LeeRon Yahalumi 0:02 I’m a big believer that customer success is not an individual sport. It’s a team sport, work as a team, work as a unit, help one another, have each other’s back. Ask for help when you need it. Help one another, you’ll be more successful doing so as a team as an, than as an individual.
Taylor Kenerson 0:18 Welcome to the Hyperengage podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement.
Shawal Fida 0:40 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Shawal from the Hyperengage podcast, and I have my co-host Adil and a very special guest LeeRon, from
regie.ai. Thank you so much LeeRon, for taking the time today. Nice to meet you.
Adil Saleh 0:53 Nice to meet you LeeRon. Cool stuff. LeeRon – thank you for the introduction, Shawal – LeeRon, it was a real pleasure having you around. And just more than that, I was looking at the technology and the product that is competing in a very, very fast like emerging industry, which is, you know, AI-powered copywriting. Yeah, AI-powered content writing. We recently heard one of our friends, and we’ve, we’re using Jasper for like, since 2019, when they had their initial beta access. So Dave, the team from Austin, they just raised 120- $125 million, just maybe yesterday, I guess, or two days back, and on $1.5 billion valuation in just 18 months, which is quite impressive. And this shows that this, this industry, this space is quite moving fast. So I have a question for you, you’re serving as Head, Head of Customer Success at
regie.ai. right? It’s more of a AI-powered, AI-powered content writing tool for sales. And, you know, I would say creative teams as well. There are loads more use cases in different operations in a tech business. So why did you choose this? Like what was your motivation to join a customer facing role such as this, and what actually drove you at the time and when you started?
LeeRon Yahalumi 2:14 So I made my way into the startup world that I found is very intriguing to me years ago, my background is actually in education. I was an educator and a school leader for many, many years. And I like to say that I had my first midlife crisis, I just woke up one morning and decided that’s not what I want to be when I grow up. And I didn’t know what I wanted to be. So I decided to take a break and figure it out. And I was extremely lucky and a very good friend of mine was part of a emerging startup at the time that was in education technology. And he said, we need people like yourself with a background in education and the mind of customer success. And the mind of- we didn’t even call it customer success at the time, it was customer-first or customer-obsessed, or customer advocacy. And so I joined my first startup about 12 years ago, and kind of made my way through and customer success was not what I thought I would do. I joined the startup, early stage startups, you kind of do everything. So I got to do everything from support to sales to marketing and found my home in customer success really by just natural growth, and discovered that that is the place that I feel most comfortable and most successful. I love having conversations with our customers, helping them realize value with the platforms and systems that I provide them, helping them grow and become a better service to their customers and kind of paving it forward in each step that we take. To your part Adil, the world of AI is a world that’s really been growing over the last few years. And I find fascination in the fact that we can use AI to help us do things that as human beings, we just maybe are not as good as or maybe we can’t scale and we can use technology to really help us speed things up and do things a little bit better. Regie is the perfect example of that. Regie allows you to streamline all content workflows for go-to-market teams in a way that you could not do without AI tools. The power of regie really allows go-to-market teams anywhere from your SDRs to your sales team, to your marketing to your customer success, to communicate with prospects and customers in ways that today are still extremely manual, that you have to constantly measure and adjust and take information and a human can only do so much without the power of AI and data, and Regie provides you with all those tools and helps you just make it faster, scale it up. It saves you so much time of just manual creation and manual monitoring and manual processes. Why not let an AI do it with you?
Adil Saleh 4:54 Absolutely, absolutely. Because I still remember previously, it was a different technology. And now, it got upgraded to GPT-3 now, it’s the, and a lot of investments been put into this space by big innovators. And then we saw all of a sudden, like a lot of tools coming in like tools like Jasper, tools like Regie, tools like
copy.ai, lots of them they’re serving in the space, some for agencies, some for freelancers, some for, you know, just like, you know, Regie, like, you’re you have some enterprise segment you’re serving, you know, customers like AT&T that’s, that’s not, that’s not a small business. So we, it’s quite clear that you know, your processes and your infrastructure like on the technology side is scalable enough, it’s big enough. So, I mean, I really appreciate you guys took it like two years, and, you know, a team of 50 people up till today. It’s quite exceptional. So congratulations on being this-
LeeRon Yahalumi 5:58 Thank you, we’re a small but mighty team!
