. And now we can’t do that, right. It’s too expensive. It’s too manual. But I think that because we had the leadership and the funding and the space to be able to do that, that set the foundation for you know, two to five years of just like amazing customer relationships, that all flourished from those, those initial meetings. And so I would I would just offer a counterpoint to all of these people saying, you know, we’ve got to do everything digital and, you know, do things at scale is do things that don’t scale, and do those as much as you can to figure out what really works and over invest in the in the relationship side of SAS. So you can’t quote, do things that don’t scale without citing Paul Graham, by the way,

the great mastermind of that, but I fully agree with you. from a startup perspective, for sure. It’s essential for every company, though, I think it’s really it’s a great way to kind of ground yourself in the right processes. Okay, so this is a year you’d been there you started 2014 2 million arr. Let’s just assume back in the envelope, you guys were at like 10 million arr. Now. So this is the that was the first tranche so now we’re at like, the 10 million ARR to 100 million arr. So maybe you’re from Fifth, you know, 100 customers to 500 customers, your mid market level company? What what changed? What what did things start to look like then? Yeah, so so as we started to grow, a number of accounts started to increase, there was a couple of things that were happening simultaneously. So not only were we retaining more and more customers, so our retention rates were going up. But we also were increasing the new logos that were bringing on board. So that meant that the actual pool and our customer base was growing considerably year on year. And we’re starting to see a little bit of that hockey tick, you know, hockey stick type type growth. And this is where this whole phase of collaboration, it’s specialization came in. And that’s kind of the way that I would maybe summarize it is the collaboration, specialization, phase and specialization, because within customer success, we realized up until that point, we had been filling a lot of gaps. We had been like meeting with customers and doing QBR hours and processing renewals. And we’ve been doing all the things both sales. And we had to have this kind of, you know, moment where we looked ourselves in the mirror and what are we going to focus on? What are we doing uniquely, we’re going to partner with these other departments to really drive value within the organization. And at this point in time, you know, when we when I started the team, it was very much on the spectrum of a commercially led organization retention quotas, expansion quotas, things like that. And realizing that, you know, it looked more like account management to be honest with you and

Over time as we started to add more and more customers, and we’re starting to think about how we can be more proactive and mitigate risk and identify customers that were struggling and help them along their value journey, I realized we needed to change the model and allow for the specialization with the sales team to like, take over the expansion responsibilities, right. And so there was a big commercial change that happened, in which ces matured, and specialized and narrowed its focus on adoption and retention and kind of said, Hey, sales, we’re gonna partner with you on this expansion stuff. But that’s what we’re gonna give away out of Legos here, you guys are going to, you’re going to take that over, right.

In addition, we started to specialize within the support organization. So we started to spin up more regional teams right around this time. So we started to have teams in EMEA teams in the US, we started to do a follow the sun model, so that we could have better 24 by five support. Professional Services also was maturing. So we started to put together a proper service catalog, right, because up until that point, it was basically like an Esso W with 25 hours and we kind of do everything. And so we were like, yeah, now we actually have to say, what we’re going to deliver and what we’re going to, you know, give the to the customer, we sort of have assets and things like that. And so that was kind of the the specialization of each of the respective teams that were touching the customers. And then the collaboration was how do we bring all of these teams together? Right, they all are specializing, they’re starting to specialize because before the company was small enough that I could go and tap this, the SE on the shoulder. But now we’re starting to see these distributed teams that we have the EMEA team, we had New York offices that was being being spun up. We had Santa Cruz, which is our headquarters, San Francisco. So that’s where you know, collaboration started to really kick in. And this is where we actually started to spin up. This is right around the 500 customer Mark, I remember this, we started to spin up Slack channels per customer as part of the like, procedural process, right. So as a new deal closed and customer moved from closed one, we had a Zapier integration that would kick off a brand new channel that would say, hey, based on the Salesforce account, ID, I’m not going to map this slack channel, we’re going to spin it up, I’m going to invite the right people and say, Hey guys, this is now going to be the Uber Slack channel for looker. Invite the SCE the AE the CSM, the renewals manager all these folks be pulled in immediately. And that allowed us to have a little bit more of a collaboration while each of us were all specializing in our respective functions. Now we’re beyond now now you’re approaching becoming an enterprise organization. You’re you’re you’re you’re kissing 100 200 $350 million ARR and 1000s of customers at this point, what does it look like? We just talked about building real IRL relationships. But now at that point, are you all tech touch? What changed in that case? Yeah. So I think that the the collaboration and specialization continues, right? I don’t think that there’s that’s a phase that ever ends, as you get into 2550 100 million, you’ve got to make sure that you’re really connected with the other teams that you’re working with. And so that that was hyper important. But circa 2017, we realized the CST needed to mature and transform yet again. Right. And so at this point, up until that phase, they had been, you know, focused on retention and focused on adoption. And what we realized after taking a couple of, you know, audits with the team and realizing, you know, where CSMs are spending their time, we needed to introduce another specialized function on renewals, you know, because the number of customers had grown. And we found in talking with our CSMs, all they’re doing is processing renewal paperwork, that’s all they’re doing, right? And because of the way that they’re compensated, why should they focus on anything else, right? And so we decided to bring in a new and more specialized role, which is renewals, managers, that is like renewals, operations, right? They’re the ones that are making sure that the i’s are dotted, the T’s are crossed on the contract, we’re making sure we’re doing some sort of uplift if we can, right, so for healthy customers, are we doing a 3% or 5% uplift? Are they navigating with the sales team about what expansion opportunities exists? And so that allowed us to as the CST ended, then transform yet again, and we said where is the business need now? And where we were in our trajectory, we said, okay, renewals are going to be processed by the specialized team, and they got really good at it, right? Because when you were at a CSM that’s doing commercial negotiation, and adaption and relationship building, it’s kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, because sort of thing. But when we brought in some of these, like specialized renewals, managers, man, they were sharks, they were great. And that allowed the CSMs to focus on the relationship building the adoption, the value confirmation bit. And that’s where I think that we’ve kind of landed where we have our CSM today. And so I offer that because that is kind of like the full journey of going from owning Retention and Expansion all the way up to like value orientation and adoption. And there’s still metrics that were associated on with with revenue, right? Grr. NRR C SQL, which is the expansion opportunities. We’re passing with sales, things like that. We’re still judged by those

