The Great Reset: Architecting a Proactive, Data-Driven CS Organization

Hi, everybody. Thank you so much. So the first thing you need to know about me is that this is a workshop, and I think that slides kill a workshop. So there are no slides.

So what you do have is on your table in front of you, there is a worksheet, and there is a takeaway guide. So those are sitting there. I would say grab them. On the bottom of the takeaway guide is my LinkedIn.

Feel free to connect with me. And if you have questions after the session or anything else you want to talk about, please reach out. But these are your two key pieces of information, key artifacts. So let me start by introducing myself and why I wanted to talk about this topic.

So I have been in customer success for probably just over 10 years now. Before that, I was in account management, and I moved to customer success because I liked the idea of being in a role where my job was to make the customer happy, not only just try to get more money out of them. And I know that obviously we all need to focus on the revenue, and I very much do. But at the same time, I want to make sure that I'm focusing on more than just that and getting to those successful outcomes.

When I started in customer success, I had the good fortune of starting at a company where at the time I didn't recognize it, but the chief customer officer was a visionary. She was well ahead of her time. I mean, she was doing things that-- it was multiple-- five, six years later, they started to get talked about in the wider community. And I learned so much from her, and I didn't even realize that I was doing it.

And when it really hit home was when I took my first CS leadership job, and I went to a company that was not set up for success. And I've since gone to another company that was in a similar situation. So I want you to listen to this scenario, and then I'm going to ask you to tell me if any of this sounds familiar to you. Everything was being run out of spreadsheets.

We had a CSP. Nobody was using it. Any time that something needed to be tracked or monitored, it was admin work, and everyone complained that there was too much admin work and they couldn't do it. Every CSM was running their own process with every customer.

These customers' experience varied so much, depending on which CSM they got. The data is a mess. You can't get a metric. You ask a question.

Nobody gives you an answer. Any of you, that sound familiar? Yeah? OK, I hope so, because if it does sound familiar, you're in the right place, because that's what we're going to talk about.

One of the other things about that company that I joined when I started in customer success that I have found so valuable in the rest of my career is that the product was a product that required data management, modeling, reporting, change management. And so I had to develop that with each of my customers and work through that with them. And now, as a customer success leader, I find myself doing the same thing, only for our customer success team. And so that's going to lead me into talking about the six steps in my CS Reset Roadmap.

All right, and this is the least interactive part, but there will be lots of interaction leaders, so hold your horses. If you want to look on the takeaway page, you can see that they're there. That's basically what I'm talking through, but listen to me talk about it. Don't just read it.

So I'm going to start off at the bottom. Does it want to work on me? At the base, the foundation of pretty much everything is data, right? And so the first thing that you want to do, the first step you have to take to have a proactive organization is understand, what data do I have?

What data is missing? Can I trust it? And where is it coming from? And based off of that information, you can then say, all right, what do I need?

And where do I need to focus? If you've got a great base of data, you're really lucky because you have a lot to work with. If you feel like you don't have a great base of data, there's a lot you can do about that. But really, data is at the bottom, right?

And I'm going to introduce one of my key tenets of thinking about all of this right now, which is that we're never going to solve all these problems in one minute, right? All the things we just talked about, those take time, and they get solved one step at a time. So checking your data, understanding what you have, that's the first step. What's the second step?

The second step is your visibility. Excuse my handwriting. Right, visibility. What does that mean?

OK, I've got this usage data. Who needs to see that data? What does that data tell me? And how can I create a place where the people who need to know that can find it, right?

So once you understand your data, next you have to give visibility to the right people and start asking a lot of questions. How does this change what you're doing? How does this affect the way you're thinking about it? And that helps you to then develop the process.

Right, process. I think I'm making these way too big. I'm going to run out of space, but we'll get there when we get there. Process is saying, right, now that I have this data and this visibility into this data, what am I doing with it?

But also, you could set up a process to create data. Problem with that is it doesn't work unless it's really consistent. Otherwise, you just end up with more bad data, which nobody really needs, right? So create the process on top of the data that you can now see.

Next level up-- oh, wait, sorry, I skipped one. I skipped one. Guys, I'm sorry. We're going to put process up here.

Because first, you have to identify your risk. Because we're all in CS. I think we all know what risk is, right? I think we all care about what risk is.

The visibility you can say-- here, I'll move this too. When you have your visibility, you can say, right, where do I see risks coming out of this? Process that's on top of that-- all the reasons I already said. But also because the process is how you're going to mitigate your risk, right?

