Staffbase's Journey of Risk, Renewal, and CSM Empowerment with Gainsight

0:00

Welcome back everybody to track three. This is must have skills for high-

0:04

performing CSMs.

0:05

Hope everybody's having a wonderful day one. We're getting to the end of the

0:08

day. I

0:09

lead the community programs at GainSight. I think everybody by now knows the

0:13

drill for Q&A.

0:15

It's in the app. We're going to do Q&A at the end. Pop your questions into the

0:18

app. We'll tackle

0:19

them at the end of the talk. Today I'm very, very happy to welcome onto the

0:24

stage ODA from

0:25

staff base. We normally do a fun fact and welcome to ODA.

0:29

Hello everyone. I have the lucky spot to be in the very last session for today

0:39

so I guess you're all

0:40

really excited but we're just going to keep this quick and short and I hope you

0:46

can take a lot of

0:47

this with you for today to just embrace or bring to your CSM lives. This is

0:52

really the goal for

0:53

today. I'll keep my fun fact just a little bit longer but you'll see it in a

0:56

second.

0:57

One quick curveball is we're going to do question answers at the end but I also

1:02

have a poll in

1:02

like the next three slides. So you will see it there. Once we have it there you

1:06

can go into the app

1:07

and to the question we'll take it from there. Okay I had to bring a picture of

1:12

a dog because I

1:13

work first. I don't want to put a dog personally but I work for staff base and

1:17

our office dogs are

1:19

one really essential part of our culture. So ODA worked at staff base now for

1:24

four years.

1:25

Initially worked in hospitality so not a SaaS professional from birth but

1:30

trying doing that

1:32

for four years now. I started at staff base as the very first renewal manager

1:37

so maybe raise

1:37

of hands. I know six are at the conference this year. Any renewal manager is in

1:41

the room right now.

1:44

There are more. Last year I was the only to understand a little bit who in this

1:47

room is

1:48

this customer success manager. A lot of you are. Who is in this role for less

1:54

than a year?

1:55

Okay we have some. Okay I think for you this is going to be very interesting. I

2:01

think for this

2:01

year's M that I hear that happened in this role a little bit longer. Might take

2:04

things and say

2:05

okay yes yes. The session today is I am not ODA who has all the wisdom and all

2:10

the truth and I'm not

2:11

going to be the one brazing to you how risk management works but I think if we

2:14

can leave

2:15

the session today and you're going to say okay this is something I'm going to

2:18

take with me.

