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Natasha Evans

AMA: Hook Head of Customer, Natasha Evans on Customer Success Leadership

May 20 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. How do you inspire and motivate your customer success team to achieve their goals?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    • Showcase the “why” behind CS team goals (e.g. if you’re asking them to do certain activities, why is that, how do they drive outcomes?

    • Align the CS team goals to company goals

    • Align company goals to personal success

    • Help lay out strategies for the teams to hit target - show them you have a plan

    • Get stuck in and help them get there, they’ll be motivated to see you helping rally them towards a target


    486 Views
    2 requests

  2. Can you share any successful customer engagement initiatives or programs that your team has implemented?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    Figure out your foundational offering for every customer first e.g. 1) Every customer goes through an onboarding journey at scale that consists of them receiving X content over Y days and every customer has access to X customer programs (webinars, office hours etc). Every customer and every CSM in the company should be leveraging these initiatives to drive value at scale.  I’m also a big fan of creating a digital CS journey that’s more focused on data-driven content. E.g. For every customer, as ...Read More

    512 Views
    3 requests

  3. How do you approach right-sizing of CSM or PSM Teams as we're in a somewhat stagnant microeconomic climate?

    Let's say your company requires you to reduce costs and productivity of your existing team. Where do you start? Is it by looking at individual productivity or looking at the outcome you're trying to achieve and then reverse engineer?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    I always start with the outcome. What’s the goal you’re trying to get to (revenue wise, or GRR/NRR) and how far off are you right now. Essentially you want a forecast to compare to your target.Then in that forecast, break it down by CS segment, geo and team. Which teams are closest to hitting their target and which aren’t? Therefore where can you afford to reduce headcount vs not. Or, how could you better align people/resource to pain in your business.If I’ve got one segment with a tonne of risk ...Read More

    649 Views
    1 request

  4. How do you foster collaboration and communication between customer success, sales, marketing, and other departments within the organization?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    It all starts with you (really it starts with leadership but even if you’re not a leader this works) taking the initiative. Find out what these departments are working on and care about, share what you’re working on and how it might help drive company goals to work on these things together

    Share more openly about how you’re targeted, ask how they’re targeted and how you can help. 

    Build joint plans, share your success and shout out the departments that you worked with.

    453 Views
    1 request

  5. How do you set realistic goals for customer success teams, and how often do you revisit and adjust these goals?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    For revenue based goals such as NRR/GRR - I set these annually and revisit them annually. The way I figure out what’s realistic is by always having an annual data-driven forecast and then working with finance on what feels like a realistic stretch above and beyond that, that also meets the company targets. For more activity based goals - firstly I want to know that the activity/KPI drives the outcomes I want (either based on data or seeing the success first hand). Usually I’d set these annually ...Read More

    435 Views
    2 requests

  6. What advice do you have for someone aspiring to become a successful customer success leader?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    I’m a big believer that there are 2 sides to being a great leader; people leadership and business leadership. For most part I see CS leaders as great people leaders, but needing to know and own their business more. What outputs are you driving for the company, how can you build better data-driven plans to align your team to those outcomes? How can I deeply understand the health of my business and what it would take to improve it? How can you measure progress along the way? I’d be investing in th ...Read More

    493 Views
    2 requests

  7. How do you evaluate and adopt new customer success technologies to enhance the efficiency of your team?

    Natasha Evans
    Natasha Evans

    Hook VP Customer Growth • 1y

    For evaluation - really root yourself in the problem you want to solve. Throughout your evaluation you want to figure out exactly how using that tech (and which usecases) would help solve that problem. So you know you’re making the right decision based on what would drive value vs which has some shiny cool features or the best sales person. Then for adopting - I’d share all of that with my team. Here’s the problem we’re facing, here’s how I expect you to use this tech to solve that problem and h ...Read More

    473 Views
    1 request