Adil Saleh 6:01 Yeah, so by the, how big is your team, by the way?
LeeRon Yahalumi 6:03 So today at Regie, there are three customer success managers. I joined about a month and a half ago, and my charter is really to just build that out. This is kind of what I do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past 12 years is join early stage startup and build the function and organization of customer success, operationalize it, build the foundation of what needs to happen, scale it up to where it becomes super successful. And then I get bored, and I go do it again.
Adil Saleh 6:32 Yeah, you do it differently. Do not get bored. That’s great. So you, since you shared you started your journey, customer success journey with, with
regie.ai, is that right?
LeeRon Yahalumi 6:46 Yes. So I started, I’m actually at Regie for the past month and a half.
Adil Saleh 6:49 Okay, cool. So tell us a little bit about how you had it like in the first place, like what kind of challenges you might face individually. And then across teams, across technologies, you know, getting accustomed with the, with the processes that are more tailored towards the technology, and you need to cope up, you need to make sure you are well aligned to it. Tell us some stories?
LeeRon Yahalumi 7:12 Yeah, absolutely. So I really believe in taking your first 30 days and just being curious, asking a lot of questions, both of the team that’s already there, and people who had started the work, but also what’s most important to me is to talk to our customers. And so I’ve made it my mission, to connect with every single one of our customers on a personal level, to hear about their journey to understand why they decided to partner with Regie, what are their current challenges? And how can we help them so that I can put that information into how I build the process of operationalizing customer success. In early stage startup, Customer Success usually starts organically. You bring in two people with a customer success background and tell them, “Can you make sure you success this customer? Can you help them renew?” But there’s less thought being put into the operation side of what does it take to succeed a customer? What are some of the foundations you’ve got to put in place? What is the journey you want to take them through? What are those value moments that you want to create for them throughout their journey with you? And so this is what I’m starting to build out. There’s a lot of questions on my mind, as I’m sure other customer success leaders have like, what is the right segmentation for a market? And as someone who’s done this before, I can tell you the same way I tell others, there is no one-size-fits-all in customer success. Every company is different. And in every stage, you’re a little bit different. You really need to look at the mapping of all your customers and figure out how can you help them succeed, really take a snapshot of where you are today. What are the tools you have, the skillsets, the human skills that you have on your team, and build from there, then you will take a look at the landscape outside and take a look at technologies that can help you scale that up, and can help you make those processes better. Different technologies, in my opinion, can help you in different stages. There’s not one that is better than others. They’re just all good at different places. And I’m a big believer of starting fresh and starting from the ground up and then understanding what do you need, what are the pain points and opportunities where you can insert a technology to help you grow versus forcing a technology in that doesn’t fit with what you already have. We’re lucky enough to have such a wide variety in the market where you can get to choose and pick and then grow with that technology until the place where, okay, now you need to mature and move into a different platform. Using, using what you have to build from, I think is the best approach.
Adil Saleh 9:46 Yeah, and go with the basic, like if you want to just start over and if you’re, you know, just getting the foot in the door, just start from the scratch. Do the basics right and then you build up. You want to ask something, Shawal?
Shawal Fida 9:59 Yeah, yeah, amazing, LeeRon. So just diving a bit into your CS journey, what does your day to day look like? Like as the Head of Customer Success at
regie.ai? What do you do throughout your day?
LeeRon Yahalumi 10:10 Yeah, that’s a great question. I think my favorite thing about customer success is, it’s never the same day, every day is so different. You get to do so many things. There’s all kinds of adventures, I try to really balance my day between internal things that the company needs, that my team needs from me, and then our customers. I make a conscious effort to spend 50% of my time every week, engaging with customers in different ways, in different approaches, whether it’s having conversation about how they’re using the product into how they would want to use the product in the future, understanding their landscape, understanding their challenges today, understanding what the future would look like from- for them, so that we can grow with them and continue to serve them as they grow. But I try to balance it, I think customer success, the approach is, you’re here to help customers succeed both internally, inside your company you have customers, and externally, your customers that help your company grow. And so really spending that time helping customers.
