Solving the CS “Gray Zone”: A Pooled Model for Mid-Tier Customers

Hi, thank you for joining me today. My name is Mirka Padia-Kromkova and I've been leading the CSM team at Slido for the past seven years. I really hope that you have already used Slido today and submitted your questions or maybe you have voted, they already submitted ones. Well, we will be for sure using it today, so just keep your pulse up open.

I'm going to share with you how we approach in Slido our mid-tier gray zone. So these are the customers that don't really neatly fit anywhere. Most of the companies have a CSM taking care of the biggest clients, they are responsible for the adoption of the most important fast-growing clients, and then there is some digital team that is responsible for the long tail. But then there are these clients that are too big or too complex for the digital approach and too small or not growing fast enough for the CSMs.

And this is the gray zone that I'm going to be talking about today. So first of all, I would like to know from you, how are you covering this mid-segment? So please, if we can switch to Slido, and if you can go to your Pulse app, the room 203, right, yes, and share with us. How are you covering this mid-segment right now?

Is it the CSMs that are covering them? Or maybe you have already a dedicated pull team, and you should be still, you know, sitting, standing here with me. Or is it the digital team? Maybe you don't have a clear strategy, so this is a good session.

Okay, okay, nice. So, okay, so it's mostly CSMs that are covering these clients. Well, it was the same for us in Slido. Can we switch back to slides, please?

Thank you. It was the same for us in Slido, actually. We gave these mid-tier clients to the CSMs, and we told them, don't really focus that much in here. Be mostly reactive, it's okay.

Just spend your time on the most important strategic clients. And if this sounds familiar, maybe your CSMs are going through the same emotions that our CSMs were going through. And kind of being confused, a little frustrated, because the results of the mid-tier clients would still count towards their KPIs. So this is not really, doesn't make it clear for the CSMs.

Where am I supposed to focus if this is the result of my work, where are my KPIs? And then the CSM were just confused, like I should really do just the reactive support. But then they knew that they were missing the growth opportunities, because they were not there at the right time when the client needed them. And obviously some of them were nervous that the results are counting towards their KPIs.

So they were still trying to approach the clients. They were knocking on the door. They were not getting the right replies. So there was a lot of invisible CSM work as well.

And we actually knew about this problem for quite some time. We were just really focusing on building a strong CSM team. We were focusing on building a strong digital team. And this gray zone just stayed there.

And one year ago, we finally decided, OK, this is getting too much over our heads. We need to start doing something. But we didn't really have a head count for a full pulled CS team. And honestly, we didn't even want to invest too much into this trial.

But what we did have was a CSM that was interested in data, in operations, and was ready to own this motion, Katarina. And we paired her with Mike, our retention specialist, from the sales team. So our pulled CS team was really consisting only of these two people. And they were owning this mid-tier book of business together.

So now let's dive in and let me show you in very practical terms how our mid-tier adoption journey looked like. We implemented the pulled CS team in four phases. First of all, we defined the gray zone. Then we started reactive.

We scaled the work that CSMs were already doing. And only as the very last step, we started building the proactive outreaches. And I'm going to walk you through each of these steps with examples of how it looked like in Slido. And I really hope that you can copy paste some of these learnings to your teams.

So first of all, we needed clarity who we are actually working with and what's the overall goal. So first of all, we defined the ARR range of these customers. And when we did that, we actually had 2-thirds of the customers in the mid-tier being from the CSMs. And 1-third was from the digital team.

So it was kind of a combination. Then we set up the pulled CS team in game site. And we moved all the clients there. So now we knew who exactly we are working with.

And then obviously, we set up the team NordStar and KPIs so the team knows what we are expecting from them. And we started planning the activities. So this is how it looked in Slido in practical terms. The mid-tier clients had more than 300 clients with 3.7 million in ARR.

And one of the KPIs that we set for this team was a logo retention of 94%. And then obviously, we defined a NordStar so the team knows what we actually expect of them. And once we had this, we started Reactive on purpose. And I know that when I say Reactive, it often sounds or evokes something negative or to be avoided.

But actually, it really helped us. The incoming customer requests showed us where clients need help. Auditing the digital and CSM campaigns made sure that these clients are receiving information that really makes sense to them. And then auditing the Reactive CSM requests helped us define specific flows for the pulled CS team and also for other teams so they know what to do exactly when a specific request comes.

And once we had these two bases covered, then we kindly could start having fun with scaling. So we started scaling the things that CSMs were doing. And again, we did it in four steps. First of all, we identified the biggest gap that we had.

