From Gut Feel to Board-Ready: Connecting CS Operations to Outcomes That Matter

Welcome everyone. Yes, I am in fact a space flight nerd. So if you would like to talk about launching into space, please find me after the fact. But I'm really excited to be here today.

As Nicole said, I lead our advisory services team, but my life to gain sight is as a practitioner. My last three roles were leading post sales, organizations, scaling, customer success, renewals, account management, onboarding, technical support, and operations teams. I'm really excited to be focused in on the subject today around moving from that gut feel, thinking about how CS impacts the business, to getting ready for those executive and board meetings, to be able to show the impact, what our teams are doing on the bottom line of the business. I have been in both types of board meetings throughout my career.

The ones where I felt like I was showing all the data, I was telling a really great story about what our team was doing, and it was not landing at all. I was not getting the feedback that I expected, thinking to myself, why don't they understand all of the great things that our team is doing? And I've grown over my career and have been in board meetings where I walked in leading that conversation and helped shape how the business operates. And so today we're going to give you a very repeatable framework to think about how to make sure that all of your future executive and board meetings are very much the latter.

So let's get into it. First and foremost, as you're walking into executive sessions, there's a tendency to think about, okay, I need to be able to report, look back in time, talk about what our team has done, and then think about the strategy go forward. Both of those things are critically important, and we'll talk about how to get to some of that data. But I want you to keep in mind the lens that true executive financial leaders are going to have in their minds as you present information to them.

It is where is retention going and how do you know? What did the team put on the board, potentially in terms of expansion, and what would it take for your team to do more of it? What happens if we invest more in the CS team? What is the plan to increase our revenue trajectory?

And what I want you to take from this is, the kinds of questions that come to the minds around the room are less about point in time metrics, like what was our turn? What was our expansion last quarter? And more about do you understand the business mechanics deeply enough to present a plan and a strategy go forward that's actually going to change the trajectory of the business? It's a very different mindset than being able to report on what has happened in the past.

And those leaders who can walk into those rooms and present the answer to these questions, whether asked or not, are the ones who are gonna be able to shape how the organization runs in the future. They're gonna be the ones who are talking about real AI strategies and where it fits into the business and moving forward. So as we think about that, I would love to learn from you all before we get into the frameworks itself of where potentially the biggest gap is in your organization. As you think about that gap between what your CS does and what your executive team understands about it, I'd love to hear, where is it coming up most?

Is it the retention story? Is it growth contribution, expansion becoming more and more important to teams? Is it the investment case? Can we talk about how $1 invested to CS falls out the other end?

Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Or is it the cross-functional plan? Are you well aligned?

Does everyone understand how CS fits into the broader ecosystem of cross-functional partners? We'll give another second here. Yeah. Okay, cross-functional plan is running away with it.

And what I find really interesting here, and it's such a great call out and great awareness from everyone in the room here, is A, I'll call out also growth contribution. More and more CS teams are expected to talk about how they are contributing growth back to their business. We'll give you some really specific ways to start telling that story in a meaningful way. But it's that cross-functional plan.

It is difficult, once you actually have the data, to really foster that alignment, to make the right trade-offs internally with your business partners, to determine the strategy, to go into boardrooms, executive meetings, with clarity together as a unit around one outcome, versus individual teams presenting on the metrics that matter most to them. Awesome, so let's get into it. So I'll walk you through the four As that we'll talk through today. And this is how do you start to gain trust within your organization that, again, you understand those business mechanics.

You can tell the story. You can create the plan that's gonna drive you to the next iteration, the next evolution of your CS team. And to be noted, we cannot skip any of these steps. We'll start with Articulate.

Can we really clearly see how we can get can we really clearly define what it is that our customer success team is doing? And I'm not just talking about CSMs, I'm talking about the programmatic approach to CS, all of the functional partners that drive that customer experience. Can we then attribute it to revenue impact? What are the incremental steps that that activity is creating to be able to drive revenue outcomes?

Then the review starts. About the data, we understand the mechanics behind it. Now how do we align with our cross-functional partners, again, to make those really smart trade-offs? And then last but very not least, you can advise the business on the right choices to make to get the most out of their investment, to make the most of the CS team that you have.

Ultimately, it's all about putting customers at the center of everything that we do. So let's start with these first two. This is about, again, building that trust and clarity. Language is an important mechanic across the business.

