Scaling CS: The SUSE Transformation Story

[Speaker 1]
Thanks so much for taking the time, for being here with me. I have my colleague Carlos with me here as well. Even though you see me today, it takes a whole village to pull this off, what I'm going to show you in a couple of minutes.

As Lisa mentioned, it's very lightweight content because if you hear this transformation of the year award, right, you're like, man, I want to understand what this is about, right? But let me tell you, it is not rocket science, right? We all think we have to do this incredible thing in order to transform our customer success organization, but it's not it.

If you look at this, you'll be like, nah, I can do this myself, right? And that's what I want you to leave getting out of this room, being like not intimidated by transforming your own organization if you have the appetite for it, okay? So let me spill the tea.

Customer success 2022 at SUSE looked the following, right? It was very simple from a people process and technology perspective. From a people perspective, we were very thin, like we had a couple of CSMs managing a couple of accounts, but what was most prominent at that time was that CSMs were paired with a lot of AEs, right?

They had to have a lot of handovers, a lot of communication in order to make sure that the right information was passed on at the right time, making sure that the customer would achieve the desired outcomes that they were looking for. Bye. See, that's how it starts already.

It's like wrong session, didn't want to listen to this. Okay, confidence is still high, okay? And that was kind of our pitfall back then because we couldn't scale through headcount alone.

We all know headcount has a price, and money is not endless, right? So we had to kind of look from a people perspective, how can we scale our organization without necessarily hiring more people? Then we kind of looked at our processes, and I'm probably preaching to the choir, right?

But back in the days, we had Excel sheets, we had notepad, yeah, thank you, yeah, yeah. We had notepads, we had information in the brains of our CSMs, and nothing was documented. People always thought and kind of knew they were doing the right things, but we didn't know what the right things were.

So we had to also kind of overhaul that kind of whole process thing, right? How our CSMs would engage with our customer base. And then last but not least, because we were so unable to scale through headcount and no processes alone, we had to look at a technology piece.

Because we all know we're in the era of technology, right? And that was the number one thing that we had to look at in order to turn our whole organization around. Because I don't know if any one of you heard this, but we always heard, oh, customer success is just a cost center.

How do you prove your value? What is the impact you're making? What are the outcomes that you're trying to achieve, or that you are actually achieving for our company, right?

We weren't able to answer that question. We could only say, yes, we have a dollar number against our department, and that's it. So in order to sustain ourselves and to be, let's say, part of our organization, we had to find a way to make a shift.

So we did four things. Number one, we looked at our processes first. How do we engage with our customers?

From an onboarding perspective, to the adoption phase, to renewal, or however you might call your layer or their kind of life cycle, right? We looked at it from a people perspective. What can we change from a coverage ratio perspective, but also which accounts we're covering?

We also looked at technology, because remember, we cannot scale through headcount alone. If money would be endless, yes, but it isn't, unfortunately. And then last but not least, we wanted to make sure that whatever changes we made in number one, two, and three were actually quantifiable, because if we make a change, that change needs to be successful, and we had to measure how successful it is.

So I'm going to walk you through all four stages, so quick monologue from me for the next five minutes, and then we get to Q&A, because I really want you to ask me questions and understand where your headspace is at in your companies to make a change. So number one, we looked at our CSM customer life cycle, and how it looked like is this little extraction that you see here on the top right-hand corner. We looked at what do our CSM, I'm getting out of the way, you're all taking pictures here, we looked at what our CSMs do on a daily basis with our customers, and we try to operationalize that.

And how we started was we talked to our most senior CSMs, right, the ones with the biggest, let's say, dollar sign against them, and try to understand what is the difference that you're making with your customers, and just give us one thing, right, or give us three. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we just want to understand what are the moments of truth that really matter. We put them into a life cycle, and then we bake them into, we call them our six pillars.

Six pillars where the CSM focus should be on. We have a relationship pillar, making sure that there is some sort of engagement with our customers, right, simple. You have to talk to them to make sure that they're staying engaged.

We had governance, making sure that our customers were achieving the desired outcomes, and we were making sure that they're actually achieving them through our engagements with them. Then we have our adoption pillar, making sure that they realize the value, and value can mean a lot of things, right. It can either mean that you get whatever you need out of the technology that you've purchased, or you build connections, right, throughout the life cycle.

That's really up to you what that means. Advocacy, pretty simple. We incorporated anything around NPS or CSAT to query our customers to make sure that they're really getting the value out of it, because we all know even though we think they get the value, doesn't mean that they necessarily do, right.

