Ep # 121: From LMS365 to Zensai – Amie Weizer’s Journey in Enabling Human Success (Director, Zensai)

Discussion with Amie on Customer Success and Operational Excellence at Zensai [00:00:04] Adil Saleh: Hey. Greetings, everybody. This is Adil, from Hyperengage podcast. Long time coming. It's been, like, 3 weeks since we last recorded. We came to, SaaSter London, met a lot of, look alike products in our category, like CXO, and met a lot of folks doing podcasts. A lot of, product that came on with particles and people coming up and say, hey. We know Hyperengage. Is that a is that a podcast? I said, no. It's it's it's also a it's also a product. That's why we, I'm here. So, folks, we've got Amie back again. We had our first, about 2 years back. She was, leading customer success, organization there, and still till you know, she's she's involved in the same company with a a different brand. We'll we'll know the story, you know, from from from her real soon. So thank you very much, Amie, for taking the time. Today. She's, in in the LMS, learning management, ecosystem for quite some years, and she's one of the contributors, when it comes to, you know, Microsoft First LMS, and they're one of the first movers too. So thank you very much, Amie, for taking, the time today. She's the director of global operational, excellence, more in the web ops at, Zensai. They got a a rebranded, a new completely new name. Appreciate your time. Building a Customer-Centric Culture of Human Success at Zensai [00:01:20] Amie Weizer: Yeah. Hey. Happy to be here, Adil. I know. Long time coming. Super happy to be back and sharing some knowledge of what we first started with to where we are now Zensai. I've been on this journey with this organization for 3 years now. Woo hoo. So brought a lot of best practices to customer success, helped us scale from 1 customer success manager to 2024 in the Americas. We're coming up on lucky number 10. So super exciting to watch that growth and see all of those processes we built, get rebuilt, get rebuilt over and over again as the company grows and scales. What I'm doing right now for Zensai is ensuring that over this, last couple of months, we had an acquisition of an organization called Weekly10, which is in the performance and engagement platform. We took that and we brought it into our suite. Now we are a suite of products in the talent management space. So we now cover learning, performance, and engagement, and it truly speaks to the first ever time we talked to deal because a lot of what I talked about early on was the human centric approach we have at Zensai and how we really put our people first and empower them to help our customers be successful. Zensai fully takes that to the next level as we embark on our new category leadership in what we call human success. Human success is really about ensuring that your employees are successful. They are learning every day on the job. They're engaged in the work that they do, and they're performing against the goals that we set for them. So by tracking all three of these things, we hope that that employees will find success in their roles and feel fulfilled in the roles. They continue to grow with us as Zensai goes along this journey to be the human success platform for Microsoft focused organizations. [00:03:02] Adil Saleh: Amazing. Amazing. Apart from all that we see, like, my entire team sees, like, you're doing adventures, you know, keeping, you know, yourself motivated and your team motivated. Like, what what else did, motivate you to, you know, of course, be there long enough and, you know, stick with I mean, talking about human success as people success, you could have gone and joined, like, a lot of other companies, like, products there, loads of them. What actually made you stick to this, company culture this long, and then, of course, evolve and, you know, interact with these these customer segments that are specific to, you know, Microsoft. So what are what are these kind of, I would say, learning patterns that you have or the closer than maybe, made you stay? [00:03:45] Amie Weizer: Yeah. Wonderful. So for me, my journey has been really about influencing, a lot of different folks that I'm working with. And now being in this revenue operation space, even more folks. Right? Revenue operations covers the full lead to cash or quote to revenue journey. So that's making sure that we have good lead management practices and cross functional support from marketing and product marketing. In the opportunity management phase, that's really about making sure the sales processes are sticky, they're working well, and they fit our new multiproduct motion. From there, we move into our subscription management and revenue, which is how we have a relationship cross functionally to our IT folks as well as our financial, our FP and A folks. So for me, seeing all of these people we can influence and work with along the journey, there's so much potential and there's so much opportunity Zensai. We know we have grown over the last couple of years together, and we have done so successfully. We just wanna keep growing. We have an unlimited potential of things that we can do and different routes that we can take. So now we're getting down to what are we narrowly focusing on? What would we like to improve as a team? And just watching that grow over the next couple of years. Me specifically, I've built some really good relationships with those folks along that lead to cash or quote to revenue journey. So it's exciting for me when they are feeling empowered and they have an idea, they bring that forward. We've vetted across the rest of our team, and then we can go and implement something. In all of my previous organizations, there was a lot of red tape and there was a lot of, siloed decision making. The thing about having a rev ops team is that you have cross functional