Oftentimes, we'll talk a lot about the data and we'll talk about how that supports the case for how CS is operating today. But being able to articulate clearly with language that the business understands about what the CS team is doing is step one. And then linking it to those revenue outcomes is step two. I'm gonna tie those a little bit together today so you can see how those flow.

These are the three superpowers of customer success. So we saw on the poll a little bit earlier there are potentially some gaps in your organization, your executive team's understanding of where your CS team is contributing to each of these. And I'm sure if we asked for a show of hands, there would be some folks who say they own retention, some who say they own expansion, some who might say, "We don't own revenue metrics yet." And what I'm here to tell you today is that does not matter. Your team is impacting these three business initiatives.

Whether you are measuring it or not, now's the time to start thinking about how you're gonna tell the story of how they do impact it. You don't have to own expansion to impact growth. So mitigating risk, accelerating growth, and driving efficiency, these are the key areas where CS teams are absolute rock stars and it's time for us to start telling that story more effectively. So let's get into risk.

What you see in front of you is a bit of a visual around the rhythm of risk. Often we hear, you know, we're trying to drive down risk. We're trying to eliminate risk. And that is probably not ever going to happen.

And I think that's okay. There will always be inherent risk in our businesses. You heard it this morning, the pace of change. I know we all feel it.

There will always be risk in our customer base. The signals are changing all the time. Our competitors are changing all the time. That is okay.

The question is, can you see it? And when you see it, do you understand the consistency of it? So you can see in the middle here, this band, think of this as what percentage of your business at any given point in time is at risk? Is it 5%, 15%?

It's unique for every business. To you as a business leader know what percentage of your base is at risk and can you see it? The leaders who then know what your baseline is, you can start to spot the deviations. All of a sudden, is there a dip in the velocity of risk being identified?

Are we really eliminating a lot of risk? Or are we missing signals that we haven't been sensitive to in the past? That's a deviation that's really mission critical. On the other side of it, all of a sudden there's a peak in risk being found.

Okay, this is far outside. This is normal standard deviation of what amount of our base is at risk at any given time. What's happening here? And it's again, the leaders who can start to create that baseline and spot the deviations that are gonna be able to tell a really powerful story about when and how to intervene.

So we think about, I mentioned those mechanics earlier. What are some of those revenue mechanics associated with risk that you wanna be able to measure and tell stories around? First is volume and rate. How much risk do we have?

How quickly is our team able to spot it? What's the rate of us being able to surface risk? And a lot of organizations stop here. And this is really good information to have.

We need to know the volume of risk. We need to know the reasons for risk, all of that. What I would tell you then the next step is, let's talk about when rate. Can we win it back?

Last is what does it take to win it back? Because it's not just about heroics at the 11th hour that got us to win that risk. It's now how much did we as a business have to invest to get that outcome? With all three of these mechanics under your belt and being able to articulate these, you can start to make really smart decisions and trade-offs about where to invest both your human capital time as well as resources of the business, whether it's tooling or other departments to make changes, to mitigate risk more effectively and more efficiently.

Costs to retain, that's one I really want you to keep in your brain. Baseline that today and in six months, see how your team is helping improve that. I'll give you an example of what this can look like in real life. The graph that you're looking at here is a relatively typical churn review slide.

You see these gray bars, these represent the amount of ARR that was lost in let's call it the last quarter. And across the bottom here, the different reasons why those customers churned. And this is a pretty typical graph that we might show in an executive meeting to talk about what churned and all right, let's come up with the plan. But what I would suggest to you all is that a churn review tells you how well we executed on last year's strategy.

What it is missing here is both what's coming up as well as what did we actually affect positively in the past period of time. So these bars start to change dramatically when you layer on top of each of these reasons, not just the churn dollars, but then also how much is at risk, that's our yellow bar here. And interestingly, how much did we win back for that exact same reason? Now, okay, big green bar, fantastic.

This means for product gap number two, we actually win a lot of customers back. But before we celebrate, we also now need to go a layer deeper and say how much did it cost us to win those customers back? This is when you start to build that full holistic story of what's really happening with some of these churn and risk reasons. We're now looking at what are those heroics that happened at the 11th hour, how many hours are across functional teams spending and investing to win this customer?

