Product-led video series: Episode 6

Driving product-led transformation: The evolution of product-led customer success

The most effective customer success (CS) teams have learned that a product-led approach frees CSMs to help customers tackle larger, more strategic challenges. In this roundtable discussion, Ben Carey (Chief Customer Officer, Pendo), Abby Hammer (Chief Customer Officer, ChurnZero), and Alaina Loori (Director of Customer Success Operations, HackerRank) discuss how product led has changed the CS function, share tactics to help CS teams adopt a product-led mindset, and explore predictions for where product-led CS might take us next.

Transcript

Marcus Andrews:
Housekeeping stuff, everything this session is going to be recorded. We will share it with you within 24 hours, and you can share the recording with whoever you like. If you’re having any technical difficulties, if things sound funny or look funny or whatever, just let us know in the chat, we’ll try and help you figure it out. We should have time for question and answer at the end. If you do have questions, you can put them in the chat. You should probably put them in the Q&A, I think that’s the right place for it. Either one, we’ll figure it out. We’ll keep an eye on both.

Marcus Andrews:
This is a very exciting session. At Pendo, this is our second webinar in the Products-Led Transformation Series. Today, we’re really focused on customer success. The things that we’re going to dive into a lot today, and we have a very exciting panel of experts to dive into it with. But, we see customer success becoming more and more products-led. We see companies really winning by making sure that they’re delivering a better product-led experience for their customers and empowering their customer success teams to do it.

Marcus Andrews:
The definition of customer success, it’s changing the role of CSMs, it’s changing how companies work with their customers. It’s very exciting. When I think about it too, every role and every team inside of a company can benefit to help achieve their goals by doing more through the product, and this is especially true for customer success. That’s what I’m excited to learn today.

Marcus Andrews:
We’ve got our awesome panel here to help figure it out. From Pendo, we’ve got Ben Carey. Ben’s our Chief Customer Officer. From ChurnZero, we’ve got Abby. Abby is the Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero, and then we have Alaina from HackerRank, who is the Director of Customer Success Operations. We’ve got some awesome slides that we’ll jump over to, but before we do that, can you just, tell us a little bit about yourself. Ben, why don’t we start with you. Tell us about yourself, your team, what you do at Pendo.

Ben Carey:
Yeah, sure. Hello, everybody. Great to be here. I’m Ben, I’m our Chief Customer Officer at Pendo located in Raleigh, North Carolina, actually here at our headquarters right now, which has been great. But my job is really focused on making sure that we have the right skills, the right models, the right emotions in place to make sure that our customers are achieving their outcomes to the use of Pendo products and Pendo services.

Ben Carey:
The teams that end up rolling into my org, which we call the success org are customer success, professional services, technical account management, customer education, and the support team. That’s a highly level overview of our crew here at Pendo.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. Thank you for spending some time with us, Ben. Abby, how about you, what does Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero mean, and how long have you been doing that?

Abby Hammer:
Hi, everybody. Really happy to be here today. Thank you for having me. I am the Chief Customer Officer, I’m also Head of Products at ChurnZero. I’m part of our founding team. I’ve been geeking out about customer success and how it relates to products for a long time now. We can say ditto a lot to what reports up to me in our customer org is what Ben said. Our CSMs, our professional services implementation, support, our customer education, overall up to me as does our product organization. It’s a great way to have a lot of alignment between our customer and product orgs.

Abby Hammer:
I’m joining you all today from the nation’s capital. I’m about three blocks from the White House, getting some nice sunny weather in D.C., finally.

Marcus Andrews:
All right. Say hi to Joe, for us. Alaina, all right, how about you? Tell us a little bit about HackerRank, your role, what you do there, how long you’ve been there.

Alaina Loori:
Sure. My name is Alaina Loori, I’m the Director of Customer Success Operations at HackerRank Really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been with HackerRank a little under a year now. The CS operations team was a new team that I had formed and I actually don’t want to give away too much of the presentation, because I think I’m going to talk about my role and department in just a few minutes.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. Okay. Thank you. All right. I’m going to share my screen and I’ll show you some slides here, but I think the most interesting place to start with this topic, and maybe just start in general is like, how have customers changed? Before we get into all the details of how CS is changing and what is product-led success. I think a lot of this is driven by how the change that we see in the actual human beings and the people that we’re serving.

Marcus Andrews:
High level question, but Ben, why don’t we start with you. When you think about the big changes in people, what’s different, what you’re seeing in our customer base or people in general, what are you seeing?

Ben Carey:
A couple of things come to mind. I guess, to start, with a little bit of context, I just read, I think it was last night that the average American spends about eight hours a day in front of the screen, and the majority of the time in front of that screen is spent with software. Interestingly, we spend more time interacting with software than we do sleeping, which is definitely a change over the past, say 10 years or so. And we’re spending more and more time with software.

Ben Carey:
I think the wants and the expectations have definitely changed. Some of the big patterns that I see are, number one, this ability or this want to be able to self-serve. The only thing worse than getting stuck in software is whenever you have to wait to get a resolution to why you’re stuck. Improving discoverability, findability, all of those things within the software and getting the right information to customers at the right time, I think has become super important.

Ben Carey:
Another thing that stands out as well is the degree of knowledge and personalization that the applications should have about you, as a customer, or as a user. Recent story of this, I had the unfortunate experience of losing my wallet a few weeks ago. Lost all of my cards and got onto the app, requested a new card, locked my card, and overnight, card gets sent to me, comes in the nice white envelope, no markings on it. I open it up and there’s no sticker on it for me to activate the card.

