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CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
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E261 | From Zero to Success: How to Build Customer Success Teams from Scratch with Ben Francis
Today on the show we have Ben Francis, the Director of Customer Success at Evident.
In this episode, Ben shares his experience in building and scaling customer success teams from scratch. He offers actionable insights on refining onboarding processes, consolidating essential customer data, and employing strategic hiring practices to foster team growth and enhance customer loyalty.
We then discussed the significance of specialization within customer success teams as they scale, with Ben introducing the concept of time inventory exercises to optimize team efficiency and quantify the value of new investments. We wrapped up by exploring strategies for fostering a positive team culture through continuous learning and proactive communication.
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Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Ben Francis: So yeah, you have an athlete who's doing a specific movement, you say that's a squat or a deadlift or you know, so one of the classic movements. You're trying to correct little pieces of their form, which will have massive results in their stability and just overall longevity with being able to do that exercise. And so you'll use these little cues, hey, stay back in your heels or hey, you know, eyes up while you're doing this movement to kind of change little patterns of behavior while they're performing this exercise. And I do a very similar thing with my CSMs.
[00:00:46] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.
[00:00:59] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.
[00:01:12] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics, and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host Andrew Michael and here's today's episode.
[00:01:22] Andrew Michael: Hey Ben, welcome to the show.
[00:01:24] Ben Francis: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:01:26] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Ben is the Director of Customer Success at Evident, a third party risk management platform. Prior to Evident, Ben was the head of customer success and support and compliance at Salesmsg. And prior to that, the senior customer success manager at Intellum. So my first question for you, Ben is what is the difference between an amateur CrossFit athletes and a professional CrossFit athlete?
[00:01:54] Ben Francis: So many, so many reasons, mostly just strength and speed. Yeah, it's I do not have the luxury of being a professional athlete. That is not where my where my skills lie. So I like to stick to exclusively amateur.
[00:02:13] Andrew Michael: I noticed that on your LinkedIn program, I was thinking for saying like CrossFit in its own right, like it is very, very difficult. So like classifying yourself as an amateur, I found. But I appreciate that some of these top athletes, like they dedicate their lives to it. So then obviously like going through your background, you've been sort of the first in first customer success lead at a lot of different startups along your career. And I think I'm keen to dive into this experience today. And we could probably start with your most recent experience now at Evident and we can work back from there. But maybe I'm first of keen to hear is like, how do you get these roles to begin with? How do you land a first customer success higher at a startup?
[00:03:01] Ben Francis: Yeah, I'd like to say that my threshold for ambiguity and chaos is inordinately high to be gravitating towards these earlier stage organizations that are really building out the customer success motion from scratch or are really trying to scale up pretty quickly. I've had the fortune of being a part of some really fast growing companies where customer success was a brand new business unit, brand new motion as a part of the retention and expansion arm of that customer acquisition motion for these earlier companies.
[00:03:42] Ben Francis: I got lucky with moving from the kind of individual contributor CS type of role for the last several years into more of that team lead architect of the business unit in my last couple of roles, which has been such an amazing experience to run experiments, to build what I think should be done, apply that to process and ultimately find out that I need to refactor the way I was approaching things and breaking it and building it again.
[00:04:17] Andrew Michael: Love that. There's a lot in there. I think definitely like the embracing ambiguity and being attracted to it is something that's always attracted me about startups, like as you're talking, you reminded me of a story at some point in one of my earlier startups, we randomly like went to startup competition on the weekend, we had no idea what we were doing, we just like had a game, we picked three words out of a bucket, chosen idea, we ended up coming second in the competition and then sort of like, oh, we have something here. This is amazing. Like as a group.
[00:04:44] Andrew Michael: And then, we ended up quitting our jobs at the time. We had like some of the best jobs will be on the island for our age. And we packed up our wives and bags. We moved to Denmark and the first thing, when we met with this accelerator, the director of this clearly is like, guys, we love your team, but your idea is absolutely shit. And then he's like, if there's one thing I can teach you in startups is you need to learn to embrace uncertainty. And this is your first lesson. Like go figure this out now. So like, yeah, definitely I think in startups, like there's just so much chaos all the time and you're either the person that enjoys that and thrives in it, or you run away from it.
