Ep # 125: Merging Heap, Hotjar, and ContentSquare: Building a Unified Customer Success Strategy ft. Tushar Bansal (SVP of Customer Success, ContentSquare)

[00:00:03] Adil Saleh: Hey. Greetings, everybody. This is Adil from Hyperengage Podcast. Very long time coming. It's been, quite a transition as as a as a as a media company, you would say, but we never wanted to be. [00:00:15] Adil Saleh: We always wanted to be a product company backed by, a community that is very, very, very much integrated and sharing knowledge, information, and bringing people that are a huge contributor to the community. Initially, we started with customer success and that we're gonna plant another seed, and, we're gonna, be talking, to Tushar, who's, this SVP at ContentSquare. Previously, when we had it, had him, about 2 years back, he was leading global CS operations and support operations at, Heap, now acquired by ContentSquare and, you know, operations. And, of course, we're gonna be knowing more about, how those the merger went on and how the operations took over as as as a bigger global team. And now he's being an SVP at, of customer success at ContentSquare, how it feels like, and, you know, what what kind of decisions he's making now. Tushar, I really appreciated you came in again, and it's I'm super excited for this conversation. Thank you for coming on. [00:01:12] Tushar Bansal: No. Thanks thanks for having me, I know. We've been discussing this for some time now, so glad we could do it. [00:01:18] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. I really appreciate that you you made time finally. Okay. So, just picking up, on where we left, 2 years back. Like, you were, relatively of course, analytics, in a nutshell, it it is still relatable to ContentSquare, what you're doing at the ContentSquare. [00:01:36] Adil Saleh: But, when it comes to role, you know, to a significantly bigger operation, a bigger segment, how did how did it feel initially, during this transition? [00:01:48] Tushar Bansal: I think, for me, a lot of this was, I would say, easier in the sense have been part of the conversations practically from day 1. So so for me, this was this acquisition was not sudden. I saw this happen over a period of time, and I was part of, I would say, the the the core team that was helping with this whole process. So in that sense, it was easier. And from from the role perspective, even if I think about or talk about my experience prior to Heap, I've always worked for bigger enterprise companies. Like, at Medallia, we were selling to, like, big ACV and enterprise customers. So in that sense, it all resonated. But I think the most important piece when the companies come together is really the culture. From day 1, we felt when we started interacting with ContentSquare at the leadership level, at the executive level, the the ethos of the 2 companies in terms of customer centricity or or or people first approach. I think that that culture was that culture, played it really well. I think both the companies shared the value system. So I think that part was easier. And then I think the biggest, obviously, uphill task for all of us last year right after the acquisition was merging the companies, both from the tool platform perspective, but also systems operations. So I think that has been a challenge, and and we are still in the thick of it. But all in all, I would say it has gone as well as it can. Fundamentally, I believe as you take on any new role, you have to stick to the basics, and and that's really what I have been focusing on. For me, especially as a customer success leader, the fundamental principles, how I like to operate, which is, number 1, keep it simple. Number 2, focus on prioritizing your customer experience. Really, that's the purpose of our job and why we exist. So don't lose sight of your customer experience. I always keep saying this before. Every decision you take, think about what it does for the customer. Why do they want it? How does it impact their experience? How does it make their life easier? And if it doesn't, then why do it? Right? So so, again, sticking to that. And then the 3rd piece is practice transparency. As we bring the companies together, there's so much information flowing. Sometimes it's noise. Sometimes it's important. So to the best of my ability, I like to be transparent with my team, my people, and and and work from the place of trust, then authority. So I think, just focusing on those fundamentals has really helped. And overall, I would say it has been a wild ride in terms of learning. Learned a lot, but it has been a great, fulfilling one. [00:04:28] Adil Saleh: Amazing. And and having someone like you with such a big exposure, not it's just not about, about having serving a bigger segment. It's about how you're serving it and how you're transforming the product experience, with the customer success organization, which is super important. It has to be very, very much, strongly in in especially in in, in industries like where Heap is serving. You know, ContentSquare’s or experience matters. And it has to be 100% integrated with the with the customer feedback loops and, you know, making sure that you're getting the right information and you're customer centric at all times as you mentioned. So now thinking about, you know, your leadership role at ContentSquare, are you still serving the same, set of, you know, segments, like customer segments, or is the is it like, of course, also as a team? [00:05:17] Tushar Bansal: All the lot. Right? So to give you a little bit more context, ContentSquare first acquired Hotjar, around 2 years back. And then a year later, they acquired Heap, and then we kind of merge all 3 companies together at the same time. What this acquisition