Ben Carey:
So, I get on the app and face ID logs me in, and I’m presented with a dialogue box that says, hi, Ben, would you like to activate your new card? I just thought that was great. That’s the type of experience that we’re looking for overall. That particular application that bank was able to use that context to understand that number one, I had lost my card. Number two, I’d just received something in the mail. Number three, I was probably getting in the app for a specific reason, which was to activate the card and they made the right guesses at all of them.

Ben Carey:
I think having knowledge, having context, and personalizing those experiences is definitely there as something that customers are looking for. The last one that I’ll mention is a really high level one, but one that we’ve definitely seen the macro pattern of, is that our customers overall and users overall expect their software experiences to evolve with them. With their businesses, with the context that their application exists in.

Ben Carey:
The one I think about here and we have some customers in this space, so it comes to mind very easily is point of sale systems. If you think about restaurants and point of sale systems, and everything that happened throughout the pandemic, those business models have drastically changed. It used to be just a waiter or a waitress sticking a card machine and giving us a receipt that we would sign.

Ben Carey:
But if you think about self-service ordering and kiosks that have started to show up, if you think about the whole world of pickup ordering, of drive up pickup ordering, the world has really changed. Those business model have changed, and that software really needs to be able to support those changes as well. Before we always got a little grumpy, whenever software would change, but now we’ve really come to expect it. Certainly, all of these things have product-led implications and ramifications and ways that we can deal with that. But these, I think are high level patterns that stand out to me, and that we see our customers seeing as well.

Marcus Andrews:
Yeah, absolutely. The pace of change too. It just seems, some of the things you’re talking about when you take a step back, even a few years ago, those would’ve seemed strange or they weren’t imaginable in some cases. Things are moving really, really fast too. Abby, anything to add there? Maybe we’ve got a prompt here for your own expectations too, but anything to add on this idea of how people are changing, what they want and what they expect?

Abby Hammer:
I think Ben said it really, really well. The first thing that I see when I think about expectations from customers is that they’re really high, they’re at an all time high. We used to talk a lot in the customer success in any customer space about customer delight and how you’re trying to hit that really high note with a customer.

Abby Hammer:
I think it’s becoming tables stakes. We just listened to that story that Ben told about his credit card. We love it when software, in our professional and in our personal lives really understands us. Now, the expectation is, well, you must have the data. We all know people are paying attention to what we’re doing. If you know me really well, how are you harnessing that information? How are you constantly delighting me with that information and smoothing out my experience?

Abby Hammer:
I think for those of us who work with customers, it’s now really about how we go from having just-in-time experiences to be successful, versus consistently, constantly being proactive about how we anticipate needs, about how we anticipate goals. It’s those types of partnerships that are going to have staying power versus constantly trying to keep up with someone’s experiences.

Abby Hammer:
I also think I’m seeing the role of relationships changing in customer work. If we think about spending eight hours a day in front of software is expected that might happen. Traditional account management was really relationship based. Don’t get me wrong. No one come for me, I’m not saying relationships aren’t still important. But as we think about the SAS model and particularly as you think about a lot of the macro trends employment in the last few years, and people changing jobs.

Abby Hammer:
The matter is for those of us that work with customers, relationships are no longer the foundation on which you want to build your house. They’re just too dependent on single individuals who may leave, change jobs, whatever might happen. Relationships can certainly absolutely still make or break a partnership, but they are increasingly not the linchpin of a sustained successful partnership. Instead, product adoption, measurable results, a lot of the hallmarks of a product-led strategy are really going to become king here.

Abby Hammer:
When we think about that, we also see that customer’s expectations for how, when, why we’re delivering information and what information we’re delivering is increasing as well. A couple of years back, the idea of giving a bit of guidance when someone came into software was pretty revolutionary. Everybody was doing it. This idea of like, let’s show people right in the app how to do things.

Abby Hammer:
Again, becoming a bit table stakes. We’re now expecting that level of initial guidance, and we want to see it go beyond that. When we say beyond that, it actually gets into domain expertise, I think as well. From their vendors, people want software solutions, sure, but they also want strategic guidance, and they want that certainly from the humans that they work with, but they also want it within the product itself. They want to be a frictionless part of what they experience.

Abby Hammer:
It’s a really challenging set of expectations to come up against, but it’s also a really exciting one. At no point have we had more of an opportunity to really influence experience of customers than we do right now.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely. There’s a lot of opportunity there too. I think what you’re saying is interesting where it’s like, the things that were a delight yesterday are expectations today. That’s tough, especially with strategy and in enough guidance that you’re saying. But I think there is this still… This is also an opportunity too, because you can figure it out, and you can nail it, you can do it well, it’s going to be good for you.

Abby Hammer:
Absolutely.

Marcus Andrews:
Alaina, anything to add on top of this? I think, from your perspective, what are you seeing or what the big trends that pop up for you?

Alaina Loori:
I would definitely agree with Ben and Abby on a lot of those points. I think the customers want things to be easy. They want their software to be easy to use. They want an intuitive UI. They want it to be easy to get started. They want easy access. Ben, you mentioned frictionless experience. I’m seeing that more customers are going towards in-app chat or quick access to learning resources or knowledge base to get their own answers quickly, instead of having to wait 24, 48 hours for technical support to answer you. Jump to the next.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely. Sorry about that. There you go.