[00:05:22] Andrew Michael: Next thing you mentioned as well as around like now having the privilege and the experience as well to be able to run experimentation and set up things in your own way and the way that you believe things should be done. I'm keen to understand like, where do you get started? So you come in now you've landed this first role is yes. What are your first actions looking like in your 30, 60, 90 days as you start to think about what CSS is today at that company and where it can go and where it should be?
[00:05:52] Ben Francis: Yeah, great question. So whether you're inheriting a department or building it from ground zero on the CF side. The way that I've found myself wanting to start is looking at the bookends of the customer lifecycle. I always start with the onboarding phase, obviously reducing that time to value and ensuring that that transition into an active customer is as smooth as possible and really looking for what are the quick wins? Are there automations that you can use? Are there tools that will make life easier? What does the client need to know? And what does your team need to know in order to get that customer to value as quickly as possible?
[00:06:37] Ben Francis: And fortunately, we've come such a long way in the customer success space with tooling to really have such a great repository of tools in our toolkit to make that process easier than ever. I'll plug different tools along the way, but I like to focus on the onboarding phase first. Try to figure out what can I really nail there. And then I've found that once I get that to at least a [Z1] stage shifting gears into what does that renewal cycle look like? Because I find that a lot of those project management type of type of resources or the data I'm going to need to collect on the onboarding phase are things that we need to reference on that when I go into that renewal conversation later on. So typically I find that there's a lot of crossover value in the process that you build for onboarding for that renewal motion as well.
[00:07:36] Andrew Michael: Very nice. And so you're coming in, obviously, like It's a difference between inheriting a team and starting from scratch. Just for context as well, the last two experiences that you have, were you inheriting a team or is it something you were starting completely from the ground up?
[00:07:53] Ben Francis: One of each. Building the customer success motion from zero in my last role. And here I inherited a customer success emotion albeit refactoring significant chunk of it.
[00:08:09] Andrew Michael: All right. Nice. What would you say is the biggest difference between the two? Like starting from scratch or inheriting, and which do you prefer maybe?
[00:08:21] Ben Francis: I found in both cases, in the case where I've inherited a team. I've peeled back the elements enough where I'm effectively rebuilding. Where I really want to get back to what are the pieces of data that I'm going to need to reference on a regular basis? And where do those, where do those things live? And how can I possibly get them into a single tool, which is a, sometimes the harder challenge is what do we need to know about this customer, either from the, the sales motion, you, who are they, how much, you know, what are their terms, how much do they spend, what products are they, are they utilizing?
[00:09:01] Ben Francis: But then how are they utilizing those within the context of our product? How are we collecting information? Both on the utilization of that product, but also the sentiment and engagement overall. And then plugging in, what does the experience look like, whether with our customer support team or any sort of existing motion there. And really defining what are those building blocks of customer data that we're gonna need to then figure out, okay, how do I organize this and consolidate this into a tool that doesn't just create noise?
[00:09:35] Ben Francis: I found that in either case, whether I'm inheriting a customer success motion or taking the mantle of building one from scratch, it's all coming back to what are those building blocks of customer information that I'm going to need to reference? Because then I can start to tell the right story about where they are in their customer journey.
[00:10:00] Andrew Michael: So you would say that would be like your first... points to go to is really trying to understand, okay, what data do I need to have in place? Ideally, how can I get this into a single place for, to be able to inform the strategies and the decisions that we go for. And you said your first 90 days, you're really just trying to see, okay, what are some of the lower hanging fruits as well from that perspective, from an onboarding and activation, how do we get customers from that entry state into an activated customer.
[00:10:29] Andrew Michael: When it comes to sort of thinking about the team itself then as well, like in the previous role, you started as an individual and you started to think about hires. Like in that case, what were you thinking as for like your first couple of hires within that CS team that you built and how did you decide what those should be?
