In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Claire O'Regan, Director of Customer Success at Juro about how to drive time to value (TTV) for customers in only 14 days.
Getting a quick return on investment (ROI) from new software is essential. But how long should it take for a new customer to start seeing value? And is it actually possible to get customers up and running in just two weeks?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Claire O'Regan, Director of Customer Success at Juro about how to drive time to value (TTV) for customers in only 14 days.
Getting a quick return on investment (ROI) from new software is essential. But how long should it take for a new customer to start seeing value? And is it actually possible to get customers up and running in just two weeks?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika Zer, and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Channel podcast, brought to you by Plan Hat, the Modern Customer platform. This podcast is created for anyone working in or interested in the customer success field. On this podcast, we will speak to leaders in the industry about their experiences and their definitions of customer success and get their advice and best practices on how to run ACS organization. Today we're speaking with Claire Ogan. Claire is passionate about founding and building customer success teams at high growth tech companies. She has scaled CS teams at large tech firms and is now growing startup businesses. Her previous experience includes j O Zero and Swerve. She is also the most recent winner and recipient of Customer Success Leader of the Year. From the customer success excellent awards at J, she has grown customer success from scratch as their first senior hire in post sales delivering high net dollar retention, creating repeatable revenue engine and an employee NPS of 94. Today we will, speaking to her all about how she not only built this high growth CS department, but how her team is delivering implementation. In just 14 days, Claire and her team have been able to drive time to value to their customers in just two weeks. Let's chat to her to find out how she's doing it. Welcome, Claire to the podcast. I'm really excited to have you here with us today. Before we get into today's topic, can you please tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what it is you're doing at J?
Speaker 2:Uh, yes, definitely. Thank you and happy to be here. A little bit about me is that I have built my career almost, almost entirely in customer success. So I've been in this area probably for close to, uh, 15 years, beginning in big tech. So beginning in Google at a time when the concept of customer success I think was quite new and, and was really like, um, a new concept, particularly in emia, maybe had had taken, um, a little bit of a hold in states and was, uh, something that was being developed. I have specialized in building customer success teams from scratch, particularly at early stage startups, usually about series A or B, and being the, uh, first hire on the ground for a customer success organization, either regionally in EMIA or as a, like a first global hire, which is, which is what's happened in in J. So j I've built out a approach to post sales relationship management for our customers, uh, focusing very heavily on implementation and enablement, but also on full life cycle enablement of customers and the ability to, uh, renew and upsell them so that we're, we're growing together. Um, definitely a a passionate customer success head. I'm very happy about, about the work that j has been doing in this area in particular.
Speaker 1:I love hearing it. Also amazing to hear your background and what it is you've been doing, and so focused on customer success, which is really awesome cause that's what we're here to talk about today. But before we kind of jump in a little bit more into the topic, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about J what is it that J does and, and a little bit more about kind of the team you're building there.
Speaker 2:So Jro is a startup in the legal tech space. Um, what we are is an all in one contract automation platform. We are built for, uh, legal teams in rapidly scaling businesses. And so we enable, um, either those legal teams or the teams that they are, uh, enabling in turn to manage all of their, their contracting needs. So everything from creating and negotiating contracts to executing them and signing them, and then the management of those contracts after they are agreed so that the, the information in them is universally accessible and usable by those teams across the
Speaker 1:Business. And I know you've had a long career in customer success, as you've already told us, but you've recently actually received the honor of Cs Leader of the Year from the Customer Success Excellence Awards, which is really amazing. Congratulations on that. But maybe you can share with our listeners what are some of your key things you have done at Gerald this past year or so that's led to the nomination and ultimately the win.