Alaina Loori:
The next part again, I think this just builds on what Abby and Ben said, customers want more data. They want to be able to make data driven decisions. They want comprehensive reporting capabilities. I can recall, 15 years ago when I started in customer success and account management, everything was very manual and time consuming and customers just won’t accept that. Like Abby, you said, table stakes of just having those delightful experiences and having access to that data, it’s no longer a nice to have, it’s a necessity.

Alaina Loori:
Lastly, I just wanted to call out that, I think a lot of people in general, just want to be able to connect with others. They want community. Whether it’s through a shared vendor, a similar role or a department, like customer success, people want to connect, share best practices and learn from each other. The idea of being social has gone beyond your personal life and certainly into your professional life.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely. Okay. All right. I think that we’re going to shift… That was great insights around the changing customer and what are these big trends. If you have questions out there, put them into the Q&A about any of the… As we’re going through it live, or something that you noticed or heard that you want to dig deeper into, drop it in there, and I’ll try and work them in.

Marcus Andrews:
But I think we want to talk a little bit now, about some of the principles of product-led success and what does it mean to be a product-led CS team? Alaina, you have a very interesting role. I think you’re helping success teams figure this out, from an operations standpoint. Can you tell us about that? How does success work for you guys? How does your role come into play at HackerRank?

Alaina Loori:
Sure. As I mentioned in my intro, I’ve been with HackerRank a little bit less than a year. Prior to me there was no CS operations team. At HackerRank, I’m responsible for a number of different things, but first is creating scalable and repeatable processes within customer success and also cross departmentally. I also oversee all of our tooling to maximize automation and efficiency.

Alaina Loori:
I work with vendors like ChurnZero and Pendo. I’m responsible for, or I have an analyst on my team that’s responsible creating those scorecards and data analytics so that our CS leaders can make those data driven decisions and really see what’s going on within our business and take action from there. In addition, maybe slightly different than some CS ops teams, I also have technical support, customer enablement and scaled customer success within my team.

Alaina Loori:
In addition to your normal technical support activities, we take our ticket data and we actually use that to help inform what customer trainings do we need, what enablement do we need? Beyond that, we work with our product team to share where are customers getting tripped up, where are the most questions coming from? We actually take that data and use it throughout the business to get better.

Alaina Loori:
Mentioned customer enablement, that team has live webinars, recorded trainings, our knowledge base, learning management system for customers to go through training. Lastly, our scaled customer success team rolls up into CS operations. This is our one to many approach for our customers that don’t have a CSM, but it allows us to use technology to create that personalized experience for those customers.

Marcus Andrews:
Super interesting. Thank you for sharing. Ben, how about you? How about, what does success look like at Pendo? How do you think about being product-led in the terms of how we’re working with our customers?

Ben Carey:
Yeah, sure. I think if you stand back from CSR… CS org doesn’t look much different than I think the stereotypical CS org would look. We still have customer segments that we target with different levels of CSM entitlements and things like that. But the one thing that we do that is drastically different is we build all of that on top of a product-led foundation.

Ben Carey:
That starts to come into play at just about every common touch point along a customer’s journey. If you take onboarding as an example, the one critical area for us in getting Pendo up and going is the initial implementation, which is a light implementation, but it’s extremely important. We do have a human-led emotion whenever a customer first signs their contract and comes in as a customer. We do handhold them through that and make sure that Pendo’s set up correctly because it’s not a safe to fail type of thing. It’s something that we have to get right. We involve humans in that.

Ben Carey:
But if you look at, say for Engage, for our main product line, there’s no incremental cost to add a new user. Whenever you think about users onboarding, as opposed to a customer onboarding, we have hundreds of new users that come into the system every day and we can’t rely on a CSM, nor should we rely on a CSM to walk them through their orientation to the system in general. We do use product-led onboarding techniques there. We know why customers bought our software, and based on those jobs to be done, or potentially we prompt them for what jobs they’re trying to get done, we’re able to guide them and onboard them in a way that is contextual.

Ben Carey:
We don’t need to show them everything inside of our platform for them to be effective, we need to show them the right things. We don’t want to blast them with a bunch of information on their onboarding. We want to show them the right things for them to be effective. That’s one level of product-led onboarding that we have that’s baked into our process.

Ben Carey:
But we can also use those types of interventions or those types of campaigns or that type of contextual awareness to get them the right information at the right time, like with customer education. If we notice that a customer looks like they’re stuck on a page or they look like they’re trying to save something and they haven’t been able to do that or they haven’t, for us, been able, say, to launch a guide for some reason, then we can use that knowledge and that product data to get them to the right level of education materials that could help them along that journey.

Ben Carey:
That may be customer education and on-demand training, it may be recipes, it may be best practices, it may be an overall email campaign. We can use tools either in-app and sometimes outside of the app to help do that. Things like Pendo, ChurnZero can help you do a lot of those things, depending on the interaction that you’ve got with those customers.