2:19

This is something that maybe I'm going to hit ODA on LinkedIn afterwards and

2:22

tell her what

2:22

you're doing is crazy. Also perfectly fine all right. Staff base and the

2:28

company that I work for was

2:29

founded in the love that know exactly that cabinets is well I would say maybe

2:34

not the most relevant

2:35

city in Germany but it is very well known just for the industrial industry that

2:42

is there and

2:43

it was founded by our three founders who all three is still in the business in

2:47

2014 and the goal of

2:49

staff base is to bring inspirational communication to app it has now expanded

2:54

to a full platform with

2:55

internet email channels external channels and internal comps management so this

2:59

is what we're

3:00

offering. I also like to give a little bit of a scope in the beginning because

3:04

I saw that come

3:05

up in the questions a lot in my last sessions. We currently have 2200 customers

3:10

approximately

3:11

and the CSM team size of around 40 CSMs for zero so that gives you a little bit

3:16

of an idea on how

3:17

big the team is. There are different models I have my colleagues here today who

3:21

are running the

3:22

scale functions so we have digital CS scale CS and named CS roles and the named

3:27

CS staff base

3:28

handles approximately 30 to 40 accounts so you can get a little bit of an idea

3:33

with the process on

3:34

what that looks like. Okay now comes my fun fact you saw a little bit about me

3:42

already

3:43

imposter, symptom is real because I've never been a CSM more have I ever

3:48

managed a CSM team

3:50

I'm a renewal manager who's also the very first renewal manager that they had

3:54

and so

3:55

the role renewal manager didn't even exist in our Salesforce CRM and they had

3:59

to give me some sort

4:00

of role that didn't exist so I was added to all the opportunities as backup CSM

4:05

and that's the

4:05

road rally very closely to CSMs but I just want to put it out there I was not a

4:10

CSM but I think I

4:11

can still show a lot of the things that we do in our collaboration together and

4:15

because I am not a

4:16

CSM I had to ask someone in our team and really look at what have we maybe not

4:22

done so well

4:23

the first management in the past and how has this developed into something that

4:27

is more

4:27

useful to CSMs right now so I asked Julia she's one of the enterprise CSMs in

4:32

our team in the UK

4:34

and she said before the recent changes there was a noticeable lack of alignment

4:39

and clear

4:39

direction within the team which impacted our ability to collaborate effectively

4:43

as a CSM I

4:45

often felt like the responsibility for mitigating risk fell solely on my

4:49

shoulders. I'm not going

4:51

to ask who can relate so here comes your chance to participate in the poll I

4:56

put out one question

4:57

so let's see how you're feeling about risk if you think of your organization

5:00

right now how

5:01

structured is the risk process right now do you say we have a really clear

5:05

defined process or are

5:06

you feeling well we manage risk but only s and when we need it we'll just give

5:12

everyone like a quick

5:14

30 seconds to answer the question yeah that's what I was expecting yeah I think

5:22

it gives us a really

5:24

good idea which also is really nice for me to see because it means that this

5:29

session is really

5:30

relevant today all right so I think this is good and I mean managing risk when

5:36

and as you need

5:38

at least you're managing risk already right that's a start no one is perfect

5:43

you're also

5:44

see this we at staff base use gain side and I'm going to give you some ideas of

5:49

how we do

5:50

inside super user right we started with spreadsheets and we've done sales force

5:54

and we've tried

5:54

everything out so I'll tell you what worked and what did not oh I skipped one

6:01

so so I think the

6:02

slide that I'm going to focus most on is really the topic of CSM empowerment

6:07

because this you are

6:08

not alone in this I think is the most important thing for me and it's also what

6:12

I wanted to bring

6:13

across to all of you today because CSM's own risk they all wrong as well in the

6:19

past where it almost

6:20

felt to the CSM's like if risk comes up it's your job to track it it's your job

6:24

to solve it right

6:26

but this is not the way we want to do this and this is why we made some changes

6:29

to our process

6:30

CSM still are the coordinators they have to see risk earlier we saw a lot of

6:37

sessions today on AI

6:39

now there are a lot of options to also like risk without even having a CSM

6:43

involved but today

6:44

we're talking about CSM so I'm gonna skip that part a little bit and there are

6:50

three core ideas

6:52

for me to this idea of CSM empowerment we're seed right I want you to feel like

6:57

you have control I

6:59

feel or I want you that you feel that you can make the calls if you want to and

7:02

no one should just

7:03

come and rule you over and say do it differently I mean there are a lot of CSM

7:08

's here you know

7:09

relationships with sales sometimes can be difficult and I don't want to make

7:13

that a whole story today

7:14

but that is one of the things so you have to be able to trust your team members

7:20

they can be

7:20

everywhere right I have a colleague here today who works in onboarding you have

7:24

colleagues that

7:25

work in customer care maybe you have solution engineers you have sales there

7:29

are a lot of

7:29

people that are involved in this process but it's really important that

7:32

everyone understands what

7:33

their role is this one that I also want to look is so those are like the two

7:41

three things why do I

7:43

think this going back to the very first one you being in the driver's seat if

7:48

we look at cars in

7:50

the past you had a car would take you to a destination that's it now it looks

7:54

differently

7:55

right you have someone that assists you to stay in your lane if you get tired

7:58

it's going to sound

8:00

the ring and it's going to wake you up right and this is also how I'm reasoning

8:04

how we rethink

8:06

risk at the business it's not the CSM anymore doing everything from the start

8:10

to the back but you

8:11

have all these supporting systems that are going to come to help you so first

8:16