[00:10:46] Ben Francis: Yeah. And it's not without asking, you know, and researching, there've been some great resources out there, um, at a previous mentor through the catalyst cohorts. He's a charge of CS at Zoom info now set. And while he was at Chili Piper, put together a really great CS capacity headcount matrix that I've referenced a couple dozen times at this point. Measuring capacity and when to add in the customer success motion is, there are so many factors that go into that, whether or not your customer success team is full lifecycle, managing onboarding all the way to renewals, or kinda managing a tighter confine of the customer lifecycle will dramatically change that forecasting and that headcounts exercise.
[00:11:42] Ben Francis: But at the end of the day, It comes down to the decision of am I going to measure my customer success team's capacity by manage [revenue] or manage quantity of account in their portfolio or some combination [therein]. And really aligning with the expectations from your executive leadership on what is reasonable for a customer success manager to own that will allow them to gracefully manage all facets of that customer relationship they're responsible for. In so many cases, especially right now, we see so many tech companies are trying to go a little bit leaner in leveraging tooling where appropriate, but the size of books of business are continuing to grow and grow and grow.
[00:12:33] Ben Francis: And with that ability to speak very directly to what's going on intimately with that, oh, that client has this specific initiative going on as our books of business continue to inflate that gets harder and harder to do. And so really being plus one on that head count capacity is, is really important to allow the customer experience to not dwindle for the sake of trying to be a little bit leaner.
[00:13:04] Andrew Michael: And so then, in your opinion, in terms of like, it really comes down to capacity, as you said, and you're either optimizing on the number of customers, the order book of business and the revenue that CS is leaving. In your opinion now, like, which of those two do you have you decided to go against or go with when it comes to deciding on how you resource?
[00:13:27] Ben Francis: Yeah, so I found that in my experience, it is a bit more classic customer success to lean more in the camp of managed revenue in the book of business. Whether that is for accounts that sum up to a larger book of business or it's an army of SMBs and mid-market clients, it really just depends. But trying to be equitable with the distribution of that customer base across the customer success team. We naturally wanna gravitate towards the most senior CSM gets the highest revenue account. And there's merit to that to a certain degree.
[00:14:07] Ben Francis: However, am I going to give a more junior CSM an at-bat with an enterprise potential account? Allow them to exercise and flex up a little bit and showcase that they're going to be ready for that senior CSC as it becomes available. So I try to be as equitable as I can across the customer base with my assignment for the portfolio. But it typically letters up to the managed revenue for a CS book.
[00:14:34] Andrew Michael: Interesting. And when it comes to laddering up to that revenue metric, like you have sort of any... benchmarks where you've experienced is a good threshold in terms of revenue. So, obviously no specifics needed, but are there any like milestones that you see, okay, at this stage, just becomes too much revenue for an individual to manage or...
[00:14:56] Ben Francis: Yeah, it's it all depends on the ACV of your product more than anything else. So like I'll provide that with an asterisk, but, historically, what I've seen across multiple SaaS organizations that I've been part of is that Northstar seems to be somewhere around the million to a million and a half ARR per CSM and managed revenue. Again, going back to whatever the ACV for your product is, if you have a low ACV product, that's an army of SMB customers to make up that managed revenue where might want to adjust your ratio a little bit for managed revenue or start to look into what are those one to many customer success motions. Obviously, the concept of scaled customer success is particularly popular right now. But leaning into that kind of digital forward one to many type of experience will serve to better support your CS team when you're looking to manage a larger quantity of logos that may be smaller in spend.
[00:16:03] Andrew Michael: So, and I think the reason as well for asking is because then it almost goes back to the, it feels more like a number of managed customers rather than the revenue itself. And the revenue is just the after pic because you might have a large ACV of 1 million and you're not gonna have a single CSM focus just on an individual client as well. So it's this, it feels like even though you're focused on revenue, it's still somehow tied to number of accounts that reasonably you can reasonably manage as an individual and build those relationships depending on the ACV that's needed. Would you say that's fair?