If we see this, then we do that. That's a playbook, right? Those are the playbooks we've been creating. This is where it changes nowadays.

Because actually, I'm not going to run out of space because I want this to be next to it. On your sheet, it's not, but really it is. Because you need to layer AI on this too. And this is what's different about now versus five, 10 years ago, right?

Is we've got these new amazing tools. But I feel like a lot of times, they get talked about. Like they're the initiative. We need to implement AI.

We need to roll out Plod. We need to do these things. But actually, AI is just another tool. I mean, it would be ridiculous to say, we need to implement spreadsheets, right?

That's not something that any company says, we need to implement spreadsheets. No, you use a spreadsheet to do something else. And that's the way you should think about AI. And at each step of this roadmap, you can take that AI and figure out how to improve what you're doing.

It can help you with getting your data and cleansing your data. It can help you with creating the reports or socializing the reports that are going to provide visibility. It can help you to identify risk. We use staircase for that.

I don't know, does anyone else here use staircase? Great, great. Staircase is awesome. And I think this is a great example of where we're building the map.

The staircase is AI. It identifies our risk for us. But then we need the process to know what to do about it. And now that process, maybe we can get rid of manual tasks.

Maybe we can streamline it, again, by using the AI. And then there's one final piece, right? Which I'm just going to kind of put up above in the clouds, which is cross-functional partners. Can we do this alone?

Can we? No, no, we can't, right? I know that I personally work very closely with our business systems team. That's where our gain side admin lives.

But it's also, now we're working with Workado to set up tools. We have our database where all of our data lives. We need to work with those people. We've got the sales team.

They have their own processes. We have to align with them, right? So if you try to do all of this and bring these people in at the end, again, it's going to cause problems. You're going to then be stuck.

Because you're going to have your entire idea of everything you want. And you're not going to be able to do it. Because all of these pieces are going to get in the way. They have to be all a part of it.

So that is kind of the basic framework. All right, how are we doing here? Are you following? All right, cool.

My instinct is to ask if you have questions. But I know I'm supposed to save that for the end. All right, so now that we got all this stuff up here, right? The question is, what should we be doing?

Thank you. Can you not read it? All right, the next thing is, now that we have talked about what all of these steps are, how do we use them, right? So let's see if I can erase this.

It doesn't like me. We'll get there. We'll get there. All right, there we go.

So when you think about the problems that generally are in a CS org, in my mind, oftentimes, the problems that we are having as CS leaders-- and you're a leader even if you're a CSM just trying to affect the process-- is that we're trying to accomplish things. And we have problems that-- the base of the problem is either people. The people that we've got are either not bought in. They don't think it's the right thing to do.

They don't like the process, so they don't want to do it. Too much manual work, like I said. The data, we don't trust the data. The data is bad.

We use the data, and then someone looks at it and goes, that number's wrong. I don't believe anything you're saying now. And the process. If our processes aren't right, then we don't get what we need out of them.

We need them to be set up properly. And I think I'm missing something I wanted to say on that, so hold on one second. I'll just confer. So we've got the people, the data, and the process.

So what I want you guys to do right now-- this is when we get interactive. Is everyone ready? Woo! Come on.

Woo! Everyone ready to be interactive? All right. I want you all to start thinking about problems.

So here is your worksheet, and this is where we're going to start. You've got this lovely section up at the top. That's for you to write down all your ideas. I'm going to ask for those brave people out there, which I hope is most of you, to call out some specific problems that you're having.

But for your sheet, just write down whatever you think. If someone says something that makes sense to you, write it down. The purpose of that is to be your big laundry list, not to be-- it's your brainstorming. It's not your edited version.

So I'm going to put up here-- we've got people. All right, can we read that? We'll go with it. Can you guys read that?

Yep, OK. Data and process. So our three sections. So who's got a problem?

I would say give a problem that you're actually dealing with right now. You don't have to give all the details. Data organization. So I would say that seems to be a data problem.

Or I mean, do you think it's a data problem, or it could be a people problem if the people aren't? Yeah? [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] OK, so we'll put that right in the middle.

Data organization. Who else has a problem? All right, I see someone in the back over there. [INAUDIBLE] Sorry, I couldn't hear the-- I heard you deployed a new rubric.

[INAUDIBLE] So operationalizing. So where do you think that falls? Process, yeah. Who else?

Just call out. Someone call out. Too much data. Tell me about that.