question is how do you

8:18

track it we use gain side we use CTA items and gain side but maybe you will be

8:26

surprised but we

8:27

also have a spreadsheet am I proud of it not really was it the only version

8:32

that worked for us really

8:33

quickly of what this morning and I know a lot of you probably feel the same

8:37

renewals was something

8:39

I would say rather easy in the last three to four years but it's become

8:43

increasingly hard now we

8:45

face much more churn the economical situation I believe is really hard on us

8:49

and then it depends

8:50

on what kind of solution you're selling we are selling internal comms which in

8:55

our opinion is

8:56

incredibly important but also customers sometimes believe that this is just a

8:59

nice to have solution

9:00

right so you have to adapt your processes and you have to make sure that your

9:03

risk processes are

9:04

more aligned what we're doing now is with that mighty spreadsheet is we're

9:08

pulling in all the data

9:10

that we have from the 120 SARS tools that were and this is really a truth using

9:14

its stuff base

9:15

and trying to align all the information in one source that everyone can access

9:20

because you have

9:20

to make sure that wherever you're tracking risk everyone has to be able to see

9:25

it in our case

9:26

gain side is only used by customer success managers and renewal managers but

9:29

they don't have access

9:31

to gain side so they have to have the information visible as well so this is

9:34

why we're using this

9:35

sheet the sheet is then used to define what are the risks that we have to

9:40

review in our case we

9:42

have a threshold of 50k or more ARR at risk but of course this deeply depends

9:48

on what your average

9:49

deal size is right because if your current makes sense to look at 50k only

9:52

because then you would

9:53

only look at your top accounts to churn however we're saying okay ours is

9:57

probably somewhere between

9:58

50 and 100 so it's very relevant to look at all of those where we're thinking

10:02

we're going to

10:03

potentially lose 50k or more of ARR and these are the ones that go into this

10:07

sheet and then

10:09

what we create out of it is a executive outreach and this is where senior

10:13

leadership comes in

10:15

so what we've implemented in Slack is an actual executive outreach request

10:19

where you can just

10:20

start a workflow in Slack you say okay I need to see or I need to see you or

10:24

this is why you need

10:24

their help it goes directly into their Slack message they'll reach out and ask

10:27

for more content

10:28

right so pull them in early they can offer so much value to your conversations

10:33

because they have

10:33

the context out there that will help you solve your case and it goes right back

10:38

at this you're

10:38

not in this alone there are so many people in there just accept that you're the

10:43

one that's managing

10:44

it and pulling in all the resources that you need but there are so many others

10:47

out there that can

10:48

help you do this um just a little idea on why we did this in the first place or

10:57

how some of the

10:58

principles we're using that just approach or present a culture that we have I

11:03

picked ownership but

11:04

empathy and I think ownership is the one that relates most of this but it's

11:10

really that we have

11:12

those values off let's go the extra mile together let's approach this as it we

11:16

're also saying okay

11:18

we will celebrate our wins but we will also celebrate the losses as terrible as

11:24

it sounds but there is

11:25

so much to learn from the things that we lose and we also saw it in other

11:29

sessions today there

11:31

are things we cannot avoid right if we're having customers that have been

11:34

acquired and then we

11:35

always think oh this is a great group expansion opportunity and we can upsell

11:39

to the larger

11:40

business where in reality chance of that happening is usually 15% I would say

11:44

we've also seen with

11:46

the challenges on the market lately more customers actually going bankrupt and

11:50

those are just the

11:50

things that you cannot do anything about but it's about those other risks that

11:54

you're flaking like

11:56

like of adoption product market fake we really use those and learn from the

12:01

lessons that came

12:02

with these risk and potentially churns at the end and would consider myself a

12:07

very empathetic person

12:09

was a little hard for me in the beginning but we call it clarity over harmony

12:13

and now I am a big

12:14

fan about it because if we have those conversations internally and maybe your

12:18

CRO is in the meeting

12:19

with you this is not about a personal thing this is not about you did a mistake

12:23

or you didn't do

12:24

it correctly but this is about we have this problem and we're going to solve it

12:27

and so taking this

12:28

approach when going into these conversations has been incredibly helpful um all

12:34

right this is

12:37

just a rough outline how our risk management approach works and looking at the

12:43

slides afterwards

12:44

you can take a look at what if you want to you can also take a picture if you

12:47

want but generally

12:48

the very first start is when is the risk flagged and where are you flagging it

12:52

so that's creating

12:53

and managing a risk CTA in gain site again this is where you could also put it

12:57

in a sheet

12:58

log it in sales then we're doing this review this is where uh CSM team leads

13:03

and CSMs are

13:04

reviewing their risks on a weekly basis that are locked in gain site but we're

13:08

also reviewing this

13:09

sheet that I mentioned on a bi-weekly basis first there and we all together

13:12

review the risk on a

13:14

weekly bi-weekly basis and see what is developing where we can support we look

13:18

at oh this is a nice

13:20

win we'll bring it as a success story and if we lose something I mentioned that

13:23

we will uh learn

13:24

from it and then if an account appears there so at staff pays at the moment

13:29

every customer that

13:30

has more than 50 K ARR risk gets an account plan I'm not saying no one else

13:35

does right all of our

13:36

large enterprise accounts have account plans but we've decided to create some

13:40

for the customers

13:41