Example here, maybe your CSMs and professional services team are on average spending 30 hours on a workaround. It's working, but goodness gracious, it's costing a lot of time. And that translates to $15,000 of costs to save each customer. And oh, by the way, we've got another customers who are at risk in the second half for this exact same reason.

Now, what do we do with this data? We've got a lot of data story to tell. We'll come to that in that next session. But to be able to put this kind of a cohesive understanding together of not just what we have lost, but what we have won and what it costs us to the business, now we're starting to talk about some really interesting trade-offs we can make about opportunity cost to the team is spending their time.

And ultimately, what you're looking to get to over the course time period, over time period is can we improve the cost to retain these customers? Whether it's through a product fix, whether it's through better deploying our team or automation or work around, whatever it may be, now you've got the data to back up the trade-offs you might need to make. All right, that's risk. Let's talk about expansion.

And I'd love to do a quick show of hands. Who in this room is now maybe taking on expansion or being asked to report on expansion revenue? Okay, yeah, so I'd say at least half of the room raised your hands there. This is an area where customer success is relatively nascent in this area, but the good news is we've got cross-functional partners who have been doing this for a very long time that we can learn from, not just how to report out the revenue and the motion itself, but how to really think differently about CSs, again, not just CSMs, but a set of channels to drive growth.

Similar to how we talked about risk, some of the mechanics to keep in mind. Volume and rate, important. CS team generated 200,000 in pipeline last quarter. Fantastic.

We're seeing our volume, we're seeing the velocity potentially of leads coming in the door. But same thing, let's take it further. How are we winning for the different products that we source? And how much does it actually cost to grow?

Again, as a leader, we're gonna baseline that today and say how much time it takes, whatever has to go into sourcing that lead, that's our cost right now. And over time, we're gonna start diversifying channels to reduce the cost to grow. So these are, again, important ones to be baselining right now and being thinking about how we're capturing that information. I mentioned channels, and this'll just give you a visual of when I say channels, what I mean by that.

Again, CSMs, we often think about, let's take our classic, the business review. This is our time when we're talking about value delivered to a customer where we are showcasing potentially new use cases that are gonna be really important to them. If you are in a consumption-based business, no doubt you want customers to expand into new use cases and moments of value where they can adopt more heavily your product. But then there's all these other channels where CS delivers value, where leads could potentially crop up.

Maybe you have a one-to-many webinar program where you have customers joining and they're potentially interested in learning more about products or services. In-app engagement, community, all this driven by Agintiq, there's so many different channels where leads can come. Be sure you're starting to assess pipeline-generated from the CS organization that you're not just looking at, was a lead sourced by CS? But in addition, what is the event or the activity or the high-impact conversation that was going on to source that lead?

It's as simple as putting a field on an object to be able to see where that came from. What that gets you over time is then for each of these channels, we're now looking at how many leads were generated by product and service. How high quality are those leads? Are they accepted?

Are they closing faster? Is our win rate improving over time? And we're showing those outcomes. Ultimately, how many dollars are closed one from those leads?

Not all channels are created equally for your business. So now it's understanding, once we have those metrics, where can I pour in and invest in the business by each of these channels to drive more of those outcomes that we want to be able to see? Maybe it's business reviews, but there's sort of a capacity crunch on that. Ultimately, CSMs are gonna run out of time to be able to have that conversation.

Maybe there's a different way we can deploy that conversation. Maybe there's automation. Maybe one-to-many programs are actually driving significant high-quality leads back to your business because customers are leaning in and they're engaged in that channel. This is a great moment as you're potentially now taking on expansion.

And again, you're impacting it whether you own it and are accountable or not, to start to look at some of these channels and see what's feeding your business. I'll give you an example too of how this can play out for one specific high-impact activity. I get to spend a lot of time with some of our very large global complex customers and where we actually spend a lot of energy is really clear and defined understanding of what those high-value activities are for their most precious resource, which is their CSM. What you're looking at here is a graph of, on the left-hand side, the number of CSQLs per business review over time.

And in this particular organization's case, this is an example from a real organization that looked at this over time, where they started was we're not really getting many leads from business reviews. A lot of that was because they weren't really looking at the sources and understanding where leads are potentially initially sourced. And then they launched some initiatives. They put in a incentive for the CSMs.

Okay, let's spiff the team. Let's get them excited to source some leads. And that worked for a little bit. They saw some behavior change, but then it started to level off.