It needs to be this bi-directional communication all the time. Expansion is something that we just incorporated quite newly, because under the notion of customer success as a cost center, we wanted to contribute to the sales pipeline. So our CSMs are generating warm leads, so to say, handing them over, and that is our expansion pillar.

And then I feel like a non-negotiable, right. Risk mitigation CSMs are there to protect and to grow renewals in the customer base at all time. I wanted to ask questions, but let's go to the questions after.

If you have them, please put them in the, however you call it. Now let's look at the people pillar. What did we do here?

We did two fundamental things, or actually three, I should say. Number one is we looked at how many CSMs are covering how many accounts, and that ratio was quite high. We started with 1 to 20 accounts, right.

And if you have big enterprise customers, that is really heavy on really good CSMs, right. If you don't have technology, if you have to kind of do your meeting notes all the time, if you have to meet with them, right, you don't have a 40-hour week, might be 80 or even more, right. So we were burning out our CSM.

So we kind of looked at how can our CSMs cover more from a footprint perspective like ACV, but cover less customers. And that was the goal, right, making sure that we have a bigger impact in our customer base with less customers, so to say. The second thing we looked at was also the AE alignment, making sure that CSMs don't have to talk to five different people across all six pillars that we just showed you.

And that kind of helped, A, increase the alignment from a CSM, or let's say like customer success, sales, and outside-in perspective, but also made sure that we were doing the right things at the right time. And through that alone, plus some management changes, and what I mean by that is, we started off with a very simple pillar of CSMs, managers, directors, and VPs, but then we kind of broke it more down into geos and regional kind of management styles, so that the ratio from manager to CSM was also like a 1 to 6 or 1 to 8, and not like a 1 to 15, because I see you all nodding, we've all managed at one point in our time or are going to.

If you manage people, it also takes a lot of time away from your day-to-day, right? So we wanted to make sure that there is a big impact as well. And what I want to emphasize is, these changes can happen at the same time with you increasing your coverage.

Just because these numbers show we're reducing something, doesn't mean that we reduced our impact. Our impact actually grew through these three little changes. And then last but not least, technology piece.

We invested into Gainside, we looked at multiple options. It was Totango back then, I think they changed their name now, which I don't know by heart. Say it again?

Oh lovely, yeah perfect, thank you. And some others right there, but you know, it was a bit of a politics thing with us internally, why we chose Gainside. But at the end of the day, Gainside helped us achieve this.

What you're looking at at the moment is something that Carlos and I are very proud of, is 2022, our customer success organization was not able to quantify its impact. We did not know what we did right, how much impact we had. And through technology alone, how we fed it, we were able to generate KPIs.

And let me walk you through them one by one. So managed ACV, I spoke about the people changes we've done from a CSM to account coverage ratio. From 2022 to 2026, we had a 40 to 24% increase of how much ACV we have managed, which is a big leap, right?

Covered accounts, we also increased them tremendously, because our CSMs were focusing on the right things through the changes we've done in the customer lifecycle. And then the CSM account ratio as well, which I talked about too. Now on the right hand side, this is what's just more interesting to be honest, because I don't have a comparison to 2022 at the moment, or on the slide, let's say, but just imagine 2022 shows zero.

We weren't able to tell how engaged we were with our customer base. We weren't able to tell, are we achieving the desired outcomes with our customers? We weren't able to tell what the health is, whether we're engaged with them, whether they're actually doing the renewal with us.

We had zero visibility. And now through this technology alone, we're able to get at least 90% visibility into our customer base. So we know why they're engaged with us, what are they're trying to achieve, when they're renewing, why they're renewing, right?

And these are the questions that leadership is always asking us. And then the question, which I started I feel like with is, customer success is the cost center. What's the impact that you're making?

It's right here. Customer success at SUSE achieved more than 100% NRR. And for those, to kind of put this into perspective, let's say you have a bucket, right?

And NRR defines how much this bucket is full. 100%, the bucket stays, right? If it's less than 100, it's leaking.

If it's more than 100, it's overflowing. And ideally what you're trying to achieve with your customer base is that your customer base is growing. It's overflowing.

They're only not buying what they're intended to or had with their initial purchase, but you're actually growing the base. And that's what customer success at SUSE was able to demonstrate. Four years later, took us a bit.

Questions? Good. Now, 2026, where we are now, right?

Because everyone is asking, what's next? Yes, this is what's next for us. So what we want to focus on at the moment is not only being engaged with our customer base, but we want to dig deeper.