that are at risk as well so these account plans get created and then they have

13:44

an executive review

13:45

so mostly our CRO goes in there reviews the account plan with you helps you

13:50

with your strategy and

13:51

does follow-ups if necessary and then it's an ever evolving circle it goes back

13:56

to whenever

13:58

something happens going back into the risk making sure it's updated maybe

14:01

having another review

14:02

and it until at the end you either set it to close one or you set it to close

14:06

last now

14:09

I know I have to keep this part really short and it hurts my heart because this

14:14

is my core topic

14:16

right but what we have at staff base and I just wanted to give you a little bit

14:20

of an introduction

14:21

to it we have renewal managers this is not a renewal manager this is actually

14:25

our former CIO

14:28

but so the usual commercial team on a renewal is an account executive a

14:34

customer success

14:35

manager and a renewal manager you might ask why we have renewals you wanted to

14:39

take some of the

14:39

hard conversations out of the customer success manager's job because they were

14:43

the ones owning

14:44

renewals before but do you feel comfortable talking to your customer about

14:50

outstanding payments

14:51

contracts that need the negotiation maybe someone has the wonderful idea to put

14:56

in an automatic

14:56

pricing that you have with your customers and that's why we have renewal

14:59

managers now that love to be

15:00

the bad cops people in this team worked in procurement before they really like

15:05

to talk contracts and so

15:06

this is what my team does and then everyone in those conversations takes a

15:11

different role

15:12

the account managers or account executive really focus on the commercial topics

15:16

so that's the renewal

15:17

manager but renewal managers have a churn target and it affects their quota so

15:22

they're really focused

15:23

on customer retention and then we have customer success managers like you who

15:28

are in those

15:29

conversations bringing the aspects of retention and relationship and odd only

15:33

is a part of their

15:34

job but we've also made sure to include it in everyone's compensation so CSMs

15:39

are compensated

15:40

on churn renewal managers are and our sales leaders are now compensated on

15:44

churn as well

15:45

and you can imagine that that really created a shift of mind when it comes to

15:49

importance of

15:50

getting involved as an AE into a churn mitigation because we all heard this

15:54

there's nothing in it

15:55

for me why would I go into a meeting like that so that has really changed the

15:59

approach that we're

16:00

taking and I could really speak another hour about how we're doing renewals if

16:04

you want to learn

16:05

more about this feel free to talk to me I want to keep it at that you might

16:11

want to know how are

16:13

we leveraging Gainsight we've now had Gainsight for two years we have a

16:19

wonderful implementation

16:21

partner on site I was that it helps us making doing and I think we have some

16:25

cool things that

16:26

we're planning to do that will just help us with this process in general so

16:31

first of all you see

16:32

a little screenshot of the means that every month something is going to be

16:36

different so just two

16:38

days ago I saw the revised risk dashboard so you see we're also still improving

16:42

things we haven't

16:43

figured it out entirely on what we're going to do but this is one point to come

16:48

in see all the

16:48

risks that have been created you can see all filters filtered by territory this

16:52

is especially

16:53

interesting I think also for this for the CS leaders here it will give you a

16:57

very good overview

16:58

over the risks in your teams what we also and I heard this today surveys are

17:06

maybe not the most

17:08

effective tool but we've implemented one anyway and what we're doing now is we

17:11

're sending out a

17:12

survey to our customers six months prior to the renewal date asking them about

17:16

the likelihood of

17:17

their renewal if it was but the cool thing is only the ones that are angry come

17:22

back to us so

17:23

they're like oh we hate it we want to churn okay which is not good news but

17:27

knowing that six months

17:29

before your renewal is an incredible insight so I don't want to hear all the

17:33

customers that are

17:34

extremely happy because we know about them right we have a health score we have

17:38

all the tracking

17:39

in gain site we see the customers that are happy but knowing from the cutting

17:42

to be really successful

17:44

we now started doing this for a quarter of a year we have to figure out if we

17:48

're going to

17:48

the messaging and how we're going to use this moving forward but definitely a

17:52

very quick win

17:53

if you're having the tool anyway and want to try something out so I can

17:55

definitely recommend

17:56

this something that we only introduced I think four weeks ago actually is this

18:02

CSM churn forecast

18:04

churn forecast and they always come up with a number and sometimes only last

18:07

week I had this at the

18:08

office we run into conflicts because every new manager might say okay my

18:12

forecast has to be

18:13

conservative I think we'll only renew 25% of ARR for this customer the CSM

18:19

however says oh no

18:20

we're now bringing this in so if you're feeling it's 100% great you can put it

18:25

there no one's going

18:26

to hold you accountable for this and tell you three weeks later oh but you said

18:30

it's 100%

18:30

out what the CSM thinks that the churn risk on the account is so we're just

18:35

going back to the whole

18:36

topic of CSM ownership you might not be the people earning the churn forecast

18:41

but you can definitely

18:42

give some very valuable insights on what you think it's going to be okay just

18:47

bringing in a

18:48

little bit more automation when it comes to our non-human touch customer

18:51

success models right I

18:53

have Fabian who's here today he's doing a wonderful session tomorrow on

18:57

building a scale CS function

18:59

because we actually moved to a digital and scaled team almost half a year ago

19:03

so we're now also

19:04

running into challenges where the customer that hasn't been talked to in over a

19:08

