Grab the reins | Brittany Casey

[Brittany] (0:00 - 0:27)

A lot of people that are in customer success roles want to continue working with customers, but in a more traditional customer success sense that maybe isn't so directly tied to revenue. You can support customers in a lot of different areas of the business. You are the captain of your own ship to say for your career.

If you can translate the value of how you're interacting with your customers, what kind of impact you're having to the business.

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:47)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here who has not said a single word yet. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:48 - 0:51)

What's up Jets and Yankees fans? What's up?

[Dillon] (0:55 - 1:16)

Shameful, shameful. And we have the number one.

It is very clownish. Anyway, that was Rob putting on a Jets hat and then he took it right back off because he looked very sad. Rob is also here.

Rob, can you say hi, please?

[Rob] (1:17 - 1:25)

How do you do fellow kids? You guys better know that meme because you don't know that.

[JP] (1:25 - 1:26)

And yet I don't know.

[Dillon] (1:27 - 1:40)

You may be the youngest one on this call, Rob. Oh, that's cute. And we have Brittany with us.

Brittany, can you say hi, please?

[Brittany] (1:41 - 1:53)

Hi guys. I'm Brittany Casey, director of customer engagement at DocuSign. Also that customer success gal, if you know me that way.

Yes.

[Dillon] (1:54 - 1:56)

What is it? The at sign that customer success.

[Brittany] (1:57 - 1:59)

Brittany, because yeah.

[Dillon] (2:01 - 2:16)

Old and dear friend, Brittany. Thank you so much for being here. I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Brittany, you already said your title, but do you want to tell, do you want to explain a little bit more about what that means? The director of customer engagement.

Is that what you said?

[Brittany] (2:16 - 3:00)

Customer engagement. Yes. So I've been in customer success for about 10 years.

I've been at DocuSign for four and a half at this point, about a half a year ago. I moved over from the customer success organization at DocuSign to the growth organization to build out our global advisory councils program. So our customer engagement programs, how we come to customers, how we listen to customers and how we connect with them.

So I've got a huge passion for connecting customers to each other and creating really meaningful executive relationships with our enterprise and key customers and translated my skills. And I'm trying my hand at the growth and marketing side of things.

[Dillon] (3:01 - 3:05)

Right on. It all starts to bleed together. I feel like you'll be just fine.

[Brittany] (3:06 - 3:07)

Thank you, Dillon. I appreciate that.

[Dillon] (3:08 - 3:45)

Look, we would be remiss if we don't address the skeleton in the room. And for anybody who's not watching the video, that is because Brittany is surrounded by her most treasured possessions, all of her Halloween decor. We are recording this on Halloween day.

There's hues of orange all through Brittany's video. It's unfortunate, Brittany, because we were going to have you on last week in time to publish for Halloween. And you've got some stuff going on over there at your house, don't you?

[Brittany] (3:46 - 4:09)

It's a little busy always in October, but I do have a three and a five-year-old and we're just dealing with the typical daycare sicknesses and just trying to navigate that and try to still get them out and trick or treat because they're getting to a point where they love the holiday even more than myself or my husband trying to strike a healthy balance there. Yeah, dealing with life.

[Dillon] (4:10 - 4:36)

Well, wishing rapid recovery to the little ones just in time to get sick again. I know that very well. Anyway, Brittany, you know what we do here.

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? And you've got a unique position here on the growth and marketing side, but still obviously dealing with customers all day, every day. So I would love to hear what is on your mind.

[Brittany] (4:37 - 6:05)

So you said it best, it bleeds together a lot. And what I'm hearing from a lot of people that are in customer success roles that are changing is that they want to continue working with customers, but in a more traditional customer success sense that maybe isn't so directly tied to revenue because that seems to be the direction that a lot of customer success roles are going. For myself, I have a sales background.

Before that, I worked in legal tech sales for a long time before switching to the customer success side. And what you find in all these different areas of the business is that these skills are transferable. And you can support customers in a lot of different areas of the business.

I found a place where I can have a greater impact by bringing our customers together for these advisory councils. But you can get really creative with that too. You are the captain of your own ship, to say, for your career.

And you can really truly design the career you want to if you can translate the value of how you're interacting with your customers, what kind of impact you're having to the business. And that's what I'm doing right now is translating the years and years of customer success, customer facing experience I have into a new and different role so that we can take a new perspective on how we come to customers with these customer engagement programs.

[Dillon] (6:05 - 6:14)

I have already talked enough. So I want to hand it immediately to JP to either ask questions, provide his opinion. JP, why don't you just take it away?

[JP] (6:14 - 7:17)

I got a question. Oh, I got a question. I got a question.

I thought you were going to actually ask this earlier when you said the skeleton. But I guess I'm going to come to the elephant that's in the room. You mentioned this direction that customer success is going in with being tied to revenue.