We want to profile our customers based on certain archetypes and then create engagement models through that. And you all know it can be journey orchestrator, right? Being a little bit more individualized on how we engage with our customers.

So we started off very generic. We had our CSM customer lifecycle, and now we want to kind of make it more, I always say it's kind of the Apple experience, right? Because Apple is so good in telling you what you want without knowing what you want, right?

It's like, oh, yes, haven't thought about that. That's the kind of experience we want to give our customers. And then the other thing that we're trying to do is we want to focus on our CSMs. Luckily, knock on wood, we did not have any attrition or voluntary attrition in our customer success organization, but we want to invest more into our CSMs because we see that we need to upskill them in a lot of different ways, right?

And it's as simple as knowing anything around revenue, knowing anything around the industry, you name it. Because the more knowledged our CSMs are, the better experience they can deliver to our customers, the better experience our customers have and that they can deliver, the more they're going to return to us, right? It's always this infinite loop that we're having.

And then, again, AI, it's a buzzword these days, but we have to jump on the wagon as well. We have to find a way to use the AI capabilities and technologies that are available to us. SUSE is not sure yet whether this is in-house built or whether this is a purchase decision, right?

We heard that earlier at the keynote, but we do know that we have to do something. And we're struggling a little bit to cut through the noise of AI because AI is so fast-paced that we, if we have made a decision, it's already outdated. So we have to kind of find our space in that in order to deliver on our operational excellence and the growth goals that our company has in 2027.

Questions?

[Speaker 2]
You did good. We've got lots of questions.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, man. Okay. How can I read this?

Okay.

[Speaker 2]
How do you overcome leadership resistance to scaling customer success when leaders fear losing control?

[Speaker 1]
I have to think about the questions for a second. Bear with me. What means losing control in this context?

Control over what?

[Speaker 2]
I don't know how the question author intended this, but I guess...

[Speaker 4]
Please do. What happens when you do this sort of transformation? Thank you.

[Speaker 3]
What happens when you do this sort of transformation is you could be stepping on sales toes.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, and we are, yes.

[Speaker 3]
So there are other organizations within the business who think you are marching on our territory. You could also be stepping on support toes because they think you should be a part of our organization in support. And what you're doing is making yourself distinct from support and a bit more like sales.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. My answer would be at the end of the day, you don't want to cannibalize each other's work because that's a waste of time. And time is something that we don't have.

It's very precious. So what I would do if I were in the shoes of the three people who asked this, I would paint the vision because that's where it starts with. Paint the vision of, look, this is where we want to be.

Here are the different parameters or the different kind of variables within the company. And if we were to bring all of these together in some sort of capacity, right? Either you stay in your lane or you don't.

You work together with each other. That's what we could achieve because I'm going to give you a prime example. I had a meeting earlier with Lisa and one of Gainsight's colleagues, and I told them that my VP approached me and said, look, the sales organization wants you to define a digital model of how we can replicate what we've done here to non-CSM covered accounts, the long tail, so to say.

That is cannibalizing sales territory at one sort of way, right? And I was like, that's great because we have to think outside in, right? Customer comes always first.

So if you have a leader who is resistant to change, always paint the customer picture. What's in it for them? If we were to do this change, what can we gain out of it?

Don't be selfish because it's not about us. It's not about internally. It's not about, oh, we can work better together.

No, it's about the customer all the time.

[Speaker 2]
I love that. Thank you. Okay.

What FTE impact did the 1 to 12 model have?

[Speaker 1]
None. We hired. We consecutively hired over the last four years.

[Speaker 2]
That was an easy one. How are you tracking exec contact discovered and exec contact engaged?

[Speaker 1]
Great question. So exec contact discovered, we're tracking three personas. So we're tracking champion, executive buyer, and decision maker.

And we're tracking whether a CSM has been engaged or discovered them through their, let's say like through their network. In Gainside, we have a field which says that they name or kind of tag the specific contact against either of the three. So it's in the system.

And then how we track the engagement is did they actually have a meeting with them? We're not tracking emails or a phone call or something. We want to make sure that they're face to face, either on site or digitally, whatever works for you, have had a conversation.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. What's your strategy for high touch accounts versus long tail? How do you achieve balance with a limited number of CSMs?

[Speaker 1]
That's what I just tried to touch with the digital tail. That's one of the challenges I will have for FY27. But let me try to paint the picture.