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Really, really, really proud of, of that nomination, uh, alone or, or even to be shortlisted. Um, really great list of of nominees and a fantastic, uh, event and a fantastic evening meeting. Some of the, the names that I've been hearing for years and, and some old faces as well. Yes, the, the award was fantastic. I, when I think about the journey that I've had at jro, I think, uh, a lot of the reasons for the nomination were to do with the journey that the team and that the company has been on over the past three years. So I mentioned that I sort of came in and, and grew a team from not exactly nothing. I think there was, there was one head already, uh, in the business, but growing the concept of customer success basically from, from scratch right through at the business looking at the past year that part of the organization is now in a state where it is a repeatable revenue engine. So we've had about three x net ARR growth year on year and reaching about 130% of, uh, net dollar retention if we look at a, a 12 month, uh, rolling basis. So really happy with the repeatable and reliable numbers that are coming out of this side of the business. I think being able to stand beside those numbers, um, bring CS accountability into a go to market team, which has a lot of accountability on new business and on advocacy and building a a really strong community, it's nice to be one of the four or five key contributors there to the, to the leadership team,
Speaker 1:130% net dollar attention. That's amazing to hear. I think that's something very aspirational for our listeners as well. And just a lot of little nuggets there that I wanna dive in a little bit deeper into when we do get into our topic. But before we, we talk specifically about implementation and how quickly the J team is able to get customers to their time to value. Um, curious in this podcast where we're speaking about customer success, you've had, like you said, 15 years in the industry of customer success. Can you please help our listeners understand a little bit about how your focus on customer success has ultimately led you into the growth of director of customer success at j obviously the leader of the year, What are some of the things that you focused on to ultimately lead to this moment in, in your career?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. It's probably a quite a, maybe a quite a simple answer, but I think when you're approaching, uh, a somewhat of a, a blank canvas, it's important to gather as much information as possible and to learn the state of the customer portfolio that already exists, and then to build an approach that's going to be appropriate for, for them. So looking at that journey and how we moved to a state where customer success was contributing as a significant influencer on growth, we looked at things like, um, what the customer life cycle should be based on the existing customer base. So something that we saw was that, um, a tool like jro, it's being implemented by legal teams or operational teams. Um, the implementations that teams like that tend to run when they do embrace, embrace technology tend to be maybe a little bit longer. They, they wouldn't be the, the fastest moving and sometimes there can be friction there. So we realized that onboarding and implementation was going to be the key value delivery for us. And so when we were dividing the customer life cycle into various stages, we did focus quite heavily on those early stages of delivering value, which I know we're gonna talk about in a little more detail. But as we built that as a solid foundation, we found it easier then to bring the same narrative, the same value stories through all of our other interactions with customers as they move into adoption phase or as they come towards their renewal, again, when they're going to be, um, deciding whether to stick with our subscription, which is on a a 12 month basis. So I would say learning from exactly what the needs of the customer base are and then very thoroughly dividing it into stages and investing appropriately in each one was, was a, a key factor in success.
Speaker 1:I love hearing it. I also love hearing the focus on the customer journey. I think that's something that a lot of organizations will only look at when they're first building customer success, but I think you look at it repeatedly from what you've just said, and you are segmenting it out and you are looking at parts and pieces that make sense and you're optimizing and you're continuing to improve upon those segments. One being implementation or onboarding as some companies call it. And that is a topic of today's conversation. You guys have a great metric that I know we talked about, which is 14 days from time of let's say signing up contract to go live or time to value, your first time to value milestone. And I'm wondering, is this part of the reason you won CS Leader of the Year award? Can you please explain what exactly does it mean 14 days time to value? It's a great, it's a great metric.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah, it is. It's fantastic. And it's, it's one of the areas that we're proudest of at j. So j we see the benefit of having such a streamlined and value driven onboarding process in the way that customers speak about us externally. So JS consistently, um, flagged on review websites like G2 and Cera specifically for ease of setups and the quality of, of support that that is given. So that's sort of the external validation of, of some of the work that we've done internally. I think I mentioned that contract management deployments or, um, deployments of tech from a legal standpoint can, can often take up to a year. And when Jro looked at the customers that were most successful in the platform, we saw that those that onboarded quickly, or like to be more specific, those that reached value quickly were the ones that were, um, most successful long term. And also the ones that scored highest in net promoter score and the ones that gave these these excellent reviews. So by looking at the, the existing data, we were able to see that onboarding customers to the point where they were seeing value on their investment as quickly as possible was a very sensible approach, and therefore we looked up ways that we could do that more efficiently.
