When to Hire for Customer Success

Alex Kracov: So I'd love to start by talking about sort of the lifecycle of customer success function at a company. Maybe we'll start in this sort of really early days. When a founder comes to you and asks, "Alright. We have a few paying customers now. Do we need a customer success team," how do you think about that advice? And then what are the typical signals you look for when a company is ready for their first CS hire?

Rachel Provan: You know, I hate saying it depends because that's what we say about everything in CS, right? The reason it depends is because the whole point of customer success is to make sure that the customer gets what they came for out of your product. The benefits of CS for the company are retention and expansion, right? But the point of customer success is to make sure that the customer gets that outcome. So the question then is, are they getting that outcome on their own? Typically, without customer success, about 70% will, which is why a lot of people think like, well, do we really need this, as kind of self-explanatory. That may be. But people are not logical. It's kind of whether, like, are you losing that 30% for whom it isn't logical, and who do need a little bit of hand-holding? Because that's a lot of revenue to lose. It's also like, how much of your time as a founder is being spent on this? Customer support will take up a lot of time for not a lot of additional revenue. I've also found like the less people pay, the more hand-holding they want. So it's a combination of those factors. Usually, success and support. Usually, start with support. You want to do that as soon as it's preventing you as a founder or CEO from improving your product, making more money. When it's slowing down your growth to be dealing with customers, that's a good time to get a support person. Once things are more about strategy and renewals or people are having a hard time getting what they want with the product, that is when I would recommend a CSM. Generally, I would say if you have anywhere from 20 to 50 accounts, it's probably a good idea. I definitely wouldn't have one person managing more than 50 accounts without - you know, you're not going to have the technology to have a person managing more than 50 accounts well.

Alex Kracov: The way I thought about this at Dock, I mean, I think I sold the first hundred customers and onboarded them myself. A lot of them were super small, like one seat customers or things like that. But when I got to the point, I was just so overwhelmed. Every day I was just like, oh my God, I have all these intercom tickets I got to follow up on. I'm just like not getting to the work I need because I'm also the product manager for Dock and the CEO and sales, all this stuff. It was like I was just feeling so stressed internally that I wasn't able to get to the work that I needed to make customer successful. And so yeah, for me, it was more of like a feeling that I had in the pit of my stomach. Rather than, oh, I had this specific metric or this specific customer account that I was looking for, I was just like, ooh, I think it would be helpful for me to have somebody. Then I can kind of go focus on other areas of the business that I need to be doing too, like product and sales and stuff like that.

Rachel Provan: Exactly. It's like, is this costing me money to do this myself rather than pay someone else to do it? That's something I ask myself all the time with many things in my business. And every founder should do that no matter the size of their company.

Dealing With Smaller Customers

Alex Kracov: The other thing you mentioned, which I find such a funny dynamic, is that the smaller customers are just way more demanding. And it's wild. In some ways, I love it as a product manager and founder. I'm like, I want to hear all the stuff that's wrong with my product and all the stuff. On another level, it's also like in some ways it's annoying. It's like, you pay me $60 a month. I have customers who pay me $25,000 a year. You're bothering me way more. And so it's such an interesting dynamic. I'm curious, your take on that.

Rachel Provan: The people who are paying you $25,000 a month are used to paying people $25,000 a month. They have been in business longer. They know how things go, so they don't need as much hand-holding. The people who are paying you $600 a month, they're probably not very big. They probably don't know a whole lot about business. So part of what they need from you is that guidance. Ironically, a lot of that would be like either CS or digital enablement. But you learn from these people like, all right, what don't you know? How can we teach that to you in a scalable way? But it's like they're not used to paying for things like this. They're used to trying to do everything themselves. They're not used to like, okay, understanding that having time to do other things brings you more money. They're still looking at it as like, "I am paying you for this, so why is everything not absolutely perfect into my specifications even though you built this for more than just me?" They don't quite get it yet. They're young.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, and I've also found that those smaller customers, you just need to be way more prescriptive with. They want to be told the best practices. I mean, this was the same at Lattice, my last company, where it was like we did performance review software. It was like, they just want to know what are the three questions that you ask in the review. That's it. Whereas the big enterprise customer is like, you have to mold to their process. They already know what they want, but you just need to fit to their side. And so it's such an interesting dynamic of the, I don't know, different mentality of the customer and sizes.