For us, this was the owners and admins adoption activities because we had a lot of build for the end users. But the owners and admins, those were mostly owned by the CSMs. So CSMs were doing everything one on one. So this was our biggest gap.

Then we listed all the activities that the CSMs were doing. We brainstormed what could be scaled and then selected the most impactful ones. And now I'm going to show you in very practical terms. This is our CSM-led adoption iceberg that I developed with my team.

It's all the activities that our CSMs are doing to help our clients adopt Slido. In the tip of the iceberg is the education part. That's what everybody thinks about when you think onboarding, basically. It's all the user trainings, building the knowledge base so the users know how to use the tool.

Then the inspiration part in that belong to things like user stories and user communities, QBRs, relationship with the leaders so they know how to use Slido well. And the consultation part, the very bottom of the iceberg, was meant the consultations with the key users, building the champion roundtables, executive engagement, and so on. So we looked at this adoption iceberg that our CSMs were doing. And we identified five adoption activities that we could start scaling.

And I'm going to show you how we scaled each one of them. So the very first thing we looked at was where our CSMs were spending the most time. In our case, this was training the users. So we decided to replace the ad hoc CSM training sessions with monthly sessions, which would be scaled one too many sessions.

So it were not per client anymore. This was open to anybody. And this was both for the mid-tier and for the CSM-owned clients. So we managed to lift some work of the CSMs and free their time for more impactful adoption activities.

One interesting thing that I wanted to share with you, what we learned when we implemented these trainings, was that it doesn't have to be just the CSMs and the pulled CS team delivering and facilitating the trainings. We actually involved the whole CS organization, the customer care, the digital team, the CS ops. We had a sign-up sheet and a track talk to enable them. And half of the facilitators over the past year were actually outside of the CSM team.

And this was very successful because we actually allowed people who normally were not able to practice their presentation and facilitation skills to upskill themselves. The second activity that we scaled were all those random knowledge-based links and articles that the CSMs kept sending to our clients. We are using the game site community, and we created a dedicated admin app for all the things that an owner or admin could need. And this, again, enabled both the mid-tier clients, but also the CSM-owned clients.

And we didn't put there only the links to articles and so on, but we put there also all the sessions that we are organizing and let people sign up right there. Our next scaling attempt was replacing the monthly client calls with open hour sessions. These were basically AMA sessions where the clients could join and will ask us anything. But honestly, it wasn't really successful.

We had very few clients showing up. And if they showed up, they just wanted to hear what other people are asking. So we decided to switch the format, and we created slide admin news sessions. So what we did was that the first 10 minutes of the session was product news.

Everybody wants to hear what's new in the product, right? So clients were actually joining to hear. And the next 20 minutes was AMA. So it kickstarted-- the product news kickstarted nicely the AMA.

And then we actually got to more elaborate and deeper questions about adoption and so on. So this was, again, much more successful than just the open hour sessions. And except for the monthly calls, we also scaled the QBRs. We created one-to-many business reviews for the mid-tier clients.

We built on the slide of quarterly insights report that our clients were already receiving. And we were teaching during these sessions admins how to analyze the data, how to look at it, how to improve the user adoption in their company. This was actually very, very well accepted and very-- we got a really good feedback from the clients on this. One caveat here is that this was the only session where we sent direct invites to all mid-tier clients.

Normally, we would just let people sign up. But for these sessions, it was actually really nice because these clients were already used to having QBRs with their CSMs. So it wasn't really anything surprising to them. And the last CSM activity that we scaled were the internal user community posts.

What is this? This is slide on news and best practices for the admins to share internally. Whether they are using Slack or Teams or WebEx or Yammer, they could just take these news, copy-paste them directly in there, and keep that way their users in the loop on what's happening in Slido. But they didn't have to come up with it.

They just would subscribe again to our community. And they would get it just regularly. So now that I went through the CSMs activities that we scaled, I have a question for you. So we are going to go back to Slido.

Where do you see in your CSM team the most repeatable work today? Is it also the customer trainings, how it was for us? Or maybe some admin office hours? Maybe it's business reviews, monthly calls, onboarding?

Nice. OK, we are going between the customer trainings, sharing resources. OK, those are tied now. Interesting.

Well, thank you for sharing. I mean, repeatable work is not a bad work. It just means that your CSM found out something that is really useful to the clients. The question just is if it really has to happen one-on-one.

So let's now move to the last part of our journey of implementing the pooled CS team to the mid-tier clients. Once we had all the previous steps done, we moved to start in building the proactive outreaches. We keep this really, really simple. We are using Gainsight, as I mentioned.