year and they get

19:09

all the frustration or they get all the praise but we just have those blind

19:13

spots where we just

19:14

don't know exactly what's coming up we're doing a lot of things already with

19:18

health scores so we're

19:19

looking at adoption we're looking at engagement we're looking just at an

19:23

overall how to be saw

19:24

today and I think that we're going to hear more about tomorrow on has a

19:27

customer left the business

19:29

or maybe our emails being pushed back all the time or is the response time much

19:33

longer because this

19:34

is the things that we will also have to look into now that we have customers

19:38

that don't have a customer

19:39

success any manager anymore so a little bit on what's on our future agenda so

19:46

three key or three

19:48

key takeaways for today I would say really ownership and accountability you don

19:54

't have to own it all

19:56

but it has to be to be clear who owns it and then you can say this is your job

20:00

I'm not responsible

20:01

for that and I know in startups everyone is responsible for everything but that

20:05

doesn't have to be like

20:06

that then really approach challenges ahead of time there's no shame in raising

20:14

a risk a risk is

20:15

never your personal fault but it's just about tackling things early clarity

20:20

over harmony let's

20:21

discuss this six months out and not two months before the renewal when there's

20:24

nothing we can

20:25

change about it anymore and you're not alone leverage your support system so go

20:31

talk to your

20:31

executives talk to your CS leaders use their linked in network just pull in all

20:36

the things that you

20:37

can do and then together you will be able to save more risk that you think I

20:41

actually graciously skipped

20:43

over our result that I had in the middle we started with the new risk

20:46

management approach in summer

20:48

and until now we have already saved 1.4 million that we have lost otherwise to

20:52

churn so I think

20:53

these are some good first results but of course we're also still in the

20:56

starting phase of this

20:57

so we're hoping to see more improvements of that next year all right so with

21:03

this we can move to

21:05

question and answer wonderful thank you so much Oda that was fantastic so yeah

21:14

it's time for Q&A

21:17

already see quite a few questions coming in that's awesome we have some time if

21:21

you don't have a

21:21

question feel free to go in and also vote for the questions that you would like

21:24

to see answered that

21:25

will help us make sure we answer all the all the ones that reward your CSMs for

21:29

renewals the CSMs

21:32

at staff base have a team net retention target so of course if customers renew

21:36

and they renew

21:37

it with expansion instead of churning then that's going to go directly towards

21:41

their salary nice

21:46

let's do this top on you how are you combining health scores with written from

21:50

the CS team

21:50

on the effectiveness of the health score so we are not yet triggering CTA's

21:58

with resi revised

21:59

health score launched I would say four weeks ago what we're doing that is also

22:04

helpful is we're

22:06

using the health score for our churn forecast because what renew owners have to

22:10

do in their

22:10

renewal opportunities they have to forecast on how much churn they're expecting

22:14

with the renewal to

22:15

come now these opportunities get created the moment another renewal is closed

22:21

so you have this

22:22

really 12 months long period where you don't know what's happening and you don

22:25

't have an automated

22:26

churn forecast what we've now done is we're actually using the health score to

22:31

define that

22:31

defaults really low health score we're going to go in with a renew probability

22:35

it's probably only

22:36

between 10 and 20 percent however if we see that they have excellent health

22:40

scores we're going to

22:41

forecast that with our average GOR so that's how we're using it right now but

22:45

yes definitely planning

22:46

to have automated CTA's as well nice now we have a very very nice question here

22:52

I love this one I

22:53

can see like getting a lot of uploads as well with three teams managing a

22:56

customer sales CSM

22:58

and renewals how do you manage who is speaking with a customer at the right

23:00

time avoid the customer

23:01

being called a message by multiple people I think I would say I take a lot of

23:07

pride on changing a

23:09

little bit on how the culture is at stuff base amazing and changed it all but

23:14

with having a

23:14

renewal manager suddenly as part of that team we had to have a lot more

23:18

conversation people

23:19

couldn't just go out there anymore and do just every customer that we have and

23:23

now we're doing

23:24

it with a little bit of threshold because you can imagine I have six renewal

23:27

managers for two

23:28

things saying okay for the big ones we're gonna have a 15 minutes renewal

23:32

conversation internally

23:34

with the renewal manager the CSM and the AE and we're going to come up with a

23:38

plan and the CSM's come

23:39

in there they tell us everything about what happened in the QBR last they can

23:43

give us insights on the

23:44

support ticket the EE might have already existing expansion plans so they're

23:48

discussing it there

23:50

and then a renewal manager owns that conversation and kind of pulls or makes a

23:53

decision on who's

23:54

going to do the outreach and we're deciding it there so we've really limited

23:58

the surprises

24:01

to a minimum where our customer success managers or for example talking to the

24:05

customers and they're

24:05

like well great you're calling me but I just talked to yourselves rep yesterday

24:09

this is what we try

24:10

to avoid especially in these renewal conversations so we come up with a plan

24:14

before we start the

24:15

entire outreach to the customer awesome can you talk a bit more about how you

24:21

work with risk CTAs

24:22

and gain site right now risk CTAs are created in gain site by three different

24:30

personas mainly

24:32

the customer success managers but we have also onboarding consultants that can

24:37

create risks and

24:38

we also have renewal managers that can create risk so throughout the entire

24:42

