Graham Gill
Graham brings two decades of experience developing and leading high performing teams (pre & post sales), and is passionate about driving client adoption and customer loyalty. These skills enable him to build customer experience strategies and services that result in increased revenue and retention.
“I love that young professionals who are entering the workforce are now looking to CS as a first role and asking what they need to do to prepare themselves. I am encouraged that we are seeing more folks like myself from product, sales, marketing, and all walks of life be drawn into CS.”
How did you find yourself in Customer Success? What was your journey and what drew you to this industry?
When I ‘got into CS,’ it wasn’t because I woke up and said that this was a direction that I wanted to go. I often talk about my quest to be well rounded in the workplace. I spent years as a Project Manager and a Product Manager building what I thought were really amazing products. It wasn’t until I went on the other side of the house that I realized that there was just as strong of a need to understand the customer side of the equation. I couldn’t understand why these great products (in my mind) that I was creating were meeting so much resistance.
Some of the resistance was due to product market fit but the larger issue was how our clients were being introduced to these products. This got me wondering why adoption and evangelism wasn’t taking place. As I got to spending more time with Account Managers (at the time), I began to realize that I wanted to better understand why clients/customers were selecting one vendor over another or what challenge they were looking to solve. This really is what started it for me.
How did your early professional experience contribute to a successful career in Customer Success?
I believe that my success and failures on the product side gave me the blueprint of what to avoid when I got into CS. I also know that my ability to understand the technical and business side of issues contributes, even today, to my being able to connect with a wide audience. I also have been fortunate enough to hold roles in different industries. Not only do you see clients using software differently, you see them struggling with different challenges. In CS you spend a lot of time working to become that trusted advisor and proactive in nature. Knowing you are headed down a bad path based on experience is extremely valuable.
What excites you about Customer Success and where it’s going over the next decade?
At the heart of it, Customer Success isn’t anything revolutionary or ‘new.’ What it is looking to achieve has been around since the dawn of business. There have been great strides made over the last 10 years that have elevated the concept and made it a must have for organizations. We have seen CS go from an under appreciated discipline to a must have for any startup out of the gate. Hiring a VP of Customer Success is now happening as quickly as hiring a VP of Sales.
I am excited by the network and community that has developed in CS. The willingness to help a peer, to jump in and offer advice/guidance, is unrivaled in any other discipline. I love the information sharing that takes place in this community. I love that young professionals who are entering the workforce are now looking to CS as a first role and asking what they need to do to prepare themselves. I am encouraged that we are seeing more folks like myself from product, sales, marketing, and all walks of life be drawn into CS.
As for where CS is going over the next decade, I worry that we are starting to recycle ideas and talk tracks. I think the industry is probably going to need to define itself a little better. You now are seeing ‘what is next’ in terms of career growth. I believe you will see more CEOs, COOs, Chief of Staffs, etc. come directly from custom centric roles. I know a couple of peers who are looking to take lessons learned from CS into Sales Leadership.
You oversee both Customer Success and Professional Services teams. Could you go into a little more detail about each department, what they’re responsible for, and how they work together to support the customer?
Many years ago I not only held a consultancy role but I also started a small consulting business. The one thing I noticed early on was how important it was to gain trust and show that the guidance I was providing was in the best interest of making my clients better. From that early experience, I came up with a model that I have run a couple of times.
With a SaaS offering, you tend to hear from clients on requests that aren’t necessarily just about your software offering. This could come in the form of guidance and best-practices utilizing multiple vendors within your clients’ stack. I look at this as an opportunity to engage outside of the traditional guardrails of our product’s features and functionality. It is one thing to be seen as an expert on your own tool, but I believe the ability to show where your offering plays alongside a multi-vendor, say a larger Marketing and Sales initiative, leads to longer and deeper engagements.
When you have the opportunity to take on an engagement like this, you often need to balance your resources and the goals of your team. Here I am a true believer in the Professional Services model. You can sell your team's time to essentially act as a SME in your given space, versus just speaking about your own product offering. At the end of the day, the guiding principle here is to help customers optimize their product investment, build stickiness, and potentially drive additional upsell business down the line.
The early challenge with this model is that you need to separate responsibilities and balance the hiring and onboarding of resources. You ultimately need different skill sets if you are going to try and staff this model for long term stability.
In my organization today I have three distinct roles that are used on the relationship side of the house.
The CSM is responsible for the overall management of the client. They are responsible for the renewal, the overall adoption and success of the client.