Rachel Provan: It's also a matter of like what are you selling and what are you saying yes to, I think, early on with companies. You're trying to get customers. You're like, "Yeah, yeah, we can do that," and doing whatever it takes to get to yes. It becomes very unscalable very quickly. You can't customize it for everyone, or you'll have a franken product. There's no way to update that.

Alex Kracov: Totally, yeah. But we've tried to do it at Dock because we have managed and unmanaged accounts.

Rachel Provan: Of course. Of course.

Alex Kracov: Then from a product perspective, it's like, we care about everyone obviously. But we care more about managed, and we listen to that feedback more. We focus in that way. It's generally working, but it definitely distracts us. If there's a bad bug, unmanaged customers dealing with, we still want to help them and we still fix that.

Rachel Provan: Of course. Of course.

Alex Kracov: And so it's such an interesting dynamic, although part of me dies a little. It's like, oh, why are we spending enough time on that when we could be building some awesome feature that helps us get $100,000 contract or whatever it is?

Rachel Provan: And that's always the battle between CS and product, isn't it? Product is like, "We want to be working on the new shiny thing. The new shiny thing is going to fix all our problems and bring in all these new customers." CS is like, "Yes, but your existing customers are really, really mad because what you have built does not work." Sometimes that's the case, and sometimes it's just a few really loud complainy people. But there is always that battle, and it can be very difficult to weigh those two against each other.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, especially in the early days when building product and companies, when you're pivoting. I remember at Lattice, we sort of went from a goals product like OKRs to performance reviews. We sort of under invested on goals. Lattice eventually ended up building goals again, but like we kind of churned all the goals customers. They were all really mad at us. But it was like, hey, we changed as a business, and we're focusing on this now. And so it was better for Lattice. Lattice ended up being successful, and I was right. But it was painful to watch the churns come in and to have people upset at you. And that's not what you want. Because I like making people happy, obviously.

Rachel Provan: Yeah, in CS, too, it's often that's incredibly painful. Because we're measured on churn, right? We're measured on retention. When it's like, well, we made a business decision to not serve these people anymore, but we're still measuring you on how many of them stay. As a CS leader, I've been in this position, of course, where companies pivot. I've worked in a lot of startups where companies pivot and I've had to say, "Hi, totally get the direction we're going in. It makes sense. However, this is how much revenue we have tied up in what the company has been to this date. We have to expect - I'm going to throw a number out there - 80 % of them to leave because we are no longer providing the value that they're paying for." We have options. We can do like a step-down program where they're paying less. You want to give them the time to find another solution. You still want to treat them well on the way out. But as a CS leader, you have to say like, "All right. I need these taken out of our team's target, or my team is going to be really demotivated." You have to find a way to not screw over your existing customers. I see people doing that. Did you see Canva just had to walk something back?

Alex Kracov: Oh, not yet.

Rachel Provan: Because I see this happening with several softwares I use where, all of a sudden, companies are tripling the price. ActiveCampaign did this. Leadpages did this. Canva was kind of the first one to do this recently. They basically had a team. You could have up to five people for this $120, $200 a year or something like that. All of a sudden, they decided like, nope, now each person is going to be $200 on your team. We're sunsetting that plan, and now here's 5x what it was. And people were not happy. Obviously, everybody just kind of like took their other people off the plan and was like, "I guess we're going to share a login, you know." They actually walked it back because they lost so much revenue. That doesn't happen so often. But if you don't give people the time to find another solution and pivot off - like I have a subscription that just went from $250 to $888 a year, and they gave me 30 days' notice. They apparently knew about it earlier in the year, but they waited for all their customers to give them 30 days' notice. It's like, "Oh, but it's 30 days of extra AI features." No one wanted that. None of your customers asked for that. It's your shiny new toy. But by knowing that you're changing your business model and not letting your customers know, it's like the opposite of marketing. Because an angry customer is going to talk about it so much more than a happy customer.