Ben Carey:
Similar to that, we have a series of what we call interventions that basically look for anti-patterns in product usage. They indicate that a customer may be stuck or that we want to nudge those customers along a different way so that they are more effectively able to achieve their outcomes. The last thing is we collect a lot of different sentiment across a variety of things. Whether it’s right after a professional services engagement, something like a typical NPS score, maybe it’s some type of usability score around a new feature that we’ve released. We do collect all that data and we synthesize that data and we make sure that it’s exposed to the right people and get the right eyes on it as well.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. Lot in there. I think one thing Alaina was talking about, and you were talking about it too, but it’s like, there’s all this potential data in your product, or coming from customers that you can use to focus your efforts, better help them. You were talking about ticket selling and how you all use that for product feedback and to figure out, there’s a lot of tickets for this thing, we should do something proactive of about that.

Marcus Andrews:
Ben, you’re talking about a lot of great things too with anti-patterns. That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know we did that. That’s very interesting. It’s like, there’s not a thing that people do, it’s a thing that people don’t do that tells us something that they could need or that they might want, which I love. Also, sentiment data and how you use that.

Marcus Andrews:
There’s so much… I don’t know, probably most people feel at this point like there’s just so much data. It’s not like they don’t have enough data, it’s like figuring out how you sift through it and how you use it and what you ignore maybe, and then what you pay attention to. Anything to build on that?

Ben Carey:
I that’s absolutely true, and to Alaina’s point, to match those together around the multitude of data that we have. This is the exact opposite problem that we used to have. For Pendo, it’s why we created Pendo in the first place, was to help solve this problem. But looking at things like support ticket data. I spend a lot of time looking through those verbatims, in the same way that we look through NPS verbatims. Absolutely, there is a ton of great insight in there.

Ben Carey:
Our team here has recently been doing some really cool experiments where they’re looking at, what are the things that bubble up to the top in terms of volume, that we feel like we can proactively deflect, in terms of tickets? There are all kinds of things that start to stand out whenever you use something as a source, like ticket data, and there’s generally a lot of that. You can make a lot of really good decisions and try a lot of really fun experiments based on that type of data.

Marcus Andrews:
Question for everybody, this is from Dan. Thank you for the question, Dan. I think Dan must be at a smaller company, a startup. Is there things that as a startup, like getting started or things that you can do earlier on in your life cycle when maybe you don’t have as many tools as resources or data? It’s a pretty general question, but any advice for Dan? I’m thinking about that.

Abby Hammer:
You go, Alaina. I’ll go after you.

Alaina Loori:
Okay. I was going to say, honestly, invest in software because that helps you not need as many people to do the job, and you can build out… We use ChurnZero for this, but you can build out automation to show you what customers do I need to be paying attention to, and when. It allows one person to do the job of potentially many.

Abby Hammer:
I was going to say, invest in an Alaina. I think one of the mistakes that a lot of young CS teams make is that they wait too long to start thinking about how they operationalize, which you is not uncommon, because some of your strongest leaders in customer success are going to be very driven on EQ and working with customers. It takes a little bit of a different mindset to be successful at fully operationalizing systems.

Abby Hammer:
But if we look at our counterpoints in sales and in marketing, they don’t wait too long to get operations in p;ace, to get data, to get systems in place. It can feel like it might be a little too much. It may be a little too much, at first, but that’s about where you reset your expectations. But don’t wait too long to invest in the resources and in the human specific roles you need to fully operationalize the team.

Marcus Andrews:
Love that. Also, there’s good free tools out there too, not to make it a Pendo commercial, Dan. Pendo has a free product. There’s good stuff. There’s a lot of software companies have startup programs too. There’s always things like that to keep an eye out for and take advantage of. All right, Abby, why don’t we stick with you here? ChurnZero is a company that Pendos love. There’s a really great integration between ChurnZero and Pendo and you guys are battling churn as your name sounds and you work really, really closely with a lot of CS leaders. I think your customers obviously, have a good sense of the market too. I’m curious how you see products-led and freemium and all these factors that are in place, and the modern consumer changing success as a whole, and maybe in ChurnZero. Any thoughts on that?

Abby Hammer:
Yeah, absolutely. ChurnZero has believed in the power of product-led customer programs from the beginning. If you’ll indulge me to quickly tell our origin story, several of us on the founding team all came from the same organization where we had a churn problem. We couldn’t define it. We couldn’t get our hands around it. We couldn’t weaponize our team to do anything against it. A lot of that came down to, at the time, we were not giving our customer facing teams any sorts of information out what our customers were doing.

Abby Hammer:
They were out there acting on hunches and feelings and well, I haven’t spoken to them in a couple of weeks. I guess it’s time to try to check in and see what’s going on. It was very loosey goosey interactions without intentionality. When we got into this space and we started looking around at potential solutions for that org, and then eventually deciding to start ChurnZero, we saw that usage data at the time, wasn’t a central element to being a robust customer success platform.

Abby Hammer:
But even our beta product many, many moons ago now had two ways for our customers to directly integrate their solutions into our solution because our own experience struggling against churn, told us that data was the key to revolutionizing your customer work. The changes that you can make, even with the most minimal of data, just have huge, huge implications for the customer success team and for your customers themselves. Now, in the last few years, as we’ve seen CS teams get increasingly more support and have better partnership with their product counterparts, and as they get access to product solutions like Pendo, we’ve spent a lot of time integrating with those native solutions. Because the most important thing that we can first do for a CS team is to get them the data, centralize that data.

