Life as a First CS Hire

Alex Kracov: So before we get into Notion, I'd love to start with your time at Signeasy, your first customer role at a startup. What was it like being the first CS hire at a startup?

Monica Perez: Yeah, I joined Signeasy when it was, more or less, pre-revenue, and I left at about 10 million in ARR. And so the premise of joining that role was, hey, Signeasy is a cool product, primarily consumer or self-serve product. I started experimenting with a B2B plan or like an enterprise plan that seemed to be working. There's one sales person. Then they're like, "Okay. Well, we have all of these customers, and we don't know what to do with them. So we need to bring somebody who's actually going to build a program and be more intentional about how we support our customers." At the time, before I joined Signeasy, I was actually working at an international organization, like an arm of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. What we did was, we were at the innovation department. So we helped government promote innovation and entrepreneurship in their countries. I was focused on Latin America. And so, at the time, I was exposed to a lot of very cool tech startups coming out of like Mexico City and Argentina. I realized, while I love being on the policy side and on the investing side, I actually just want to be at a startup. I want to be on the other side of the table, and I want to be there having that impact. So I was very intentional on switching into tech and trying to find a role where I got my skills are really transferable. And so a customer-facing role, a CS role, kind of client success, felt like a really good fit. I was really excited to join this early-stage startup. The product was like a Docusign competitor. So, yeah, electronic signature solution. I kind of joined to be the first customer-facing person, at least on the enterprise B2B book of customers that they had. Then I had a chance to kind of build that out into various segments and specialization.

Alex Kracov: It's funny. I actually had a pretty similar journey. I was working at a consulting, a marketing consulting thing, in DC as well, directly on political stuff. And all I wanted to do was get into startups and tech. Then you get my whole story. I ended up moving to California and San Francisco, and I found my way to Lattice eventually. So I don't know. It's funny looking on the outside and looking back on it.

Monica Perez: Yeah, our office was at a WeWork in D.C. It was definitely during that WeWork Revolution era, and I definitely was drinking that Kool Aid. So very much sort of that way. I was like, "Startups are the future. I need to be at a startup at all cost." So, yeah, the ecosystem was a really exciting place to be.

Alex Kracov: While you were at Signeasy, I'm curious, what did you learn there that eventually kind of prepared you to take on the role that you're currently at, at Notion?

Monica Perez: Signeasy was really small when I joined, like 25 employees. So I was wearing every single hat. I think customer success was my title, but it was almost like a chief of staff role. I reported directly into the CEO, and we were doing anything and everything. I was doing everything from like monthly customer newsletters about our product launches, to events, presenting at SaaStr, manning the booth at SaaStr, to owning the whole book of customers, running QBRs with all those customers, working closely with sales. So it was a really all hands-on-deck, wear-every-hat kind of a role. I had to use Marketo, email marketing tools. I was in Zendesk constantly answering support tickets. I was also building out the onboarding program. So I would say I learned a little bit of everything, which was great. I reported directly to the CEO, so I also got a purview into what it's like to potentially be raising money and having a board and getting ready for those things. And so I was just really grateful for that because it was like a dive into the deep end of the pool a lot really quickly. He was a great mentor to me. So I think that was honestly one of the best places to start.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, and it seems like you just learned how to become the scrappy startup person who can just figure it out and get shit done and growth mindset, which is like every - I don't know. As a founder now, it's like that's all everyone I wanted my team to have, that kind of experience and that mindset.

Monica Perez: That's right. I specifically remember - this is probably a bad example, and I wouldn't put this on anyone on my team. But I was sending out these like monthly customer newsletters for new features. I was working with our designers to get all the assets ready. Then one of them had to go out. But I was on a cruise, on a family cruise, a really long cruise, like a 14-day cruise during that time. I was like, "Oh, no. What are we going to do? We got to get this newsletter out." I've never missed a monthly newsletter. And so I went into my cabin on the cruise ship. I bought the Wi-Fi on the cruise for one day. We're in the middle of the ocean. I put the finishing touches on the newsletter. I sent it. I watched it go out. It's like 30,000 recipients. I was like, well, I just sent this from the middle of the ocean. It just had to get done. I figured it out. Stuff like that would happen. It was an interesting time. Lots of memories in that sense.

Alex Kracov: I love stories like that. 14-day cruise, that's a long one, yeah.

Monica Perez: Yeah, my family - I grew up in Miami. Everyone is in South Florida. So cruises are just like a way of life. You just hop over to the port. You can take a cruise for any reason.