Alex Kracov: And so what's the right way to go about that, like if you were one of these software companies doing CS? Because I get it from a product software perspective. You're adding a lot of new features. You think you sort of deserve more money for those features you ship. The product keeps getting better. But I also get it from the customer perspective. Like, oh, wow, big build. They see that coming. What's the right way to sort of approach that?

Rachel Provan: The bummer on that is, you know, there is a part of that that is a problem on product and the owner of the company in that people have shiny object syndrome. They're like, "Oh, I want to build this. Someone else is building this." They never bother to ask their customers. Do you want this? Just because you added a feature doesn't mean someone wants it. So you either need to keep a lower plan in which people can keep their existing plan. Or, if you truly believe in the value of what else you're providing, you should have a plan that provides that for the additional price. But you have to be able to show people here's why it's worth paying that. Not just, "Look at all we've done. Now you owe us three times the money." It just does not go over well. The best way to raise prices is with, you know, look people under - it's also how much you do it, like how much you do it by. If my product goes up $100 or $200 for an annual subscription, okay, I get it. The cost of everything has gone up. If it triples, that's greed. That doesn't feel good as a customer. It doesn't feel respectful.

I actually sent a couple of these companies, like, look, as someone who's someone who's been in CS for 17 years, here's how you do a price increase. You give 6 to 12 months of lead time, letting people know that like, look, we're doing the price increase. New customers, they're paying for this going forward from right now. We so appreciate you being an early adopter. Obviously, our product has grown. The number of people we have working for us has grown. To keep existing as a company, this is what we have to do. Out of appreciation for you, we're going to give you a year to get to that price, or we'll give it to you for six months for this price. And at a year, it'll be this price. That tends to cushion the blow, make a lot more people stay.

Alex Kracov: It makes sense. Yeah, giving people optionality and don't accept those features. I think I saw a thing even like yesterday. Like Slack has AI now, obviously. Then they were like-

Rachel Provan: Who doesn't?

What to Look For in Your First CSM

Alex Kracov: Yeah, and I was like, I don't care. I don't use it. Maybe one day, I will care. At least, it was like, hey, you can upgrade this if you want. But I think I'm still able to just keep my normal Slack subscription. I should probably go check that. But yeah, all right. It was a very fun tangent we went on right away. Will try to get back on script. Going back to the early days of building out a CS function at a company, what type of profile do you look for as a first CS hire? You mentioned care. Is it sort of a more junior customer care support person, or do you want a more senior CSM person who can lead onboarding and renewals? How do you think about that?

Rachel Provan: I think you want a support person first, but that doesn't mean that they should be a CS leader. So I would hire someone to handle support ticket, have someone who can manage them. You don't have to be an expert. I don't think you have to be an expert in support, but you do need to understand like Zendesk or whatever you're going to be asking them to do. You can have people be a combination of CS and support. But again, sort of at that 50 to 100 range, you're going to need to split out CS from support.

In terms of hiring, that's the point where a lot of experienced senior CSMs are able to make the jump from CSM to manager. Because you're going to need them as a player coach for a while. I also think that's the only situation in which player coach is appropriate and only for a short amount of time. Because you cannot manage accounts and build strategy at the same time. One requires an in-the-weeds view, and one requires a higher, more strategic view. But take somebody who's risen fairly quickly and who really seems to understand customer success, that understands what it's for. You have to understand, what do I want customer success to do? It shouldn't be different in every company in terms of like what it's here to do. Like, oh, here it's there to sell. Here it's for support. It's not a miscellaneous department. But it's like, do I have a product that even has upsells? Do I have a product that's so technical that I need somebody who's really a technical account manager in terms of when you actually want to strategize customer success, where you're creating a plan, to create what I call customer value realization maps? Just like how do we get the customer to that value. Because it's only once you do that that they will stay and that they will buy more.