The Technical Account Manager, has a deep understanding of the client and the product, but views the relationship through a technical lens. They are also well up to speed with other offerings that they might encounter in the Enterprise Stack.
The third role is the Project Manager/Analyst, who manages the non-SaaS subscription projects and initiatives that arise in complex enterprise engagements.
On larger engagements all three roles are active on a single customer account, and we leverage our collaboration suite to make sure we’re promoting a “one-team” approach to our customers.
Can you share more about the makeup of your Customer Success and Professional Services teams? What profiles and/or specific traits do you seek out for each?
I don’t look for specific traits per say, I look for talented people who are interested in making a difference, taking on a challenge, and can connect with folks who have different missions and backgrounds. CS has this rosy and exciting view from the outside at times. You often see people attracted to the profession without understanding how challenging of a role it can be. Having to deliver bad news, dealing with escalations, right sizing contracts, or transitioning accounts is stressful. Customer Success has a lot of playbooks, guides, methodologies, that are only as good as reality. Like building a sports team, you want to look for individuals who aren’t afraid to jump and get things done.
I am building our PS team to be more akin to a Technical Account Manager group. They possess the skills to work with many different technologies and data sets you would find in a client's enterprise structure. They are able to step out of the single vendor mindset and look at an opportunity or challenge holistically and offer insight and solutions across multiple vendors. They also possess the business background to handle a wider audience.
What is the most impactful program you’ve rolled out across Customer Success and/or Professional Services?
I truly believe that rolling out a Customer Council, which serves as a Voice-of-the-customer series of events, has had the greatest impact on our business. It's no surprise that 2020 was a challenging year. Being able to sit face to face with our portfolio and learn directly their hopes, fears, and challenges, allowed our team to adjust and advocate for our customers in challenging times. This empathy has led to fluid discussions resulting in great feedback on usage, product direction, and future opportunities. Your clients’ business is always evolving, you shouldn’t expect that they are going to look at you the same way as they do.
How is compensation structured for Customer Success and Professional Services? What metrics are you driving toward, and which behaviors are you trying to incentivize in support of those?
I am a firm believer that one compensation model should not be the one and only model for the life of a CSM in an organization. The model I am working with now is geared for a smaller organization that is primed for rapid growth. I break down compensation by half years. This allows us to incentivize on High Valued Activities/Goals as well as Logo Retention and Net ARR.
The overall goal for 2021 is to drive increased adoption and to introduce our newest product line to our base. So for H1 2021, our CSMs are compensated on Logo Retention, Net ARR, and a series of activities that positively impacts the organic introduction of this new product line.
I want to drive and support behaviors that make clients see CS/Services as an advocate, a trusted advisor, someone who really cares about where they are going to be in 6,9,12,18 months, not just another vendor who shows up and asks ‘what can I do for you next.’ We are utilizing many of the standard plays and metrics to support this: Satisfaction Scoring and Health Scoring, which we get from our own product. As our company grows, I am also working on a Customer Retention Cost metric.
More from Graham below 👇
If you were to start over and build a Customer Success and Professional Services practice from the ground up, what would you change? What would you keep the same?
I’ve been lucky enough to grow a number of teams over the years. With that comes the successes and the failures that you can learn from along the way. I have always felt that the mistakes (or learnings, as I like to think of them) are just as important as the actual successes.
I am a firm believer in attracting a diverse background to any team I am building or a part of. I am guilty of, at times, spending too much time in the recruiting and hiring process. I want to bring different points of view into the team, I want to bring in people who have gotten into and out of different situations. Bringing in diverse talent and perspectives is something I would absolutely keep the same and continue doing in future CS organizations.
On what I would change…. I’d rethink my desire to move too quickly at times. When trying to implement a CS Practice you sometimes want it to all come together overnight. That is not realistic. You can’t start journey mapping or running all sorts of plays if your audience (the customer/client) hasn’t traditionally interacted with your organization in that fashion. It took me a while to understand things won’t change immediately. You may need to hire, not for the role today, but for where the role will be in 6 months to a year in the future. I think there comes a level of transparency that needs to be shared in these situations with candidates. When you speak with folks who get excited about this evolution, that is an amazing feeling. You know you have found someone who wants to foster real change.
What is one book that has had a significant impact on your career?
Shortly after being part of an early company acquisition I was given the book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni. I think it is a must read for any manager who has found themselves in a tough position.