Adil Saleh 11:13 Okay. Okay, that’s great. So that’s the most, you know, knowing your customer, and, you know, understanding your customer and then communicating, engaging with them in the best way, with all the resources, like I’m also thinking of what kind of data that’s like, what is your tech stack that enables your team to be more proactive on the engagement side, as well as, you know, monitoring side like data analytics of like, you can also go ahead and share one story of any customer, starting from onboarding that how you actually received the customer, and then, over time, how you make sure, you know, you’re mapping the entire processes across the journey of the customer, and then enabling them to adapt. And then, you know, the entire journey.
LeeRon Yahalumi 12:00 Yeah, so I think data is extremely powerful. And it helps you understand where you are, it’s kind of your compass on the map of where you’re going to take the customer. So you can start with the very basic things, of how many people are going to use the platform, and asking the customer what’s your vision, it, will it be 10 people, 100 people or one so that you can start measuring what success would look like, are we meeting those objectives that they want to achieve with us? Then really take a look at usage. Usage is really where everything is, there’s a difference to me between usage and adoption. Usage is people using your product, adoption is when the tool has become part of the workflow, when it’s become part of the process of how they’re doing everything else throughout the day. And so we use different tools to make sure that we are tracking that. And this could be you know, in my history, I’ve used Mixpanel, Tableau, Amplitude, different tools to really take that usage information and map that out into a visual, so we can track if usage is sustaining, or whether it’s moving. Usage is kind of like the weather, some days, it’s hot, some days, it’s cold, some days it rains, it moves. What you’re looking for is patterns. And so you want to make sure that you are tracking patterns of success within your customers, and finding a few customers who are using it to the best of their ability and really adopting your platform into their workflow, to then develop what is the ideal customer profile, so then you can use that to guide other customers as they’re joining you. So a lot of the work that I’ve done in my first 30 days here is the same work I’ve done in every role I’ve been in, is really map that journey with a current customer who feels they’re being very successful with the tool that we’re serving them with. And then developing that customer success plan and that customer journey for their point of view, asking them their question, what was their onboarding like? How long did it take? What were the different data points? How many users did we have in week one? How many did we train? Did it go up? Did it go down? What were the best approaches so I can design the map for the next customer that comes along? And tell them that this is what we’ve found success with, and really asking them if that’s something that they see themselves being able to achieve as well. You have to remember that when you build the journey for a company like AT&T, then you try to make a new onboarding startup fit that journey, it’s not going to work. A startup with 10 or 15, people will not have the same customer journey as a large enterprise company like AT&T. So you’re gonna have to develop different customer journeys and different success funds for companies at different stages, different sizes, the different use cases of how they use your technology. And so by asking all those curious questions and really mapping things out, tracking how their usage is and how their adoption of the platform is, is where I find that success. I’m a big believer in using CRMs, I don’t care whether you use HubSpot or Salesforce or any CSM-specific CRM, but without a customer retention management platform, it’s really hard to track in your early stages, be as simple as using Excel, like you can start with nothing and still track your customers and still track those important data points. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and you have to track metrics. Otherwise, you don’t know where you’re going.
Adil Saleh 15:25 Absolutely, you know, like, like, it’s circling back to the same point that being curious on what your, what your customer is doing inside your platform. And consistently, looking at them using these technologies, like you said, Mixpanel segments a lot of technologies that are, you know, mapping data points and recording sessions. And so what do you think like, I’m thinking, because I’ve used Jasper that’s serving in the same industry, so I’m thinking that what, how your customers are perceiving value differently? You got my point? Like, there are three different customers that can use your platform, three different, three different ways. So can you exemplify some of them? So we, our audience, will know better about
regie.ai and how it is leveraged in different, across different teams?