And we just created a few CTAs that would be triggered directly to the pooled CS team. And every morning, Katarina and Mike would log into their cockpit and assign the CTAs to themselves so they can then continue the discussion with the clients. But we keep it really simple with the fact that we had just few CTAs, just very few tasks there, and very simple playbooks. The key really here, we had just two people.

We could not overload them. So that was the most important part that we don't create complex playbooks. We had only six to seven CTAs per growth, risk, and lifecycle category maximum. And I'll give you an example how this actually helped us.

One of the risk CTAs that we created was informing us when a new or absolute client didn't add users to their license. And the CTAs saved one of our clients. We got the CTA. We reached out.

And during the client call, we found out that the users were joining a completely wrong license. The owner had no idea. The users were completely lost. So the CTA saved the adoption of this client.

And we didn't stop with the CTAs only. We also added other proactive motions. So to give you just a few examples, we added an in-product banner for the owners when the 90% of the user seats are filled so they are aware. Then we also added an in-product alert for license members impacted by a downgrade if the owner downgraded their license.

Also an email notification to license members if they were removed from a license by the owner. And with the renewables, we already had an in-product renewables banner. But we also added a consultation offer where Mike would talk to these clients before the renewal. This is what we did in one year.

So now I'm sure you're curious. Was this worth it? After one year of the pooled CS team, our logo retention was at 91%. This was a little lower than the goal that we set of 94%.

But what we didn't realize when we were setting that goal was that we were setting that goal based on the CSM-owned clients. But one third of the clients in the mid-tier was from the digital team, from the long tail. And when we looked at the same group of clients previously, their logo retention was 68%. So it actually grew from 68% to 91%, which is really good, I think.

We also managed to upsell one third of the clients, and we trained more than 1,000 users. And we concluded that implementing the pooled CS team with just two people was very successful for us. We started delivering more content, the right content at the right time for these clients, and really we had just two people. So if I should give just a few tips to other CS professionals here, it would be these four.

First of all, you can really start smaller than you think. I know it's scary. It took us six years to start implementing the pooled CS team, because we kind of thought we need an elaborate system. But we actually started with just two people with the right skills, and this was enough.

Starting reactive is not bad. It can really help you see where the demand is. The only key is not to stop there. Your CSMs are already doing so many amazing things.

You just need to take it and build on that, figure out how to scale it. And once you get to the point when you are building your CTAs, go simple, because complexity just kills adoption. And that's the story, how we approach the gray zone at Slido. I really hope that you can take some of these learnings back to your teams, and please submit your feedback in the session for me.

And for this session, I really hope it was useful to you. I try to keep it very practical. And if you would like to chat more about the pooled CS team or how we run CS in Slido, I'll be here, or you can just add me on LinkedIn. Now let's go to questions.

Awesome. There are a ton of questions here, so let's start at the beginning. How did you address churn with the pooled CS model? So as I mentioned, we had Mike, our retention specialist, and he was the one responsible for the churn of the clients.

So he was the one looking proactively at these clients, seeing the risk CTAs. The risk CTAs were mostly going to him if they were in the last part of the journey. And he was really out to the clients if he saw that it's not really going so well. Honestly, from the beginning, we actually were just reactive about churn.

If the client didn't renew, that's when we reached out. But as we moved forward and kind of later in the year, he started looking at these clients a bit more proactively and about six months before their renewal, because our renewal period is one year. Where the QBR is done in a group format, they got individual reports. Was a session how to interpret the data?

Can you tell me a little bit more about this? Yes. Yes. So this was a group format.

And what we basically did was that we took the quarterly insights report we were already sending, and section by section, we explained what it means, how the client can interpret it. What does it mean if this number is going up, and what does it mean if it's going down? We then explained how you can approach it. What can you do if it's going down, and how can you encourage it if it's going up?

And this report is not super extensive. There are like four or five main sections. And that's, again, you don't want to overload the clients with information here. Take the most important things, and then elaborate on those, and explain those.

So that's what we did. The plan is going forward, going more deep, as we kind of repeated this group QBRs. But yeah, at this point, we really took it just section by section, and explained what going up and going down mean in your data. So clarity is that an individualized report may be for the client that's delivered quarterly?

Yes. Yes. So our digital team created that about, I think, two years ago. And we've been sending that for some time.

But before that, we just sent it, and they didn't do anything about it, except for our CSMs. They were then using it also at their QBRs, on their one-on-one QBRs. But now we started kind of also doing it on the scaled. Awesome.