customer lifecycle

24:43

we make sure that things are being flagged if it happens within onboarding

24:46

there's clear ownership

24:47

with the onboarding consultant if it's within the growth phase due to our

24:51

skills and digital CS

24:52

models it is either the CSM that is assigned part of this project for a shorter

24:59

period of time or

25:00

it's the renewal manager is going to raise the risk and then we are currently

25:05

using it more so for

25:08

reporting on it and tracking it what we want to do in the future is operate on

25:14

the risk but we're

25:15

trying to figure out how we're going to do this just because not everyone that

25:18

's involved in the

25:18

process has access to gain site so that's a little bit of a question mark for

25:22

us still but

25:23

CSMs and renewal managers are collaborating on that CTA already together they

25:27

're a renewal

25:28

manager to be able to have hard conversations with customers on nuclear fast

25:33

pricing well

25:34

I hired them to be comfortable doing that it's the quick answer to do that as I

25:41

mentioned I have

25:43

one of my team members used to be a procurement manager before so she's

25:47

extremely comfortable

25:48

having those conversations I would say another role that goes really well for

25:53

renewal managers is

25:54

maybe not so much as CSM as I could be you have CSMs who are really

25:58

commercially driven it's like

25:59

okay I want to make more of this also account executives who just want to take

26:03

the pressure off

26:04

a little bit from that new business hunting right so some of you might heard of

26:08

this concept of

26:09

being a hunter or being a farmer a account executive might be more of a hunter

26:14

I would say every

26:14

renewal manager is more of a farmer so they're working with an existing

26:17

business but they have

26:18

the same qualities as people in sales and they just don't care and really we

26:23

have those if we have

26:24

meeting with the customer who's going to play the bad cop and who's going to be

26:27

the good cop I can

26:28

tell you in 80 percent of the cases the renewal manager is going to be the bad

26:31

cop in the conversation

26:33

but that's just the way it is I guess so how do your leadership or executive

26:41

team review current

26:42

customers at risk on a specific frequency yes so we review them on a bi-weekly

26:47

basis on a bi-weekly

26:49

basis we do a risk check-in meeting we do that one for a mere and one for North

26:53

America and if we

26:54

have especially risky cases in their senior leadership and myself we're taking

26:58

these risks

26:59

and flagging them choices and a very nice I think a common question we all

27:04

think about a lot how

27:06

early do your CSM start talking about renewals so I'll equal CSM with renewal

27:11

managers in our case

27:13

but I think you can put it in parallel we're starting the process at the moment

27:17

six months

27:17

prior to the renewal date it also depends a little bit on what your contract

27:22

setup is for our customers

27:24

most of the customers are an auto renewal and we have a 90-day termination

27:28

policy so I do have to

27:29

start minimum six or six months it has been renewed and there's nothing I can

27:33

do about it

27:33

anymore right so that's why we're starting at that time another great question

27:39

here

27:39

how oh yeah sorry they're jumping around a bit oh well okay yeah that was the

27:47

one I had in mind

27:47

yeah how do you ensure that CSM's continuously update risk CTAs preventing data

27:53

quality issues

27:54

yeah if we're going back to this I'm not a CSM leader but I have my CSM leaders

28:01

in the room

28:02

with me for exams and really just making it one part of your one-to-one agenda

28:06

is to look at

28:07

those risk items and use the tools that you have again it doesn't have to be in

28:11

gameside it could

28:12

also be somewhere else but really pull a report and see okay out of all of

28:16

these risk items and

28:17

some might be in 2025 December so maybe you're not worrying about it right now

28:21

but if you're looking

28:22

at the risks entered and you see that there's been no activity for over 45 days

28:26

I would definitely

28:27

look at that risk and make sure that it gets updated and then for product

28:32

related risks how

28:34

does CSM uh I will answer this to my best abilities but there are regular

28:39

things between product and

28:40

customer success and this is where those topics are being raised yeah where

28:45

your risk can be

28:46

attributed to multiple teams such as product, tax, support, onboarding CS

28:49

commercial teams

28:51

how do you this goes back to where the customer success manager is the

28:55

principal owner of the

28:56

risk and then they will see okay which are the departments that I have to pull

29:00

in you might not

29:01

have the conversation with product right in that first risk view but if you

29:05

think that this is

29:06

definitely related to a product issue and maybe you want to have a product

29:10

owner in the conversation

29:11

with the customer we reach out to them and give them a brief it should be there

29:15

is really open I

29:16

think it's a great part of our culture that whenever you approach someone they

29:20

're really happy to

29:21

help you just have to show initiative and go towards them and then they'll be

29:25

there to support

29:26

how do you ensure that executives don't get crowded without each request what

29:33

are the

29:33

thresholds apart from the 50k era threshold are there? In these cases we use it

29:38

for risk management

29:40

and then also our account executives can use it for new business uh right now I

29:46

would say we're

29:47

still fine because the hesitancy maybe is big enough still to keep it leveled

29:53

uh of course um

29:56

they will let you know if the question that you've asked them is maybe not as

30:00

relevant for you or

30:01

direct you to someone else who could help you with this but if if it's really

30:05

relevant control

30:06

we say they're approximately like maybe two to three requests on a daily basis

30:12

and we have an

30:13

ELT of 5G members so that's okay and not everything results into a call right

30:17

could be an email that

30:18

you can do that doesn't involve bringing your CRO into a call how do you renew