and merger does, it really expands ContentSquare's customer base, like, really wide. Like Hotjar was all SMB. At Heap, we had a good variety of SMB, mid market, enterprise, and ContentSquare was more heavily focused on enterprise. But when you put it all together, now we are servicing all segments. Right? So while it is exciting in terms of our coverage, right, but it's it's also, important. We are very mindful how we think about servicing each segment where, you you apply the right level of touch, which is both needed by the customer, but also sustainable for the business. And that is really where we spend bulk of, I would say, early part of this year, thinking through our overall customer journey in context. So not just segments, but also geos. Right? We are now a global company. We have, huge operations and footprint in in EMEA, ANZ, and, of course, Americas. Right? So how we think about these 3 big regions and how we think about all the segments within, that has been the bulk of our focus. And to give an example, with our EMEA business, it was heavily ContentSquare and and and and small portion of Heap. So it made sense for us to keep the 3 business lines separate as of now and and over time will emerge as we move towards 1 product, 1 platform. With Americas, the size of business for Heap and ContentSquare was roughly similar. So it would be very isolated and and and very siloed if we kept them separate. So we decided to rip the bandage upfront, and we merged, all segments sorry, all three business lines together at the beginning of the year. So important to be mindful of the region. But then when we think about the segments, right, SMB, heavy focus on digital touch. So we we have we have been good at, deploying digital and scale programs even during our heap only, tenure. But but how we scale that, thinking that motion, right, more broadly. So that has been big part of our thinking. So so we have SMB, which is by and large digital only. We have some community touch and and some reactive touch in that. But for the most part, we rely heavily on self-serve or digital touch there. Then we have mid market, where we have assigned customer success managers, but obviously they're handling a bigger portfolio. So it is still very important. We are mindful how we leverage our, like, additional resources, like training enablement and other playbooks while we apply the right level of proactive touch. And then obviously, as we go more upmarket, you need more white gloves. So that has been the basic principle. Right? How we think about, like, the geos and segments as we bring it all together. [00:08:16] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. How sweet. Like, you you you're sticking to the basics as you mentioned in the beginning. Like, it's always, like, no matter where you're serving, you gotta make sure you're, you're sticking with the core principles of customer success organization and, making sure that you, you know, you build things on the top. Perfect. [00:08:35] Adil Saleh: So now thinking about you now from a customer, segment side side of things on ContentSquare that is slightly more towards retail, as opposed to, you know, what what you guys have in in Heap and mid market and SMB, what kind of different customer journey mapping that you you you got to experience with the team? Maybe, different skill set might have required different teams that you are leading there. What what's different at that's ContentSquare? [00:09:03] Tushar Bansal: Right. So I think, we did even during the heap time. Like, retail was a big part of our, customer base. Right? So we've we were big in retail and B2B SaaS and and financial services. But comparing that to ContentSquare, ContentSquare is very heavily focused on similar to 3 industries, but retail and ecommerce are really big for for ContentSquare. And part of this has also come from the fact we were selling more to product organizations than data organizations during Heap time. At ContentSquare, obviously, marketing is a big buyer of, at what tool like ContentSquare. Right? So when you put it all together, it puts us in a unique position where we can we can service all the different, persona within the customer. Right? So even if you are a big retail, from marketing to product to design, we have something for everyone. Right? So and that and that was also a fundamental reason why they started acquiring these companies because, as you can see, the macro economy is different now in the last 2 years. We are seeing a lot of consolidation. Customers don't want fragmented experience. They want one source of truth. Right? And in that sense, bringing it all together puts us in that unique place where I would not claim one stop shop. There's no such tool, and there's no such analytics platform that is a one stop shop. But it is definitely more coverage of different use cases and more coverage of different persona within within a company than I would say any other tool out there. So it gives us that competitive advantage. In addition, if I specifically double down on retail, retail spaces and and on this, ecommerce is evolving, like, really, like, quickly over the last, I would say, 1 year since AI and and and all of that is becoming, more real, I would say, from from from being a philosophy to being a reality. The customer's expectations and their experience or their, I would say, requirements are changing. Right? For example, I see a world where customers may not browse through different websites, to get what they need. A lot of that might happen through a chat interface. Right? So now in this evolved world, how you you know, your technology still is relevant, right, is a is a big task, I think, ahead of all of us. I was at this Microsoft Partner