Joining Notion

Alex Kracov: Love it. All right. I want to switch gears and talk about Notion, which I think we're going to spend most of the time today talking about. So you were hired to kind of build out the CS function at Notion. Can you share the story of how you got the job, why you joined and kind of go from there?

Monica Perez: Yeah, we used Notion at Signeasy for running the startup. And so for all of our documentation, our protocols, our wiki, our knowledge base. I was really big - I still am. But at the time, I was a big productivity nerd following Thomas Frank on YouTube, and bullet journal, and all of those productivity systems. So Notion was great. I loved it. I was obsessed with it. I used it personally and professionally. Then at the time, I was trying a lot of different note-taking productivity tools. I don't know if you guys remember Bear. Bear was a big thing at the time in to-do list and all of these guys. So I was like always on product hunt, always trying to find the latest and greatest. And at Signeasy, I was very lucky to be surrounded by really just smart, tech-savvy people. I was closest with the product leaders. They were always just trying to share cool things like Superhuman email tool. Like, everybody should try this. So we're always kind of looking for the latest and greatest. So I love Notion.

I thought Notion was way bigger than it was when I joined because it was so successful already at that time. But I saw that they were hiring for a customer success role. I kind of just applied and went through the process, to be honest. I think it's a good lesson because I was leading customer success and support at Signeasy by the time I left. I had a full team. I would have considered that maybe a step back to go into customer success kind of IC role at Notion. But I didn't because the stage, the scope, was totally different, much broader. It was going to be a learning opportunity either way. And I think that's a valuable lesson because being at the right place at the right time is the most important thing, more than title. Like if you pick the right place to pitch your wagon, you can ride that wave. And so that was what was important. It was for me to break into Notion at all costs. And it has paid off. But early on, I kind of was going through that mental battle of like, "Is this a step up in the ladder? Is this a step down the ladder?" But really, context is everything. So I was really glad that I was able to be early days at Notion regardless.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I think it's such a good lesson. And I think it's a Sheryl Sandberg quote maybe, where she was like, "It doesn't matter what seat on the rocket ship. Just get a seat and go from there." I felt the same at Lattice when I joined. I was an account director at this agency. I had pretty good salary and a team around me and stuff like that. I was like, I don't really care. I just want to join a startup, and I'll do be a marketing IC. And that's totally, totally fine. And it worked out. It was like the best career decision I ever made. So, yeah, I think that's such a good lesson. And so, what was CS like at the time? Because Notion is famous for product-led growth. Did they have customer support people? Did they have a customer success function? Can you kind of paint the picture? And even, how big was this company? Like you said, you thought it was bigger. What was it like? What was the state of go to market?

Monica Perez: It was 30 employees. The whole company was 30 employees across all functions in, effectively, a warehouse in the mission. We open the garage door, and that's the office. The floors were heated. That was really nice. We didn't wear shoes in the office. We walked around barefoot. And so, yeah, it was like as scrappy as you can think of. It was kind of actually a similar story, which is, Notion is, I think, the poster child of product-led growth. At the time that I joined, Notion was already 40 million in ARR with 30 employees. Just mind-blowing numbers. I remember thinking when I was going through the offer, like, 40 million in ARR? You added a zero. Surely, it's 4 million in ARR. They're like, "Nope, 40." I was like, there's something here. There's some magic happening. And so it was primarily self-serve. Yeah, it was primarily a consumer product. It's still a customer product in a lot of ways, consumer self-serve and, really, just like the poster child of what user love looks like and what community looks like. But then similar premise, it was like, well, we actually have invested in more enterprise, B2B features. We think that we can sell a B2B product, and we can get contracts with companies.

So Notion started providing the enterprise plan. At the time, we had the free plan. Then we had a plus plan, and then we had an enterprise plan. The enterprise plan was no different than the plus plan. Like, no difference. We just thought, like, maybe we can package this up and sell it and have contracts. But the head of sales at the time, this guy named David Apple - he was the Head of Sales and Customer Success at the time, and he led sales and CS at Typeform prior - he was closing the deals himself. He was like, "Yeah, so it's the same as a plus plan, but you also get me. I'll help you out because I'm also like your CSM." That was working. We were actually closing deals. And so we closed a handful of deals. I want to say probably less than 100 enterprise accounts. At that time, they started staffing the team. So I came on as the first CSM for that book of business. It was just kind of like same idea. Like, figure this out. We just need to support them at all cost. Any type of customer under the sun, any type of contract size under the sun. Like, if they wanted to buy 10 seats, we are open to selling 10 seats. We're also selling hundreds of seats global. There was no regionalism or localization going on. It was like just anything and everything. So that was really fun. But we scaled pretty quickly, so I had a chance to - he ended up moving on to a different role, to a CRO role, at another company. I was able to step in and take over the team. Since then, I have been there for over four years. Notion revenue has 10x-ed since the 40 million, and we have a pretty robust global sales and CS team at this point.