And then they said, "All right, initiative number two. We're gonna launch a value calculator. We're gonna have value conversations with our customer. We're gonna make this a really prescriptive moment with our customers." And then they started to see things take off.

And in and of itself, this is a great thing to be able to show. What's even more powerful is now we can articulate the team over the course of the past year. We're now averaging over two CSQLs per EBR, representing 10K in pipeline at a conversion rate of 50%. We're driving 5K and close one revenue back to the business in every business review that we have.

So the next time a new initiative comes at your door that might divert the CSMs time away from these high value activities, you have a real cost to the business that you can showcase to say, "We can get off here." If you want to pull our team away from some of these high impact activities, it comes at a cost. And some of that cost is directly related to it. And some of it is that it's gonna cost us more to be able to grow. Again, over time, ultimately what we're trying to show is that we're improving that cost to grow the business.

All right, last but not least, I'll touch on efficiency. Again, a critical mechanic that I'm sure is on everyone's mind right now. Again, it came up so much this morning. And as we think about efficiency, a lot of the narrative around improving this kind of a ratio around CS centers on the denominator, the number of employees that we have.

And yes, it is critical to make sure that we are thinking, rethinking, redesigning, restructuring the teams to remain relatively flat or grow at a healthy pace in relation to company revenue. So yes, that is important. And the other way to win this ratio is to show that for every incremental resources added in the denominator accelerates the numerator faster at a higher rate. So the other side of that coin is, let's put all that great information together that we just spent time sourcing and gathering and telling the story around and start to talk about every incremental CSM that we bring on board.

What are they driving back to the business? So you can see here over time, the dollars that a high impact CSM is mitigating in terms of risk back to the business, as well as the closed one lead revenue that they generated over their 10 year for a year as well. What does that add up to? In this particular example case, this CSM is generating $400,000 back to the business, higher than the cost to the business.

So again, for every incremental resource we add, we are accelerating the numerator faster than the denominator. What's important for this too, is it's not just about hiring more CSMs, it's also to show the business the cost of attrition, as well as ramp time. This is another area where our colleagues in sales and marketing do a really great job of quota ramping. It's the exact same thing with CSMs.

Not only when we lose a CSM does it hurt from a, of course, tribal knowledge perspective and customer relationships. It means there's a real material cost to the business of ramping someone new to be able to create this kind of an impact. And it doesn't stop there. When you think about being able to tell that story of how a CSM is impacting the business, those high value activities that mean the most to them, we've talked a lot about sort of that high level CSM who's hands on, maybe one on one with the customer.

But now you've got to start thinking about laddering down across your segments. And too often the initial thought is let's go digitize everything. For our let's call it long tail segment or one of our scaled segments. Let's go digitize everything.

Let's go automate everything. Let's say maybe, maybe. Let's look at those mechanics that drive the most impact back to the business. And let's actually think from a where's the highest impact moment with our customers.

And maybe that still does need a human touch. Maybe that's actually where we are building an experience around having a teammate focus on that particular activity. So you can see here in this example, those pink dots represent let's keep a CSM on every single one of these activities. It's worth the time investment costs because the payoff is high in terms of leads as well as risk service that we're able to turn around at a high quality.

And start to leverage some of our other tools, agentic, in app, other domains to be able to serve some of those other activities. Still effectively and still well for our customers but maybe not as hands on. Again, you've got those mechanics in your back pocket. You can start to make the trade offs.

All right, that was fun, right? It's fun to talk about how incredible CS teams can be in terms of impacting the revenue back to the business. So we talked a little bit about what our team does, how we attribute it to revenue. You as a CS leader are now able to talk about some of those trade offs where your team is being most effective, least effective.

And again, we're not just thinking about CSMs. We're thinking about the entire ecosystem of channels that you have at your disposal. Now comes that aligned part. Getting together with cross-functional partners and being able to set the plan, set the strategy.

And partnership is such a critical part here. On the left hand side you can see this is an example of the ask. We're talking about the ask and we're talking about the plan. The ask is, let's think back to our product gap now.

We've got a lot of churn, we've got a lot of risk. It's costing us a lot to win these customers. Let's go solve product gap number two. That's an ask.