Summit representing ContentSquare last month. This was a big topic of discussion. We had a lot of heavy hitters in that conference from retail and and ecommerce. So I think, the expectation, the customer experience, everything is evolving so rapidly. Right? Just keeping up with that pace where omnichannel is a big, big requirement. Right? Customers, especially if you have any big ticket size item, they seldom just go and buy. Right? So they have to sometimes, go in store and and and and and develop perspective, do some research, right, before they make a purchase decision. So how you stay connected with your customers throughout that entire process of acquiring them. Right? And then then retaining them. Right? That whole end to end customer journey, that is really the thinking behind how we are designing our product for the future. [00:12:18] Adil Saleh: Interesting. Interesting. You mentioned about AI. You know, it's it's for the last, I would say, 8 to 12 months. I've been meeting people, founders. [00:12:27] Adil Saleh: They're doing a lot of things. Like, it's it's more about they're trying to a lot of them are trying to ride the wave, which is in some industries, it it works and, some may not. Just like, we we came across a lot of, AI SDRs like agents in the sales operations. We just came across a couple, recently that are more for customer success. Always more interested in, like, hey. I'm gonna bring this up, and we're gonna have this question. What's your viewpoint? How efficient it's gonna be? Like, AI's CSM, SD— or, like, CSM agent versus, an an account executive that's an agent and, you know, you get get them some task and they assign them tasks and they do the task and, on their own. Like, how do you see it from a customer success standpoint? How efficient Yeah. [00:13:13] Tushar Bansal: So I think that, personally, I have gone through the journey of being, like, a skeptic to truly believing AI is here to disrupt and it is real. So I have I think the last 8 to 9 months, I've gone through that journey. And, my my fundamental belief is, AI will help us, and it is already helping us become more efficient. So I don't buy the argument that AI is going to replace humans. I think it'll only make us more efficient and and help us be more productive. And I'm already seeing that happen. Right? Like, if I if I talk about how we are leveraging this today, something as basic as in the past to to before a customer meeting to do a research on the customer and and their business, I used to spend, I remember, like, hours and hours reading their 10 k's and and they're scouting their websites and whatnot, right, to to develop perspective before that conversation. Now I feed some of that information to to something like Google Notebook, upload maybe some recent interviews from their CEO or 10 ks reports, and then boom. In 10 minutes, I get the gist of what their painpoints are, what their business focus is, what their strategy is. Right? So so we can cut down that hours and hours, if not multiple days of research work into a few minutes. Right? That's just one basic example. Similarly, I've I've been to some of these recent conferences. There was one, customer success collective in SaaSter. There's so many cool tools out there which are really disrupting really how we capture data. The biggest, I would say, hurdle for me in my role has been quality of data that goes into our system of records. Right? End of the day, any system of record, data in, data out. So sometimes it's garbage in, garbage out. So if you truly want to refine your understanding of customers and be more proactive in your touch, it's important you have clean data. But if that data is all happening through manually capturing or entering the data, that's where, right, the the the the the quality gets compromised. But now there are a lot of new age tools which you can deploy on top of all your customer touch points. Right? And they can directly, get information and gather and and truly create a custom health score, for example. Right? So it's not a fixed health score. So that so I'm seeing a lot of disruption, a lot of cool tools out there. And of course, support use cases are the most evolved ones, right? They're amazing chat agents, right, where it's it's a productivity boost, not just for a supporting, but everything that that touches customer journey. But I'm also mindful of while all this cool stuff is happening and I'm I'm totally bought into the vision, how we balance the execution with with with innovation is equally important. Right? You don't want to double down on this so quickly that everyone is feeling lost, right, and lose the fundamentals of customer centricity and then customer experiences. So being very mindful as especially for us, like I mentioned earlier, big part of this year has been consolidating 3 companies, 3 teams. So there's there's a 3 CRM converting into 1 platform is converting. There's so much is happening in all of this. A lot of people were adjusting to the new teams and the new cultures, right, or the expectations of the role. In all of this, I didn't wanna start rapidly throwing tools into the mix. So like I said, while we have started on this journey, we have started using some of the AI agent for our support and how we do the customer research. But being very mindful where the there are at least 3, 4 things I want to do, and there are 3, 4 tools on my radar. But I'm being mindful now and when we deploy without overwhelming the team with all the change. [00:16:57] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. Because the change management is a big, big thing for teams, especially when this, the in a company wide change management is happening and migration is happening, you guys are merging