And again, most of that is, "Are we having a problem yet?" It's only once you start to see churn where you're not expecting it where it's like, "We didn't change anything. What the heck happened?" People are like, "I just didn't really see the value." That's where it's like, you saw it when you bought it. So something happened there when you're seeing that more often. Because I mean, even just hiring a CSM and putting bodies on the accounts will increase your retention. But that is not going to give you the same kind of customer success department that Salesforce has. I see a lot of startups being like, "We're too reactive. CS is too reactive, and they need to be upselling more. Why isn't this happening?" It's like because they're working off a spreadsheet, you know. It's like they don't have data. So you have to understand that it's in different stages. But I would get CS once you got 50 customers. As a rule of thumb, to me, that would be a good time to bring it in.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I have found, at least the early days, we hired Maddie, who's a fantastic CS person at Dock. She's so good at product, which is great for customer support and helping people figure out how to do things, and then also getting the feedback back to the product team and then helping people get set up. Then now as we've sort of onboarded bigger customers, it's like, okay, we got to be good at product and be more consultative and strategic. I have that same feeling of, we're too reactive. But I have also understanding of like, all right, well, we have 250 customers. It's hard to be proactive across that base. There's less vantage. But yeah, it's tricky how to do that.

Rachel Provan: You absolutely can be proactive, but there are steps to a maturity model of CS. It's reactive, informed, proactive, predictive. The reactive is: we don't have any data coming to us, so we just take what comes at us. Informed is when you start to get some data and systems in place. But you've got to be willing to spend the money on that and the bodies and the time to set it up.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, and I've tried to focus. It's also be like, all right, let's be proactive with these 20 accounts. Everyone, let's just take a subset. These are the 20 that matter. Let's go after that.

Rachel Provan: Yeah, absolutely.

How to Structure a CS Team

Alex Kracov: We can at least do that. We can't be proactive at 250 because there's me and her. But yeah, it's tricky. I'm curious, like, is there a rule of thumb as you grow the sale, I mean, grow the CS team around number of revenue each CS person should handle, or is it number of accounts, or maybe it depends? How do you think about that?

Rachel Provan: I can tell you as someone who worked with a product that was over a million dollars a year and as somebody who worked with a product that was $1495 a month and it was month to month. Those two things. I can't say like you should handle two million dollars. One is going to be completely overwhelmed. One is going to be twiddling their thumbs. So you look at, you know, it's kind of a bottom-up approach. Would it be bottom up? It's just top down. I don't know. It's math. You look at, how long does it take me to serve a customer? What's involved? What is everything I have to do on my end, that kind of customer journey mapping, to serve a customer and to get them where they need to be? For a more reactive, early-stage customer success department, that's going to be more hours because you don't have things automated. Usually, they're in different systems. And just that switching between systems takes up a lot of time. So it's really, how many hours does it take to serve a customer on average, and how many customers do they have? You have to listen to people when they say, "I'm at capacity." Hopefully, you want to hire before people. Because CSMs want to help so badly. They're people pleasers, and they will burn themselves out. They will work till eight o 'clock, nine o 'clock and not tell you they're doing it. You have to check in on them, being like, "Hey, how's your account load?"

Alex Kracov: Yeah, one tactic I found was just like calendar auditing, creep on their calendar and see. Like, oh my god, you are in so many kickoff calls for onboarding or renewal, whatever it is. Then it's like, all right. Then I see you responding to all these tickets. Like, okay. Then weekly, there's a vibe check too.