[00:16:41] Ben Francis: Yeah, it comes, comes with significant trial and error. There's not one magic ratio for managed revenue or managed logos. And I've found that in the evolution of the customer success motion, you know, you're going from your first couple to, you know, five plus to 10 plus. That ratio starts to change dramatically as you look into specialization, whether by industry or by service line or products, you then had the luxury of being able to look at the customer base through different lenses and support those customers uniquely.
[00:17:17] Andrew Michael: Nice. All right. We have a little bit of an idea then in terms of how you think about resourcing now when it comes in. So really, you get started, you get setting up with your data. You're trying to understand, okay, what is the early activation experience would like? You start then to think, okay, how can I reasonably manage this as an individual? How can I start thinking about resources now? And you're using a combination then of like manage book in terms of revenue and number of clients that you can reasonably manage. When you start to think about the skill sets that you want on board as your first hire. So are you looking for any specific skills or is it really just like you're looking for a talented CSM that can manage a book of business?
[00:18:00] Ben Francis: Yes. I mean, the skill sets have been relatively universal across my hiring endeavors for customer success. And I've had the luxury of hiring some really amazing CSMs over the last couple of roles. Beyond the classic customer success traits, the high empathy, the detail oriented project management type of skills. Some of the things that I'm looking for is really the ability to gracefully manage expectations. And so something I do as a part of my hiring process is I'll share over a prompt either live or written in some cases to try to see what a CSM can find on their own. But ultimately trying to get them to have to answer the question, I don't know, but let me find out and take ownership for you. And really gauging how do those people manage that scenario, which is a very, very common scenario in customer success that we don't have all of the answers, but we are responsible for finding them and closing the loop on them regardless. And beyond the project management side and relationship building side. I'd argue that the ability to gracefully deflect and reset expectations subtly are some of the most important skills in customer success because we can't be expected to know everything about every niche corner of our product. We're a bit more generalist than we are specialists most of the time. But we are the relationship owner to get those answers and see the outcomes to fruition.
[00:19:50) Andrew Michael: Nice. And this is specifically then in the context of like CSMs bringing within the team. Thinking a little bit then a step further now, you started to build and scale up the team. You're hiring your first few CSMs to join and manage the business. When do you start to think about specialization then in terms of roles coming onto the team? Obviously in CS, there's many other different specializations. At some point, companies as well like to split up the focus, like onboarding to engagement to renewal. And at what stage do you start to think about other specific specialization in roles, whether it be like an ops type role or starting to segment by the journey if you think that is something that should be done?
[00:20:32] Ben Francis: Yeah, there's immense value in specialization. And, you know, CS teams, as they grow. I think it's a natural progression. The way that I do that assessment for whether or not specialization is, uh, is, is a worthwhile investment. Is typically through the exercise of a time inventory more than anything else. So periodically throughout the year, I will, I'll run this exercise both for myself and for my CSM. So just in five or six categories, just really outline what percentage of your time is spent in these core functions, whether it's, you know, operational. Whether it's more admin work, it's strategic work. You can kind of lay out the buckets however you see fit. But typically that time inventory exercise will be very apparent into, hey, we're spinning our wheels dramatically in this specific category more than others. And I think that will point me in the right direction towards, hey, do I need to leverage either additional headcounts or offload some of these tasks to another business unit if appropriate? And I think that's beyond the delegation of specific functions, whether that's internally or hiring like an ops type specialist or some of these other roles that I've wished for in most of my CS leadership career so far. You know, I always look for, are there tools that can serve as a force multiplier that aren't as it may not be as costly as a true head count here. And fortunately, the CS tech stack landscape has come a dramatic way just in the last eight to 10 years to really serve as a lower spend force multiplier for customer success operations, which has been really great.