While it's backed up by a lot of great data and understanding, might not be the fastest way to get our product partners on board to understand and co-create the plan to solve that particular need for the business. A plan comes from an understanding of where there are potentially shared outcomes with your business partner. You're making informed trade-offs together. And we're getting really curious about the other pressures that impact their department that we might not know about.

And it's not just about being able to better connect with your partner, it's also listening out for, oh, there's an outcome you're looking to drive that's outside of the scope of maybe our direct working relationship, but if we were to tweak this thing that's on my plate, I actually think it's gonna positively impact that other outcome that you're looking to drive. Getting really curious about what your teams are up against, quarter over quarter, is critical to start building the plan together. This is continuous collaboration. This is getting curious with each other.

This is how you create the plan. And as you think about going into boardrooms, it is co-presenting a plan together is where the magic really, really starts to happen. So here's what that starts to look like, is across your cross-functional partners, understanding what are those shared outcomes, what are those metrics that we both care about on a regular basis we need to be able to talk about in front of our executive team. Getting curious about what's not on that list, what are other pressures that you're facing right now, stressing you out about the end of the quarter, and getting really curious and listening to those.

And then starting to make really healthy trade-offs around the plan. We can take the product one, for example, we talked about again, our friend Product Gap number two. All the data in the world points to, let's go fix that one, it would relieve a lot of risk pressure in the second half of the year. However, it means deprioritizing something else.

So how can I support my product partner in understanding what might need to be prioritized? But oh, by the way, they have goals around net new business, and deprioritizing anything off of that list impacts our net new gain as well. There's no perfect answer here, but you have to start looking at what are the costs of making one trade-off and impacting another. So maybe the ultimate outcome here is we're fixing Product Gap number two.

Maybe there's a work around that our product team is supporting, maybe enablement and marketing is supporting us in some other way. But you can't really decide that outcome until you've got those cost trade-offs deeply understood on both sides. And ultimately, co-ownership, if you want to co-own an outcome with a teammate, has to begin with co-authorship. Not an ask, but a plan built together.

All right, last but not least, we're at the really fun part where we get to actually go tell the organization what to do and what we're gonna do and how we're gonna drive even bigger outcomes back to the business. What I wanna do here is we're gonna take all of that work we've just done, articulating what our team is doing, attributing it to revenue. We've aligned with our cross-functional partners. Let's take a look at now how the narrative can look and feel in board meetings where you're stepping into that leader role and driving and shaping the future of what's happening next.

From a retention perspective, this is what it can sound like. We're moving instead of, GRR was 92%, we missed it. Here are the key reasons why we missed our gross retention. And we're shifting towards our proactive adoption checks, articulating what our team does, save three (audio cuts out) a 70% risk win rate that protected one full point of GRR.

There's a million dollars at risk in the second half for this exact same reason. And at our current win rate, just saving that cohort puts us above our retention rate for the whole year. Here's the plan of how our team, the product team, marketing and enablement is gonna help accelerate to get us in front of that cohort of customers and get them back on track. Totally different conversation.

We're now walking in with confidence, telling the business exactly what we're gonna do and how we're gonna solve this. The plan is already created. We've already got the buy-in. We're showing we've got the influence to actually go make it happen and the clarity and the understanding of the mechanics that can get us there.

Let's look at the growth narrative. So we're moving from our CS team, drove 200K in expansion pipeline this last quarter. Again, great metric. But we're moving towards business reviews, including a value review.

So we had to get signed up from an executive that they saw value, generated 300K pipeline. At a 60% CSQL win rate, these leads convert 2X the rate of any other expansion lead channel and close seven days faster. The gap between us and our goal is the quality of those conversations. Here's how we're investing in tooling and targeted enablement to get us there.

No one's looking at you after that and saying, ah, you sure you wanna invest in tool? Are you sure you need a tool? Can we just try? No, now the conversation becomes, what if we doubled the investment?

Could you get 3X of the expansion pipeline out of this? We're changing the narrative completely to how did we get that 200K of pipeline to, I know exactly how we got there. I know the gap to be able to do it faster. And oh, by the way, these leads are higher quality than any other channel that generates leads across business, so we would be silly not to focus our time and investment right here.

So again, these are just examples of how you can walk into these conversations with all that information that you've gathered, showcasing that you understand the mechanics behind it and really driving change in the business far before you get into a board meeting. So my challenge to everyone here is stop reporting, start advising. Really, this should be keep on reporting and report on really great stuff and also advise. We're gonna walk across those four steps together and make sure that we're not just talking about the past.