So we have three tiers from a account perspective. We have enterprise, commercial, and territory. Enterprise and commercial is something that should always be customer success covered.

And territory is, so to say, the long tail for us. But we decided that we don't look at the long tail. We want to cover the bottom 10% of the commercial or the enterprise territory because that's where the money is at.

We're a little customer success organization. And even within the enterprise and commercial territory, there are around 200, 300, 500 customers, right? If each one has 100K renewal, right, that's a big footprint, right, of AR that you can try to try to retain.

And how do I find the balance between the limited number of CSMs? We actually want to induce digital touch in CS covered accounts so that CSMs can focus more on the high value engagements. And that potentially might even mean that they can take on more customers, that the ratio increases again.

But because right now we're at a point where they don't have that capability, we have to make sure that the customer receives the right engagement that they deserve. If I don't answer these questions, please ask again or differently.

[Speaker 2]
There's also lots of time at lunch, so you can chase her down. Are your CSMs domain experts? How did you define CSM to AE alignment?

[Speaker 1]
At our company, CSMs are not domain experts. We have not split them into manufacturing or retail or you name it, right? For us, it's really territory.

Is someone in the DAX space, do they speak the languages? That's really important for us to make sure that the customer can communicate with the CSM. And in our product portfolio, it's quite universal, so there is not really a difference whether you would go into manufacturing or retail.

Like the knowledge you would need to have about our products are applicable internationally or how you say that, across all domains, so to say.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. I was going to say I love this next question and then I saw who authored it.

[Speaker 1]
Hang on. Did I answer that? How did you define CSM?

Oh, yeah, I did. Go ahead.

[Speaker 2]
What was the feedback from your CSMs when they had eight less customers to manage in their book of business? What are they doing now that they didn't have time for before?

[Speaker 1]
They play with AI way too much. No, all the fun aside, what they're doing now is they dig deeper with every customer and it's just incredible how much they find out. We have product teams, we have sales.

Anyone where a CSM is assigned on the account, they're 24-7 questioning our CSMs or they go to Gainside and find out the information. They query it because there's such a vast amount of knowledge that the CSM acquired that none of, I would say it, that none of anyone else has in our company, to be honest. Like our CSMs are that close with customers for a long, long time as well.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. Looking back on the transformation, what's one change you'd tell other teams to make first and what's one you'd tell them to wait on?

[Speaker 1]
I would answer this question across the three pillars, people, process, and technology. What's one change you'd make team first, you'd ask teams to make first is understand your customer base. Make sure how your customers are spread, whatever metrics you use, ACV, ARR, NRR, GRR, right?

What are the customers we need to cover in order to have the biggest impact and then align your CSMs accordingly? And try to align your CSMs for a longer period. Don't change it every six months like our sales organization is trying to do.

Because we all know if we have a human touch, for example, I'm going to pick on Harry now, right? Harry was our CSM for like, what, two months and then he left. And then Lisa came.

I mean, Lisa's great. No, don't get me wrong, right? But if you have this frequency of change, you're not able to build relationships.

And relationships is the number one differentiator that we have as humans, right? Technology can take away so much, but if you have someone who you're familiar with and who knows your business like no one else, there is a high potential for that. So know your customer base, know how you align your AEs and CSMs on that one first.

And one thing I would wait on, don't try to do everything at once. And why I say that is in our customer success organization, we have CSMs who go crazy with AI. They ping me every day, oh, let's do this, let's do this, let's do this, and let's do that, right?

But I'm like, what's the impact we're going to make? Because if I ask 40 or 45 or even another organization with 2,500 CSMs, you know, this is all change and transformation. You have to bring them all along on the journey.

And if we decide to change our mind eight months down the road, I mean, I can't swear now, but you would think what I might be thinking now, right? They would be very, very upset with me, right? Because I don't think in their shoes.

I only think about myself, what a that should never be the case. Again, always outside in first. What benefits the customer immediately and what might benefit the customer on a long-term perspective.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. What was the scope of the CSM role with the new ratios? Did it include any technical coverage, product demos, and integration assistance and onboarding?

[Speaker 1]
The CSM scope did not change, and we actually include all of that in our basic training. So CSMs need to be able to demonstrate value. They need to be able to demonstrate product demos, but we're not asking them to be experts.

Whenever they say we draw the line here, we bring in a solution architect, and that's always the guideline, right? If you don't know, don't say anything. Just say, I'm going to find it out.

Here's an expert. So we didn't change anything.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. How do you define engagement, and what do you measure besides the number of meetings and or emails?