Speaker 1:That makes complete sense. And I think even as someone who purchases software, as we all do, we all have our own software, is that we are using it as an organization. You obviously, everybody wants to get an ROI as quickly as possible. So it makes complete sense that you guys are focused on that, but also makes complete sense that you're evaluating that and looking at the data and the metrics that show evidence that your most successful, happiest, most engaged customers are the ones that are seeing value in that two week turnaround. But to some businesses that just sounds still super crazy fast, and I think that every business in SAS is different and how you implement is different. Um, what type of customers are you guys implementing at J that's able to get up and running in 14 days? Like do you talked about segments earlier? Does this apply across all your segments of customers? Who is it that's getting onboarded and seeing time to value in 14 days?
Speaker 2:So we would, we would look at different segments of customers and deploy treatments in different ways to them. And, and I think it's important to, to recognize that j as a business targets the mid-market more or less. So our, our ideal customer profile will be, uh, a legal team in a rapidly scaling tech business. Um, that is specifically, there's a generating a high volume of contracts that have relatively low complexity. So we're really clear on the type of customer that we know we can make incredibly successful. And those are, those are the businesses that, uh, predominantly come on board with us internally. We do tier our approach to customers and we will differentiate between enterprise, mid-market and long tail, which is a, like a, I feel a very sensible approach when we're talking about this 14 day average time to value. We're talking about both the long tail and the mid-market, which is the vast majority of our
Speaker 1:Customers. Makes sense. Okay. I'm guessing you guys have an enterprise segment as well, that you're probably doing something a little bit different with then?
Speaker 2:We do. We do. So if we find that engaging with enterprise customers has different expectations and has different, uh, indicators that will lead to longer term success. So enterprise customers, whether that means they're above a certain spend or they are rolling out in, you know, more than 10 countries at once, or if it's a larger project, we will class that as enterprise and we'll run that with, um, like different project management approaches because that's more appropriate to the type of customer that you're speaking to.
Speaker 1:That makes complete sense and also makes complete sense that the 14 days works more for your ideal customer profile, which is the mid-market and even your long tail as well, because like you said, enterprise is probably a little bit different of a beast and it's pretty overwhelming to get someone up and running an enterprise in 14 days, but still something to aspire to. But we did talk about you guys reviewing kind of implementation onboarding and how you guys saw that there were certain metrics that were important that a customer reached in order to see time to value. What made you guys start to think or define 14 days as the ultimate milestone for time to value? Can you talk us through how that was kind of defined?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and I would say this is a, this is a target and this is a measurement that is tweaked over time. Usually on a quarterly basis, we will look at the learnings of, of the previous couple of months, things that we find are now really resonating with customers. We will look at success stories and we'll also look at areas where we had friction and look at ways that we can improve the, um, the implementation process to, to get the value quicker. 14 days or somewhere between, let's say 14 and 30 days is the window that we have seen where customers are most likely to continue their engagement with the, with the onboarding team. So in the first 14 days of, of an engagement, customers will be very keen to dedicate resources to this new project. They are generally at their most enthusiastic about the new tool that's going to, that's going to help them. Um, and they will engage on both admin training and configuration and on end user training where they're engaging end users across their business who are going to be touching this platform. And we will capitalize on that by bringing in like expert product, um, engineers on our side or bringing in, uh, integration specialists to tie our tool to theirs, um, in that, in that sweet spot where they're most engaged with us.
Speaker 1:Again, 14 days was one milestone that you guys looked at. Was there any other metrics or anything else you noticed? I noticed you mentioned that momentum a big key factor. Anyone who's purchasing new software, they're excited, they wanna get up and running, it's in the best interest of everyone to execute on trying to get everyone up and running. But what marks kind of the completion of onboarding or what's kind of 14 days is a timestamp, but at j if I was j customer today, how would I see success in that 14 days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I would say, I would say the 14 days is the result. You know, 14 days is what we are seeing. The, the timestamp or the, or the event that calls the end of the onboarding phase, um, again, has varied over time. I would say when we were much smaller and much scrappier, um, you know, we, we have about 300 paying customers in our portfolio now, but when we were sub 100, we would often allow the customer to sign off on when onboarding was done. You know, we would have a, a very flexible relationship with them and their sign off and agreement that they felt as though they were onboarded was, um, was the only factor. And although we do still incorporate that, we've become, uh, a little bit more metrics focused. So we will look at engagement with the platform and specifically we'll look at the number of contracts that have been created in the, in the customer's dashboard once about about 10 real contracts are created. So not testing, but actual documents that have been sent out for signature. We feel, okay, J is now business as usual for this customer, and we would move them on
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. 10 contract milestones. So that's what where we're working towards. How did you, or let me be more, be more specific, which data did you actually come across that indicated that you guys needed to hit 10? Like, where was that milestone created from? Was it average across all customers? Was it from, you know, industry standards of number of contracts, uh, a customer would be doing? How did you, how did you come to that number?