30:24

a man yeah that's

30:25

why I said okay I can do an hour of a talk on that topic I would say they're

30:31

really close to each

30:32

other and they both care about the same thing which is net retention and so the

30:37

customer success

30:38

manager is talking to these customers on a weekly monthly basis and the renewal

30:42

manager is there

30:43

to support them but they are also the ones that are going to flag things for

30:47

example if there are

30:48

in a renewal conversation they realize there's absolute potential there they're

30:51

definitely gonna

30:52

make sure that they're going to raise it to the customer success manager and

30:54

then they can work

30:55

on the expansion together so it's not that concept where if I spotted it it's

31:00

mine and I will do it

31:01

by myself but they always work on it together and so it works really well and

31:05

then for risk as well

31:06

they're both part of the stakeholders in this process so they have to

31:11

collaborate on it

31:12

and then so it might be a budget question

31:17

since we also have another CRM in place AEs for us mostly will work in the

31:23

Salesforce so that's

31:24

why they're not using gain site at the moment but all the emails that they're

31:28

linking to Salesforce

31:30

are also going to go into say into gain sites so CSMs are not missing out on

31:33

the things that AEs

31:35

are discussing with our customers.

31:36

Staff base continues to strengthen its risk management and renewal processes

31:43

what are the next steps

31:44

to further enhance CSM empowerment and cross-functional collaboration?

31:47

I think what we're constantly working on especially for CSMs is and you've

31:54

probably heard it also

31:55

a million times already it's a little bit of a buzzword as well but really

31:59

making time for the

32:00

things that matter right if you have a portfolio with 100 accounts you probably

32:05

don't have the time

32:06

to spend it on meaningful conversations but if some of your portfolio is

32:09

covered by a digital

32:10

CSM and just have those 30 to 40 accounts so we really empowered them to take

32:14

ownership on their

32:15

accounts and put in the time and effort that they think is necessary and we're

32:20

trust more value there

32:21

we might skip on other things so I think it's one of the biggest thing is

32:26

making time and making sure

32:28

everyone feels that they have the resources that we need and I think this is

32:31

just going to be our

32:33

biggest exercise growing but that doesn't mean that we can hire five new CSMs

32:37

every year right

32:38

so we have to put more and more focus on this and really making sure that if a

32:42

customer success

32:43

manager touches that customer that we're bringing real value.

32:46

Nice I think you've touched on this next one in your slides but maybe to read

32:52

it are your risk

32:54

CTA is manually created by CSMs and if so what are your barriers to automating?

32:57

The barriers really are that we only implement digital models half a year ago

33:05

and things take a

33:05

little bit of time to address the truth in the million projects that we do

33:09

every day.

33:10

And I think this next one I think that this is a theme I think around

33:16

collaboration between

33:17

functions so are there any best practices between renewal managers and your CS?

33:23

I would say open communication is really important and also being really honest

33:29

about what you feel

33:30

comfortable with and what you don't feel comfortable with because I have CSMs

33:34

in our organization.

33:35

I hate contracts I have other CSMs who are commercial geniuses and who come

33:41

into the conversation being

33:42

like I want to pitch this oh that can we do this why are they not paying us 30k

33:46

more and then I'm

33:47

going to take a step back and be like okay you can handle that conversation I

33:49

don't have to do that

33:50

so either bringing to the collaboration but also where they might lack certain

33:55

things that another

33:56

person can take over and that has shown. This is an interesting one how do you

33:59

handle continuous

34:00

risk cases where the case cannot be mitigated but the customer can turn or won

34:04

't turn eminently?

34:05

A new old date so if we have a customer and we have a risk open and the renewal

34:09

date is for example

34:10

we use this now first of January is the renewal date it could be that the

34:15

customer ends up renewing

34:16

anyway but that doesn't mean that the risk is not going away what's going to

34:19

happen is that risk

34:21

stays active in gain site it's just going to be pushed out or comes up next

34:24

year we'll already

34:25

have it there and we have the collaboration on it as well. Why do you need a

34:30

specialist renewal

34:32

manager and you have more hunter like people in your in your AET? Well because

34:37

new business brings

34:38

more commission. You could ask that question JERS I think also for us I mean we

34:49

are still a scale

34:51

up we're still managing our processes on a monthly quarterly basis so there is

34:56

a potential

34:56

scenario in the future where we might have account executives and account

34:59

managers and the role of

35:00

a renewal manager is no longer assist right now it was the very first solution

35:05

that we brought in

35:06

just living or a little another person so there are now the people managing

35:10

risk managing churn

35:11

etc that's not necessarily an idea job for us at the moment. All right so what

35:19

is the seniority of

35:20

your renewal managers in your org compared to leaders managers CSMs and sales

35:25

etc. Renewals has

35:27

as new as the concept is still it's not very new I mean we have a renewal

35:31

manager here but we also

35:33

have gone through a journey at staff base in the last four years when I started

35:37

I was reporting to

35:38

our head of customer success I then moved into rev-ups because they thought it

35:42

's a little bit of a

35:43

sales CS thing so we'll put you in the middle then I moved into sales now last

35:47

ly reported to our

35:48

CRO so this is where we sit on a seniority level and then the renewal managers

35:54

are individual

35:55

contributors on different levels yeah and they all have their own portfolio.