[Speaker 1]
Engagement for us is what is there. Meetings, emails, it's onsite, it's QBRs, anything you can imagine, right? It's pretty basic of what we do.

We don't do anything out of the box. The number one thing that we want to make sure is that the right stakeholders are aligned at the right time, because one thing that we have been facing, or our sales organization has been facing, from the moment that they sold the product to the moment that they were supposed to renew, nothing happened. There was no nurturing, no engagement.

They just sold and assumed that the customer would renew, and with customer success, you have seen we have little touch points, right? Making sure are you receiving the value added from a product perspective, from a, I don't know, engagement perspective, whatever it might be to you, right? Stick and be engaged all the time.

[Speaker 2]
How are you upskilling your CSMs on revenue accountability?

[Speaker 1]
I was afraid a question like this would come. We're working on it. We haven't drafted it yet, but the idea about it, or behind it, is that we're going to use our internal expertise.

We're going to use RevOps as much as possible, because they are doing this 24-7. It's their bread and butter. We're going to pick on their brains and try to understand what are the three things our CSMs need to learn about it, and then trying to build certain, how do you say that, educational courses, like skill jar, or anything around that for them.

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. How are you measuring renewal health?

[Speaker 1]
I have a blank in my brain for a second. Just bear with me.

[Speaker 2]
That's okay. We can jump to another one and come back to it if you like.

[Speaker 1]
Because I think I put that down on the metrics, right? Yes, thanks. Took a second.

Renewal health, how we measure it, our CSMs, it's very lagging. We don't have a leading indicator. How our CSMs are doing it at the moment is they're getting a call to action.

Carlos, what is it? 90 days out?

[Speaker 3]
180?

[Speaker 1]
Even better. 180 days out. They get a call to action, and they say, please get in touch with the customer.

Find out all the information of whether they're renewing. Is there any upsell or cross-sell to inform the renewals team of anything that might be additionally and or being downsold? Then we have a formal handshake with the sales team, making sure that there is cross-pollination in information, because usually sales and customer success have different types of contacts.

Then what does the CSM do? In Gainside, they're going against every opportunity for us greater than 75K USD. They put a traffic light system.

Is it red, amber, or green? Then they put a comment in it with certain parameters, which I just mentioned. Is there any upsell?

Have we talked to them? Have we talked to sales? Is everyone aligned?

As simple as that. We want to get to a place where we have leading indicators, where data is telling us, but the problem is that we're facing we're an open-source company. We don't have product telemetry unless the customer gives it to us.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. This next one's a great extension from the earlier question on headcount. Did you increase headcount in success, reduce headcount in sales, or reallocate?

How did the ratios change from 1.5 to 1.2?

[Speaker 1]
Yes, we increased headcount in customer success. We're the only company or the only department or function at the moment who has received headcount to do so because we were able to demonstrate our numbers. I can't answer the question whether we are reducing headcount in sales, but I can tell you the number one question that is on the table at the moment because of the transformation we were able to demonstrate is, should we hire an AE or should we hire a CSM?

Because when I started, it was sales has a leaky bucket. Customer success is growing the bucket. What is the difference that customer success is doing that could potentially outweigh the role and responsibilities of an AE?

I'm not saying that because our CSMs, they don't sell, we're not in charge of renewals and everything. There are components which are purely sales focused, but you have to put the question out on the table, right? Could we train a few more CSMs on the sales motions?

Could we transform how an AE operates and pick up more customer success motions? That's the question.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. How are we doing for time? We're good.

What KPIs do your CSMs report on?

[Speaker 1]
A number of KPIs. The ones that you have seen earlier on the metric slide, we have actually across all our six pillars. We have engagement metrics, whether the CSMs are engaged with their account patch.

We have success plans as a metric, whether the CSM is engaged through the success plans and desired outcomes. How old these success plans are, very important, because just because success plans exist, doesn't mean that they're up to date. We have expansion KPIs.

A CSM is supposed to create three net new leads within a quarter. We have engagement KPIs that CSMs are at least engaged with 90% of the customer base through meetings. At the end of the day, when we hit the whole year, it will be a retention KPI as well, because we're setting ourselves to get at least 90% of renewal rates in our CS covered customer base.

[Speaker 2]
How did you quantify your efficiency gains?

[Speaker 1]
Efficiency gains we quantified because we start from zero to a number. We weren't able to quantify in the beginning, so we started from nothing to a number now. Unfortunately, I'm not able show you the exact numbers.