different, technologies organizations, altogether now. And and I love the fact that you mentioned that it can apart from support, because tier 1 and tier 2 support has been absolutely vanished. And, you know, you you can completely say, like, it's been replaced. But when it comes to customer success, sales organization, it can act as a as an augmented source. It can help you save 60 or 70% of your time just like in your case. [00:17:33] Tushar Bansal: Right. We have to we have to give an example on that front. Right? So if I think about jobs to be done, in the success org, there is this technical product success. Right? You need to make sure customers know how to use the tool and be able to answer their product questions. And then the 2nd big component is relationship management. You're making sure you you you are connected at the right level. You are connecting to your executive buyers. Right? And then and the 3rd equally big piece is having the overall alignment with those connections on the strategic value you're getting from the tool, how you quantify that value, right, and how you tie it to the future of what they are trying to do as a company. Now my belief is AI can help you automate a lot of that first pillar, right, around product knowledge and product support and use it, freeing up your time to focus on relationship building, the 2nd pillar. And and through that that that conversation, through that engagement, you can achieve the 3rd pillar, which is ultimately getting handle on how what value we are delivering, how we quantify that value, and how we align it to their their company goals. So so that's how I see AI, and that's how I see even, like, today with everything available to them, not even talking future, we are in position where a lot of that first pillar is automated. [00:18:52] Adil Saleh: And just you mentioned earlier that a lot of it's it's pretty much digital touch, especially in the SAP segment, and you're trying to, you know, this is more of a scaled operation and, you know, you can you can go up market pretty fast if you just scale it 80 to 90%, all Adil or, you know, digital touch. Perfect. So now thinking about, mid market segment, how are you going about it? Like, I know that you you're merging, like, 3 different use cases. For enterprise, it's gonna be a lot of process coming from Heap and all the analytics that you guys are doing. [00:19:22] Adil Saleh: And then Hotjar, is, of course, cherry of the cake. Like, how you guys are managing? What kind of data points or team formation that you have for this huge expansion opportunities you have within this segment? [00:19:34] Tushar Bansal: Right. So I think of, with with mid market, we again, the good news is we can service multiple use cases, but at the same time, you have to meet customer where they are. So depending on customer maturity, you cannot just slap a ContentSquare offering for a Heap customer just because they want to do something in marketing. Right? So you have to be mindful. And and for that reason, both when we approach even our product developments, we have been very mindful how we we can add a little bit of ContentSquare into Heap and vice versa, but purely working backwards from customer use cases. So if if your use cases are primitive, for example, if you are if you have a very evolved voice of customer program and you're using some of the, like, tools like Qualtrics, for example, out there, our goal is not to go and and and rip that out. But at the same time, if you are focused on optimizing your user journeys and in the process, you wanna make sure in app, in web, you gather some customer feedback right on top of it. Say you're looking for a voice of customer tool that can do it, we'll empower you with that. The whole idea is that you're meeting the customer where you are. Now, when you think from mid market lens, this is the market where customers have enough maturity, where they have these evolved use cases that are more lateral. At the same time, may not have enough budgets to go after those 3 complex tools or use cases. So that's the fundamental thinking, right? So how can we create one platform which can service multiple use cases at some complex, some simple, and ultimately we can scale with the customer. Right? So now that is the product development thinking. Right? How we create a platform where we meet the customer where they are and then we scale with them. And then from customer success perspective, similar play, right, where, leverage digital touch or automate, things you can, where you don't need as much human interaction, but be available for the customer and have enough, I would say, enough handle on the customer health signals where you can apply proactive touch. Right? Now in our mid market, we roughly end up, covering, I would say, 40-ish customers per per CSM. Right? And with with with that number, I think you can apply just enough. Right? Where by and large, you automate your playbook. A lot of this is automated and reactive, but at the same time, you are also meeting customers. You're doing regular executive reviews. You're making sure you have a success plan for those customers. So following a lot of the principles we follow in the enterprise segment, but may not be as complex. A success plan in an enterprise, world or the enterprise customer, for example, could be a, like, very lengthy document with a lot of details, multiple teams, multiple interactions, whereas it could be just a one pager for mid market. Right? So, again, working with the same kind of journey, but just simplifying it just enough, we can do it at scale. So that's that's really the thinking behind it. Now, of course, there are details in terms of how many customers per segment or or or how many