Reports, dashboards everywhere. Different source. Depending on what application it's in, it tells you something different. It's great data.

Somebody's looking at it. Someone cares about it. But what's really, really a drag chain? [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, that's great.

So that kind of gets between-- you've got your data. How are you actually using your data in your processes and with your people? But also, I heard something that you said about they're coming from different sources. And when you have data coming from different sources, nobody trusts any of it because it all looks different.

And that can be another problem. All right, what else? [INAUDIBLE] Sorry. [INAUDIBLE] Sorry, I couldn't hear that.

[INAUDIBLE] Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, silos. Are you talking-- so now, are we talking-- [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, so do you think that's a problem where the data is coming from different systems and you never brought it together? Or do you think that's a problem with the process where you have created different visualizations?

Like, for example, you have to log into GainSight. You have to log into Salesforce. You have to log into Tableau. [INAUDIBLE] Oh.

[INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] OK, so yeah, so it's basically-- [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] So it's almost-- if I'm hearing correctly and correct me if I'm wrong-- it's almost that you're saying that you haven't got effective reporting. So you've got all this data. It's in all these different places. But you don't have that view that's going to pull it all together.

Is that accurate? Or do you think that's-- [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, so visualizations. We're going to call that ready visual-- or prepared visualizations. [INAUDIBLE] Sorry?

[INAUDIBLE] Yeah. I like just in time. Oh, that just spread all over my finger. Well, that didn't work as well as I was hoping it to.

All right. Just in time. Visualizations. And do you want alerts, too?

Yeah? I'm going to add it. I think it's a good thing. Excuse my handwriting.

[INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] That is a big problem. [INAUDIBLE] She said that we have a C-suite leader that does not let people in his organization work with other teams. So adversarial leader is what I put up here. Yeah.

Yeah? [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] Okay. So is that a lack of data? A lack of-- I think it's just a lack of leadership in the line of like, no one actually knows what data we have are not.

Okay, okay. So is it that you know you have the data but they're saying you don't? Or is it that you don't have the data but you want the data? Well, I think we were jumping from the planning process to starting from what data we had.

All right. So basically it's looking, yeah, it's, hmm, that's a cross-functional mismatch. How's that? It's not great.

Thank you. I appreciate that. We had a problem where we just launched a very first-hand health student. There's an issue where I see some people think that the customer is better than the data.

So there's like this line of buying. And one of the people in the room was thinking pretty different through the years and they were pretty confident in it. Yeah. You're getting that.

Yeah, the lack of buying is a hard one. I know better. I know first, yeah. All right.

Yep. [inaudible] Yep. [inaudible] Mm-hmm. [inaudible] Yeah, it's like CS becomes the dump heap.

Everything just falls onto CS. Right. I would definitely put that under a people, right? It's an organization issue.

Yep. [inaudible] Okay. I would say that is also a prioritization issue. Because if you have a finite number of resources, right, then you prioritize your work.

And if you're working with your cross-functional partners to prioritize your work, then you should all understand what can get done and when and why. And if you don't all understand that, that might be something where there's some cross-functional mismatch there as well as a bandwidth issue. Yep. [inaudible] All right.

So that's kind of you're saying that I'm tempted to put that under process. [inaudible] Yeah. It's kind of both. All right.

I'll give it an arrow. Buy in to execute. We'll just do an arrow up there. There we go.

All right. All right. Does anybody have a last burning one before we move on? [inaudible] Ah, right.

[inaudible] So I guess the question is why are you having trouble demonstrating return on investment? [inaudible] Yeah. Is it? [inaudible] Yeah.

So is it? Do you have the issue that there's no single version of the truth? So you say this is the return on investment and they say, no, it's not. [inaudible] Yeah.

And is this your customer saying that or your leadership? Leadership. Leadership. Okay.

Leadership. ROI. I kind of feel like that's almost, I'm putting it under data because you seem to be saying that the base problem is the data. But I also think that there's a process thing there about, you know, how we bring our leadership teams along with us on the journey.

Yeah. Yep. [inaudible] Yeah. I think that comes back to it's the same as unclear duties, right?

If it's not clear who is responsible for what, then everything gets pushed back to somebody else that they don't want to do. Yeah. I'm not going to write that because I'm running out of space on the board, but I think that, I think that lines up there. All right.

Great. So we've got this whole list of stuff here, right? And I'm sorry, I'm going to just take a quick sip of water. Be right back.

The question is, what do we do with this? Right? Because it's, you come up with all of these problems, you classify them right. What are the root cause?