decision making and you have an unbiased view to all of these departments. So it's not really a fight between what marketing wants and what sales wants. It's how do we, as a go to market team, agree on what we want and work together to achieve those things. That's the fun, and that's what keeps me excited every single day here at Zensai. [00:05:39] Adil Saleh: Oh, amazing. Amazing. And thinking about, you know, I mean, because we've been looking, through your journey very, very closely because my entire team looks up to, you know, Zensai, and previously, it was LMS 360. And, you know, thinking about you as a success, like, human success, how it has evolved since last spoke. Of course, in between, a lot happened, like, in AI and all of that. How you see it different today? [00:06:03] Amie Weizer: Wonderful question again. So human success is definitely something we are defining in our organization along this journey, and then ensuring that we have something that works well and can be repeated across multiple different organizations. For us, what human success meant in the beginning was that we are running fast and we are figuring things out together. So our customer success team I originally started with, the story was that I started as just a a team of 1 or a team of 2 in the Americas. That meant we had to define what our playbooks were, what our processes were, what our strategies, our technologies were. That was a lot of fun work to get all of those things defined. And then we saw, okay, let's carry that same success into our sales team. Let's carry that into our support engineering team. So what has evolved in terms of human success is now bringing this growth mindset across the entire business to every single customer facing team. I have a series that I do on a reoccurring basis that's called delivering on human success and delivering on human success is about bringing every facing role together and saying, this is the messaging. This is the focus. This is the priority. Oh, what inputs are you having as a support engineer? What is it looking like from the tickets you're getting from a customer success manager? What's it look like from the responses you're getting when you talk about these features and these products with your customers. So we still have the ability for anybody to raise their hand and say, I have some input. I have an idea. But now we've taken on a new layer of cross functional alignment. So every single team can understand, oh, that's what product means when they're doing this. Oh, that's what customer success means when they're doing that. Giving everybody a voice and then really building the culture built on trust and collaboration that we all have shared goals and that we all have shared outcomes we want to reach together. [00:07:48] Adil Saleh: I love the fact that you have, not only just made sure that you under you helped your team understand the journey, how is it different when it comes to product and customer success, But, you know, having the to find the right dots, you know, to mutually get them into a focal point where they can have a 360 view on the product side, which is, quite critical and and for the product team too on the customer side. So thinking about customer experience, I spoke to Jason a while ago. We had a really, digging deep, discussion about customer experience category, like how is it evolving in the coming years. So, thinking about your customer success experience. There's how much of that is more like data driven because we talk about data a lot. You know, and, the sooner you invest in it, the better as a as a company of of any scale. So only talking about your operations, and and the kind of customers that you your team, they have under them, like, the accounts, how much of activities and engagements are data driven, and the decisions are data driven, how much of it is unified or, or centralized. So could you tell us more about about your experience in organizational success? [00:08:58] Amie Weizer: Yeah. Absolutely. So the customer success organization covers customer success and partner success. So we have both of those channels running, which means we get a lot of, aligned enablement materials. Enablement materials obviously connects the entire customer experience. That's what connects the support engineers to the product team and so on and so forth. So just to call that out as well. But then when it comes to our customer experience, of course, it's changing. The world is changing with the introduction of AI and something that we have been focused on as an organization, 2 specific things. We are really looking at product triggers and really defining what are the important product triggers that are driving that proactive customer outreach as opposed to the reactive we all know and absolutely love. And then we've got from the other angle of that, which is, the jobs to be done framework. We're really utilizing the jobs to be done framework to build a common nomenclature across our customer journey. So that from the very first representative, our human success advisors who reach out to our demos or who reach out to anybody who contacts us, making sure they have the same nomenclature about our personas and the job stories that need to be completed for the different personas we're working with. That is then carried through the rest of the sales cycle. “So tell us more about your jobs to be done,” or “let's confirm your jobs to be done as we work through the sales cycle.” That way we're matching up the right product to the right need for the customer. From there, customer success during the handoff also can understand these are the things our customers told us that they wanted to achieve. Now let's validate them so we can build your value story as you embark on your human success journey through Zensai. Having those two things in place, these new product