I can only show you the percentage increases. Let's say, for example, you started with managing zero customers and then went to 100 in one year time. That's 100% more coverage.

That's how you should try to think. Where did we start? Where are we today?

What's the percentage increase based on the changes that we have made? That's efficiency. You just have to find what are the things that we have done differently in order to get to that number, whatever might be meaningful to you.

Financial metrics, coverage metrics, quantity, quality, could be anything.

[Speaker 2]
We lose a lot of customers during the first six months, mainly long tail. How do you manage the first three to six months? What do the CSMs do with long tail accounts once they are on boarded?

[Speaker 1]
CSMs do the CSM customer lifecycle. For us, there's no difference between long tail, short tail, front end. Everyone receives the same customer experience.

Some receive it a bit more detailed, let's say, if they're bigger customers, but we want to make sure that 80% of our customer success engagement is identical, and we leave 20% for regional nuances. What CSMs do is because we're an open source company, they bring the customer on board, they show them what are the products you have purchased, what are the benefits you're getting out of it. One thing where we want to get to is we want to document the desired outcomes the customer is trying to achieve, and then once they're going through the adoption journey until the renewal, so you can demonstrate it.

The one problem that we had, I think it was two years ago, Carlos, was that our customers were also churning, and the number one reason why customers are churning is because they don't see value, or they're not able to articulate what value the product is giving them, and if you help them see the value that they're getting, the question of renewal is a non-negotiable, because I always take the example, right, if I go buy a new washing machine, right, if I don't see the value of my washing machine, I get rid of it and buy a new one, but if someone tells me, well, you have this button, you have this and this, and they're like, oh, I didn't know, right, I can wash on a wool thingy, right, but you have to have that touch somehow. Someone has to tell you things you don't know yet, or maybe aren't even aware of it.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, what is the NRR of your non-managed customers from your CS segmentation, which segment has the strongest NRR, and why do you think that is?

[Speaker 1]
NRR of non-managed CS accounts is below 100, we have a leaky bucket, and we don't make a difference, we don't measure NRR based on our segments. I mentioned enterprise and commercial, we don't make a difference on them, we just call this our customer base, but we could, though, section them out if we wanted to, yes.

[Speaker 2]
How do you ensure adoption of Gainsight with your CSMs? How do you ensure they were not seeing it as admin work or reporting tool for leadership? I've never heard that one before.

[Speaker 1]
Well, I'd love to spill the tea on what we've done great, but it was a roller coaster, it was really, Carlos, you're nodding right, if you want to say something as well, it was very difficult, because just imagine, put yourselves in your own shoes, if you're doing something for a long, long time, and now someone asks you to change that habit, you're usually resistant to it, because you're like, oh, why, right, I've been doing it, I've been successful with it, why should I change?

So we had to do our due diligence and kind of constantly reminding them of the bigger picture, why are we doing this, what will be the benefits, what are you getting out of it, and it took us two years to get to a point where CSMs are not telling us anymore that this is just an admin tool. I hope it's quicker for you, because it was really painful for us, because if you're very close to the product, you see what it can do, and you see the vision, so it's really important that you paint the same vision to your CSMs as well, bring them on board, reiterate the same thing over and over again, until it's so annoying and exhausting that it goes out of the ears, and like, okay, I got it, it helps me, right, once you don't hear that, continue, continue on educating them.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, how do you prove the business to reduce the accounts per CSM?

[Speaker 1]
We were able to prove it through the ACV footprint we were able to increase. So just because a CSM went down from 20 to 12, and doesn't mean that the ACV footprint was reduced, they went up from 100, or let's say like 5 million portfolio up to a 10 million portfolio, right, if you're able to show the footprint, you're able to increase through the changes that you're making, then I think it's pretty easy to argue.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, we've got time for one more, do you want to pick which one?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, just tell me one, two, or three, four, which one you want to hear?

[Speaker 2]
One, two, three, three, okay, any tips for incorporating NPS? I'm currently rolling it out.

[Speaker 1]
Just start, be as simple as possible, right, I mean, let's pick Gainsight as an example, you always send out a survey, right, it's the question of would you recommend Gainsight to friends or family is the question, right, that's enough, you just need one question that really matters to you, and how you measure engagement with your customer base.

[Speaker 2]
I will say as a person that absolutely despises surveys that come out and on the surface look like one question, and then you click another button, and there's another question, and then you click another button, there's another question, and then I quit, and I don't finish it, I agree. Okay, thank you very much, Sonia. Thank you.