[00:22:30] Andrew Michael: I like that sort of as a measure and as a constant pulse check as well. I really just trying to understand, like, what are you spending your time on as a team and identifying then where there's opportunities to remove friction and to basically give the team back time to focus on what they do best as well. Cause I think a lot of times like, and I think this happens across the board, not just in customer success, but we ended up getting stuck in like these mundane tasks that can easily be either automated through software, or they can serve as like a dedicated hire, can bring special specialties and expertise. And this is sort of like a nice measure to understand like when potentially is the right time and then a good way to understand, okay, I know my CSMs are spending this many hours on it on the course of a month. This is what it's costing the business. This is what a new hire costs, the sort of software costs. And you can really easily tie that back into like an ROI of making that investment either in a new team member or a cost saving on software. Very nice.
[00:23:31] Ben Francis: Exactly. Yeah, that exercise is proven to be valuable specifically for that exact reason for really quantifying the value of either headcount or a tool in terms of time saving. But I've also seen an unintentional secondary benefit with that exercise, which is really allowing employees to vocalize their sentiment through a different lens. By verbalizing, hey, I'm spending a lot of unproductive time in this area, and I feel that I need this taken off of my plate, you know, beyond like the, you know, internal NPS or some of the other employee engagement motions that we do on a regular basis as CS leaders, the time inventory exercises allows, allows your team to be able to speak to that maybe a bit more intentionally and without, without it coming across a little bit too direct, you know, sometimes when we take these, these NPS, oh, I'm, with where I'm going with my career, or doing professional developments, we typically take those through a different lens than, hey, there are core needs for me to be able to do my job that sometimes I can't zoom out enough to identify until I can put a quantity in a bucket on this time inventory exercise.
[00:24:50] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I like that as well. Like as you say, another way to vent, but through a different lens, and it's really focused as well in terms of things. While you were talking, I sort of like, it got me thinking about all the times I've heard people say I want less meetings and this is where biggest times suck and it's always like a big frustration point in companies and it's not to the same, it's not to the same point, but you can see like that's an area where the event doesn't venting doesn't really help the situation and it's not really like improving things, but really when it's taken from the lens, okay, we're spending too much time in meetings and where this is an exercise now for us to see how we can become more efficient. And it's a structured focused time given dedicated to seeking those improvements in efficiency, I think is a great way then to say, okay, like this is a problem across the board is not just one individual complaining or moaning about things and let's fix this now and get it done. Very cool. So you're using this then as a tool to understand the case specialties and that wins the right time to bring that in. How do you then sort of think about growing the team from a cultural perspective as well? So you're coming in, you're getting things set up from the beginning. CS can be a demanding role as well within organization and you're needing to sort of grow. And you mentioned some other challenges as well, like who do you give business to? You're not going to give it to the new guy or the new person who's just joined as an intern, an enterprise account and being able to split and manage those things. And how do you go about thinking through these nuances of the business that are more subtle and more on the person side, which is essentially what the CSM role is as well. How do you empathize with your team?
[00:26:38] Ben Francis: Yeah, man, what a question. I find that as I'm adding CS, CSMs to the team, I start to find a bit more natural personality traits that come out, either that, the way that they build rapport with certain types of clients, either there's commonalities on the functionality that they're using or the industry, or really just the personalities aligning can start to point me to areas of expertise for that specific CSM. So I had a CSM who had the privilege of leading for a while and she was unbelievable at deescalating. And it was really remarkable to watch because as a CSM, obviously, we all want to be relatively good in this area, but we're still people. And although we're supporting B2B software, we're not solving all the world's problems, at least as overtly as other industries. Sometimes the art of de-escalating can really shine through, whether that's in the context of like a contractual red line conversation, or maybe it's just a gap in expectation for what a product does. So I had a CSM who is really, really great at this. I got to observe it just in, just like being a fly on the wall in a call directly. And got to take that to the rest of the team to do a bit of a post mortem with that CSM guiding us through, hey, what were you? What were you keying in on when the client said this specific phrase and actually turned it into a bit of an AMA for the rest of the CS team to not only showcase this one CSM skills, but also utilizing that as a training exercise for the rest of the team to try to level up collectively. I found that through that exercise, it changed the culture where other CSMs started going to this colleague directly without my involvement to try to better understand how she assessed the health of the situation and got to walk this customer off the ledge, so to speak. I found that celebrating that skill internally to then making them the subject matter expert to help level up the team really did a remarkable thing for creating a culture of people that are gifted in specific areas, maybe more so than others, but allowing that to benefit everyone.