triggers leading proactive and then having jobs to be done being built out and building the nomenclature is absolutely helping our teams to further align, to get these data driven decision making, but also to get some more of the qualitative, “what does it feel like to be a customer” and keeping that human interaction at the center of it. Right? It's definitely a time where there's a lot of high touch, low touch conversation where people are trying to figure out what's the best fit for their organization. I think that's the case for us as well. We're really figuring out what is human led and what is being done by the automation. So we're on that journey right now. [00:11:12] Adil Saleh: Yeah. And, of course, as you as you double down on your customer segments, like, you stack more customers in the lookalike segment, then you'll be able to send standardize and all of those. Tell us more about your biggest customer segment where you guys, you know, pretty much embedded and trying to penetrate, you know, slightly bigger enough, this year or next? [00:11:33] Amie Weizer: Small medium business is still where we're continuing to win because that is where we see the biggest need to really aggregate this human success within an organization. Moving out of, “hey, we're just taking training for compliance” or, “hey, we're just doing engagement for compliance” to, “we want to see employees grow, learn, perform, and engage.” We want to see that journey for every employee at an organization. So that's kind of the, the connecting piece for us. And then also understanding that those are most often the customers that grow with us. So we understand that customers come into the Microsoft ecosystem first, which is what we're built on top of. And then they start to see, oh, there's a platform built into Microsoft Teams to manage my learning performance and engagement. It's an easier opportunity for us to drive those cross sells, drive those upsells, and really improve on our churn rates with more stickiness and our NRR with more stickiness as well. [00:12:27] Adil Saleh: Amazing. I remember we spoke about about your team culture and how what kind of things you're cultivating the last time, and that, that was quite inspiring. So how far are you out in terms of, building, or instilling new skills and, you know, mindset development and all these kind of traits that are super important when you're facing customers and you're the front runners. So what what is different now? [00:12:52] Amie Weizer: Yeah. So, in addition to this, delivering on human success session I mentioned to you, I became known as DJ Amie in the organization because I'm always pumping up the vibes and I'm always pumping up the energy of everybody around us. And I think rev ops is a big culture leader within the organization. We have the opportunity to turn these lemons into lemonade when we bring in something like humor. You know, I, I heard a, a TED talk recently talking about turning lemons from lemon and turning lemons into lemonade is good, but you really need that sugar, that humor to bring the levity to the situation. So that lemonade is fully drinkable and not just the sour taste, bringing the culture into the organization is done through, on various things. And one of the other ways that we're doing this is to encourage these feedback loops. So our organization going through the transformation that we are, we need to have feedback loops at every level of the organization. When we started the year, we spent a lot of time on top-down communication and that served us well, but we realized we needed to do a lot more bottoms up communication as well. So I implemented various strategies to have the ability to talk about both of these communication methods and then the change management that goes around them. So I talk a lot about the change management model from Gartner called from, to, because. This from, to, because model allows our employees to be part of the change and also drive and empower this change in our organization. So for example, we could say we are moving away from siloed ways of working to consolidated and streamlined ways of working because we need efficiencies in our go to market. Just an example of the statements that we continuously repeat and we continuously share to remember why we're on the journey and what's in it for me along that journey. The second thing that we've done is to have reoccurring sessions for all of these leaders at every level in the organization. So I have individual one to ones with many of the front facing roles because it's super important they have a space and they have the opportunity to be valued in what they bring to the team. So I'm constantly making sure I'm there for them at the frontline of defense. The second thing that we do is then commercial alignment at the leader level. So if you're ahead of customer success, ahead of support, or ahead of our, marketing or our sales teams, come together. Come with us on a reoccurring basis and help us to prioritize correctly with our teams, help us to communicate effectively with our teams. And, hey, you should hear the information before it makes it to your employees. Something so simple, but something we definitely have learned over our first couple of quarters in our new way of operating with the multiple products in our human success suite. Finally, I'll say change champions is another thing that we have started in the organization. I absolutely love this topic because this too comes from comes from my my my Gartner background. So first time I ever got to work with change champions or I was introduced to the idea, I was basically explained that a change model, you know, adoption curve, it happens on every single product. There's going to be walkers, there's going to be joggers, there's going to be runners. When you're doing any level of change management, you