Speaker 2:Largely it came from our analysis of our own customer interaction with the platform. So it came from looking at the customers that we saw most being most successful on the platform. Bearing in mind we do have quite a lot of data to, um, to use here, probably about quarter of a million contracts were created in j in the past 12 months. So we can see how how those are, are working out down the line. I think the number 10 was chosen because we really focus on identifying a champion and ensuring that the project has sponsorship so that the new tool is adopted across the business. And sub 10 contracts could still just be one or two pla people maybe playing around with the, with the tool, maybe investigating, but not adopting it as they're, as their business as usual. So we wanted to make sure that the tool had exceeded the threshold of what we see as being an engaged customer. And this 10 contracts is a, is a number that's also used in our sales cycle, um, to qualify leads from customers. So if a customer is creating 10 or more contracts in a month, that's one of the qualification criteria for big moving a lead to an opportunity stage and, and sort of that, that tooling element of our thinking internally. So it's a consistent metric throughout the life cycle.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great. I love hearing that. I love that something that starts in presales and something that's a salesperson's, you know, job to also discover within the existing lead is like, Hey, how many contracts are you looking to successfully set up with J? And then it's still something that flows into implementation, which I think makes complete sense because you're setting entire tone of the relationship and you're also setting up goals before the contracts even closed and before you're even starting to implement that customer. Makes complete sense. So with your team, um, that you're growing and building right now, are there team members that have a specific skill set so that they're able to ensure this 14 day time to value is met? Is there something specifically you guys are doing or hiring or training for so that the team can, can hit this milestone?
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>? Yes, I think there is, um, at a general level, I, I really believe that in order to be, to be successful in any customer success role, one of the, one of the most important skills or I suppose attributes is empathy, is able to understand in detail what the issue is that the customer is, uh, needing to solve mm-hmm.<affirmative> and bringing a technology solution that, that can solve that problem. So that level of empathy and of working with customers is incredibly valuable. Yes, in implementation, but also in relationship management and also even in support. Um, probably that's more my philosophy really than, than this role is, is looking at really specifically in, in J. So we are, we are a startup operating in the legal tech space and we are enabling legal teams. We've seen really excellent results from hiring people from that walk of life, but specifically, um, hiring those who maybe did a law degree and, and have the background knowledge but choose to go into tech rather than to go into the role of those that they're enabling. So there's several people on the Euro customer success team who did a law degree, could have been lawyers, maybe even started down the road of being a lawyer. Our CEO actually was a lawyer in a previous life. But see the appeal of a career in tech and they can use their skills to uh, you know, help help others to solve the problems that they were facing in these
Speaker 1:Types of, There's two pieces that I completely agree with that you've just said. The empathy part I completely agree with. I think in customer services, support, sales, whatever you anything customer facing, to really understand what it is your customer wants and why they're buying you and what problem they're looking to solve, we'll help everyone. If you just go in with a mindset of I'm gonna tell you exactly what you need kind of thing, sometimes that doesn't go over well because the customer doesn't need that. Sometimes you just need to listen and empathize and understand what is it is exactly that the customer is looking for with your product, whether it's j or any other product out there. The other part that I completely agree on is hiring customer success managers that have some sort of industry expertise or background. I think in previous roles I've hired CSMs that are, let's say call them career customer success manager. So they definitely understand how to bring empathetic great customer success managers. But I've always mixed it in with hiring, like you said, X lawyers at j so ex industry experts and having that mix of a team really helps execute on the larger vision of the company. So I completely agree and that's awesome to hear that you have so many ex lawyers within j It's actually, I always wanted to be a lawyer, didn't go down that route. So interesting to hear that you guys hire ex lawyers that wanna work in tech<laugh>.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it works quite well for us. We're, we're happy.