Abby Hammer:
We’ve talked about making data-driven decisions, the first part of that is you have to have it. The second part of that is you want, in the long run, CS and product to have shared understandings of adoption, shared understandings of success so that everybody’s rowing in the same direction. I’ll be honest that when we think about a ChurnZero implementation and what parts of it could take the longest, getting usage data. So, our customers metricing their app and pushing that data into ChurnZero can be the most challenging, depending on availability of the dev team, things like that. Though, I will say, this is why I make a plug for having something like Pendo, then it’s a quick integration and you’re off to the races.

Abby Hammer:
When you think about us trying to set expectations for our customers, one could argue, it would be to our advantage to downplay the importance of usage integrations, because it has the potential to make integration take longer based on our customers availability. But we keep it at the forefront of how we encourage customers to think about customer success, think about ChurnZero, because it is truly the most transformational data, more than any other type of customer data insights into how customers leverage your solutions and what success, what specific measurable success they’re getting from that can really change your customer programs. As our industry… I’m so sorry-

Marcus Andrews:
Not to interrupt you, but there is some questions on that. I think it’s very interesting to hear, trying to understand churn risk and customer health. I think what you’re saying is that, the most valuable data is how they’re using the product and then the outcomes that they’re seeing from that. There’s a couple questions here. One’s from Helen, which is, what is the number one data point you’ve found to help fight churn, which may be hard to answer. But there’s another question that’s around usability scores. What’s the most useful data from your point of view?

Abby Hammer:
Hellen, if I had the one data point, I’d be sitting on top of a mountain meditating somewhere. I would love to have that. I think when people are saying, okay, well, what’s going to give me the biggest bang for my buck? Especially when you want to be a product-led CS team, is to go back to the product. What is your product designed to do? What is the benefit it’s supposed to bring? Why are people putting money on the table for it?

Abby Hammer:
Because a lot of us have products that do a lot of things, but then we think about our central features that are likely our stickiest, that bring the most value to customers, that are hardest to replace, things like that. That’s where I’d focus your attention first. I’d also put out a plug there to be aware of vanity metrics that can lull you into a sense of everything being fine.

Abby Hammer:
One big metric that I sometimes, maybe I’ll upset people, put into that is just straight up login data. Think about it, if someone logged into your product and then did nothing else, is that a successful customer? No, unlikely that they are. It really comes down to what is most important for your solution in making sure that it is specific enough that it’s something you can actually action on.

Marcus Andrews:
Yeah. Can I ask a question here? I feel like this is something that people struggle with, because they can over it maybe too, where it’s like, at Pendo, there is this PES score and you have to define your core events to get to this score. I know it’s hard for people, because you do… Who do you need in the room to figure that out? What are the right teams to figure out, what are the actions that a successful customer takes inside of a product? Any tips on how a CS leader or a product leader could define that?

Abby Hammer:
I think you could justify having a lot of different teams in the room. I think there is a risk of too many cooks in the kitchen. I think starting with your customer product teams where I think it is most important that they are aligned. Then that those things are shared along to your marketing, to your sales teams, things like that. It’s a good place to start.

Abby Hammer:
I think, to extend the cooking metaphor, I usually describe coming up with any sort of health scoring, like cooking. In baking, you’re going to be super precise, measurements, they can throw you off, all these sorts of things. In cooking, you put some stuff in the pan, you stir it around, you taste, you look at your results and then you keep going. You add more things, you season.

Abby Hammer:
I think we need to think about developing understandings of health, particularly if we want them to be predictive, and something that can guide us in the same way. In the same way that you wouldn’t leave a pot just sitting on the stove and walk away from it, you can’t do that with your health scores as well. It needs to be something that’s constantly revisited as your programs grow, as your team grow, as your product changes as your customers change. It’s not a set it and forget it thing. Mostly being in the habit of revisiting, being open to where you didn’t get the result that you wanted and having that drive the conversations is usually a good place to start.

Marcus Andrews:
Love that. I’m not a good baker, but I can cook, because it’s like, yeah, you got to keep seasoning and figuring it out along the way. That’s a really good analogy. I’ll have to steal that. Anybody want to add? Alaina, do you want to add at all?

Alaina Loori:
I would just echo what Abby said, we had our product team and our CS team sit down in a room to identify what were the most important attributes of our product that we wanted to ensure got into ChurnZero, as we were looking at our health scoring. Certainly, I would say, starting with those two teams was good for us.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. Abby, I’m not sure, I may be off your slides here, I don’t know. These are just helpful guides-

Abby Hammer:
Actually, we talked about that slide. I think we got to some of the most important things in there, and that is, you need to figure out how to harness the data, and I think the last advice I would give is don’t be afraid about stepping through the phases of maturity. Don’t boil the ocean. Sometimes people want to go all the way to having everything figured out, everything perfect. The way you’re going to learn, and you’re going to learn in a natural way is easing into it.

Abby Hammer:
I think it’s important to think a little bit about, anytime we talk about something like product-led or customer centric, these words that can take on a life of their own. I like to take a second to think about how do you know if you’re actually doing it versus not? What are the signs that you might be talking the talk, but not walking the walk?

Abby Hammer:
CS teams that are not product-led are going to have a couple of challenges. First, I’ll say, one of my biggest pet peeves from many CSM is when they show up to their leader and they say something to the effect of, “I talked to company ABC, they really love me. They think I’m great, but they’re not going to renew.” Now, done customer work for a long time. Get the impulse there from that CSM, they want there to be an understanding that they invested in the relationship and they did the best that they could. But the fact of the matter is, if we end up in that spot, that was not a successful relationship. We don’t pay thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes to have a friend and a CSM, we pay for results, and that’s going to come from being product-led and having your CS team be part of being product-led.