Rachel Provan: And there's prep time.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Provan: Like adding that stuff into the CRM, things like that. One thing I do advocate for - this is kind of a hot take that not a lot of people have started doing, but I think they will - getting sort of CS admins, people that you can just hand off your notes and everything to, even AI notes and whatever, and get it in the proper systems. Or, let's say, you need your data cleaned up. Hire a one-off contractor overseas to take care of that instead of having, "Oh, let the CSM do it." I have a VA who does a million things for me for $7 an hour. Should I be paying someone $60 an hour, $50 an hour to do a $10 an hour task? No. So stop giving them $10 an hour task. Pay someone who makes a lower rate to do more of that administrative work, and you will get much more strategic CSMs who will be able to handle a lot more accounts and actually move those accounts forward and get more out of them.

How to Partner CS with Sales

Alex Kracov: Makes a lot of sense. That's really good advice. I'd love to shift gears a little bit and talk about CS' roles across the customer journey. Maybe we should actually start on the sales side. What's the right way for CS to partner in an actual deal before it becomes a customer? I feel like sales always wants CS to come in and be like, "Look how amazing your onboarding is going to be. It's all going to be great. They're going to deal with you."

Rachel Provan: No, that's a hard no.

Alex Kracov: What's the right way to do it?

Rachel Provan: It's called, "That's your job. Quit trying to put it on us." Yeah, sales loves to do that. They love being like, "Oh, why don't you give the demo? You're so much better at it." It's like, okay, you're going to give me part of your commission? CS always has way too much on their plate, is the fact. I've been in sales. It's a lot more glory for a lot less work. It's hard work. I don't prefer it. But people don't understand how much work CSMs have to do. CS is post-sale. It cuts off there. The way they should work together, there should be a sales-CS handoff, which doesn't have to be crazy. Some CS people will be like, "Here's a three-page document." I'm like, no, get out of here. They're not doing it. Who are the key players? What are they trying to achieve? Is there anything they hate and red flags? Is there anything really different in the contract I need to know about? Okay. Give us our goals, who the key players are, and we should be okay.

I also think the best way for CS to work with sales and marketing is to give them feedback about what customers are saying about the product, like the positive things they're saying. In marketing and sales, you have personas. You have these cards of like, okay, this type of persona needs this messaging, or this role of someone at this kind of company, here's what we say to them. CSMs are the one with that info. If we say to you, "Okay. Well, you have a lot of customers in manufacturing. The ones who are in manufacturing, here's what they say they like about the product. Here's what they say has changed and revolutionized things for themselves." If you use that customer language for those specific kind of customers, there's going to be that instant resonance. It's something that you're not going to get unless you are talking to those customers. I mean, even with Gong calls or whatever tool you want to use for that. Just record those little moments of where they're saying "Yeah, we really love this," and use that in your messaging. Not as a quote but as a template.

Alex Kracov: I find those tidbits so helpful too as a founder in thinking through the product roadmap, right? Because it's either like, all right, we have a use case that's working really well. Let's run towards that and build more stuff for them, the manufacturing segment or whatever. Maybe that should be our whole company as we go out for manufacturing. Or, let's actually run towards the stuff that's not working well and try and fix all the things. That's a separate type of decision. But it's important. The voice of the customer is so essential to building a successful company, I believe.

Rachel Provan: And that gets harder the bigger you get. Because the more feedback you're getting, what tends to happen is that there isn't an organized way to go through it and to communicate it. And so what happens a lot is, CSMs will fill out some sort of ticket or feature request and be like, "Here you go. Here's what they want," and throw it over the wall to product. It's like, okay, you know. And I do tend to think that we need to own that better. It's okay to have it in a big, old Excel sheet. But then run it through like a ChatGPT or something like that to say like, "All right, what were the main requests here? And also looking at who they were from. Was it from the mom-and-pop place on the street, or was it from Amazon who makes up 80% of your revenue? Those things all matter. But it's like, is this going to be 70% of our customers want this, or is this like one guy keeps saying he hates the color green and wishes we wouldn't use it for buttons, you know?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's so true. I think, I mean, this comes back to company maturity, too, I think in the early days. Right now, at Dock, we have a Slack channel where people dump all of the feedback in. Then it's sort of on me to figure out what's most important. But then at Lattice, we got to the point where it was like, okay, we had a monthly quarterly meeting where CS, sales, product, marketing each had their own little spreadsheet, each had their own stack drink things with columns of customer size, who requested it, and how often it was requested. It became a much more of a sort of scientific process, if you will. Even that, you got to be careful of overengineering towards that. But it at least wasn't like, all right, we're paying attention to this one random guy.