[00:29:41] Andrew Michael: I like that. At Hot Chocolate, we did something a little bit similar in the sense that we had these sessions that were called Coffee and Learn. And really it was like an opportunity once a week where an individual would either get nominated or they would nominate themselves. And it was a session for them to like, share something that they had learned. Sometimes it was like, completely random and nothing to do with work, but it was interesting and fun just to have a conversation and coffee with over. But other times it was really sort of like directly related to our roles and to our jobs. And as you say, then like it was this knock on effect that we noticed as well is that people would then be the go-to people for those specific topics and lean over and it really helped like, foster a really good culture around learning within the team. And yes, I, like those observations. I think you're fortunate to be able to see them as a fly on the wall and be able to pull them out and then share them with the team. Is this something that you sort of systemize now or is it really just sort of like, you see something, you think this is interesting, let's let the team go? How are you thinking about continuously evolving this as well?
[00:30:47] Ben Francis: Yeah, building that culture, especially from zero, is challenging. It feels a little artificial in some ways. But some of the things that I deploy to try to create this environment across the customer success team. So we utilize Slack and have in the last couple of roles, and creating a channel specifically for celebrating wins, whether that is, you're sharing a win on behalf of a colleague or I really want to empower the CS team to say, like, you know, hey, there's an email thread with the client and they're they're really validating, hey, they're they're getting value from this or the this interaction led to positive results, whether that's revenue focused or not. Anytime that you walk away from, you know, from one of those client interactions, either, you know, on a call or, or via email, and you just know that you nailed it. I really want to empower my CS team to post those into this, into this Bragg's win channel, as we call it. Any of those moments that I have access to directly, unfortunately, utilizing specific tools like our customer success platform, I can go in and kind of see the interactions that are going on, at least via email, as well as through Zendesk with that with our clients directly and kind of one pane of glass.
[00:32:18] Ben Francis: So like I've got a lot of access to go view those myself, but I really want to empower my CS team to brag on themselves a little bit. And it's all with the premise of if you think you nailed something, I want to hear about it. I want to, and more often than not, it pivots into a question, what went well in this case and how can we… How can you apply that learning to other situations? And then, you know, sometimes it'll turn into, you know, very similar to that coffee chat that you guys were, that you referenced. It's this culture of empowering the CSM to brag on themselves. It feels a little odd at first. And so sometimes it takes a little prodding on my part. So I'm really going to look for those and getting loud about them when I see them.
[00:33:09] Ben Francis: And they may be benign, it may not be closing a massive expansion opportunity. Sometimes it is, which is great. I love those. Obviously my executive team loves those too. But sometimes it's just, it's changing the sentiment from, you know, from red to green, and just, Hey, I had a really good interaction here. And the client has dramatically changed their tone over the last couple weeks because of what we've been able to do. I want to hear about those too. And I want to empower my CS team to share those with us.
[00:33:39] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah, I think like having these public channels is a great way sort of just to encourage as an obviously like, and then when it does feel a little bit weird to start bragging about yourself, but it's also great when like you, I think you start to end up seeing the opposite as well as that others start bragging about the team members as well. When they start noticing these things more than you yourself, like you say, you notice these things and to them, they might be benign, but to like the team, they're actually, very big deal. Cause I think a lot of times we underplay as well, like the things that we do and the impact that we have. I'm keen to also understand, like, you bring any of your experiences across fits trainer into the way that you're training your team.
[00:34:21] Ben Francis: Yeah, I do. And it's, as much as I try not to be that guy, admittedly it's become a significant part of my life. I've been… So beyond amateur CrossFit athletes, as you referenced, I've been a CrossFit trainer for the last several years as well. And so when I'm not leading a customer success team at Evident, I'm coaching CrossFit classes. I have the great fortune of building some strong relationships with my 6 AM crew that I coach. A lot of those skills directly apply to how I approach building and scaling customer success. Specifically, the concept of cueing an athlete comes to mind. You have an athlete who's doing a specific movement. Say that's a squat or a deadlift or one of the classic movements.