need to understand who these people are and how you influence these people differently with different modes of communication. So a change champion is somebody in the organization who raises their hand to say, I want to be part of driving this change. I want to be a runner. I know that I'm not always going to do well. There's going to be failures, which is okay because that's why we're learning. So making sure that's part of our culture and any change champion knows that it's okay to fail because you're learning something new. Then a change champion also has the opportunity to be a leader with their peers. So we make sure they have all of the insights they need to give input to us on something maybe new we're piloting or even something new we're announcing to the teams. So they're kind of our on the ground communication, and then they're feeding us back these loops to say, hey. We did do a good meeting. There was good engagement, but the after gossip is like this. How could we address some of this stuff? So really every level of the organization is now being addressed in different forums. So we have good flowing communication and feedback loops at these change champion level, which is anybody can raise their hand and say, I wanna lead the change. We have these commercial alignment calls that allow our leaders to feel informed and ask questions before it makes it to their team. And then we have the overarching just how are all of our teams working together through these feedback loops individually at the field level and then at our executive leader level down, really marrying all of those communications. And that's truly, an a RevOps started thing. Right? Rev ops is the glue of all of those teams, making sure that everybody feels heard, seen, and valued. That's something super important to me, and I know we went in detail the first time we met talking about that. Empowerment, Customer-Led Growth, and Team Expansion in Customer Success [00:17:41] Adil Saleh: I cannot say how bad it I could be even 2 years down today. Let me tell you what happened. Like, a few weeks back, you know, we had our 1st, marketing hire, like, product marketing for our product, 3, 4 months back. And, you know, for the 1st month, we didn't tell him anything about the product. We didn't show him the product. We just talk kept talking about our industry, our customers, how we are, doing the messaging, how we are investing into understanding our industry, you know, the patterns and, you know, kind of, you know, unique freights of our customers. And he, one day, came up and said, hey. I want to see the product result. And we tell him, hey. You will not only see it, but you'll give the feedback. You know? Because we want you to have, a beginner eye to it, and whatever feedback that you you can have, destroy it back to you know, get it back to the product team, and you'll have all the freedom, if that makes sense. You'll have all the freedom to do that change that that you want. So he he loved it so much. Like, he's now you know, he's, like, now using the product to see how it can better fit in our customer segment that he already knew in the first place. You know? So, yeah. It is giving the freedom, to people that are, that I mean, don't put don't put roles and titles to it when it when it comes to and, you know, the. It's it's one thing that has helped us and, you know, talking to all these these founders for the last 3 years, more than a 130 of them. It's just all about, you know, making sure that how curious you are at any point. You know? Like, with anybody that you have on your team, always be curious with all the things that you put that they put on the table. So, you know, I really appreciate that you brought this up again. And you're still you know, the same, you know, same Emmy that we had, like, 2 years back, instilling the same, pushing things, the same way with the same mindset. You know? I love that fact. So now let me tell you about one more thing. When it comes to go to market, same happens with your customers. A lot of teams that we get to meet, they they are not just, you know, doing cadences or business reviews for the sake of, you know, weakening them or making sure that they use a product or adapt to the platform. They're actually keeping them as partners while they build new products, you know, new features. You know? They they are basically discussing their road map, and they are one of the successful businesses I'm talking about if not mentioned. So that I mean, what kind of customer education, are you guys doing, and what kind of investment do you're making initiatives you guys taking when it comes to customer? [00:20:16] Amie Weizer: 1st, I'll I'll respond back on, the empowerment you're doing internally. I'm so happy for you, Adil. That is amazing. The empowerment is truly the secret to success. Now I'll say empowerment also comes with giving guardrails and giving expectations. So to all the listeners, it's super important that before you start, expectations. So to all the listeners, it's super important that before you start addressing accountability, you really need to tell people what you expect of them and what their guardrails are so they know what they can live within. But then once they understand the expectation and what their guardrails are, then you get to that piece of accountability and empowerment because as you have done with your product manager, hey, here is the world that we're living in. Here's the box that we have. We want you to now bring your empowerment to these particular things. I learned a similar lesson myself even. It's just about getting out of the way to those people who are curious. Right? We just brought into our team in rev ops. We brought in a sales enablement program manager who comes with over 15 years of experience in leading sales operations. She has an incredible history