Rachel Provan: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're not logical beings, you know. We have recency bias. We have like, I heard this more often. I was talking to a group of people about which do you think you're more at risk of dying, of a shark attack or a falling plane part? 30 times more likely to be hit by a falling debris from a plane.

Alex Kracov: Really?

Rachel Provan: Right. But you don't hear about that as often, so you don't think it's more likely, right? Because it's much more publicized when there's a shark attack. But we don't necessarily - and that's just us not hearing about it. We could still hear about it. But because we're not thinking about it and it's not something that we've noticed or we feel is relevant to us, it'll still go right over our head. So we can try, but it's still not going to be scientific.

I think that there's a more important part of this, where if you're going to be constantly giving feature requests and explaining what customers are mad about, you need to be making sure in customer success that you are giving that feedback of what customers really like as well too. Because it's really easy to have customer success be coming in and calling your baby ugly all day. It's like, they don't like this. They're complaining about this because that's their perspective. That's what they're hearing the most. They're not hearing from the people who call up and are just like, "Hey, CSM, I just wanted you to know we love your product." People don't do that. But it's just, no one is going to listen to you if you tell them they suck all day long. They're going to be like, "You have bad judgment."

Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. Honestly, that's like the hardest part of building a company, as you hear so much negative feedback of this bug, this thing, that thing. It's like, you just look for these little glimmers of, oh, well, they're happy, or this is working good stuff. And so yeah, it's a funny thing. I have the benefit of doing this a little bit once before, so I sort of know that that's like the game. But if I didn't, I'd be like, oh, God. Sort of it just gives you anxiety. So it's funny. The psychology of all is really, really interesting, yeah.

Rachel Provan: That's why I focus on it.

Why Live Onboarding Doesn't Work

Alex Kracov: So you're super big on integrating psychology into just the customer success function. Let's talk about onboarding, like from a learning perspective. Why is live training maybe not always the best way to onboard customers?

Rachel Provan: It's expensive and time-consuming. And it's not necessarily better. You can have the sense that people are there, and therefore they're definitely going to get trained because their butt has to be in the seat. Can you tell if they're reading email? Because I can't. They probably are, and are multitasking in some way. And even if you do the live training, we forget 90% of any trainings or any instructional stuff within 24 hours. But people don't like to be like, "Hi, I completely forgot what you told me yesterday, and I now don't know what I'm doing." People aren't comfortable saying that. So you're far better psychologically to drip training and have it in multiple modalities. So for people who like to just listen to things, you can have video. Because people can kind of multitask with that. You can have, something like Scribe can create screenshots if people want to see that. I tend to think video is great along with - I really like what Loom does in that you can record a Loom video and it will then, if you have like the paid AI version which is not expensive, you can, with a click of a button, create an SOP out of what you just recorded. Or you can create a ticket. It knows how to interpret things to do that. But that I have found hugely helpful in CS for creating SOP documentation. That's really, I mean, it extrapolates things that I wouldn't think of. It's like, be sure to watch out for XYZ, which like I never said in there. So you want to have those different modalities for people who are readers, for people who are watchers, listeners that keep it short, like short little pieces, make it easy, give them a win. We get very few wins in our day, and we're very easily addicted to dopamine. And if you don't think so, how far are you from your phone?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, right here, too.