customers, sorry, per CSM in that segment and how much digital touch versus versus, CSM touch. Obviously, those are more, like, defined journeys that we already have in place, but the the thinking behind is simple. Right? How much how we keep evolving our journey where it becomes more and more proactive touch versus reactive touch. [00:23:05] Adil Saleh: Very, very interesting. Like, I was also thinking, like, a lot of this, in the, like, I spoke to the team at Slack, and, they had this, team excellence, portfolio excellence. And they specifically made it for for the enterprise segment. So they are just trying to, you know, of course, search and having a high touch model there, but they're trying to standardize a lot of things, templatize a lot of things in the enterprise segment. So are you thinking of doing, anything similar to that, like, in a longer term view, especially for for the customers that are that, you know, like, for the Heap customer, that's it. For that segment that are not using not so big enough, they're just sitting between, mid and enterprise or maybe slightly more towards the mid mid market size. So Right. Are you guys doing anything? [00:23:50] Tushar Bansal: Yeah. In general, that is the approach always. Right? Every everything you do repeatedly, you keep, keep, I would say, keep that in mind how eventually we can templatize it. Right now, the whole idea is templatize it to reduce the repetition, but not to a point where it loses value. I think that is that is a principle we try to follow. So, for example, we have a success plan templatized. But if you look at 2 customers, they will look very different. The starting point, what kind of information we want to capture. Right? Understanding of their business goals, understanding what projects will eventually tie to those business goals, understanding how we quantify that. Right? So those building blocks are similar. So we templatize a lot of that and into our tools, but making sure we work with the customers to truly customize it to their needs is is where we apply that human touch. So, and the other piece is the onboarding experiences. Right? So what parts of onboarding can you tempretize or or you can deliver at scale through digital particles, digital products versus where you actually need to do a work long session. So I think every part of the journey, we pick up we keep optimizing what are the pieces which are more reputable, we can templatize. But making sure, again, you can still apply the human touch where needed. And also a lot of this has to do with setting the customer expectation and being transparent with the customers upfront. Ultimately, we have to be a sustainable business. So what we provide with enterprise, what kind of white glove we can will never be the same for mid market. But as long as we make sure, any gaps we capture through the delivery process, we have a process to either, either templatize that, right, or create resources, for the customers to get value. So you just keep focusing on that same thing, and then you keep reiterating on those articles and and documentation and whatnot. But, ultimately, be it enterprise based, mid market, the idea is Saleh. You keep, templatizing everything you can. And, again, look at all these tools and and technology to make that whole process much easier compared to what it was in the past. [00:25:59] Adil Saleh: Data points, AI, bringing all the external data points, giving you more information, you know, research agents helping you, you know, saving up your time. Okay. So now, you earlier mentioned that, it's your your the at the time of, merger, and, you know, both parties, they make sure that they're very much aligned with culturally aligned as well as, you know, all the values and operating principles. How do you see your culture, outside of, the culture you had at, at HEAP in all good and bad beats? [00:26:30] Tushar Bansal: Yeah. I think, I would say the the the culture is in in a way a lot similar. Right? Where good people want to do right by the customer, spend every decent point we have to take with this is the right thing to do for the customer versus temporarily benefits the business. I think most of us are aligned, let's do what's right for the customer. This will long term add value to the business as well. So I think that part is similar. There were some basic differences in how we were delivering the customer journey. For example, at Heap, our success managers would own lot of end to end, journey of the customer from commercials to, upsell motions to obviously relationship part. Here, we because it was, I would say, more mature in terms of, the overall org structure. So sales played a bigger role handling the commercial where customer success managers can focus more on adoption. Right? So so so now as you think about different segments and sustainable growth, sometimes there is expectations for CSMs to do more in certain segments versus the other. So in that sense, role is evolving as a whole for both the companies, I would say, be it Heap or ContentScale, the role has evolved and and and we need to be more efficient. Right? So we cannot afford to just throw bodies at problems. Right? So how we make sure our customers get the services they need. At the same time, we we differentiate between what we provide for free versus paid. Similarly, we want our customer success managers to be able to handle commercials, but at the same time, for bigger opportunities, more complex scenarios, bring in the sales expertise, right, on on the commercial side. So I think overall, our journey is evolving as we bring the 2 companies together. It just gave us opportunity to think this through end to end, and also learn from each other as we as we move forward. So