LeeRon Yahalumi 16:17 Absolutely. So let’s start with our SDR AE teams, these are teams who write a ton of sequences to communicate with prospects. If you’ve ever been in one of those roles, I have, it’s part of the most painful parts you do. The second painful part is keeping your CRM up to date and doing all the admin work or filling up the fields. But writing a sequence is really hard. And writing isn’t something that comes easy to everyone. I personally struggle with writing, staring at a blank page is really hard for me, I don’t know where to start. The power of Regie is with Regie, I give Regie a few data points. Who is the persona? What’s the value proposition for my platform? And what is the pain point that this persona has? I give Regie that information and click ‘generate’, and Regie creates an entire sequence for me. That entire sequence is automated, and includes the emails that go out, includes the calls to action, it already is in there, we’re using industry best practices. And you can create different types of sequences from 12 steps to 25 steps, whatever your company has found that’s successful for you. But this saves our SDR and AE teams a huge chunk of their time, they no longer have to create sequences. The beautiful thing about Regie is we’re going to measure how successful those sequences are for you, we’re going to help you AV test them against other sequences you have and serve you up with information about which sequences are doing better than others, which subject lines are clicking better, which is which value proposition, so we’ve served you with all the information to help guide you to where you go. For the marketing teams, you can imagine as a marketing person, how many hours a day in a week you spent on creating blogs, and how long it takes to even come up with like a mapping for a blog and the information you want to share. With Regie, you can start from scratch by telling Regie I want to write a blog. For example, I wrote one last week about cycling throughout Seattle. And I told Regie that I just want to write a blog about bicycle trails and cycling through Seattle. And I clicked generate. And within two minutes, I had an entire blog about cycling through Seattle, Regie makes sure that you’re not plagiarizing anything. But instead of spending hours and days creating a blog, you can do so in two to three minutes. In speaking with our customers, I’ve heard from marketing teams that this saves them about 70% of the time they would spend on blog creation. One of my favorite tools is our social posts. So if you’re part of any company, you know that everyone is posting on LinkedIn. But the problem with it is that if you have 5 or 50 people posting on LinkedIn from your company, you now have 5 or 50 different value propositions and brand conceptions of what your company actually does. There is no holistic way of looking at it in one eye. But if you have Regie, everyone is posting similar things about your brand, because you’re given it the UI from your homepage, and you can create social posts in less than a minute.
Adil Saleh 19:15 Tell us more about it. I’m sorry, could you tell us more about this? Tell us more. But how does that work out like for any business that needs to distribute content on a daily basis like across entire marketing team, how automated it is, how time saving and scalable it is, and how intelligent it is when it comes to really, you know, content creation part. So, because that’s a real challenge on LinkedIn, like people, that stops them a lot, you know, they’re not able to write good content, quality content. How does Regie help, you know?
LeeRon Yahalumi 19:47 So you can use current content that your company’s created to put it into Regie and ask them to create a blog post or social posts out of it and Regie will take that information, rephrase some of the words that are there, keeping the main concept there, provide you with some hashtags that are really relevant. And then click post. It is that simple and easy. If you don’t have current, you know, one pager or content created, you have your website. And there are different sections in your website, give Regie the URL, and he will create social posts from that URL and that page information. A piece I didn’t mention is creating ads, marketing teams screen a ton of ads, you can do all of that in Regie, we’ve got a complete set of tools to help go-to-market teams. So your SDR AE teams, there’s marketing tools. And we didn’t even talk about the fact that our customer success team communicates so much with customers, you can automate all of that through Regie as well. So really being able to take an AI that helps you with your communication, making sure that not only as an individual, we’re saving you time and we’re making sure you’re spending your time in really important pieces, but that you’re also communicating with the same branding messages that your company wants to put out there. And that the company as a whole sounds as one company. So it solves the challenge of content creation, it solves the challenge of content workflow, it breaks down silos between different teams who usually just don’t collaborate with one another, and makes them into one unit, one go-to-market unit. And that’s the mission.
Adil Saleh 21:21 Amazing, that’s interesting.
Shawal Fida 21:23 Yeah, that’s amazing. So earlier on, you talked about your customer success tools, and you know, Amplitude. And so do you have a dedicated CS platform that you use for a sales team to stay on top of customers?