[00:35:21] Ben Francis: You're trying to correct little pieces of their form which will have massive results in their stability and just overall longevity with being able to do that exercise. And so you'll use these little cues, Hey, stay back in your heels or Hey, you know, eyes up while you're doing this movement to kind of change little patterns of behavior while they're at, while they're performing this exercise. And I do a very similar thing with my CSMs, especially during that… During the employee onboarding, I'm adding a new team member phase. I wanna get them into a place where I'm shadowing them while they are actively exercising their skills and client-facing.
[00:36:09] Ben Francis: And we'll typically do, like a post-mortem of whatever that call may be. Maybe it's an onboarding kickoff or things like that where I'll just, I'll try to, and as few words as possible provide subtle directive cues rather than, oh, I would have said this, this or this. I would change the deck to this. It's Hey, why don't you ask about this one thing and just kind of leave it open-ended and then just kind of observe how that changes in the next interaction. I exclusively look for people that I want to trust with my customers and I want them to bring their own voice and personality to how they manage their books of business.
[00:36:48] Ben Francis: I'm not interested in ghostwriting their emails or taking their talking time away on calls. I want to be as uninvolved with the execution of the customer experience for their customers as possible. And so I do apply very similar type of motions that I do with my CrossFit athletes, that I do with my CSMs with these small coaching cues along the way and they don't always land. Sometimes you'll give a bit of a directive comments towards, hey, maybe ask about this one thing and it just doesn't quite stick the right way and you as a leader have to change your approach, change what you're saying, maybe not giving them the script, so to speak but really trying to figure out how they can find their own way to get to that end outcome that you're looking for.
[00:37:50] Andrew Michael: I like that as one. I like that you pointed out sort of, if it doesn't work out, it's find another way. This was like, piece of advice again, like I got from Hotjar. I remember when I first became a team lead there, there was this survey that went out and it was asking like, what's one thing that piece of advice you would give to a manager at Hotjar? And I remember at the time, like the chief operating officer's response was, it's always your fault. And like that resonated a lot with me in the sense that like, if something goes wrong within the team, like it's your fault because like you either didn't provide the training or the guidance or the understanding to be able to execute and work the way that was expected.
[00:38:31] Andrew Michael: And a lot of times like when things don't work out and think we like, often just shift, okay. This is not working out with the team member or the employee as opposed to, okay, like taking a look back, okay, this didn't land with them. How can I try another way now to make this work and get this message across? And putting the onus on yourself as well, I think always is a good approach to leadership, at least the way I see it as well.
[00:38:55] Ben Francis: Yeah. So I take an immense amount of ownership with, I mean, ultimately I'm responsible for the entire customer base. You know, the execution of the customer success motion lies with the CSMs I entrust with their books of business. But if a CSM isn't driving towards the results that we want to see for the greater customer success motion, that burden of responsibility falls with me, either in a lack of clarity, in a lack of articulating why, what we do matters to the larger organization. And I find the disconnect to the purpose, the why seems to be what drives so much of the dissatisfaction from the NCSM experience.
[00:39:45] Ben Francis: Having sat in that seat for years, recognizing and coming face to face with things that just don't work operationally, but not having the perspective into why what we do matters to the larger organization was a major part of the CS leaders function. And I take that responsibility extremely seriously. And I'm really grateful for that responsibility.
[00:40:15] Andrew Michael: Very nice. The, what I was saying before, as well as like, I think we've, we're about to run up on time. I just want to make sure I'll ask you a couple of questions, still before we close off for today. The first one I would say, like, the question is somebody's just landed a new role now. They've been asked to set up the CS function from the ground up. What's like one piece of advice that you would give them or one lesson that you've learned where you've made a mistake in your approach to it that you would improve a second time round?
