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Catherine Blackmore GVP Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud |
Catherine Blackmore, GVP of Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud, joined the show to discuss the importance of training, change management, and business transformation to customer success. We also discuss whether the prominence of customer success is causing a convergence between sales and service. And yes, Bill did steal one of Catherine's ideas.
Recommended viewing: Training is Customer Success 2015 Panel
Customer Success Has Changed Over 10 Years
Customer Success Scaling Challenges Along The Customer Success maturity model
How do you get customers to adopt software?
Change management is critical. There are things we have to do with end user adoption and training (login for first time, use product to certain point of success, uncover advanced features that are sticky, etc.). That's an area you have to put strategy and technology. We train people, not accounts. It's the people that we have to train. It could be the beginning when a new admin arrives.
Sometimes the technology or end user won't make or break the end user. It's about helping a company like a CMO or CIO retire old business policies and procedures that sits outside of tech. Helping that company transform can sometimes mean the end user that may be successful to see value may require a bit more.
Resources, best practices, thought leadership articles, how can you help a market that's still changing and innovating and coming up with new use cases and ways to get value and needing to help companies transform becoming modern marketing teams, leaders and organizations. That isn't always about training. It truly transforms the way a business transforms its business processes.
When working with larger teams, how does it differ from working with smaller teams?
In some ways, size isn't the main issue. We think a lot about assessment of where a company is across marketing transformation journey. Whether a bit or small company, it's about how mature the customer is that indicates what a success plan truly looks like. That applies in all cases.
If you've got a sales leader that's never purchased data in the cloud or leveraged technology in the cloud, that's a differnt conversaion than if someone is moving from one cloud vendor to another. They understand the delivery model and what you have to do to retire old business practices. That's about rolling out how rolling out what you're selling in the business model whether small or complex. You need to understand their approach to change management and training and enabling people.
What do you do when the person and the people making decisions aren't people who are asked to use a new thing.
You need to understand your tech to understand where end users are getting value so you can help partner with a leader who wants to roll out to your org. If my job every day is operations person and I've done that job, understand how technology is used, key features, etc. I can be an incredible resource to their boss or the person thinking about rolling it out who may not appreciate their day job. How would you put together a training program or think about a train the trainer program. If you have a program where you're doing a lot of training digitally and need to talk to someone via campaigns and emails to nudge, what would that look like. Being able to align what motivates that end user to change and get off an old way of doing something is about unlocking a pain point of what the end user is experiencing every day to ensure you're touching on it and they see the value of making that switch. That shows up in training programs, email campaigns, and customer success manager that knows and gets that. It's a resource to the department that rolls out the software.
What are strategies for building customer success teams?
When folks ask, how should I think about CS teams? Who should I hire or how do I put a CS org in place? There are some basic framework blocking and tackling what you should think about. But the nuances of what makes a CS program most impactful is recognizing where you are as a company in your lifecycle. How many customers do I have? Who are my customers? Large enterprise or SMB customers? How many do I have? Do I have thousands that I consider end-user customers or 100 customers that are very big in terms of people I hire. Also, product. How difficult is it to launch your customers to value using you rproduct? that could mean something different around onboarding, training, adoption curve to see first value. Once you've mapped that out, that indicates if I'm early and products are complex and you sell to large enterprise this is who you want. What will sales be responsible for? All commercials so they run renewals as well? Iin some cases, a CRO or CEO will say they want best sellers out in the field bringing in net new deals and it's green space and we need to build the market. So they may want Customer Success running commercials, which would look different in terms of who you hire. Set the structure up for success by figuring out what you need to do.
It is helpful to have both owned and managed and run numbers and understand folks retiring quota and what that world is about. Also, knowing about selling services and owning a services number or none of the above where you create what benchmarks are and what adoption and success metrics are. At the end of the day, when you start to scale a success organization, you have to have some number. You have to ask CFO and CEO what value your organization is returning. How is your organization retiring quota related to renewals, upsell/crossell. It's not about retiring quota but about growing advocates. What's an advocate worth? Show the value of what your team is delivering and improving health and reducing risk in the business. There's lots of ways that you need to represent your business value. Owning a number helps you think a way your sales leaders, CEO and CFO do so you can argue how you'd hire the next headcount and scale your apartment.