LeeRon Yahalumi 21:36 Yeah, so our team, like I said, is very small right now. Today, our team uses HubSpot, and we are moving into Salesforce. I’m a believer, this is my personal point of view, customer success-specific CRMs absolutely have a value and have a place. But often when you’re small, there is no need for it yet. Salesforce by definition is a CRM, HubSpot is used as a CRM, if you’re starting small, start right there. As you’re growing, as you identify what your customer journey is, what your success plan is, what metrics you actually want to measure, there’ll come a time where you outgrow those systems, and you will need a customer success-specific CRM, and then you can go and move to that tool. When I was at Dreambox, which was my first startup, we chose Gainsight. And we joined Gainsight. Early on when they were pretty early in their stages. And it was the choice we made. At Textio, I chose ChurnZero. Again, I don’t think that one CRM is better than the other, I think at different stages, given your different customer segmentation, the size of your target, the complexity of your platform, different CRM are better for you at the time. So do your due diligence to speak to all of them, tell them what your use case are, understand the complexity of each system, how long it’s going to take you to actually onboard that new system, train your employees in it, put your processes in it. But I’m a big believer that you can’t implement a CRM, before you create a process. The CRM itself is a box, that’s all that it is, you actually have to put the things that go into the box to fill it. If you don’t have a process in place, if you don’t have a system of how you’re doing things. A box is just the box. So build your processes, then bring a CRM.
Adil Saleh 23:32 I love that you mentioned, I absolutely love that. Because any platform, be it CRM, be it any technology that you use for documentation, a lot of things that you, you need to apply technology on, it’s as powerful as you leverage them. And as you, basically as you assist them with the, all of the processes, as you mentioned, it’s, it’s super important, an early stage startup, early stage small teams, it’s very hard. At the same time, they are focused on the product growth, like the feature said, revenue growth, sustaining sustainability, retention on the customers and of course, unlocking growth from the, you know, expansion on the existing user base as well. So there’s, there’s a lot of challenges that and, and it is certainly important. I spoke to Iran a few months back, he’s the CTO of Gong. And he also mentioned this, that in the early days, you of course you gotta be data-centric, you gotta be customer-centric, you’ve got to live closer to the customer but what, as you grow old, bigger team, more customers, more processes, you won’t get to talk to your customers as same as it used to be in the beginning. So since you you’re having a real time engaging with the customers, why not you understand and the best way to get a good market fit, have shaped the product in the best way, your processes in the best way. You know, profile identification, as you mentioned, that is so important. I mean, in the first one or two years, I don’t think you should think too much about integrating a lot of technology, whether you’re a team of just a few people. And how many customers you guys are serving?
LeeRon Yahalumi 25:10 About 100, right now.
Adil Saleh 25:13 100? 100 is not a small number, all of them are paid customers, right?
LeeRon Yahalumi 25:16 All of them are paid customer, Regie is growing really fast and Regie is going to continue to grow. And our focus is to serving our customers to the best of our ability, growing with them, listening to the feedback they provide us on how we can help them better, and developing those features for them.
Adil Saleh 25:31 Oh, great. That’s that’s that’s that’s the energy that it takes. And that’s intent that it takes, even with smaller teams. So you mentioned that the data, like of course you’re monitoring the product usage data, you’re absolutely tracking all the events, and you have all of those data points, pretty much set up inside- what platform for the product are you using?
LeeRon Yahalumi 25:54 Right now we’re using Amplitude. But i think it doesn’t matter, you can, again, you can track them in Smartsheet, Mixpanel, Tableau, it doesn’t matter. You can again, even in an Excel spreadsheet, as long as you’re tracking events, as long as you’re tracking usage, decide what’s the right way for your platform. Some platforms have daily users, some have weekly users, some have monthly users, understand how your customers are using your platform, how often, understand what data points you need to track, and then just start tracking it just looking at them.
Adil Saleh 26:25 Yeah it’s all about patterns and behaviors, you have to be, you have to enable your systems and make them intelligent enough that falls- that actually chases the customer journey, your your technology should chase the customer journey. And, you know, walk them through all of the, all of the processes that you have, and then have the right people and systems in place. So now talking on this data, I was also thinking, I’m just trying to paint a picture in my head, like how you guys are basically going day to day serving about a 100, 100 customers with with a team of three. You know, at this point you’re managing, how does that data translate? Like, I know that a lot of CSMs, they are pretty good in the customer-facing engagements, you know, relationship building, follow ups, and all these mainstream KPIs that CS teams have, how does that data from Amplitude or product users gets translated? And becomes understandable so that they can take action? Yeah, like, was there, is there any training center or any anything?