Speaker 1:And earlier we did talk briefly about enterprise implementation. We did mention that that can be completely separate and a different beast in its own, and we could probably do a whole nother podcast on that topic, but just so everyone kind of understands what is different in enterprise implementation, we've talked a little bit more detail about 14 day times to value and how your CSMs are doing that for mid-market and tech touch. But what are you guys doing differently in enterprise implementation?
Speaker 2:I would say that enterprise is different right from the beginning. I think in pre-sales enterprise is different. If, if I'm thinking only of what's different from a customer success point of view, the the customer success team is much more likely to be involved in presales conversations. Um, for, for enterprise customers or for enterprise use cases at the moment, that takes the form of our, uh, our implementation team lead who spends about 20% of her time in a presales role, getting involved in these enterprise deals or in these, uh, higher value deals that maybe have a more complex technical requirement will, will begin there, which is beneficial for the customer because they have a greater understanding of what's possible. And they also have, um, a smoother transition from presales to postsales because it will be the same person and the same expert who understood their potential use case actually being the one that's that's implementing it. Um, selfishly it's fantastic for us because we gain a much greater understanding during the sales process of what the customer is going to need. We can prepare so much more when these requirements or these discussions are coming up early. So if, in the case I mentioned earlier of a business that wants to roll us out across 10 or 15 regions at once, we can allocate things like project management resources mm-hmm.<affirmative> for these enterprise deals to make sure that they happen and we can enlist assistance from other teams across the business, particularly maybe the product, uh, and engineering teams who can help to share our, uh, vision of where we see the product going. We can help connect senior stakeholders at these enterprise businesses to our senior, um, representatives in, in that side of our business as well. So I would say it begins in presales and then in implementation it will be a much more project management focused generally, generally longer term, you know, maybe we'd see between 30 and 60 days mm-hmm.<affirmative> for a large like that to roll out. And also we will look to grow with a, a business like that. So we will be looking for renewal and expansion opportunities potentially earlier in that type of a relationship because we are so involved in the needs of the business and we are able to see where we could, um, potentially be, be growing with them or offering more services to them. So it's a much more involved beast. I think you're definitely right. We could speak for,
Speaker 1:We could have another podcast. I'm literally writing notes down of follow up questions to everything you've just said. I'm like, this could be another podcast, but just a few more on that enterprise onboarding, especially what you mentioned around presales and how involved your team is in that pre-sales process. Are they starting to provide some of those time to value attributes or milestones already before the sale is even closed? Is that what's happening already? Can you maybe speak a little bit more to that?
Speaker 2:Yes, I definitely can. And you're correct, they are. So in a, in a mid-market deal or, or in like a, a regular customer deal, any involvement in presales will usually be around sharing expectations with the customer on what the first 30 days of working with us will look like. It's, it's sort of a, an information giving process more or less while about their use case. With enterprise customers, we will often set milestones with the stakeholders in the business. So if uh, and deployment is going to be very large or it's going to be a very large investment for the customer or quite complex, technically we'll wanna have a much more granular understanding of what success looks like for the customer and who the stakeholders are potentially across multiple departments that will be interested in achieving these milestones. And so there will be a lot more mapping of mm-hmm.<affirmative> like relationships between departments and with, between individuals as well as benchmarking. Like we will always look to have as many numbers as we can at the beginning of the relationship so that we can benchmark improvements over time. And I would say there's much more of a sign off process usually in these enterprise kickoffs than there would be in a, in a standard engagement.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. And are you guys still measuring the same milestone of 10 contracts then, is cuz obviously we're not hitting that 14 day time to value as the mid-market and long tail, you already said it's probably double the time if not more for enterprise makes complete sense with the amount of project management that is happening at that level. But are you still using the same internal metric or milestone to say onboarding is complete when an enterprise company has done 10 contracts with J? Is that still the same?
Speaker 2:I would say as a rule, no. I would say as a rule, these are much more custom engagements where we will look at, uh, defining the milestones that are important to this customer. So we will measure everything the same and we will certainly have a lot of our internal tooling and our, our CRMs, which will give the same graphs over time and and allow us to see what's happening. But there will be much more of a focus on agreed upon milestones as the delineators of, of onboarding and activation rather than relying on one metric.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Claire, you mentioned earlier that you are focused on renewal and expansions in the presale into implementation. And I'm assuming that's gonna be across the board, whether it's enterprise, mid-market or long tail, everyone's looking to expand and grow, hence why you have that 130% net dollar attention. What are some of the things that your CS team is doing to identify those opportunities early on in that implementation process?