How did you decide which activities were worth scaling versus the ones that needed to stay one-on-one with the CSM? Well, we had two people. And one of them was CSM. So we kind of needed to scale everything that we could.

And the idea was, let's start to scale what we can. And if it doesn't work out, we can always revert back. We knew how to do these things well in the one-on-one format. We've been developing that for many years now.

And our CSM have been great in that. So we could always revert. There was not a set-- nothing was set in stone. And it was all treated as a trial.

And yeah, I mean, it worked out so many of these things. That's amazing. What was a response from accounts who no longer had a name CSM and instead had the digital and no one-to-money experience? Actually, we didn't have any pushback on this.

We separated the clients in three categories as we were starting the pulled CS team. The clients that we can inform digitally, and we would just send them an email, about the new things that they can expect in the digital form. Then a group of clients that were owned by the CSMs previously, and that they were kind of more in touch with the CSMs. And these clients CSMs would inform them.

So they would talk to them during their QBRs or monthly calls and would let them know that this is happening. Honestly, there was a reason why these clients were in the mid-tier, right? They were not as super engaging with us. So there wasn't actually much pushback from them.

And we, again, just highlighted the things that they are going to be getting. And the third category of clients was the ones that maybe we were expecting that there might be a pushback, that they were going through some transformation. And even though they fell into the ARR zone of the mid-tier clients, we were still open telling the CSMs, if this client really needs a CSM, we will keep them with the CSM. It's not a set in stone range.

And we kind of discussed with the CSM to make sure that all clients are OK with moving there. That's great. So I know you have one pooled CSM. How are they comped?

And are they on an incentive plan like a normal CSM? We actually don't have an incentive for the CSMs. OK. Did you get pushback from the sales team?

And if you did, how did you get by it? Oh, yes. Well, they were definitely worried about it. But actually, once we explained to them that these clients are now going to get more, because previously, the CSMs were mostly reactive.

They didn't have as much time for them. And with all these things that we did, and that at the time we were planning to do, we could tell the sales team, they are actually going to be better off afterwards. And then when they were kind of a little worried, but once they actually start seeing the results, they got on board. So it wasn't really actually a problem.

Could any customer join the one on many sessions, or just a named or pooled account? So yeah, it was just the named or pooled accounts. We kept it for only the mid-tier and only for the CSM accounts. We didn't open it to completely everybody.

And this was also one of the selling points here, that it's only the enterprise accounts. Did your monthly sessions align to specific industries? No, but we were thinking about it. And we were thinking that that might be like a next step, maybe in the future.

But we didn't want to overcomplicate it right from the start. It's always better to start with something, and then iterate, and then make it better. So yeah, we didn't do this. But we were planning it for the next iterations for the future.

I love this one, because you saw different-- I mean, you saw awesome results. But if you were to start rolling this out again, would you do anything differently? Honestly, I would just start doing it earlier. So now, start now.

It still has really six to seven years to get the courage to do this. And we really could have started earlier. But one thing I'm going to say is that what really helped us was a strong digital team, strong long tail strategy that we already had built, and a strong CSM team. Because that really made us-- made these pulled CS really fast, and make them really try iterating.

They know what they wanted to do. They know how. So I wouldn't change anything in our case. But if you want to start, just build on what you already have from the CSM and both from the digital team.

One-to-many business reviews. So how do you group participants? Were they receptive to the information being shared with others? I'm assuming it was maybe more general information for sharing how it was.

How do they feel about the one-to-many meeting their needs as well, or better than one-to-one? Did these sessions open up any risk pricing discussions? Yes. Actually, it was received very well.

We made it more as a session delivery. We didn't really engage as much. There was a Q&A part to it. But we did not discuss specific client situations.

And we did that as a disclaimer at the very beginning and as an invite to these sessions. This is a group session. There are other professionals. You decide if you want to share anything in the AMA about your company.

And we got actually really good feedback on this session. So the clients wanted to continue having this one-to-many business reviews, which we also were kind of like, is it going to be received well? We had many risks in our head. But then we actually were proved wrong.

And it was good that we just started and tried. And I'm sure they didn't join every single one. So once they understood how to do it, you can do that. And if they wanted to ask questions, they would join.

So that made sense. Exactly. And then you can also do kind of an advanced one. So you can kind of build on it in the future.

But we've done this for one year. For QBRs. And basically, we didn't start right from the start. So in QBRs, you kind of have the people repeating.