metrics. But the way we get there is by working with some of the larger enterprise organizations. And we’re doing massive change management and almost acting as a pseudo Change Management Consultant for the likes of a Walmart, right? If I’m Walmart, and I’m rolling out liquor to 100,000 people, that’s going to be a way different and more complicated motion than rolling Looker out to a 50. person organization. That’s a startup, right? Yeah. Very much hands on. Okay, so it’s interesting that you hear a lot of debate of should see us own revenues or not, it sounds like you’ve seen kind of both areas of this. For companies that cannot afford a subspecialty, like a renewal manager, where do you land on this? My grandfather told me something when he was in tech, and he said, Brian, you know, whatever you do in tech, stay close to the cash register.

And it’s always stuck with me. And you know, I think that, like it or not, you know, they’re in software and subscription software, you’re you’re aiming to build a profitable and durable business. And that means that means money, right? So I think that often in CES, we get scared, and we’re like, Oh, my God, no, I, if I introduce, you know, commercials into the conversation with my customer, it’s going to totally erode trust and all these things. I don’t necessarily see it that way. In order for, you know, as somebody in customer success to be respected and valued at the company, there needs to be some sort of monetary metric associated with it. And so I’m firmly in the camp that although we did partner with sales more over time, and we introduced the renewals function, that that renewals functions still sat within customer success, right, we were the ones that were still reporting out, it was a different division, but it was within CES, we owned that renewal process. And so we were the ones that were forecasting what the GRR was going to look like, and what the retention rates were going to look alike and things like that. And so and then bringing, you know, dollars to sales, I think also helped bridge the relationship where we said, hey, sales team, when you guys just go and try to source an expansion opportunity by yourself with a sales rep and you try to go and find some sort of opportunity. This is your close rate. When a CSM brings you a valid opportunity with a C SQL that’s been validated, this is the close rate. And this is that uplift and delta there. This is why you should be friends with us. Because when we bring you an opportunity, it’s not bullshit. It’s not it’s not air and smoke or whatever else, we’re bringing you a valid opportunity that has, you know, often budget need authority, like we’ve worked with the customer, we understand what they need, this is going to be an easy close for you. And so by trying to bring some of those, you know, our goal is to help sales sell more and sell faster. And we do that by bringing them expansion opportunities and bringing them customer stories. And so I think by having those partnerships with sales, it really validated you know, where we stood in the organization to, you know, increase that prominence. I fully agree. I think that customer success teams have the ability to be the superheroes of revenue, especially in a time now where we’re seeing the pipeline getting tough and more competitive, because of macroeconomics, and just because of general competition out there in tech. And it brings you closer to sales that aligns the functions. It is probably more streamlined for the customer as well, to reduce that and incentivizes the team in really positive ways. So it’s good to hear your perspective on this, but I certainly also understand the counter that you know, there should be a pristine and purity, pure nature to the relationships we develop. Brian, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I really enjoyed listening to your story of helping to grow Looker to become a multi billion dollar company and you know and fall within Google’s impressive portfolio. Yeah, Josh, thanks for having me.