On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Jeff Heckler, Director of CS Solutions at MarketSource (former Global Head of CS at Pipedrive) about scaling CS teams and CS models. Jeff is a Senior Customer Success Leader with over 20 years of leading Customer Success, Professional Services, and customer-facing revenue teams. Jeff has been a leader in five (5) global leading enterprise companies, four (4) bootstrapped start-ups, three (3) exits, two (2) IPOs, and one (1) unicorn.
Today Jeff will share with us how ou can start to scale not only your CS team by hiring the right people, but also how to evolve and mature your CS function and model in order to adjust to a fast-growing customer base. How do you manage to keep up with rocketship growth and make sure you have a team and process around this to scale effectively? That along with capacity planning for customer success is what we will speak to Jeff about today.
Playing catch-up in CS is not unusual for today’s leaders. The global software company Pipedrive was around for a decade before Jeff joined. Yet, the CS department was fairly new and needed to scale up quickly to keep up with the extreme growth. So, what are the first things you need to tackle as a CS leader when playing catch-up?
In our discussion Jeff helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer success quickly:
- How did you start to segment out the ownership of each of your CS teams?
- You have quite a few customers, mostly long tail, how does marketing help you to stay on top of customer communications?
- CS usually works with product/sales a lot, should there be continual marketing involved in CS, especially with digital-first customer success?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Start with looking for places where you can have an impact that is either not being served or are terribly underserved. Maximize and optimize what you already have. And the last thing, getting CS ops running efficiently. A lot of people would say that you need CS ops after six to eight years. I would say zero to one. Without operations, you cannot scale
- What are the current CSM teams able to handle, and then building in what your management levels need to be from there? At the same time, you’re looking at ops. How deep is your tech stack? What does your CS platform look like? You also have to look at products for a hyper-growth organization.
- Customer marketing owned and operated by CS is the next deal.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!