Speaker 2:Yes, I would agree. We're, we're definitely always looking to, to grow and expand with our customers. We have really excellent low churn rates, which do really help us with this, um, with this net dollar retention overall. Obviously if you making customers successful and you have very little churn, then it's, and it makes your job slightly easier to reach those, um,
Speaker 1:For sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:<inaudible> numbers, yes, I definitely think we look across the board at expansion opportunities and there are a couple of ways that we do that. The best and the happiest way to do that is when we're growing with our customers. So if a customer is more successful, they're creating many, many more contracts or they're bringing many, many more people into the platform, then the, the value recogni recognition of that is a, is a good conversation to have with customers and we'll often build pricing into, into our order forms, which is scalable. So the ideal situation for us is that, um, a customer would have access to the platform and then they would pay more for the platform as they double or triple the number of contracts that we are helping them agree. So they're closing more sales deals, they're hiring more people, they're, they're building on success. There will also be times when customers will have additional use cases that they want to bring us. Mm. And I find that that, uh, that's a really valuable place for customer success to drive the conversation because we, we talk a lot about value in existing use cases and at things like quarterly business reviews, it's a very good time to bring up other potential use cases across the business. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, other businesses that resemble the current customer where we have delivered value by also enabling their HR team who are probably hiring a lot because they're in this rapidly scr scaling, um, phase of their growth or, you know, we'll work with their operations team because they process a similarly large number of low complexity contracts. So probably that's the first example is upselling by more volume. Second example then is cross-selling by finding new use cases where we can, uh, we can work with other teams. It would be our places where we see the most success. And then there are some land and expand programs that we will run in conjunction with sales where perhaps we sell to one company within a group of companies and we'll look to expand or reach across there. And for that type of engagement, we'd usually partner with an account manager or an account execs so that we're bringing a, you know, more salesy, sophisticated approach to the, to the conversation.
Speaker 1:Love it. I also love that you take such a consultative approach to the cross sale or the cross functional way of expanding into your customer base. So like you just said, you've obviously sold to the legal team, but there are plenty of other teams within the business that can actually use your software. It's not like your software is only tailored to legal, it's contracts and other teams within that legal team can, can use it like the hr and, and it's great that your CSMs are having those consultative conversations in order to expand and grow the accounts, which I think all of us, us are trying to do as well. But we can keep talking and talking. Claire, I'm sure about implementation and, and the success you guys have seen at uro. But for our listeners, what are some of your biggest learnings from building this new implementation program that let's say if you were to do it again, something you might have done differently or maybe you, something you've done really, really well that you would've done again, What are some of your learnings?
Speaker 2:I think I've taken a three phased approach to, to a lot of this, this building process. Um, I would probably apply it across the board and, and it's a, a process that I, that I have learned at J which I find works very well. It basically, I would have a philosophy of, of approaching any, any sort of building project in, in three stages. The first one is process. So design your process really well. Know exactly what good looks like, you know, and, and exactly how you would like implementation to be delivered. What all the key markers are that need to be checked off, you know, so have this process documented, probably written down. I love notion, so everything, everything I write down just, just doesn't notion immediately. Second is people mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So once you know exactly what great looks like, then either train your people or hire your people. So if you've got great people on the team, make sure that they aren't enabled to deliver any process like quarterly business reviews, renewals, implementation that make sure that they are trained on how to perform that exactly really well. Or if you're hiring, only hire people after you know what you want them to do. Really care before you start bringing in humans.
Speaker 1:Completely agree. Couldn't agree more on that point. I feel like sometimes people get excited of scaling and growing and adding headcount, but sometimes you definitely need to have that process, like you said, and what the heck they're gonna be doing before you hire them
Speaker 2:<laugh>. So then you have, you have your people either brought in or, or trained. Um, and then number three would be, uh, tooling. So once we know exactly how approaches should look and we have people doing it and doing it well, then tooling can be really helpful to tweak and make things better. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> buying a tool on day one won't solve your problem.