35:59

Nice we have a few

36:01

minutes left so do vote for the questions you'd like to see answered still we

36:04

can do a few more

36:05

how open are customers to auto renewal? I get this question all the time when

36:11

talking to other

36:12

peers in the same industry we definitely have seen the same trends that

36:18

everyone else is seeing

36:19

auto renewal is being questioned much more often than it is used to in the past

36:23

the approver of it

36:25

in our executive approval form if you remove auto renewal from an order form

36:29

because we do think

36:31

it's really a key feature of working efficiently also within our organization I

36:37

would say right now

36:41

we tend to take it out more but we also counter it with talk tracks around

36:46

pricing guarantee because

36:48

I feel that some of our automatic price increase clauses because we could lower

36:52

it to maybe two

36:53

or one percent on an annual basis but then I'm going to go back to that buyer

36:58

on the other side I'm like

36:59

well if we're just putting in two percent for four-year contract I could also

37:03

just remove it and then

37:04

we're going to renegotiate everything in four years I don't know if that's what

37:07

you want to do

37:08

so we're approaching it more from a if you're doing auto renewal we'll give you

37:13

a broken cancel until another 30 days we're doing all of that but you also have

37:17

that right to just

37:18

roll over into new year with no one touching your contract so I think this is

37:22

one of the arguments

37:23

we're still using but I agree it's become harder all right so this is an

37:29

interesting question

37:30

go to getting quite a few thumbs up I was like what do what are your specific

37:33

criteria for a client

37:34

at risk we are looking at two different things first of all we're defining what

37:42

kind of risk it is

37:44

is it an arrow I were making this first clarification on what kind of risk we

37:48

think it is and then we're

37:49

ranking it based on severity so you can see okay is the chances of this

37:54

happening really low is it

37:56

really high and that's how we're determining it did that answer the question or

38:02

maybe

38:02

I think it's good I think yeah we're just a couple minutes left so let's see if

38:08

we maybe

38:08

just do one or two more and we'll start wrapping up how do you manage late

38:13

renewals that's an

38:14

interesting one oh and a very interesting one so firstly our renewal managers

38:19

have it part of

38:20

their quota to bring we are very strict with customers that don't renew in time

38:25

if their

38:26

contracts run over and this is especially for those customers that are not on

38:30

auto renewal

38:31

we might give them a grace period of one or two weeks to sign the paperwork but

38:35

if they don't then

38:36

we have to shut down the service just for a temporary basis and once we have

38:39

signature

38:40

we turn it back on but of call renewals thing is always it depends because if

38:45

this is a major

38:45

customer and they're a risk of churning I'm not going to switch off their

38:48

system after two weeks

38:49

but I'm going to make sure to find a solution that I will figure out what is it

38:53

that starts them

38:53

from signing and try to just avoid those barriers and make them sign at the end

38:58

all right we'll do

39:00

one more question this will be the last one for today and then we can wrap up

39:03

the day what do you

39:04

do if a customer just won't respond answer the phone when a churn risk is high

39:07

or they terminated

39:08

the contract it depends there we have it again um I think what determines is is

39:19

this 50k 100k

39:21

you know all more then it's all out right we'll look at okay who has context to

39:27

this customer on

39:29

LinkedIn how can we reach out can we maybe invite them somewhere and I know I

39:33

mean it's the worst

39:35

nightmare is and I love that the question says answers to phone because then a

39:39

lot of questions

39:40

I'm like did you ever call them and then the answer is like I sent five emails

39:44

but they're not

39:44

responding so the first thing I would always say is give them a call but it's

39:48

in the question so

39:49

we're not going to do that sometimes also with lower value customers and of

39:53

course you have to

39:54

define for yourself what that means but sometimes you just have to accept

39:58

forces that we have we

39:59

have to make sure to use these resources as effectively as we can and following

40:03

up with and

40:04

I'm just saying this from our example following up with a customer for eight

40:08

weeks on a 10k contract

40:09

is not the most valuable use of a renewal manager's time all right I think it

40:14

is time to wrap up

40:16

uh thank you so much Oda this has been fantastic really appreciate it we we

40:22

have come to the end of

40:24

day one I hope everybody's had a wonderful time we have the polls party tonight

40:28

hope everybody's

40:28

gonna go or maybe they'll do our AV folks at the back who kept everything

40:31

running today and our

40:33

wonderful friends from Slido been doing the polling thank you all so much

40:36

hopefully I hope to see you