Rachel Provan: So having any sort of in-app sort of acknowledgement that they're picking something up, that they did the right thing, is going to make them like your product more. Even a little burst of confetti, that does a lot to our brains. You can have an email do it too if you can't do it in app. You're like, "Congratulations. We saw you did X, Y, and Z in the product today. You're moving right along. Look at you. You're a star." People need that. You can make it more formal or less, but you need to give that brief reward. I tend to think of adoption, which is really the point of all of this, of adoption as habit formation. The way that we form habits is, you have to make them small. You have to make them easy, and you have to make them rewarding. Because if it's not tied to a reward, you're not going to keep going back for it.

Alex Kracov: Isn't it the same whether you're doing like PLG onboardings - you mentioned some of like the confetti in the app - versus like more enterprise onboarding where you're dealing with multiple personas and admins, and it might take six months? How do you think about the enterprise onboarding side, maintaining momentum, separating out all the personalities? How do you think about that style of onboarding?

Rachel Provan: That's going to take a lot more work. I still believe much of it is, you're able to record a lot of it, templatize a lot of it. Because you're teaching people to do the same thing. So if you have sort of like choose your own adventure paths - like I use Calendly as an example a lot. Because even though they are PLG, they have a ton of enterprise accounts. And if you look on their website, even their marketing does this, but their CS does this too their onboarding. They have the easiest product in the world, right? Book a meeting here by pressing a button, like link up your calendar. They don't need to say more than that. But they have different marketing for, if you're in customer success, book three times more QBRs. This company increased their retention by 10% just by implementing Calendly, versus HR departments increased time to hire by 23%, make bookings seamless with your interviewees and stuff like that. Speaking to the language of what they specifically are trying to accomplish. It's still going to be the same how-to. But by using that language of here's what's in it for you, here's why you should bother, that's what's going to make people actually do it. So yeah, you can do it with a human. You can do it with email. It's a matter of testing what's most effective and how complicated it is. If you do have a really tech-heavy enterprise product, you're going to need people, and you're going to need technical account managers. You need to understand the nuances of those accounts. If you want to be serving enterprise customers, you need to know how to weave in all those different requirements and be set up for that.

How to Make Renewals Easy

Alex Kracov: I've often found you really got to split out the admin side of things, the technical setup, getting things going in the app and product versus the end user enablement and training, which is radically different. And if you get that out of order, it's going to go haywire. Users are going to be like, what's going on in here, and so on and so forth. So yeah, it gets tricky. I've also heard you say churn sort of starts with a bad implementation.

Rachel Provan: 100%.

Alex Kracov: And so I'd love to talk about renewals in churn and what you can do sort of leading up to the renewal? Because a renewal is like a conversation and a moment. But a lot of the work is going to happen in the lead up to that. So what should CS folks be thinking about in that customer lifecycle leading up, so renewal is easy?

Rachel Provan: A renewal, it should be kind of like, if you're a leader, kind of like a performance review. Or even if you're not, there shouldn't be any new, surprising things at a performance review. Everything should be discussed along the way. So you can't wait. You can't ignore your customer and wait till two, three months before the renewal and be like, "Hey, how's it going?" They made that decision. CSMs, early in their career, tend to think that customers decide about renewing at renewal time. No, that decision was made on a random Tuesday after some interaction they had with your product, where it either got them the result that they wanted or failed miserably. You need to know where you are in that sense. Now, onboarding is such a crucial time because it's the first impression, right? It's the first date. You're going to decide if this is worth your time during onboarding. We have very short attention spans. If it's not up and running quickly and delivering value quickly, then we're moving on to the next. Because everybody has other things to do. Your software is not what everyone else is focused on. It's one in a huge laundry list of things they have to do. So you got to, again, make it easy, make it quick and, again, even if it's a complicated product, little bites. You don't have to serve them the entire product and show them how to do every single little thing in there. Solve one small problem first and build on that.