And if they repeat, they can just analyze their data during that session as well. Yeah, you said it's time. Do your pooled CSM share an inbox? I'm wondering about the logistics behind the pooled CSM.

Yes. Yes, we created one shared email address. And the customer care tool that we are using, LA Desk, we basically have everything there. So the pooled CSM goes to this inbox.

And they take and respond to the clients. And then also, we have, obviously, the gain site, as I mentioned, where we have a shared cockpit site. Yeah, I'm going to skip one. I'm going to go to-- you just started with two people covering 300-plus tier-- the mid-tier accounts.

At what point did you know the model was working? And then I'm going to add to that. Are you expanding? What are you doing next this year?

It's been one year. You've seen a lot of success. What are you doing? Yes, so we were, over the year, evaluating more the individual activities rather than the pooled CS as a whole.

We just, obviously, with the retention and net retention, it takes some time to reflect. So during the year, we were more evaluating, OK, is this activity working? The group training is working. Are the one to many business reviews working?

And we were kind of building on that. And only now, a year later, when we actually evaluated and looked at the numbers, we were very happy with the results. So we are like, OK, this is working. So basically, if you would ask me at what point we found out that it's working, it's now.

It's been a year. Are you expanding? Are you growing the team this year? So we are not going to grow the team itself in the headcount.

But we want to keep working on scaling more of the CSM activities and on elaborating the ones that we already have. How receptive was your product work to the AMAs? We recently acquired several companies and are struggling with the cross-functional relationship between products and CS, which I think we all can relate to, which ultimately results in our customers feeling a lack of visibility in the product's roadmap and vision. Yes.

So our relationship with the product has always been really good. We always had a really good feedback loop. And our product managers joining our calls, as well, with the clients. So we were building on that.

Luckily, in Slido, we're really from the very start. We're very close in cross-team collaboration. So it was received well. And since we have such a good relationship, they relied on the fact that we know what we are doing with these changes.

But definitely, if you're acquiring companies, that's a completely different and new struggle here. And the lack of visibility in the product roadmap and vision, I can completely relate to that because we, in Slido, for a really long time did not have a set product roadmap. We would iterate so much that we didn't really have a set plan for the future. And we always had to explain this to the clients, and they were not happy about it.

But now we have at least kind of-- our product roadmap is consisting of three parts-- things that we are for sure doing, things that we are maybe doing, and the things that we would like for the future. And this is what we share with the clients. I mean, they are not the happiest about it because, obviously, they would like a plan set in stone for the next year, at least. But that's how we always did things.

We always were very flexible in Slido. That's great. Do you move clients up and down between tiers as they buy more increased ARR or downgrade degrees? And if so, how often do you move clients around?

Yes, we actually have this automatically made in Gainsight. So if a client purchases more so the ARR goes up, then the CSM is notified. So we would let them-- if they would kind of upgrade from the mid tier, then we would assign them to a CSM. If they would downgrade, they would go back to the-- they would kind of fall off from this group.

So we actually did all this in Gainsight directly. And our full book of clients is in Gainsight. So that's where we look at who are actually these clients. And they move up and down there.

How are your net new customers onboarded into the pooled cohort? So one of the parts that we did-- and I didn't mention that here, but we did start with a product onboarding as a part of the pooled CS implementation. So we focused, again, on the scaled onboarding. So we have several email campaigns that are going to the clients.

We also have in-product onboarding for different group of clients. So this is also one thing that the pooled CS team was working on, making sure that each group of clients has the right in-product onboarding. So that's what we are doing. And they can always reply to our emails.

And we will respond, but we don't do individual onboarding anymore. Out of the 300 customers, how many were you able to engage with in this model? How many would you have done without this model? Oh, that's a good question.

I don't know. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, no. I actually really don't know this answer to this. Sorry.

Yeah. That's OK. Did you survey customers to get confirmation of the new model? Did you make any changes to the model after customer feedback?

Yes, we kept constantly collecting customer feedback from mostly the individual things that we implemented. So from the onboarding, from the sessions that we did, from the QBRs. We kind of didn't do it as like, how are you satisfied with this pulled CS experience? Because that's too much.

And it's really hard to evaluate as a client. You don't really even realize. And you shouldn't even realize. It should be so smooth that you can just keep using the product easily that you want to be upselling.

So you should not be even giving feedback on a specific, full CS experience. It just needs to make sense in a way that the clients are happy with the product. They keep giving you good NPS. And that they keep upselling.

Well, I think those are all the questions. And so thank you, Mirka, for a great session. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]