and will bring all of that knowledge into our organization. It's not about what I'm expecting her to do. It's about what best practices she brings to the table. So super excited to have that person on board, but it was another great reminder to me as well. Set the expectations, set the guardrails, and then you commit to that next level of empowerment and accountability. From there, then they'll say what you were mentioning about, about customer even customer led growth. Maybe we call it that a deal because what you're asking is really how are the customers influencing the product and your future way forward? We, as an organization, have gotten so much better at starting to build up an advisory ring within our organization so we can really get to that point of understanding our customers even more, understanding our personas even more, and then bringing them into, the fold of everything that we do. We actually hired our first, we think the first in the world chief human success officer. So our first chief human success officer is building out obviously our model for what human success is, but is also bringing with us, bringing her, bringing with her Nina is bringing so much of her experience and working with other chief HROs, all people in culture leads, all of these types of roles so that we have this connection to them. And we do, various interviews with them. We do various surveys. As we start to build up, what is human success advisory and how can we put thought leadership out there from our customers who are doing things extremely well? Just got back from attending this, this RevOps AF event from the the RevOps co op where we met in San Diego with about 200 plus RevOps employees, all different leaders in their own right, doing so many amazing things. One of my favorite connections I met there was the director of CS at HubSpot. Daphne is doing, this jobs to be done framework as well within her customer facing teams, and they've actually built it into the product. So the customer is telling you what are they trying to achieve? What are their pain points and what are the goals they want to have? So, as I mentioned, our internal teams, the whole way through the journey have to keep track of that. Imagine it even better in the world of HubSpot where it's all automatically customer driven and you're rather validating these things with the customer. I'm super excited about all the opportunities and all the potential because we've learned so many great things at this event, and now these are some of the things I wanna bring back home and start to implement because this is what takes us to the next level and continues to be that customer led growth. [00:23:36] Adil Saleh: Yeah. And I love the fact that you are learning from these experiences that you, you know, connections that you need. Because, you don't get to live long enough to experience them yourself, to be very honest. And that's the beauty of, you know, this, this ecosystem we have when it comes to customer success. I think it's the biggest ecosystem, compared to other, like, you know, communities that we have, success. And, you know, women like you and Daphne, you mentioned, you know, Chrissy from, from success. These are the women that have, set the right bar, and, they're huge con I wanna pay thanks to, you and all all these ladies that are, you know, doing every day in, day out. And I did see Daphne she's she's got this beautiful course as well that, helps, helps the customer success team and experience teams, not only on HubSpot, but outside HubSpot. She's had a big impact. Love, love that. So now thinking about your team and culture, slightly on that. So, you have around how many people on your team? [00:24:37] Amie Weizer: Our team has now grown to 4 people. So we've got some revenue analysts who are supporting the sales function, and they are making sure that the opportunity matches the quote, matches the invoice to the customer. Okay. And then we've got some business analysts and program enablement. So they are working with the customer facing teams and also finance to make sure that reporting is structured well. We understand our data. We understand the trends and insights. Where I see the team continuing to grow is really in the customer success domain, actually, because we know that we've done a lot to, to acquire these products and ensure that they're ready for our sales team to sell. But another opportunity for us is how the customer success team can do soft selling, making sure they feel fully informed, making sure that we've automated with the introduction of so many AI features now, making sure that they have everything they need to continue progressing and continue reaching the next level of scale is really what I see our team continuing to grow in. [00:25:35] Adil Saleh: That that that's that's amazing. Like, you mentioned in the beginning that you have now added up more products. You know, that's, similar to, you know, other, I would say, learning management platforms that we have, but it's it's slightly different because you're specifically for hub, Microsoft. So what kind of products? Could you tell us more about those products, and what is the unique impact that they get they're they tend to make? Discussion on Human Success Platform and Employee Engagement [00:25:59] Amie Weizer: Yeah. Absolutely. Really, it's all about human success at the end of the day. The platform is just a way that enables you to build this human success culture within an organization. So what we try to do is try to, with all the organizations that are prospectively interested in our products is to help them understand that HR is going through a transformation and it's been going through a transformation for a long time. We saw the 1st generation of HR, which was all the are people paid on time? Can they take vacation? We now in the the last 10 years