The past was probably a strategy a year ago that we're just now seeing come to light. We're gonna look into the future and start advising the business with strength, clarity and confidence about the right next move to make the biggest impact. We're gonna use all four of these steps, not skip any of them. We're gonna make sure that we double down on aligning with our cross-functional partners to create a plan, not just ask for help.

Lean into our superpowers, which everyone in this room has all three of these. And you're gonna go forth from today, making sure you baseline some of those mechanics we talk about because at the end of the day, your superpowers are these. You have the discipline to see it. You have the precision to prove it and you got the influence to move it.

And when you harness these and lean into these magical things can happen. Before we get to questions, I will say part of my role here is being able to walk alongside organizations while they go through these types of transformations. If you're interested in learning more about how we can support you in building this kind of a framework, deep into those high impact activities that are gonna make impact back to your business, our advisory team is here to do that. But I'd love to hear your questions and thank you so much.

(audience applauding) Thank you, Taylor. We'll get to some questions now. So the first question is, how do you address the board narrative that retention doesn't contribute to growth, AKA CSM value prop? Okay, that retention doesn't contribute to growth.

Well, I would hope that that narrative is changing over time in that retention is becoming the base of growth. I mean, it always has been, but now it's more mission critical than ever. Every dollar is existentially important to the business to be able to keep because only with that base are we able to grow. Bonus points for if you can show as a customer is saved and retained their growth trajectory over time.

I also say that oftentimes in moments of risk retention, there are usually great growth opportunities. I always talk with CSM teams that I lead, we're never walking into conversations with a scarcity mindset. Even a customer who is at risk, we're not thinking about how do I eke out and save 100%, it's what are the problems they're looking to solve and do we have the solution set to be able to solve their business problems? Sometimes risk comes because customers actually need more help.

Whether we can deliver that or a partner or another set of toolings, fine, but let's get really curious about it and oftentimes growth comes out of it. And our next question. Now reporting on the quantitative impact of each major effort is great in theory, but in reality, tying the right data points to certain behaviors is not always as so straightforward. Any tips for how to connect the dots?

Definitely. I would challenge you that you can do it with at least 80%. There is a real way to connect the dots there and we have a specific ladder for anyone joining the ops workshop later, we'll take you through that specific framework, but it's thinking about if we truly believe that there's a high impact activity that our CS team is doing, let's take success planning for example, we're doing execution plans with our customers and we're having conversations. I talked a lot about the growth side of it, but it's not just that.

The other side of it is also risk being surfaced back to the business. So as you think about a high impact activity, if we're not able to tie it to there was some sort of a lead sourced or there was some sort of a risk surfaced or validated that we are not at risk, all of these are able to be tied back directly to revenue, dollar sourced, dollars seen in terms of risk turned around. There is usually a pretty quick path for at least 80% of the activities that you're doing, where it starts to get a little bit trickier, are like campaigns, some of that digital attribution can get a little bit tougher, but I'd say at least for your CSM team, there's a very clear way to ladder that out, but it is difficult. It's difficult and you know where the difficulty comes often is defining actually what that activity is, how to count it completes, and do we agree on that definition.

Once you get to that definition, being able to see what it should be sourcing back to the business is relatively straightforward. What is the most common mistake CS leaders make when trying to connect their team's work to revenue or retention outcomes? The most common mistake is jumping all the way to the final business outcome. We ran an initiative and we're impacting GRR.

And while it makes sense, and we all know and feel that in our bones, without being able to show the incremental steps in between, we did a thing, then we did more of it, then we surfaced some interesting information and we were able to convert that, win it back, drive growth. And with that cohort, with that information, with those dollars, we drove GRR in this amount. That is really the story to be told versus jumping all the way to sort of that last mechanic. When a CRO or CFO still sees CS as a cost center, what's one conversation or proof point that can start to shift that perception?

Yeah, I'd say, I'm curious, who here feels like still seen as a cost center? Yeah, I'd say like most organizations I speak to and work with still sometimes have that perception. And that's okay, it's changing over time. Certainly more departments are taking on responsibility for some of those growth metrics.