Alex Kracov: Very cool. Such an amazing story. And I remember that office. I remember I got coffee with Camille.

Monica Perez: Oh? No way. Yeah.

Alex Kracov: And my fun Notion fact is, I was like your first case study. There's some video out there of me talking about Notion. Camille filmed me.

Monica Perez: With Lattice.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, with Lattice. I don't remember. I mean, we must have been an enterprise customer of sort or something. But yeah, we're huge power users of Notion in the early days. It was the wiki that really saved us.

Monica Perez: Yeah, and Camille is an angel on Earth. She ran all of marketing early days. That included the amazing Notion brand that you know today. It's there in large part due to her kind of mastermind. So I'm glad you had a chance to meet her.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, she's the best. And so you get the CS function. They're like, "Here's your book of business." There's no real guardrails. How did you think about approaching that challenge? Were you just trying to keep your head above water and service and like whatever, more reactive? Or were you able to be more proactive and kind of start building a foundation? How did that sort of journey take place as you sort of stood up the CS function?

Monica Perez: Yeah, definitely a crawl, walk, run experience. I think where we are at today is much more sophisticated than the entire life cycle is really well-run. And how we engage at any point of that life cycle is much more standardized. But initially, it was very reactive. It was a combination of, like, how do we kick off this customer - so we were hyper focused on the kickoff and the first 30 days - and then how do we ensure that they feel supported as they are experiencing all of this growth? And so a big part of the early motion for CS was the fact that our customers could add licenses at any given point in time. And so there was explosive growth happening throughout the year through true-up model. So a lot of that was just like wrangling. Like, where is this growth coming from, and how can we continue to support and enable these teams that are getting onboarded into Notion at these companies? Kind of like herding cats for a long time and like, what's going on? How are people using it? How can we support? I would say, this was slightly pre-COVID and during COVID. So we did benefit from that boom quite a bit. So at the time, we were experiencing average rates of 170% growth. Like on average, a customer would be renewing for 1.7x what they bought Notion for.

Alex Kracov: Pretty good.

Monica Perez: And we saw way more than that. We saw 10x growth, you know. So a lot of it is just like very plg but plg with some sales and CS superimposed. But letting plg really run wild and trying to wrangle what's going on. I think now, over time, where we've gone to is, actually, segmenting our customers. So we put them in buckets depending on size and spend. We actually take them through a very thoughtful sales cycle and a thoughtful CS cycle. I have specialized teams with digital customer success, all the way up to high-touch enterprise customer success. I can talk more about that. Then we have also gone global. So we have CS teams all over the world. We have language sub teams as well. We have French CSMs in our Dublin office, things like that.

Notion's Customer Success Team Structure

Alex Kracov: Very, very cool. Yeah, let's actually go a level deeper on what is the state of - what are all those different teams at Notion today? How do you think about the structure? I'm curious. Do you have separate CS people versus onboarding people, versus support? How does that all sort of play out?

Monica Perez: Yeah, I think we've gone through so many different models. And we will probably continue to evolve and go through any other possible model that you can think of because we 10x-ed in four years. And so we kind of blew past a lot of milestones that maybe some companies linger for a while. We blew past 100 million. We didn't see it. We're at 200, 300, you know. And so the model had to evolve really quickly, and we kind of just had to break things down and build them back up constantly.

Where we are today, which I think is probably the right place to be, is we have a close account executive and customer success partnership. So the account executive will close a deal, but they will actually stay on that account. So that allows for really seamless transition. And because we still have a very strong land and expand motion, it's really important for the AE to help realize that additional growth throughout the year and be there. The CSM is primarily focused on onboarding and then driving product adoption, utilization, and kind of like all of the use cases that we will co-create, continue to deliver on value and go department to department at that company for those highly custom use cases.