Abby Hammer:
If you’re struggling at this, odds are your CS team feels a little bit more like a bandaid for an ineffectual product, which is certainly going to be negative for your customers, but frankly also going to be negative for your CS team. You’re going to have a harder time keeping CS talent in your org because it’s an uncomfortable place to be in, to be the constant explainer or excuser of a situation.

Abby Hammer:
You’re certainly going to see challenges with end user adoption and satisfaction. I spoke a little earlier about the double edged sword on relationships. If you’re not product-led, you’re also going to be overly impacted by the loss of key relationships, just because if you’re not anchored in solid usage and solid results from that usage, then the relationship really can pull the partnership in a lot more strong directions.

Abby Hammer:
On the other side, if we are product-led, now we’re getting into a scenario, we talked about health here, we want that to be not a subjective measure, based on a guess or a hunch or things like that. We want it to be defined, we want it to be quantifiable, we want it to be shared amongst CS and product. When we’re in that scenario, relationships become a value add, but not the definer. It also opens up the possibilities of how we work with our customers.

Abby Hammer:
A lot of times we think about customer work, we think very schedule or calendar-oriented. Like, it’s time for a QBR, as opposed to really flipping that and saying, “Well, when does the customer want to hear from me and when and why and how? How do they want to consume that information? How can I get to them and celebrate when succeeding and help them when they’re struggling in real time?” Instead of just following a schedule, if your product-led, now, you have more capturing and capitalizing on the best moments for one-to-one interaction. Those moments can be more focused on strategy, which I think is really, really important.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. There is a good question here from Nick. Any pointer… And we can open this up to everybody here, thank you for all of your thoughts there, Abby. But we can open this one up to everybody, I think, any pointers from migrating from a product building model that’s really centered on decades of satisfying customer relationships, to a model that’s more centered on product adoption and usage data?

Marcus Andrews:
I think that is pretty straightforward, but that’s a shift, culturally, where it’s like, okay, success is defined by maybe happy customers or feedback, to success is defined on account usage data. Any tips on how someone could help bring that change to an organization, or is that even the right way to think about it?

Ben Carey:
Yeah, I do think for a lot of those things, it’s a matter of… The way I would approach almost everything like that is, you probably got a hypothesis and just test it. Start to collect the data, start to look at what the results tell you, take a look and see if there are really correlations. We used to do, if you think about the way customer success overall interacts with customers, it did used to be a lot about gut, and a lot about just pure relationship.

Ben Carey:
There are times that your gut’s right. But if you start off with a hypothesis and you test it, you’ll know. I think the more data you have, the more good data you have, the more you can iterate, and the more you can change direction, neither prove or disprove any approach.

Marcus Andrews:
All right. One more good question here too, and I think this is an interesting one, because… The question is thinking about the reverse, what does a service-led product organization look like? I would love to hear what you all think about it, but being product-led does not mean that the products team running the shot. It’s simply a way of thinking about how you achieve your goals through the product, is at least how I think about it. It’s less about the team. Do you want to build on that at all? Should service teams be concerned about becoming product-led? Does this mean they’re going to have less or is there anything scary about it? How do you think about that?

Alaina Loori:
I would agree with you, Marcus, I think that it allows the service team to give better service by being product-led. I am not at all concerned about being a product-led company. I think it allows us to provide our customers a more delightful experience.

Marcus Andrews:
All right, awesome. Let’s move on to the next section. This is a good one, and I think we’ve got too much content for our hour already, but we’re going to do our best. But this is an interesting one. How has product led growth impacted the role of the CSM, or this shift that we’re talking about in general, how has it impacted the day-to-day work? Ben, why don’t we start with you. Is there any skills or mindset or… I don’t know, what are the skills that a modern CSM need to have? How is their role changing?

Ben Carey:
I think this is also true for the prior services question as well. For the most part, being product-led does not mean that the humans go away. I think in one of our last sessions, there was the comment that product-led does not equal humanless, and that’s very, very true. The nature of the work changes. I think what Abby said, what Alaina just said a second ago around, it allows us to provide better service or better strategy or different ways of thinking. Because what we’ve done is, generally, we’ve taken all those high volume, low value interactions and made those part of the overall product experience.

Ben Carey:
You can use the humans to focus much more on strategy and much more on guidance and much more on inspiration, and that ends up being much more of the role. The CSM’s really evolved to this point of the bulk of the work ends up being a lot around providing strategy and being a consultant, as opposed to telling people how much they’re using the software, how much more they should use the software.

Marcus Andrews:
To interrupt you again, but when I first started working in SAS over 10 years ago, I was a CSM. Being a CSM now, I think is like, you do get to be a lot more strategic. You do have tools. It’s harder in a way too, but I think that’s a great point. Things have gotten a lot easier and you’re doing less manual work than you probably have in certain roles, anyway. It’s a great point. Cool. Alaina, anything to add on top of these ideas? I feel like I’m lost in my slides again here, but anything you want to add on this?

Alaina Loori:
That was, I think my slide that you were just on. No, I would agree with Ben. I also, similar to you Marcus, 15 years ago, or so was, was an account manager. They didn’t have CSMs back then, but would certainly have loved to use these tools in the past because I think it helps elevate the conversation that CSMs are able to have, and they’re able to focus on those high touch accounts. Instead of having that one size fits all approach to every customer.