if I look back, is our customer journey motion similar to what it was at ContentSquare or Heap? I would say none. It is evolving, and a lot of this is happening because we learn from each other. A lot of it is happening because as a business, like all businesses these days, we need to be more efficient. And and some of this is purely just applying the learnings from the past. But but but I would say to answer your question, the cultural ethos helps you achieve that, right, when you have that customer centricity and that DNA. But this is this is never a done job. It's always evolving. [00:29:08] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, you keep on feeding it as as as teams as well. Like, of course, there's one, operating concern that goes company wide, but then there's culture within teams, that you need to, you know, instill as leader like yourself. Right. [00:29:23] Adil Saleh: Right. Members do you have? [00:29:25] Tushar Bansal: Correct. One thing I always say. Right? So building a culture of authority and accountability. That is something it's one of my favorite, go to phrases, and my team has heard me say this all the time. You want to empower your people, with the authority to to make the right decisions, think about customer centricity, and then you hold them accountable to the results while give them giving them the space to fail and experiment. Right? So building that culture of authority and accountability is really what I strive to do. I think if if there is one thing, that's what I'm trying to do. [00:29:58] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Absolutely. And then then that's how people, fell in love with, with what they're doing. Like, when they're being fearless and then when they're being given the freedom to, do the mistakes and learn from them. You know, while, you know, it's it's it's, you know, gone are those days that when bosses are sitting on your head and say, hey. This is something that you don't have to do. This is the right way to do it. Let them do. Let them make mistakes and let them learn learn on their own process. There is a process of learning as well. And, you know, you get to learn a lot, with with failures. You know? [00:30:30] Tushar Bansal: Well, I think I spend my my my theory there is, we hire smart people, and we pay them a lot of money. And if you do not let them flex, if you do not let them do their own thing, then what's the point? [00:30:46] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. You made sure that, you know, you you you induce smarter people and, you know, why not just give them the freedom? [00:30:54] Tushar Bansal: Right. [00:30:54] Adil Saleh: You know, and let them do things, in the way that they want to do. And then, of course, you know, you you can have different outcomes. You can have different perspectives, and and that's that's a part of the discussion on the table. I love that, the way that you're you're growing the team. I I remember that, we had this conversation in the in the early segment 2 years back, and you had, like, similar notions that, hey, I'm a kind of a guy. I could give freedom. I free up people, and I give them, hey. This is what we need to achieve, and you need to go and do it in your own way. And that's the way to go. So now thinking about, you know, your team, like, how big is it and how many people, from Heap and joining the same thing? A lot of people I know the kind of person you are even hey. Yeah. We're gonna be staying with customer wherever we go. [00:31:33] Tushar Bansal: So Right. Yeah. I think a similar size, I think, because the structure is a little different. Also at Heap, my role was more global and all the different teams roll into me. Here, all the different teams have a global leader and then dotted lines into the theater or the regional leaders. So so when I started looking at the number of people reporting into my org, I I would say similar. It's just that, if you look at the old or indirect ecosystem, then that's a lot bigger. Right? So so as a as a customer success organization, we have roughly 350 people, globally, and out of that, 1 third, business is in Americas and 1 third of the team is in Americas. But but yeah. But I think structure is a little different because it's a it's a much bigger global company, so a lot of these functions have global lead with dotted lines. But but I think, again, just going back to what I said, I think for me, those basic principles where you create a culture of thought and accountability, you practice customer centricity, you you practice in the decision making, keeping things simple and balancing innovation with experimentation sorry, balancing innovation with execution. In my day to day, as much as I can, I practice these fundamentals and rest, I think, happens? I think sometimes I need to take, more credit than what I achieved, but I think, ultimately, hiring smart people and then sticking to these basics really gets the job done. [00:33:03] Adil Saleh: Yeah. And sometimes it's it's not an overnight job. Like, you get your return in years months quarters. So it's not easy to, you know, measure the the outcome and success. You gotta be very patient as well. [00:33:16] Adil Saleh: So, I mean, I I can understand, like, sitting at a level that, like, you're integrated with a lot of global teams. Like, you have regional leaders, that you're working with, and then you have, different tier of teams. And then you have other teams that are pretty much integrated with your team that you gotta make sure that you, you're well aligned between the the, teams. Now, a lot of these founders that, listening to this podcast might be thinking, like, it's been, like, 40 minutes and we didn't talk about, you know, their problems. And, you