LeeRon Yahalumi 27:29 Yeah. So you gotta, you gotta have a point of view. Here. I believe as a leader, again, understanding what your customers desired outcome is, understanding what they would perceive usage to be, and then identifying what’s the goal of what you believe a successful customer with your platform can do. And so taking time every week to really be intentional, and I think that’s really critical. In the role of customer success, you have to be very proactive, but you also have to be very intentional with your actions with the information that you’re serving up. The goal with every point that you meet a customer is to provide them with value, and remind them of the value that they’re getting with your platform. So every time I would meet with you Adil, I would say, “Hey, Adil, I wanted to let you know that your goal was to have five team members use Regie, guess what? We have seven! How cool is that? I am beat- beating and exceeding your current expectations. Are there additional people we should have join on the team? And I’d love to meet all of them, so we can help serve them.” Or in a different note, say, “Hey, we plan on having five and we only have two? Can you help me understand what’s going on? Do we need to provide you with additional training? Is something happening internally in the company where I can help and support you? Can our platform help you solve the problem that you’re facing right now?” So using the data that you have to ask questions, to understand what’s the health of their business, and help them understand the health of the relationship and the uses that they have with us. And reminding them of that value that they’re seeing at each point, whether to tell you that your goal was usage, or with Regie, how many campaigns you’re creating, or how many sequences or how many blogs, and then the effectiveness of each one, and then ask him to take a look at the time that it has saved your company, the time that it saved your team, and how many dollars you saved just because of time saving, and that the feeling that the team has, have just unified, not siloed, everyone working together. Those are things, some of them are measurable, some are not. But take those different data points and help the customers see them. Understand the reason why you’re tracking them, why you think they’re important, and help them see how they’re tracking against those different data points.
Shawal Fida 29:44 Yeah, amazing. So can you can you dive a little bit into how do you build the right culture for your team? And what are some steps that you take to empower your team members and be successful CSMs?
LeeRon Yahalumi 29:56 Absolutely. I think culture is really where everything starts, if you don’t have that, the entire structure you’re building is going to collapse. There are few principles that really matter to me. And that’s, that’s just who I am as a leader. And that’s just how I lead teams. So for me, accountability has always been at the forefront of everything, be accountable for the work that you do, for the work that you tell customers you’re going to do. I think that working together in a collaborative manner is something that is really valuable to me, I have often told my team, I’m a big believer that customer success is not an individual sport, it’s a team sport. Work as a team, work as a unit, help one another, have each other’s back, ask for help. When you need it, help one another, you’ll be more successful doing so as a team as an, than as an individual. And then I think having the customer in the front of everything that you do, be ethical, be transparent, be curious, ask questions, we’re here to serve and help them. If you help them, you help yourself, and so putting all of that together. And then an element that’s really important to me, and an element that I find every day at Regie, is have fun with it. The customer success role is so difficult, and you can get so bogged down. Have fun, if you’re not having fun, then what are you doing? So if you’re accountable, you collaborate, you think about the customer first, and you’re having fun doing it, you’ll have a great team that will help you grow and scale. And people want to stay, people want to grow with you.
Adil Saleh 31:31 Absolutely, absolutely. Because you cannot be great at something that you don’t love. So you gotta have a fun fact into it that you enjoy that there has to be something that you chase, and that drives you day to day. And as you mentioned, you know, accountability, that’s super important. Like, you know, you have, you have to empower your team to be accountable for all of their commitments to the customer, to the team, to themselves. So it is so important. And I’m sure, this has been one of the biggest challenges. You know, starting off with like, with a tech business when you’re not thinking of having so experienced people like five years, six years onto your customer success team, but people that are less experienced. And they’ll have these problems, like work ethic and all these, then you gotta stand up and be an inspiration, not a motivator, not somebody that’s in a consistently stay-on-top or bring documents or having meetings and all of those, then you gotta go first.
LeeRon Yahalumi 32:28 The role of a leader is to set an example, and to lead by example, and to set the tone of what the team is going to look like. So I’m a big believer in that.
Adil Saleh 32:38 Just just right here, I would like, I would love to mention a book that one of my mentors, I listen to his videos, his talks and, you know, read his books, Simon Sinek’s ‘Leaders Eat Last’. So that book is quite inspirational. And that has helped me a lot in the road of- in the journey of leadership. So it’s, it’s a daily job. It’s a consistent, you know, academy that you learn every day. So it’s, it’s something that you take for life. You want to say something, Shawal?