or so have been in generation 2, which is people and culture led where we say, yeah, have some kombucha, have a pizza party. These things helped, but it's not enough. It's not enough for today's employees to feel like they are engaged and doing well at the work that they are set out to do. We also know that the younger generations want to have, if not monthly, weekly feedback from their managers on how they're doing. And they want to grow. They want to expand. They want to develop. So the human success platform looks at this new transition we're making into what we call generation 3 human success, where employees are in charge of their journey, their development, their learning, and they are encouraged and empowered by their leaders to start having this success of, I know the things that I have gaps on, and I want to learn those and I want to grow within those. That is our learn 365 platform. Then you have a tool on top of that, that is called engage and perform, which will allow you to say on a weekly basis to your manager, checking in for just 10 minutes at a time. So you have more consistent communication with your manager. Companies can customize those by any level, what kind of questions should be asked on a reoccurring basis and how it should be reported. But for an example, how we do it internally to Zensai is ask 3 questions to every employee on a weekly basis. What's something that you achieved this week that you're proud of? What's something you had as a blocker this week that you'd like help on? And who's somebody you'd like to celebrate across the organization? Answering those three questions then leads you to having automated performance reviews and 360 feedbacks can be put on top of those weekly things. Really paving the way for employees to have the engagement with their managers, see performance because they're getting more and more responsibilities as they grow in the organization, and learning new skills and things they maybe wouldn't have otherwise been interested in or maybe want to start learning about. [00:28:27] Adil Saleh: Right. Right. Right. You know, it's it's it's all about, like, platforms that are pretty much interconnected, and they're pretty much focal towards human success. And, I'm sure you might be thinking down the road about having people and then into it. We made a lot of start ups, this year. They're investing heavily into people analytics. A lot of them are compensation management platform, HR platforms. But what's your take on, you know, having, people generally, I would say? [00:28:57] Amie Weizer: Yeah. That's absolutely right that people will become part of Into the Fold as well because people, are not just part of an organization when they first come to you for interviewing. They are so much more than that. It's the reputation in the market. It's the brand that you build. It's how things happen upon exit. It's how things happen for your people who have left alumnis, but maybe come back in the future. So we're looking at this full ecosystem and we're starting to look at different analytics, of course, but also understanding, like, what is the culture and the value that an come into come into the organization for their, for their interviews, employees are filling out to us, what are the values that are most important to them? What's the culture that they want to see? And then matching that up to our organization. Is this what we're looking for? Is this the next direction we need to go? All the way till the very end when an employee leaves the organization, it's something that you can celebrate because that employee has learned something. They've grown. They've really performed in the work that they've done. So making sure there's enough resources after that, exit happens, that employees can always keep that positive feeling about our brand, about our product and about the other employees and the lives that they touched. So I definitely see all of that coming together. I think it's only a matter of time because learning performance and engagement are the tip of the iceberg. But as we embark on this generation 3 of human success in the HR space, we just need to be doing so much more because employees drive your organization. It's not the metrics. It's not the employees, it's not the, executives. It's really how are the employees every single day showing up to do their best work and how are they contributing to what your organizational goals are? When your employees are successful, the organizational results and outcomes will come. [00:30:49] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. Investing into employee retention and employee well-being, and, you know, growth and all of this come into play. Like, we've been back to some exciting, core where we can be satisfied only for this, you know, doing people analytics from the southern sources and, you know, having the right data of finance to understand their employees more on bigger innovations. And, and that that that's something that, that's really exciting to me. That's the only thing that got me excited. After this all AI powered video sales, marketing, all these 2 came from, you know, all over the place. You know, we we met some here, in the London, central London as well, but not as many that we're gonna meet later this year, in San Francisco. I hope, we meet you there too. [00:31:40] Amie Weizer: I definitely hope we can meet each other one of these conferences for sure. 2024 is the year of being back out at events. So if we can swing it, let's do it Adil. [00:31:49] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. I really appreciate your time, Amie, and all the insights that you've been always been original, concrete, practical, and I I love that about you. Thank you very much for being here. [00:32:00] Amie Weizer: Thank you. See you later. [00:32:03] Adil Saleh: Have a good day. Bye bye.