know, more than 70% of them are, like, start up founders. A lot of them are in the first two and a half, three years between, speed to series a. What do you think? How how how important it is to, craft a right customer success organization in the 1st 2 years? A lot of these founders, they're, chasing growth. They're hiring VP of sales. You know, they're, you know, getting their heads down every day, doing outreach, using all these data tools, acquiring customers, talking to the customer, you know, handing them on the product, getting the feedback loop, working with the product team. Unfortunately unfortunately, I don't know. Not a lot of them in the 1st 2 years talk about, hey. I need to build a real customer sort of managing where I need to configure the right data points from for my post sales team. I need to make sure I get them the data points that that are meaningful for them, that will help them proactively, you know, build relationship and eventually retain and expand and, you know, contribute towards the net donor retention. [00:34:48] Tushar Bansal: And I interact with quite a few, smaller companies and founders, advise a few. So I see this all the time. This is my take on this. Longevity of your business, or or or how focus you are on the old long term customer value defines, as an entrepreneur how forward thinking you are and and and how much you care about long term success of your company. And if you truly do care, you would want to set up your customer success motion as one of the first core teams versus making this an afterthought. And I've seen this, like, every day in, day out, I see that, like, some of the founders when they're just chasing the next evaluation, the next funding, they may not think about it. But when you talk to any of the, either forward thinking or I would say seasoned founders who might be into the 2nd and third venture, they realize now they need to invest in this early because ultimately your business exists because of customers. And at some point, your customer revenue will be bigger than your new revenue, so you must protect and preserve it. And also, this is a reality of SaaS world. Your customers need to stay with you roughly 3 years, if not longer, for for you to make money off of them. Right? So if you don't invest in the post sales customer experience, obviously you are playing with your chances of that success. Right? So that's my advice to any company, and it's not coming from the bias of being the success leader. I've done a lot of different go to market rules, rooms, and I think of myself more of a go to market leader than a customer success leader only. But but, so so it's not coming from a place of bias, but I truly believe, for long term, longevity of the company invest in this function, as soon as you start investing in sales. [00:36:43] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Okay. And quick question on that too. Like, what are the few simple steps that you, advise, speaking out loud here for the companies, let's say, with, let's say, with less than 500 customers, paying customers that can be, you know, less than a half a 1000000 annual recurring, or less than a 1000000 annual recurring in the first, you know, 1st year or 2. So what what are the 3 simple steps, you know, they need to do to be able to form at least as small as 3 CSMs or 3, go to market, team members or that are core focused on post Saleh experience, you know, product experience and retention, expansion, adoption, onboarding, all of these things, that matter a lot. And, of course, it's a it's a nutshell. It's it's a part of GTM. [00:37:31] Tushar Bansal: Yeah. I think that we should be working backwards from your customer persona and your buyer persona. How complex your product is. Right? How much touch is required? Is it a self-service product? Is it something which is heavily configuration based? So I think you need to have that clarity on what kind of roles will add value to your customer. Again, working from that principle of customer value and customer experience, in some cases, it's a self serve product, very simple use case. You can double down on on building a more business focused customer success function where you most of the businesses, especially in the SaaS, are land and expand. Right? So you can focus more on making sure you are adding value, capturing value. You can you can start upselling. Right, and and and you want more commercially driven, right, more business savvy people, to begin your customer success motion. If it's a very technical product, right, then obviously you wanna make sure you get the basics right, the product experience and how to use the product and how to get the value. You have to solve for that, right? As you start building this function before you start thinking about any customer complex use cases. So, I think the biggest is know your customer and who's your end user and make sure you enable them to get value out of your product. That is the first step. Sometimes That's the first step. Yeah. And yes. And again, depending on your product and the industry, sometimes you will need to invest heavily on onboarding a customer. But once they're onboarding, they're onboarded there on your on their own. But while there are other tools where onboarding is very quick, you deploy, you install, you're done. But after you deploy, especially this is true for analytics tools. Right? You need to engage with the tool to get value. Right? So you need to invest in the persona that can help customers on an ongoing basis. Maybe enablement is a bigger use case in that case. Right? So again, the different building blocks of customer success from from onboarding a customer, the technical implementation part, the training part, right, building