Alaina Loori:
In the past, I remember calling all of my customers the same amount of times, asking, how are things going? Now, they’re able to have those targeted, data-informed outreaches. I saw this in your tool, I saw you did X, Y, and Z. Let’s talk about it. How can I help? The result is more rewarding and strategic partnerships with our customers, and a deeper insight into what their pain points are, which then leads to that better collaboration with the product team that Abby mentioned earlier.

Marcus Andrews:
Awesome. There is a good question here that I’m going to pause on. Oops. I think related maybe to the last section, but that is okay. There’s a question from Michael, and then another question that came in that are pretty much the same. Somewhere in the slide there was CS is a bandaid is an app description. Michael pointed this out, which I think that really resonates with people. But how do we ensure CS and products alignment? Then there’s another question very similarly, how can product and service teams better collaborate?

Marcus Andrews:
Any tips here? I think a lot of product teams are really eager to work with success teams and support teams, because they’re getting good information from it. But also probably sometimes CS teams don’t have the seat at the table that they need when it comes to the product team. Is that accurate? What tips do you have for people to help?

Abby Hammer:
Actually, this gets a little bit into what we were going to talk about on the next slide is, what are some of the challenges there? I think CS and product still figuring out how to have a good partnership. I think there are some org that are doing it really well. There are some that are still finding their way through the woods. I think when we talk about CS, you’re right, Marcus, they’re often less likely to have a seat at the table. They’re still a newer discipline, they’re struggling to define themselves in the org, struggling to be seen as a revenue center, not a cost center.

Abby Hammer:
They may lack the influence or the power to successfully initiate a partnership with product. If you are on a product team out there and you’re wishing you had more collaboration with the CS team, my advice to you is go seek it out, because in many organizations, not all, but in many, product is coming from a place of more influence, more control than the CS org is. We’re working towards having them be equal weights in the organization.

Abby Hammer:
I also think when you think about, and I’m going to lean into generalities and stereotypes just bit here, but when you think about how product teams typically think and process information and data, versus how CS teams approach their work. I think just figuring out how to communicate with one another can be a real challenge. The number of times as a PM, I got approached by a CSM whose hair was practically on fire, they were so upset about the last thing that happened to them in a call, and they want me to care as much as they do.

Abby Hammer:
The fact of the matter is product cannot live and die by every single customer. It’s not how you make well rounded, informed, data-driven decisions. CS needs to think about how to bring data to the table, which is another reason that getting CS teams data is so important so that they can bring it to other internal partnership conversations and have productive means there.

Abby Hammer:
In the same way that we need CS to lean towards the data, we need product to lean towards the direct experience that CS is going to have working with the customer, because there’s nothing is going to replace insight into how you should develop your product, like seeing a customer use it, like firsthand hearing the challenges.

Abby Hammer:
I think both teams need to think about what is in it for me, from the opposite team, and what can I bring to them as well? You need to work on how you can communicate, what your feedback loops look like, and how you ensure that they’re going to happen consistently. You really need to work on shared definitions. What I think is healthy as the leader of CS should also be what you think is healthy as the leader of product. I do think this is the consummate relationship in the org that we need to figure out is, how to make sure that CS and product are really aligned. Because collectively, they represent what our customers experience and renew on.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely lot of good stuff in there. I think your point around, yes, I’ve seen that from both sides where it’s like you’re the CS person, and you have this very visceral feeling, because you just came off of a tough conversation, and products just like, eeh. But it’s not maybe that they don’t care, it’s just that they have to take all these data points in. Product is hard too because you hear it from sales, CS, customers, leadership, and you got to somehow do the algebra to figure all that out and build the right things. I think that’s a really, really good point.

Abby Hammer:
Absolutely. I think the more you can expose the opposite team to how the other teams thinks, it’s a great way to build bridges. Letting the CS team see a bit about how we prioritize and how we take certain things that were said and find a common… Said by a prospect, said by a customer, said in the space, and find a common solution to that, it’s just an insight they don’t have and it changes how they think in a scenario.

Marcus Andrews:
Anything to add onto that, Ben or Alaina than working with product and helping make sure that they, I don’t know, communicate tips and tricks?

Alaina Loori:
I would just, again, agree with what Abby said, but what’s worked for me in a past life was having a PM come to a quarterly interview, listen to how that call went so that it’s not me just sharing that information, but they could actually hear it themselves, and also jump in and ask questions. I love when there’s really good collaboration between our CS and product, but also when the customer gets involved in those conversations as well, because then it’s a win-win for all that the product team is able to hear from the customer, but also dig in and ask questions.

Marcus Andrews:
Yes. Awesome. Okay. Sorry. Go, ahead, Ben.

Ben Carey:
I was just going to say, I agree with all that/ The only additional thing I would add is make sure the teams eat together a good bit and drink together a good bit and just have a good overall relationship. But I think it’s absolutely true that the orientation that each of those groups come with is slightly different, and the curiosity from the opposite point of view can go a long way. It’s, I think getting the teams talking and getting them curious and getting them to dive into each other’s worlds goes a long way and get you to a good point in the middle.