Speaker 1:Completely agree. Music to my ears is Claire<laugh>.
Speaker 2:So, and you need to have people who can deliver on a process really well, in my opinion, before purchasing something to, to make it better. So I I probably, this is a, a pretty disciplined approach that I've seen work at jro and I now have it as my mantra for like how to, how to approach a building project like this. That'd be my,
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds great. I completely agree with the steps and I think that tooling last is super important cuz like you said, you don't know what you need or what problem you're trying to solve until you build a process and you have the team that's executing on that process and then figure out where is it the pain points, what are the tools that you need to actually help accelerate your scaling as well? So I completely agree. Amazing. Again, Claire could keep chatting it. I wanna keep asking you questions, but I wanna move into our quick fire questions, which is gonna wrap up our conversation and the challenges is that you have to, to try to answer the next few questions in one sentence or less. I know it's gonna be difficult every guest I have, it really is tricky, but I'm gonna challenge you to do that. Are you ready?
Speaker 2:I am. I might struggle with the one sentence, but let's see how we go.
Speaker 1:Okay. Awesome. My first question is, what do you think is next for the CS industry?
Speaker 2:So my answer is probably accountability. There has been, and there is still a lot of discussion in customer success about whether we deserve a seat at the table or, um, like being caretakers rather than contributors in at the, at like an organizational level. And I think in order to be taken seriously now that we have a seat at the table, we need to be able to show the metrics, the dashboards, the numbers, and take responsibility for that in the way that, for example, a sales team does.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. Another topic we could probably do another podcast on, but the next question is, what is your favorite app either on your phone or your laptop that you cannot live without?
Speaker 2:Um, probably for this one I would say notion I live and die by by notion and I'm, I'm not the only one at j All of our playbooks live in a centralized resource and it's fantastic for enabling new people, especially as we're hiring at such a rapid right now, quite painful to start, quite painful to document everything when you're not used to it, but worth it.
Speaker 1:I agree. I've done enablement through notion as well. Love it as well. Next question is, what sort of compensations should c SM get? Should it be just a base salary or should it be a base salary plus some sort of commission bonus structure?
Speaker 2:My vote would definitely be basem commission. I think there, it adds motivation. I think it incentivizes behavior, but that it needs to be on the right, on the right thing. So a commission based probably on a North star metric that that person owns. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:<affirmative>,
Speaker 2:Probably something we could talk about for hours is whether that metric and that compensation should be individual or team and I go back and forth on that bit all the time.
Speaker 1:<laugh>, I think it's a tricky one for sure, and I agree it's hard to figure out the balance of compensation and if you should have team or individual or a mix of both. Amazing. Last question is, what is your favorite part of customer success or being a csm?
Speaker 2:Maybe repeating myself a a little bit, but the empathy part of the role or the, the ability to connect with people and solve their problems is the reason I got into a role like this a long time ago and I still get a kick out of, um, getting, getting frontline and probab probably not really dealing with customers myself these days, but like solving a customer problem and reaching a mutually beneficial result for both the customer and my csm. I think that the fact that the, the whole point of the job is for everyone to be happy and to grow together is the motivator and that's the, that's the reason I'm in this, this career.
Speaker 1:I love it. I think that a lot of success professionals feel the same, that their customer success leads to their happiness and success. So I feel the same. Claire, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights, learnings, takeaways for our listeners today. If our listeners do have any other questions or wanna get in touch, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:For me, uh, definitely my LinkedIn probably, so I'm, I'm sure that will, that will be shared. I do operate a little bit on Twitter under the handle, um, at CSM Hero, which is just sort of where I, where I share thoughts on customer success, but it's not as active. So I really would say LinkedIn is the, is the best place to find me.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks and we'll link everything in this show notes, but thank you so much Claire. Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Nice to chat to you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Channel podcast today. We hope you learned something new to take back to your team and your company. If you found value in our podcast, please make sure to give us a positive review and make sure you subscribe to our channel as we release new podcasts every month. Also, if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss in the future or you would like to be a guest on the podcast, please feel free to reach out. All my contact details are in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and tune in next time for more on customer success.