[00:40:49] Ben Francis: Man, I don't know if I could distill this just to one. I think that the clearest question to focus on, that maybe I lost the force for the trees a little bit, my first pass at this, is making sure that your sales to CS motion is clearly capturing what the customer is looking to accomplish. It sounds obvious when I say it in isolation, that capturing customer value is of utmost importance, but it happens all too often that a customer… the customer doesn't know the answer to that question. Hey, why are you here? What are you looking to gain out of this experience?
[00:41:37] Ben Francis: And sometimes they'll drive directly towards specific features or functionality. But what is that? What does that impact mean to your overall business? What do you need to report to your leadership team to look like a hero? And sometimes I'll ask that direct question to my customers, but for any, a newer CS lead, making sure that you're nailing that value capture as a part of the sales to CS process, whether that is done in the sales motion, which is ideal, or done as a part of the onboarding and going live type of experience. Make sure that you can point back to that because that's the goal that you're going to need to tie all of the interactions that you're having with the customer across their lifecycle back to.
[00:42:29] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. I think it's often like the most obvious things that we let slip a lot of the time and needs to keep reminding ourselves over and over again. So interesting, one. The last question, then I had actually was, what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?
[00:42:49] Ben Francis: I think assuming that you haven’t heard from a customer and you know,
was it three months, six months, what have you. No news is not good news. Not to the point where we need to be annoying, but there needs to become a comfort with being a little annoying to not make assumptions. For those CS teams that have the luxury of having, smaller size book of business, where you have single digits portfolio count in your book of business. You know what's going on within the business units at those end organizations, but as you start to get towards a larger book of business type of format, which is becoming more and more common, especially in the mid market SMB type of customer success motions, you know, the time period between checking in with customers starts to extend because you have so many.
[00:43:47] Ben Francis: And not hearing from a, you know, from a client in a while doesn't indicate that things are going particularly well. And so I just, I would be really cautious to make assumptions that a client is healthy, just based off of, either data that you can review or just having not heard any issues from that client in a while. And not having friction with your products may not indicate that they're getting the value that they're looking for. And so making sure that you have that feedback loop and you've got the contact information up to date with the primary champion is of the utmost importance.
[00:44:24] Ben Francis: So we run automations on our side for, you know, when we get a bounce from, you know, from a point of contact assigned to an account, like we run a playbook specifically for that and vitally, which is super helpful just to make sure like we're not sending our touch points to the ether and getting surprised by an account that we thought was healthy that actually is a churn threat.
[00:44:47] Andrew Michael: Nice. So your advice was get a little bit comfortable with being a little bit on top of your customers and a little annoying. Very nice, Ben. Well, it's been a pleasure chatting today and getting to learn from you. Is there any sort of final thought you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up today? Anything they should be aware of or how they can keep up to speed with your work?
[00:45:08] Ben Francis: Yeah. I mean, finding on LinkedIn is the best option. What I'd recommend for either a CSM who's looking to make the jump into kind of their first role in the team leader, director chair, or newer CS leads, is really leverage some of these communities that are out there. Whether it's other local or more digital, there's so many experts to follow. But also, take a book from our colleagues on the sales side with the cold outbound and being bold to, make the ask, hey, I don't know what I'm doing in this area. Would you mind providing a little bit of guidance? It proves to be valuable. If nothing else, just to embolden your CS skills.
[00:46:02] Ben Francis: But you'd be really surprised at who is willing to make five minutes worth of their time to provide just a quick little insight into things I wish I knew along the way. So you see a CS leader that's doing things that you aspire for, make the ask. And don't ask for mentorship called per se, but hey, how did you accomplish, specific outcome? And you'd be surprised what comes back.
[00:46:34] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah, I think the themes, recurring now as well as, like making sure that you're speaking up, you're speaking out, ask, don't be afraid to be a little bit annoying as well. So you're constantly learning and keeping a pulse and checking either with it, with your customers or with your team members and surrounding. Ben, absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for joining and I wish you the best of luck now going forward.
[00:46:59] Ben Francis: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
[00:47:01] Andrew Michael: Cheers.
[00:47:08] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review, as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