So naturally it is changing. But if you can really start to move to that, those statements that we reviewed together, I can understand the mechanic. I know specifically what our team did to source those leads and oh, by the way, these are converting at a better rate. Or here's where I'm supporting my sales team members to isolate the products that convert most effectively so that we can help them get to their goals.

I'm just being able to talk at that level and drive confidence that you can understand how to point your team. It's like the compass, we have a really powerful engine where do I need to point it? You can both show that you have a powerful engine and where to change it. And then the other thing I'd say is go take on a big hairy scary goal.

Again, whether or not you are directly responsible for expansion, go talk to marketing. They're also being shouldered with new expansion goals into the customer base, which for many marketing teams is a relatively new motion comes with a lot of different economics than net new business gain. They have a customer expansion goal, go understand what it is, how they built whatever that number that they're gonna get to, help them understand their quota, what piece can you take on, what piece can you commit to to support your marketing team? It's not a direct quota, but start to take on some goals around the organization.

For an org that has both high touch, CSM design accounts, low touch, digital touch points only, and some hybrid customers, how should we approach attribution for customer revenue or number of CS employees? Yep, okay, so that was that ratio of revenue per employee. One of the great ways to think about particularly the hybrid customers, but also our digital touch, is thinking about that same equation you saw that ramp timeline and some of the impact, but in a potentially a scaled motion or for each of your digital customer success managers. Digital CSMs are still running great high impact activities.

You saw that kind of ladder down by segment. Maybe they're still doing one-on-one business reviews. Maybe they're leading one-to-many forums where they're talking to customers about value, whatever scale means to your business. You can still find those activities and say, what did we source from some of those one-to-many activities?

Was there an in-app campaign that we ran? Not about looking for leads, but understanding where there might be hand raisers and customers looking for more, and our digital team built that. So there's still ways to think about how that team is generating revenue. It might not be on a one-on-one basis, but in the aggregate, you can still show for on average each of our digital CSMs, they're accelerating revenue faster than each teammate we bring on.

How should CS leaders handle situations where they know CS influenced an outcome, but the attribution isn't perfectly clean or easy to prove? Yes, I have questions about this one. I'm sure there's some interesting things going on here, but this is one where having that really close relationship with your cross-functional partners is a critical one. The end of the day, no outcome that a business generates is through one team alone.

So we have to get comfortable with the idea that no one team fully owns a metric and has controlled every variable to get to that outcome. CS teams can't control retention on a product they didn't build. Sales teams need a huge team to be able to drive that sort of an outcome, but as a community, we are comfortable with who is ultimately accountable for that outcome and what are the things that they did to be able to drive it faster and better. So yes, openly talk about how CS influenced an outcome, even if the attribution isn't 100% clear, and the more you can create those plans cross-functionally, you're then also getting your cross-functional partners to talk about it.

I'll actually give you an example. A few organizations ago, we relaunched how we were doing onboarding. We moved away from a free offering to a paid onboarding service. And when we got into the board meeting, the sales leader actually presented during my section, talking about how paid onboarding packages influenced our mid-market growth in ACV by 20%.

Pretty powerful moment for everyone to see that they felt that specifically the packages that we offered were a meaningful part of the sales process to be able to bump up our ACV. So direct ownership of the outcome, no, heavy influence, absolutely, and when it comes from a peer telling the story, not just you, even more powerful. This will be our last question. What would you recommend for someone who has a lot of these ideas, but is too low on the totem pole to get any of this going?

Well, I would say I would hope your leadership is leaning into, A, if you're here, you're seen and you're heard. So I would tell you, use this as a perfect moment to bring some of these frameworks back to your organization, start to socialize them with your leaders, and get curious. What do you already know about how the CS team operates that you could start to articulate some of this on your own? Maybe you're a CSM and you can go ahead and start doing this for your own book of business, how your sourcing leads, how you're surfacing around.

Groundswell is how things get started, and particularly as we move into this new wave of AI, our frontline teammates are actually gonna be the ones driving a lot of the change, so your voice is really critical. Thank you so much, Taylor. We really appreciate it. Round of applause.

(audience applauding) Thank you again. And just some closing thoughts. If you can actually go to and leave a review for or give feedback for this session by going to the session agenda, there's actually a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card, and every completed survey or feedback counts as a raffle submission. And also, lunch will be in the expo hall, so feel free to go grab lunch and check out the puppies.

And we can also continue the conversation at the community. So thank you, everyone.