Marcus Andrews:
Love that. It helps too, when there’s people who’ve come out of support or services and they go into product at the company and you see some of that cross pollination, I feel like that always helps as well. All right, we are close on time. If you’ve got questions, get them in there. There’s been a lot of good questions. We’re not probably going to answer all of them, but I will try to get some more in before we are done. But the next section here is, what are some product-led strategies for CS teams?

Marcus Andrews:
I think one thing you were talking about earlier, Ben, was onboarding. You can see some of them here, but onboarding adoption, expansion, renewal, these are all things that success team can play a role in. But maybe we start with onboarding, what is the role of CS and onboarding versus the product? How do you think about that one?

Ben Carey:
I’ll just give a couple of quick tips here. I would say this is generally a well known space. There’s lots of good materials out there. There’s lots of great inspiration around it. But at the end of the day, a few core concepts can really go a long way. The first, I would say, be intelligent about the onboarding. There are different reasons people are using your software, especially if your software is a platform. For instance, for Pendo, the Engage platform, there’s lots of different reasons to use it, lots of different use cases, but onboarding to a particular use case, or maybe for your app, it’s a particular role.

Ben Carey:
You don’t have to show everybody everything. This concept of progressive disclosure that’s been in place in the user experience world for a long time, I think that helps guide experience very well. It’s a great topic to look into. Another one, I would mention too is finding the aha moments in a product. Almost every product has these. Facebook, whenever you first log into Facebook and you see all your old high school friends show up on the screen or in Dropbox, it’s whenever you see that first document sync across multiple devices, you want to get users to those moments as quickly as possible. Skip everything in between, have them experience that moment, and those end up being the magical moments.

Ben Carey:
Figure out how to get users to those points as quickly as possible. The other thing I would say too, is that we see a lot of customers have a lot of success with is just to have fun as part of that onboarding process. Whenever you achieve a milestone, drop confetti from somewhere and have people really experience that sense of accomplishment or light gamification makes software fun to use.

Ben Carey:
Whenever you think about going into software for the first time, a lot of times it’s full of stress, it’s full of tension. You don’t know what things are. You’re way finding a bit. The more you help guide customers around and the more you help orient them to the software, the better off they’re going to be.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely. Love that. I think there’s a question around how do you fix bad onboarding? Bad onboarding might be hard to define, but I do think the status quo is just dropping people into the product. If you use some of the strategies here that Ben outlines, like, you’re not just going to drop people into the product, you’re going to help give them a roadmap. How about adoption? Alaina, any thoughts on adoption, product-led strategies for CS? How do you think about this?

Alaina Loori:
I will just say, I know we’re short on time and I know we’ve talked about a lot of these already, I would just highlight here, first, share customer feedback with the product team. We talked about that one pretty significantly. From a product-led strategy for adoption, use those product analytics and usage data to prepare for success planning workshops, business reviews. Have that lead those conversations and add value there, and then focus on the right customers at the right time.

Alaina Loori:
We talked a lot about the high touch CSM experience, but for the tech touch, this is really central to how we’ve implemented that here at HackerRank, is we have those plays in the alerts so that the team knows exactly who they need to talk to and why they need to talk to someone.

Alaina Loori:
I know, Ben, you mentioned the aha moments and that quick time to value. But accelerating the customer time to value, it’s something that we’re really fell focused on here, right after onboarding is complete, having a really concrete plan for how we’re going to help those customers with change management and really adopt and accelerate that experience for them. Lastly, I would just focus on customer enablement and building those self-serve learning resources so that customers can train at their pace and also have a consistent training experience.

Marcus Andrews:
Love that. All right. Well, I predicted it, but we are basically at time here. There’s one more question I will ask this… There’s a lot more questions, thank you all for your questions, we’re not going to get to them all. But Abby, can you bring us home on any… What are your thoughts on the future of customer success, product-led success? Any guidance you can give us as a group on what to expect in the near future?

Abby Hammer:
No, I think the biggest thing we all need to be thinking about as leaders in our organizations is how we partner internally. Because customer success, product marketing even, everybody’s got a pony in the race. I think a big pitfall that could be in front of us is trying to beat the other ponies instead of saying like, hey, we should all be pulling in the same direction. It means things might be a little unclear sometimes about who belongs to what, and that sort of thing. But if we can navigate that space of having true partnership around all the teams that can contribute to a customer’s experience, I think we’re going to get a better output, for the customer, for ourselves. We’re going to have more shared metrics and understanding. I think it’s a win all the way around. It’s the harder road to hoe, but it’s the better one to take.

Marcus Andrews:
Absolutely. Okay. I love it. Let me put this one slide back up here. If you have questions that you didn’t get answered, you can find everybody on the panel today on LinkedIn. You can connect with them, send them a DM, ask them a question. But let’s hear it for the panel. You guys are getting lots of virtual applause right now. People at their homes, I know they’re doing it. But thank you all. It was really great. I feel like I learned a lot.

Marcus Andrews:
I know your time is valuable, so appreciate it. Everybody who joined, thank you all. Before you go, there is another… This is a series of webinars, right? We’re going to have another one of these on the product-led transformation, and we’re going to do one that focuses a little bit more on marketing. Hopefully that’s a fun one. Tag your marketing team, let them know. But that is all we got for today. Thank you very much and appreciate the time, everybody.

Abby Hammer:
Thank you everyone.

Alaina Loori:
Thank you.

Ben Carey:
Thank you.

Alaina Loori:
Bye.