And so we did consider at one point having a separate onboarding function, but we realized that Notion's onboarding is not super technical. We're not doing a long data implementation. It's a SaaS tool at the end of the day. We found that if the CSM is driving the onboarding, they're kind of positioned as that advisor really early on, and there's a lot of trust building that happens. So we do do a pretty robust onboarding program. That includes a lot of milestones and a lot of data success metrics that need to be hit in the first 90 days. Then we will take that customer through the engagements throughout the entire year, kind of gearing up for the renewal and beyond. That's at a high level. Within that, there's segmentation as well. So we do have like a digital customer success team that's only tech touch and driving those same touch points but through email and other digital means. Then we have our skill team, which is mostly for our startups and SMBs. We have a mid-market team, and we have an enterprise team.

Notion's Onboarding Motion

Alex Kracov: Got you. I'm curious. I want to spend some time on the onboarding motion. Because what's so interesting is, I assume people sign up for Notion. They just start using it. By the time they get to you, they've already done some stuff in Notion. And so there must be two parts of it. Like, how do you sort of continue the momentum what they're doing? But then there's also like the benefit of Notion is, there's so many use cases. You can use it for so many different things: internal wiki, social calendar, note f, like whatever. And so how do you think about that use case management? Do you say to them like, "Hey, let's focus on these two or three use cases to start," and then kind of go from there? How do you think about that? It's honestly something we struggle with at Dock, probably on a smaller level.

Monica Perez: Yeah, that's a great point. Notion is theoretically infinitely configurable. Therefore, infinitely valuable. So it is a great opportunity. It's also a big challenge. So I would say the philosophy around this has evolved a couple of times. Because I think we originally came from the philosophy of like, "Notion is so cool. It can do so many things. We just need to teach you the most advanced possible things so that you can really get hands on with it." But I think where we've landed is, we are actually responsible for taking our customers through more of a maturation journey with Notion. That maturation journey can take years. But we do want to start with the initial kind of aha and the core value that they're hoping for. We believe that, over time, with more education, then we can go deeper into those more advanced or peripheral use cases. So we do take a little bit of MVP approach and a little bit more of a horizontal approach before going vertical. And so we focus quite a bit on our core bread and butter which is documentation, note taking and wiki. That is the common denominator across all departments at companies. And it's well understood. You need a solution for that. Everybody needs a solution for how do folks access knowledge and how does documentation work. If we can nail that really well, then we do see the opportunity to go persona by persona and then get into more verticalized use cases per persona.

Part of what we do is, we have a use case map. So we have the core use cases per persona. What we try to do throughout the year is to inspire that and to showcase what are all the potential things you could be using for using Notion for today that you're not currently. Like, how can we create a roadmap to get you there? Because the more use cases that we can cover, the more competitor or other products we can displace, obviously, the stickier that we get. So we have seen things, for example, where we'll start at basic note-taking documentation for the whole company. We work heavily with the head of comms or even a COO to make sure that it's well-configured to represent the whole company's knowledge hubs. But then, we'll work with the head or director of engineering to make sure their engineering runbooks are there. Or, then we'll move on to the director of product to see if they can do their PRDs or their roadmapping in Notion. Or, we move on to the head of marketing to see, like, can they do their social media content calendars in Notion, as an example? We found that, in a lot of cases, they could be using specialized tools. But they're not using the specialized tools at full capacity. They're using it for like 10% of what it can do. So we do try to go toe for toe or paint the picture of what moving that use case could look like in Notion, and then go towards more of a consolidation effort. Our narrative is, like, Notion becomes more powerful the more interconnected it is with all other use cases, which is true. It relies on a network effect. So part of what we do is kind of advise on how to get there.

Notion's Customer Segmentation

Alex Kracov: As you expand from persona to persona - from the head of engineering, the head of marketing, the head of sales, whoever - is that like you and the AE doing that? Is the AE being like, "Oh, we should go after their engineering team. Let's talk about that use cases." Is that sort of how it goes about? How do you think about that expansion path?

Monica Perez: It definitely depends on the segment. So for our smaller segments, like our mid-market and below, mid-market and startup SMB, our sales team actually does a really good job of trying to get that buy-in early and build that committee of stakeholders that are going to be responsible and get all in on deploying Notion. So for mid-market and below, our average penetration rate is between 70% and 90%. So by the time that it gets to a CSM, 70% to 90% of the whole company is using Notion, or they bought licenses for. So good, big kudos to our sales team. It's part of our maturation as a business. I think before we were kind of early days, sales was more like taking orders and just taking whatever we can get. Now the sales team is much more strategic and is able to not slow things down but take the prospect through more of a process to bring more folks in and evaluate, like, how can we just get this for your whole company? Because it's not going to be as effective if we're yet another siloed tool at your organization.