Onboarding is not done when you've said, "here's how to use the project. Okay. Bye. Good luck." Onboarding is done when they are "on board," when they see value. So I always advise CSMs to ask, among the various questions that it's important to ask: what are you looking to achieve with our product? How do you measure that? Where is it now? Where do you want it to be? And a lot of people don't think of this. What would be an early indication that things are moving in the right direction? That's when you're done with onboarding. It's going to be different depending on what your product does. But maybe it's once they see something go through a full cycle, and they see how that's going to work for them, how that's going to save them time in their day, or they see a report that they're going to be able to pull together quickly. But just some small, little aha moment that is going to be valuable to them. Then I am also a really big fan of - because from there, they'll move on to adoption. I'm also a really big fan of just verified outcomes. At around six months, send them a very simple survey. You said you wanted to achieve X with our product. Have you achieved that? Yes or no? Based on the answer, you know what to do next. You have a heck of a long time to save them if they haven't gotten there. And if they have, great. Things are going well. Let's talk about optimizing. Let's talk about what else we can help you with because things have gone well.

Provan Success CS Coaching

Alex Kracov: I'd love to end today's conversation talking about your coaching and consulting business, which is awesome. It's very cool to see a CS coach. I feel like I see so many sales and marketing people on LinkedIn floating. There's way too many. So I was very excited to start following you on LinkedIn. There's so much good advice. I'm curious, like, what do people come to you for? What is your typical relationship with CS leaders who want to come to you for leadership coaching? What is that relationship like? What are the challenges? Can you take us a little bit behind the scenes on what that's like?

Rachel Provan: Yeah, I mainly have people, I mainly work with my group coaching now just due to demand. So I have the Customer Success Leadership Academy. What that does is it teaches people everything from time management, strategy, how to build that CS department across that maturity model, literally every step to take you through every part of those maturity models. So it's like, it's not just what but how, in a way that's flexible for different kinds of companies. And then how to work with those other departments and mindset, the executive presence, the people pleasing, how to lead a team. Those are the main things that I cover. Because no one teaches you how to be a CS leader. And it is an entirely different job than being a CSM. A lot of CSMs who are just put in the position of a CS leader end up failing. And it's incredibly unfair. Generally, CSLA, Customer Success Leadership Academy, teaches people how to be a CS leader, how to succeed at that, as well as showing the value of the department. Because that's become a huge part of customer success, is selling that value internally. Then I also have a few one-on-ones, which are people who are more VP level, who have specific issues that they want to deal with. I only take on three at a time. Another part of my business actually helps CS leaders get new positions. It helps with resume optimization and LinkedIn optimization, interview prep, and final presentation, salary negotiation. So I help in a lot of ways.

Alex Kracov: Very cool. I'm a huge fan of coaches. I mean, my background is more on the marketing side of things. I was a first-time marketer scaling up. I was pretty good at marketing, but it was my first time being on an exec team and leadership team. So much of it is about, how do you manage up, how do you manage to the board? How do you manage to your peers, your CRO, CCO, whoever it is? That stuff, you're right. No one teaches you how to do that. That's where a coach is so valuable. I'm like, wait, am I being crazy that this person is being a bad leader or good? Or am I being bad? You need that perspective to be helpful.

Rachel Provan: Absolutely. And to see it happening with other people, so you know it's like, okay, it's not just me. I don't suck. This is a thing that happens. Then we can say, okay, so what's working? Not just with my advice but with the advice of other people who are in seat in there every day and being like, all right, here's what worked for me today. So we really benefit from that community aspect.

Alex Kracov: Well, thank you so much for the time today, Rachel. Everyone should go follow you on LinkedIn. Then if people want to sign up for coaching, where's the best place to find the Customer Success Leadership Academy?

Rachel Provan: Yeah, just go to provansuccess.com. Provan like my last name. It's a little pun there, provansuccess.com. You'll see Customer Success Leadership Academy in there. It'll show you all the different ways you can work with me, as well as a lot of free resources to get you started.

Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Rachel Provan: Thank you. This was so much fun.