AMA: Jellyfish Senior Vice President, Customer Success, Nicole Alrubaiy on Influencing the C-Suite

Great question! I've fallen in this trap so I'm speaking from experience here. You need to lead the conversation here and find the right answer, and don't just take orders from the various departments on what they want CS to focus on. Being too responsive here (rather than proactive) is how we land in the camp of doing "all the things" and creating a ton of thrash on the CS team. My recommendation: * Start by understanding what customers need. Talk to them-- customers of all shapes and sizes. Understand where they struggle to learn about and adopt your product(s) and build a prioritized list of those things. Record your customer interviews and save them were others can learn from them too. * Work with your cross-functional partners to identify potential ways to serve the biggest customer needs. The answer to some of them may be a CSM, but challenge the business to find other solutions- whether supplemental to CSM or replacing a CSM answer. * If you have friendly customers, this is a good point to share some of the ideas and get their reactions. * Then you go back to the exec team with your point of view for where CSMs will focus and where they won't, and the other solutions that also need to exist. * Repeat the customer listening > CSM scope conversation periodically or as your business changes significantly.

Is it okay to say all of the other execs? I'm not joking when I say the Customer Success / Customer business is central to the company and needs to align with everyone. * Sales - We need to tightly align on what kinds of deals we want to bring in and how we'll serve them. I need to get Sales excited about post-sale life so they can get prospects excited about it. * Product - I joke with our Head of Product that we need to be besties, but we are serious about collaborating. I share trends I'm seeing in the customer base and involve him in retention strategy. He joins me on many customer calls and shares how our roadmap is aligned to our strategic retention/growth initiatives. * Marketing - So much synergy here! We discuss how we can boost advocacy in our customer base to help drive demand, how we can market to existing customers to drive product adoption and engagement, and what content needs to exist in the market to support existing customers as they change leadership, expand use cases, etc. * Finance - We're always talking about retention forecasts, GRR, NRR, and the cost to serve customers. I need support from Finance to try new models of serving customers, and they need confidence that I'm doing my best work. * Engineering - Engineering needs to hear from us where customers are having issues with bugs or need creative solutions to their problems. I need confidence that our platform will perform and scale with our most demanding customers. We will often take calls with customers together in escalated situations. * Everyone Else - They need the confidence that my team is taking care of our customers and will lead our company to strong GRR and growth within our customer business.

Early in my career, I didn't. I was at a larger company with many functional and department heads. Not everyone will/should work directly with the C suite, but if the work you're doing has a high impact on the entire company, you will. My first real work with the C suite was when I was building a new Customer Success function at a mid-stage company. We had built our first churn/retention forecast and our CFO needed to understand our projections and have confidence in them before taking it to the board. We walked through my model, which varied from our tops-down Finance projections. Every month, we would review recent churns, top risks and our quarterly and annual churn forecast with the CRO and CFO. This became a rhythm they depended on. As time went on, I was tasked with more strategic initiatives because of the confidence I built with them.

Ultimately, the executive team wants to know that the business is healthy and growing, and that they won't have any surprises coming at them. I see a lot of discomfort / unfamiliarity with the Customer Success teams among executives because the field is still relatively new, doesn't always have consistent definition, and is sometimes not quantifiable enough. Given that, here are a few questions that come to mind for execs when it comes to Customer Success and how your work helps to address them: * What is the true health of our revenue and what are we doing to improve it? Do we have a good handle on where the risks are? Are we running repeatable/proven plays to address risk? Is anything going to pop out and surprise me later? * Having good customer health indicators and keeping them clean * Running playbooks for risk (and building new ones) * Save plans for unhealthy accounts * Good hygiene in your CS platform <- builds confidence * Proactively flagging risks or things that might turn into risks * Having a tight renewals process to get them done on time and with high predictability * Are we getting customers to value quickly after they sign? Are we delivering more and more value over time? * Tracking key milestones along the journey for each customer * Using success plans and tracking value that the customer has achieved * Sharing stories internally regarding customers achieving value * Getting lots of customers to serve as references * Are we identifying areas to grow in our accounts? * CS Qualified Leads * Having reliable conversations with customers on where we're going next (often this is a QBR / EBR type conversation to understand their evolving business and how you fit into it) Of course, as an old high school teacher used to say "Don't Tell Me, Show Me!" so all of this is only as good as the reporting/tracking you use to demonstrate it... and the results it drives.

It's important to understand the goals of your company and your part in them. Only then can you really have a well-thought and engaging interaction with a C-level leader regarding the business. I sometimes see folks early in their career eager to share new ideas, but without the relevance to the business. We want ideas, but make sure they're tightly aligned to the goals of your organization and well-vetted. Get feedback on your idea from others and test it out in a small way if possible before going to the top. First things first though: be really good at your job as a CSM. Manage your customers well, advocate for them within the business at your level, and make sure you're feeding accurate information back into the business. If you engage with executives on the specific accounts, make sure you're preparing them thoughtfully and thoroughly. This will create a strong brand for you and help get you the visibility you're seeking.

You can go two ways here with respect to metrics. 1. Use a metric they know and understand 1. Pros: They can engage with it, they have an understanding of why it may be going up or down and a sense of how they can help influence it. 2. Cons: It might not be the best measure of the health of the customer base or may be one of 5+ factors. 2. Use something new that you feel better represents the business. 1. Pros: You can have confidence (if you've done your homework) that influencing this metric will drive retention and growth 2. Cons: It can take several months of repetition to warm up the executives to what these numbers mean and how to influence them Frankly, I do a little of both. We have aligned the executive team on a set of metrics on which we have varying degrees of comfort and confidence. Here are a few examples * Adoption Health - defined by our data science team and shown to have a strong correlation to retention. A composite score that the executives have moderate comfort/understanding of but they're aware of the strong correlation. * Executive Engagement - % of accounts and ARR where we've had an intentional exec conversation in the past 90 days. * Onboarding Duration - # of days to take a customer from kickoff to launch. * ARR not yet launched - how much of our ARR is not yet in the Launched phase (meaning they're still in onboarding). Top questions from the exec team: 1. How is retention trending this quarter, next qtr, for this year? 2. Why do we have confidence that our renewal/retention forecast is accurate? [I demonstrate this through the other metrics] 3. Which customers need help from the exec team?