Given that we're much more highly deployed on smaller customer accounts, then we kind of promote a Notion council or a train-the-trainers program. So we try to get all of those director-level department heads involved initially. They're kind of the Notion council internally. And so we do work with them as a group of very select stakeholders at that company. As we go more upmarket and we have larger logos, we're probably not deployed across the whole company. We're probably within one specific team at a much larger organization. That one is a little bit trickier. We do rely a lot on our AEs. Because it does involve account-based selling, essentially prospecting, like going after the white space. Then of course, we come behind, and we support that growth.

How Notion Enables Customers

Alex Kracov: It sounds like, as you're talking, you're mainly working with what I think of as like an admin, right? Like the head of a department, some sort of manager person. Then you're maybe working through them to get to the end user. Is that right, like the train the trainer model? Or do you do separate trainings? It's like, "Okay. Work with the admin to get things set up." Then you're like, "Hey, end users. Let's do a big training and talk about Notion." How do you think about that difference between sort of the admin and the end user as you're working with these companies?

Monica Perez: Yeah, we do separate those paths. So we do have admin-specific tracks, and we do admin training and admin enablement. We do train the trainer separately. So who is your Notion council internally? We have programming and specific roles and responsibilities and charters that we co-create with the Notion council. But then, we also work really extensively with the end users. We will run very large group training sessions. That's open for all end users. It's a part of the onboarding. A lot of companies will require their employees to join an ocean training as part of graduating and getting access to the tool. So we run pretty large trainings, like multiple hundreds of users. Notion is really big on communities, so we try to create like little mini communities within our customer account. As a very small example, we encourage our larger customers to create Slack communities for any sort of Notion help or Notion best practices. Put whoever is a Notion Champion. Who is like the Notion lover at your company? Throw them into the channel. We recommend that it's about a 10% ratio of the licenses. So if they bought 1,000 licenses for their 1,000 employees, we try to create a Slack community of at least 100 of those that are almost like the customer success managers on the ground who are out there building in Notion on behalf of their teams. And we will join those Slack channels too to give them our expert advice. But it's around them helping themselves as well.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's such a cool model. I mean, I remember at Lattice - Emily Smith, shout out - Emily was like the Notion power user. Everyone would come to her for advice around how to set things up and whatever. It's such a good model because it saves you guys time and energy. Then you can let someone who really knows that internal company do some of the support and the question handling for you. So yeah, very, very interesting.

Monica Perez: That's right, yeah.

Notion's Onboarding Metrics

Alex Kracov: How did you measure the success of onboarding? Is there a specific timeline you're trying to drive towards specific activation metric? How did you think about that?

Monica Perez: I'm actually very proud of our onboarding program to date. It took a while for us to get here, but it is a pretty robust program. We have different versions of onboarding, again, depending on the segments. For the scale segment - again, these are like startups and SMBs. So maybe the full scope of their deployment is maybe 200 employees. And so their onboarding plan is pretty pared-down. Versus my enterprise segment, their onboarding plan has 55 steps as an example. But what we've done is, we've created an onboarding report card. It is a true scorecard that's available. We use Gainsight in our CRM for every customer in onboarding. Then it kind of shows you how they're performing against those core metrics during onboarding in that report card. Then the goal is to have a score of 80% by day 90. So we say 80 by 90 which is like, did they score 80 out of 100 at minimum by day 90? Some onboarding will take longer than that, especially at the enterprise segment. So there's definitely grace there. But it's a pretty objective measure.

Initially, when we were driving onboarding, we thought certain metrics are important. So we were like, "Hey, we need them to have these many monthly active members," or, "We need them to set up this many templates." It was more of a hunch on what we think are the indicators of great onboarding. But over time, Notion got more resources. We grew. We had a data science team. I posed this question to my data science team. I said, "Hey, we measure all these things of onboarding. Are these the right things to be measuring? Is there some other metric that maybe is a better indicator of onboarding?" They said, "Okay. This is what we're going to do. We're going to do a massive regression analysis, and we're going to look at all of the customers who expanded or retained, had really healthy outcomes. What did they look like 12 months prior to drive to those outcomes 12 months later?" They came back to me with the analysis and they were like, "There's a high degree of correlation on these seven metrics. If these seven things happen in the first 90 days, it's almost a one-to-one correlation that they will retain or expand." It was things like, how many integrations did they set up? That's great. It's a very sticky metric. But we were looking at things like, are they using comments? Are they commenting and collaborating? They're like, "That doesn't matter. Don't even pay attention to comments. Comments has no correlation with retention." I'm like, okay, good to know. And so we were able to pare it down to those seven. Those seven make up our onboarding report card to date. And so it's actually a really exciting thing because I can say, hey, if we hit these seven, we know with a very high degree of correlation that'll likely going to perform well. So we're driving the right inputs very early. That's been a really cool recent development.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's such an amazing story. It makes me realize, too, I got to get my act together around Dock a little bit better too. Because we just have a lot of theories around what we need to do in the first early days. I guess that's just kind of where we're at in the stage of company. But I really want to get more scientific about it. Okay. Just do these three things, and then they ultimately will be happy in the success and retain. So, yeah.