Shawal Fida 33:11 Yeah. So earlier on, I assume that you might have done a lot of hiring in your role up till now. So what is it, something that you look for when hiring new CSMs in your team? Like, what would you recommend someone who is looking forward to joining the CS team at
regie.ai?
LeeRon Yahalumi 33:26 Yeah, hiring, instant hiring. And we’re gonna continue hiring because we’re going to continue growing really fast. But some of the things that I look for CSMs in general, is the human skills. People used to call them soft skills. I don’t think they’re soft skill, I think they’re just human skills, communication, active listening, the care and the desire to serve others and help others become more successful. I look for those in an interview. I think one of the greatest skills that a CSM can have is grit and resilience. It’s a really tough roll, you get punched a lot. How fast? Can you bounce back? How can you keep a positive mindset? I look for growth mindset, I look for people who are constantly looking to learn and become better and evolve themselves and not looking to stay in the status quo. And I look for individuals who are curious, I think that’s a really great skill to have. If you’re in a startup, ask questions, identify issues, and then figure out a way to solve it, come up with an idea, even if it’s not the perfect solution, come up with an idea of how to do it. And if you’re joining a startup, be a self-motivator, be someone who’s just gonna get it done, who’s gonna figure it out, who’s just gonna roll up their sleeves and go. If you’re a CSM joining a larger company, they probably already have systems in place and processes and manuals. You just need to follow. If you’re joining startups, which is where my heart and soul is, that means you’re going to learn as you go. You have to be very experimental. You have to be willing to try and innovate. Look for those things. Show that to me in an interview, and you’ve got to roll with us.
Adil Saleh 35:04 Lovely, amazing. Just a quick story on that I’ve worked in corporate all my life, like for the first eight years, and then I stumbled upon a startup, my friend used to work there. And, you know, I just joined anonymously. I said, okay, let’s try, let’s try something new. And it was a SaaS startup for social media marketing industries. It was competing Buffer, Hootsuite, all these competitors, now they’re pretty big. So I would consider, to this day, I would consider all the things that I’ve learned in that startup for, for my three years, that was quite a small number, as compared to nine years that I’ve spent like in three, four, AT&T, Comcast, all these businesses and doing sales enablement, and, you know, success relationships, and all, it is compared to not like, this is an entire, like, you see everything happening right in front of you, and you are a bigger part of it. So you get like, accountability, you get like decision-making, you get like leadership, you know, I then, you know, built their entire team from scratch, the customer success team. And I just, I remember I joined them when they had only 1500 customers, when I left, they had more than 60,000. So it’s just about, not just exposure, not just the decision-making power, and, and visibility, but also the courage that it gives like, you get, you get the courage that this is something that you are a part of, you’re a bigger part of it, you’re not a tiny part yeah, you’re making an impact. So I love the way you’ve explained that. And it’s just about it. Anybody listening to this, I’m sure we have like more than 70% of people that are in the CS space, and if you guys are looking for a career change, if you’re looking to, you know, change your role and get into the customer success, this is the right time for you and she’s the right person for you guys. You can reach her out on LinkedIn. You can go ahead and share your LinkedIn name and bit of your profile so people can reach out, ask questions regardless of anything, ask questions if they want to learn anything.
LeeRon Yahalumi 37:06 Absolutely. If you’re looking to join the customer success world, if you currently are added, if you need advice, if you need help, I try to dedicate a few hours every month to individuals in that realm. I believe in paying it forward and helping others. I got here because someone helped me, it is my duty to do the same for others. Feel free to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. Take a look at
regie.ai. Try it for yourself. Try it for your teams. Let me know how you like it.
Adil Saleh 37:32 I absolutely love it.
Shawal Fida 37:33 Thank you so much LeeRon, I’m definitely going to try
regie.ai.
LeeRon Yahalumi 37:37 Give it a try. Let me know. I’m excited. Thank you so much for having me!
Adil Saleh 37:43 Thank you very much for taking the time and showing up and sharing your knowledge and being so generous, beautiful heart. Appreciate it.
LeeRon Yahalumi 37:50 Thank you.
Shawal Fida 37:50 Thank you.
Adil Saleh 37:51 Bye bye. Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please share your feedback at
adil@hyperengage.io, we definitely need it. We will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a Customer Success leader and how you can empower engagements with some, building some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.