And in terms of classifying the root cause, one thing that I like to do is with myself, and I'm not, I wouldn't go that deep here because I think it's, it could be feel a bit adversarial. But is ask the five whys? Have you guys ever used the five whys? Basically, if you ask why once, you get kind of a superficial answer.

If you ask why again, it goes deeper. And the idea is that if you ask why five times, then you know you've got the actual root of the problem. So you actually understand. Because the thing about some of these, right, is that, so for example, let's go with the leadership ROI one, right?

If I was, if that was mine, I would keep asking why and trying to get to the base problem because there are multiple problems existing here, right? So it could be that leadership doesn't trust you and you have to build that trust. But if the data's faulty, then you're not going to build that trust. So if you focus on that piece, before you focus on fixing the data, you're just going to end up in a situation where you still don't have that trust and now you've wasted a bunch of time because you didn't solve the root problem.

So think, as you think about your own lists, try to kind of dig down to understand what is the real cause of these. And we did that pretty superficially here, but that's a super helpful thing to do because you have to solve it in order. Now, the next thing I want to say is like when we look at this, right, if, when I'm doing my roadmap, what I do is I do this brain dump and I do it with my team. So I love, my favorite thing to do is to get the managers under me in a room.

And we sit there and we just throw everything at the wall. What do we need to fix, right? There is no matter how good you are, there is always something you need to fix. So let's throw it at the wall.

What's not working? What do we need to fix? What do we need to make better? And then there is a concept called weighted shortest job first.

Does anyone know that concept? Weighted shortest job first. Okay, good, because I'm going to butcher it. So weighted shortest job first is an Agile Safe term.

And so I am Agile Safe certified, but that was a very long time ago, which is why I know I'm going to butcher what it is. But it doesn't matter the details of what it is. What matters is the point. The point is to say, when you look at your list, your instinct is often to say, I'm going to tackle the hardest, most difficult problem first because it causes the most pain.

But that might be a great way to have you basically spinning in place, getting nothing done. So what I would do is now look at your list, your personal list that you've got on your paper, and I want you to think about t-shirt sizing, each of these. And you want to t-shirt size each of these items for two different things. The first thing is going to be, oh, sorry, by t-shirt sizing, I mean, is it small, medium, large, extra large?

You can give it an extra small if you want. But just giving it a size for, first of all, how difficult is this going to be to do? How hard is this? So if you have-- I'm not going to use these examples.

These are all hard. But if you think about, like, if I have to fix a report, that's probably pretty easy to do. So I would probably give that a small. Whereas if I have to get my leadership's buy-in on my ROI, that's probably pretty hard.

Would you agree with that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So t-shirt size, how easy versus how hard are each of these things? The next thing is to t-shirt size it as well for how much value it's going to bring you, right? And what you're going to see is sometimes you have a small item, and maybe it's not going to be the extra large value of fixing leadership ROI. But it's going to bring you, say, a medium-sized value, but it's going to take you two days.

Do that first. It's just like with our customers, we're always like, get time to value, right? How quickly can we get you to value? Think about your own organization that way.

How quickly can I bring some value, even if it's not the ultimate final value? And if you've got something that is like an extra large, extra large, break it down. Because if it's an extra large, then it definitely has more pieces to it than just that one big thing. And if you break it down, you can find, again, time to value, those value drivers that are going to bring it in.

So right now, I want everybody to take a minute, look through your own list, t-shirt size, how hard is it going to be to do, how much value is it going to bring me? I'm going to be quiet while you do that. I'm going to give you one more thing to think about while you're think about while you're doing this, right, which is your dependencies. I know some of you have already whizzed through your whole list and others haven't, but think about now what are your dependencies.

So for example, if I need to, if I have too much data from too many different sources, my dependencies is probably the owners of all of those data sources, right, because we have to figure out how to pull it all together. Or my dependency might be on my IT team because I need them to implement something for me. So think about do you have a dependency to get this done? I know I'm probably rushing you, but we're going to pause now and go to the next step because I want to make sure that we have enough time for you all to do your breakouts.

So we're back to this sheet. You'll notice it's people data process. I want you to look at your list here with all of your items and what you have weighted them as, like your t-shirt sizing and your dependencies and think, right, where do I want to start to give myself some value as quickly as possible? So I want everybody to look at their list, and I'm going to give you 15 seconds to pick one item.

You're not going to have to announce it. Don't worry. 15 seconds. I'm going to give you a couple more minutes to think while I explain what we're going to do.