Monica Perez: I mean, it took us three years to get there. You have to have enough customers to be able to gain trends from that. So yeah, I think every company starts the way that we've started.

Alex Kracov: And it sounds like, I mean, you definitely, in your answer, onboarding is really important to get the renewal eventually. But I'm curious. What else do you do between onboarding and renewal to make sure that they're going to renew and hopefully expand? For those big renewal moments, what does it sort of look like post-onboarding as you're sort of working with these customers and driving towards that eventual renewal?

Monica Perez: Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. That's a little bit of the more traditional, like tops down engagements that you would imagine, like QBRs or roadmap sessions, or partnership kind of reviews. But it's a little bit of the bottoms up as well. So I would say, first things first is, data is king and data tells a story. So we're extremely data-centric in everything that we do. We have very robust health scores. We have lots of things that we measure, and they're updated daily. So we're able to see fluctuations in any of those changes and catch them early. Even things like, did they add a bunch of seats overnight? Did they remove a bunch of seats overnight, which might not change the health score immediately but is also a big change in the account. I get reports on this every week. The team can see all of this in their dashboard. I would say, the data drives some of the engagements that we might pick and choose to do versus other ones we might not do them.

So from the tops-down perspective, we are running like regular partnership syncs. We want to come to the table with our stakeholders. What are you seeing? What's the sentiment like? This is what we've heard from you. This is what we're building. Then these are the success stories. A big part of the voice of the customer program falls on my team. We do a lot of that success story or use case curation, and then we're able to collate those stories and bring that back to our stakeholders. And so we can say things like, "Hey, we know for a fact that your engineering team is building their runbooks in Notion. They told us that they love how snappy it is. They stopped using Confluence as much, as an example." So we're able to bring all of those stories back through these more regular cadences of QBR and partnership syncs come to the table discussions. But we are also constantly running education and enablement to even end users. Notion has a learning curve. It's also not like one and done. It's not like we onboarded you, and then you're off to the races forever. There's constant education that's required. So we will do regular trainings. We will do use case - we call them use case development sessions where we help co-create use cases, help those use cases. Depending on how big the customer is, we might go on site and train all their new hires once a quarter. Because they're hiring quickly. So there's a lot of education enablement.

Then the last thing I'll say is, the data-based bottoms-up work is also really important motion, which is like, if we see health scores dropping, if we see risk, then we will almost prospect into that account or continue to multi-thread into that account to figure out what's going on. And who are those influencers that we need to re-enable and get them excited about Notion? Because if we can convert this one influencer, they probably can impact 10 or 20 other users to drive the overall usage up. So we do do quite a bit of bottoms-up enablement and engagement as well. Then internally, as a team, obviously, we're still pretty lean. And so we're just sharing learnings constantly, the playbooks that we're building. We do run monthly risk review, monthly red account meetings with leadership. So we're proactively surfacing any risk that we see on a monthly basis. Then we also have our action plans against those risk accounts.

CS and Product Relationships at Notion

Alex Kracov: You mentioned like you're the voice of the customer. I'm curious. What's your relationship with Notion's product team? How do you think about kind of communicating what's going well with the customers, where do they need help? How do you think about kind of sharing that feedback back with product?

Monica Perez: Yeah, we are constantly collaborating with product. It's a very open flow of information, which I'm really grateful for. Because I think that's not the case at a lot of companies. It wasn't always this way. So again, kind of going back to the evolution, Notion was very product-led and product-centered for a long time. Our product teams were building for end users and the consumer market and also kind of building for B2B. So we were fighting for attention for a while, and prioritization was kind of tough. But where we've come to is, we have much more specialized product teams now. We have an enterprise engineering team, which is great. Then we have an admin product team, which is great. So there's definitely product teams that we don't interact with as much. I don't really interact with the mobile apps team, for example, because it's not hyper relevant. But we absolutely are constantly in communication with our enterprise engineering team, even our infrastructure team, for a lot of performance things. They are very open. We've hired such amazing folks. They're open to joining customer calls. We loop them in constantly. I was just on a call last night where one of our engineering leaders joined. He was great and can easily talk to customers, which might not always be the case. So I would say the dynamic internally is really good and really healthy, because we have clear counterparts now that have the same vested interest as my team does.