relationships and growing the account, right, focusing on the more land and expand motions. And then of course, what kind of issues that run into and what need to be solved through automated support versus the human support. So these are the building blocks. Now you know your product, know your customer, know your market, and see where you want to start. Another question I get from a lot of founders is, do I bring in a leader first or do I bring in experts from some of these core areas before I think about leadership? Again, depends on where you are as a founder. Like, in your founding team, do you have someone who has a lot of experience doing or scaling some of this? If yes, then you might be successful bringing in more hands, on keyboard, be it, I mean, onboarding resources, services resources, and whatnot. [00:40:25] Adil Saleh: Getting your hands dirty. Yeah. [00:40:27] Tushar Bansal: Exactly. But at the same time, if you have no experience how to think through the customer journey or how to measure customer journey, how to measure the experiences or the operational readiness and tooling, then you might Bansal start with with bringing in, I would say, a player coach kind of a leader who who has the fire and the hunger to to roll up their sleeves, but also have some experience how to build these building blocks in terms of systems, tools, processes. Right? So, again, every company is different. Their act is different. But, again, working backwards from your customer persona, your your systems, and how complex your tool is, I think that's where you get all your answers. [00:41:06] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. And it all starts with the customer. And a suspicion based, economy today, you need to invest heavily onto the onboarding. This is the one problem that we, get together and we as a product team, also facing. Like, we're trying to make sure that of course, we know our customer, today, the customers we have today. Maybe they can change. We can pivot. The product can change. But what we know today, we need to make sure we, make that onboarding process onboarding to the platform as seamless as possible. And the time to value is is is one critical point too. And, you know, being a data analytics tool, you know, that, like, a lot of a lot of these customers, they don't have all of these data points configured. So you gotta make sure that you get your hand dirty and you work with them as partners in the first maybe the sales cycle can be as big as 3 months. [00:41:52] Tushar Bansal: For, you know, a small big project. We we we we we we went through, I would say, roughly 2 years back where we had to optimize our onboarding. And in that process, we went from, like, almost negative 10 NPS on onboarding to plus 50, 55, which is world class. That is some of the things we we had to fix to to get there was, 1, making sure you're setting the right expectations from the customer. Right? When you're meeting them during the sales cycle, You're not just blindly saying yes to everything. You set the expectation in terms of their technical readiness, their skills, their time investment, what is needed to be successful. You you have that conversation upfront. Very important. 2nd piece is your onboarding. Onboarding doesn't just mean implementing the tool. It also means making sure you teach them how to fit. You get them to a place where they can they can after you start hand stop handholding them, they can be on their own, and they can trust the the data or whatever your tool does to to make decisions on on this basis of that. Right? So so how you get them to fish or teach them how to fish, I think that is big part of onboarding. I often see a lot of companies do a great job implementing, but then customers are left high and dry. They don't know what to do with it. Right? So balancing that training and implement part of onboarding is equally important. [00:43:11] Adil Saleh: They just implement but don't educate. [00:43:13] Tushar Bansal: Exactly. Because there's a lot of dead points. Right? So this for b two b SaaS companies, More than half of the customers or users drop off between onboarding and post onboarding. Right? So so you have to catch at the drop drop off point and make sure you do things like, for example, you don't exit the onboarding without validating they they get the value and they're ready to go. So we do something what we call launch, launch validation QBR. Right? So the whole idea is before you end the onboarding, you must make sure you have had a touchpoint with your business stakeholder on the customer side to validate they're enabled. It's not just deployed. They're enabled, and they're ready to go. And and then you keep coming back and validating and also monitoring how the adoption behaves, right, within that customer during onboarding, right after onboarding, and then for the next 6 months, how it is trending. That is where you can get a lot of signals in terms of their success with onboarding. [00:44:11] Adil Saleh: Oh my gosh. I I love the way that you, you know, you just show this, you know, acumen for customer success organization and you, speak for, you know, for for all sorts of use cases and for people to, you know, articulate, for their own use cases, and that makes you a great teacher. I I love that you you spent time Tushar, and, I love the way that you've been, such a such a, you know, inspirational throughout, you know, your career and for us and for my team and all the people listening. So thank you very much, Tushar, for for all your time, and, you know, we we keep you posted on this, this this is published. [00:44:47] Tushar Bansal: Of course. It was a pleasure. [00:44:49] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. Take care.