So what we're going to do is take it. I'm trying to hold this in a way that I can know what I'm pointing out, but you can see it. All right. What we're going to do is we're going to take this, and we're going to look at, right, what is the root cause of your item?

What is the impact it's having on you today? This isn't fixed. It's causing this impact. And try to come up with a business impact as much as possible.

What are my dependencies? List out those dependencies, right? And then this went on to a back page. Actually I'm going to save that for one second.

Here we go. Then what's the crawl walk run to get there? So this is the important thing, right? We can fix a problem in the ideal way, but often we can fix it more quickly in the quick way, right?

So all of my success plans are in G sheets, and nobody looks at them. Well, the first thing I can do is say, okay, I can pretty quickly get my CSMs to put them into Gainsight. That doesn't necessarily make them good, right? Then I can say, okay, they're all in Gainsight.

Now I can actually look at them, and I now understand what they are, and I can start coaching my CSMs on them. And then run is, and I'll give you a hint. This is actually what I'm working on with my team right now. How can we use AI to help us automate creating those success plans, right?

So again, this crawl, it's not perfect, but it's going to get us somewhere. And that again is trying to find that quick time to value. So think, what's your crawl, walk, run? How can you use AI in these different phases?

Because again, AI is not an initiative by itself. It's part of everything we do now. Then finally, what's the measurable outcome, and what's the future state? Okay, so that's the explanation.

I think it's pretty clear on the sheet too, so hopefully that quick run through is fine. We have 11 minutes and 30 seconds left. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. I want you to get into groups of like four to six, small enough that you can talk, but I want you to find people who have a similar root cause to you.

So people, processor, data. So who are the people people? Whose problem is people? All right, if your problem is people, stand up, grab all your stuff.

We're going to migrate you. Try to find somewhere to live. All right, whose problem? People people go over here, okay?

Just for now, because we're going to have to, we're going to transfer. People people go over here. All right, who's my data people? Where are my data people?

All right, stand up. Data people go over there. Who's my process people? All right, process people.

Move to the front. All right? Find your people. I'm going to wander around and talk to all of you while you're doing this.

So if you have questions, if you want to talk through it, but start working through your, start working through your item with your people. All right, everybody is doing, I know you're all doing great. And I kind of want to tell you that you can just keep working and talking, but there are a couple of questions, and I want to answer them. So if I could ask you to just talk in a whisper, I'm just going to answer the questions now, but you guys can continue working.

I'm not going to be insulted. If you're doing good stuff, please do. So the first one is, when everything feels broken or manual, how do you decide which operational problem is worth solving first? Well, I can give you my Pat easy answer, which is, I would say, which everyone's easiest.

Like which thing can you solve most quickly with the least requirements from others? Like whatever's easiest, that's the one you solve first. If there isn't a clear winner on that, then just pick one, right? Because the, and this is actually my closing statement, so I'm going to give you my closing statement now because it fits, right?

It's not about that you're going to go from here to there in like five minutes. It's about taking the first step and then taking another step and then taking another step. There is a quote that is at the bottom and I want to get it right, so I'm going to actually read it off. You don't have to see the whole staircase.

You just have to take the first step. And that's Martin Luther King Jr., so clearly he accomplished some things. That's my answer for that one. All right.

What's one mistake teams make when moving to a CS system of record that creates more complexity instead of less? I think that the biggest mistake people make is that they are trying to take their bad processes and move them into a system instead of stepping back and saying, "Why are we doing this this way and what do we want to achieve?" It takes a lot more time planning before you actually ever start building, but if you do that, then in the end you are going to have a system that actually does what you need it to do. Instead of a system where it's clunky, people don't understand it and they are looking at it saying, "This isn't what I care about." So don't just try to recreate bad processes. Think through intentionally why you are doing this and what you are hoping you can achieve.

In terms of just to give you something that I meant to mention earlier, and I forgot we have 36 seconds left, so I'm racing to the finish. The first thing that I did when I started at my current company was set up the C360 in-game site. I said, "Right. What information do we have available?

I want it right here so everybody knows we have one place to look and understand a customer." We are going to start from the C360. I started with five or six tabs and now we have like 10 because as I got more data, I added in information on implementation projects, information on their education. So I started off with, "Here's the basics," and then just kept building over time. If you do it that way and you do it intentionally, then hopefully you will end up where you want to go.

That is it. My clock just ticked to zero. Thank you everyone for coming.