The second thing that we do is, we do capture the voice of the customer. So we tag all of the customer feedback. We maintain the tracker of feature requests and feedback. As a whole, I could spend a whole hour talking about how we do that through Gong and all of these automated ways. Then we quantify it all. So we roll it up to the total ARR impact. We roll it up to the total number of accounts impact. It's really quantified, which I think product teams love for prioritization reasons. Once a quarter, we do present our top 10 wish list to our product teams based off of, again, the ARR impact that we're seeing. It helps with getting on the roadmap.

Alex Kracov: I'm curious what this crazy Notion journey has been like for you personally. I mean, it must have been a lot to go from the first CS person, to running a team and to seeing all of this crazy growth from 40 ARR to God knows what you're at now. What has this been like for you on a personal level, and how have you been able to keep up with the company growth curve?

Monica Perez: I think I'm very grateful that I did the job myself for a while before I was promoted to lead the team. That's not always the case as you grow. You bring in really experienced people from the outside, and they didn't do the exact job. But obviously, they have experience in the domain. But I think I've been able to gain a lot of credibility and trust with my team because I did it at Notion, and I've been able to build the strategy at the same time. It's been wild. I think it's been like, I will always probably look back and say that Notion was the career-defining phase of my career. Yeah, I think, for me, it's been an exciting journey but also a struggle. And just knowing when to lean in and knowing when to let go, being stretched and mentally stimulated and mentally challenged all the time but also trying to manage the emotional aspect as well. So I think as I've grown, I've understood, like, okay, there's a lot more people involved. There's a lot more cooks in the kitchen. Our processes have had to evolve to account for this. I still have an icy heart despite leading the team, right? So where I was expected to move really fast or I thought I could move really fast, I actually have to slow down and be more thoughtful about things. So it's just a constant push and pull exercise and learning how to navigate that really well.

There's also much more people, so I don't know everyone. I used to know everybody. I don't know everyone anymore. But trust that our hiring bar and our culture is really strong, so we have great people. But just constantly checking yourself, and what is the most important thing that you could be doing to 10x your team's impact, trying to stay focused, trying to give up control in ways where it makes sense and then really lean into other ways where it makes sense. So yeah, I would say it's like a constant tug of war. But at this point, I've realized it's important to create focus. And so ruthless sense making and prioritization is what I've been getting better at.

Advice for Hiring Your First CSM

Alex Kracov: Yeah, as you're giving your answer, I'm thinking about my own time at Lattice. It just felt like yeah, I mean, I went from an IC to a manager and all the things. It's amazing how your job every six months just changes. It feels like the company changes. You go from like, "You can just do everything," to, "Oh, wait. Now I got to go talk to all these people and get buy in." And it just becomes different. Yeah, it's so amazing. You've been the first CS person, I think, twice now. What advice would you give to founders who are looking to hire their first CS person? When is the right time to do it? What type of person should they hire? What advice would you give?

Monica Perez: I think one of the most important things is that the company and the CEO or founder really believes in the mission of customer success and really understands it, and understands that it's not a catch all or firefighting department. But it actually should be the heartbeat of the organization and is in charge of elevating the customer experience so that nobody is letting their ego going wild but really getting a pulse on what customers are experiencing, what they're feeling, what do they need. Then going after those small pockets where we're seeing a lot of success, how can that actually influence the next thing that we do? A lot of what we have today in Notion on the enterprise plan, for example, has been because of how we've elevated that voice of the customer and what they're looking for and what they expect out of our offerings, and being open to chasing that down and seeing where that leads you. I have seen the opposite. I've seen founders and CEOs hiring CS but not fully understanding what the purpose of CS is. So they're like, "Well, it's basically another salesperson. It's account-based selling, or it's technical support." It's not really either of those things. So really understanding what the customer relationship role is meant to be, that's really important.

The second thing is, I would say, coming in with a really open mind and going back to design principles in terms of how you build out your post-sales customer programs. I think that sometimes you bring in a super experienced CS leader or if I had brought in all of the principles of CS that you get out of a typical textbook and applied them at Notion, it probably wouldn't have worked. I had to keep an open mind to understand, hey, there's certain things that are important at Notion and the way that we go to market that is very different from a different company. You can't just fully plug and play. And so I'll give you two great examples on that. For us, the product complexity is very high. I was at Signeasy where you sign a document. It wasn't that high. Once you know how to sign a document, you got it. And so on the matrix of product complexity and commercial opportunity, Notion is really high on both. And so taking that principle, realize that those are two very distinct roles, they're not one in the same. We need a product person, and we need a commercial person. At Signeasy, it was different. It was low product complexity. And so I spent a lot of my time actually on the commercials. I was more like an account manager type of CS role, where I was trying to sell because product complexity was not there. So I think keeping an eye for those things and understanding how your business and your product intersect, and what are you optimizing for at any given point.

The second thing I'll say on that is, again, traditional CS principles or sales principles might be like, "Okay. You got to have a high touch segment, a low touch segment, a tech touch segment." They have all of these reasons why they're segmenting customers. But when we were building segmentation for the first time, we're like, why are we building segmentation? How will we act on these segments, and how will those motions be different? It has to be for a very specific purpose. So we had to bucket customers for reasons that would influence how we serviced those customers, not just for funsies. And so for Notion, things that are really important are the white space, like the growth potential, where a horizontal product, theoretically every employee at a company. Then also the size of company, also the complexity. Then you touched on this earlier, we have a lot of customers that are coming from the self-serve world. So we even have net new customers versus upgrade customers who have a long history on Notion. So we kind of use all of those factors to build our fragmentation and therefore influence how we service those customers. That's not something that you're able to do unless you understand the business and the product really well, and you keep an open mind to going back to those design principles and white-boarding that out in the best way. So I always say that ability to stay open is probably one of the things that allowed me to build out the strategies that I have at two different companies who are pretty different.

The Customer Success Meetup

Alex Kracov: Super interesting. All right. I'd love to end today's conversation switching gears a little bit and talking about the Customer Success Meet Up community, which I think you started or you're just at least deeply involved in. Can you talk about the Customer Success Meet Up? What is it? How are you involved? I mean, kind of go from there.

Monica Perez: Yeah, so the Customer Success Meet Up, I was not a founder of the Customer Success Meet Up, but I've been very lucky to be asked to come on as a co-director at this point. But the Customer Success Meet Up, I believe, is six or seven years old at this point. It was born out of like meetup, like the platform meetup. It was literally just like, "Hey, we need to meet up with other professionals in this space. Where is the community for us, and where is the space for us?" I think, historically, the community or the space was not quite there, or bundled with sales communities, or, at best, associated with a specific vendor conference once a year, things like that. And so it was just born out of like, "Hey, we want to get people in CS talking to each other and talking about our battles and our wins." It was a very casual meetup group.

The first meetup, they always joked. They ordered a ton of pizza. There wasn't enough people for the pizza. It was like a very sad birthday party. But since then, it has evolved to be the biggest and most active customer success community that is unbiased, a.k.a. not associated with a particular vendor, but the biggest organic community of CS leaders in the country, if not the world. So we have about 5,000 identified members. We have lots of people that float in and out to the various meetups. And so it's led by John Gleason, who now runs a venture firm that specifically funds post-sales companies that are really focused on the NRR growth thesis. It's co-run by Junan Pang, who was formerly leading CS at Slack and now is leading CS at Intercom and myself from Notion.

And so we have this really ambitious goal to culminate years of wonderful, organic community into a huge annual conference with great guest speakers and content that I believe is really timely. Things like, how are we evolving as growth and macroeconomic pressures are mounting? How does AI play a role in this domain? And so there's quite a few really cool topics. So we will be hosting our first ever annual conference on October 3 in New York City. We're very excited, because it's our chance to not only get everyone together but also to just have a really honest and open forum for how are we solving these problems and then having some really great sponsors who are the tools that are solving problems in the space as well.

Alex Kracov: Very cool. I'm excited to attend the conference. I mean, I was looking for customer success communities. There are so many sales ones, and it was hard to find good CS ones. And so I was so excited when I found you guys. I'm excited to be a part of the conference. I'm excited to meet you IRL as well. It will be fun.

Monica Perez: Yeah, same, same. So excited that you'll be there.

Alex Kracov: Well, thank you so much for joining today. It was a great, great conversation.

Monica Perez: Cool. Thanks, Alex. I really appreciate it.

Alex Kracov: Thank you.