What can you say about how much this direction of customer success might have prompted your switch? I'm curious about that because I've definitely spoken to people and it seems like some folks when they've been in customer success for a while switch. So my mind is like you can be in something for a while and be like, okay, I'm going to try something new.

But I also wonder about this element of how much of it is, well, maybe customer success has changed. So I'm just interested in your, because you're still that customer success gal, right? You're not that customer engagement gal.

So I'm wondering about what are your feelings about that direction and how much of your shift was prompted by that direction?

[Brittany] (7:18 - 9:50)

Sure. So we did have some changes happening about just like a lot of other people where CSMs were going to own a lot more of the revenue responsibility, the upsell, the renewal piece. And I think that's really logical personally because I feel like if you are CSMing correctly, then you are really influencing how your customers renew, what types of capabilities they're after.

And that prescriptive approach is really prescriptive selling, whether we want to admit it or not. For me personally, it wasn't necessarily that we were going in this direction because I do agree with the direction. I think CSM should get compensated for the work they do to keep the customers loyal to an organization.

For me, I had started building some programs outside of my immediate customer book already as an individual contributing CSM, one of which was called Customer Connections because I really wanted to utilize our customers more and that I wanted to connect them to each other because we learn best together. And I saw an opportunity to do that. That program opened me up to a lot of people in the growth organization, a lot of great leaders.

And someone I've been working with as a customer success mentor for a while now said to me very early on that if you want to be a CCO, if you want to be a chief customer officer and you want to own the customer engagement or the customer relationship piece for a company, you need to understand the other areas of the business. It is hard to come up purely in customer success. Get to that level.

Yeah, get a seat at the table and be able to interact in the most effective way possible. I had a sales background. Customer success came next after that.

I've done a little bit of sales engineering, but truly was not quite for me. And this seemed like an opportunity to really start to understand the other areas of the business and our customers in a different way. Not to mention, it was a way for me to make a bigger impact outside of my immediate book of business.

And it felt like my pet project, this Customer Connections program, was suddenly my actual job, which was really exciting. And so I took it. I took the opportunity.

It definitely was not because we were getting more revenue responsibility. Much more around trying to forge my own career path and trying to make a bigger impact at the organization.

[Dillon] (9:52 - 10:01)

Rob, I want you to jump in here. There was a lot in there. It was all great.

I wonder if you're going to press on the thing I think you're going to press on, Rob. So go ahead.

[Rob] (10:02 - 10:44)

I'm curious. You should write it down and we'll see. That last part of what you said, Brittany, was really cool that your pet project became your full-time job.

To be honest, that's actually what customer success was for me, too, in my past, where I was hired to do just operations for the business. Customer success just happened to be the thing that we needed to focus on most. And I even ended up moving cross-country for this pet project, obviously over the course of years.

But listening to you, it's empowering in a way, and it's really driving my curiosity. I've been thinking, JP and Dillon know that I've been thinking a lot about this BS framework I made up and I've been peddling.

[JP] (10:44 - 10:46)

No, this is the best framework.

[Rob] (10:46 - 11:58)

This is your best work. The five personas? Yes.

So yeah, these five personas is that I've been noticing customer success has developed in different ways at different organizations. There's administrative customer success. There's support-focused customer success.

There's purely health-focused customer success. There's purely commercial customer success. And then there's an amorphous dispatch function that happens as well.

And without going into too much detail about what those are, what I realized is that I didn't take that down to the level of the individual. I've been thinking about it at the company level, and I didn't think about, well, what about at the individual level? To what extent do we have discretion to pick our path?

And to say, for anybody listening to this, we might have gotten the question, where do you want to be in five years? Could you pick one of those identities and say, you know what? I am a support-focused CSM today, and I want to be in five years a commercial-focused CSM or something like that.

So it's really got me thinking not just about the different levels, organizational versus individual, but also how that can morph over time. I think a lot of us underestimate, some of us overestimate too, the amount to which we have discretion over that direction. But yeah, it's got my mind thinking in a bunch of different directions.

Dillon, what'd you have?

[Dillon] (12:00 - 12:04)

It is career track. Can you see that?

[JP] (12:05 - 12:08)

Maybe it's backwards. That was, you got it. You got it.

That's great.

[Rob] (12:09 - 12:14)

There you go. I do think, I do think it's fascinating. You could have put customer success on there.

Yeah, exactly.

[Dillon] (12:14 - 12:19)

I knew he was going to say it. Is that the magic word? Framework.

Framework.

[Rob] (12:19 - 12:20)

I knew he was going to say it.

[Dillon] (12:21 - 13:54)

No, I do think, I think it's interesting. And look, it's a topic we all talk about a ton, particularly if you're on social media, particularly on LinkedIn, is this idea of taking control of your future and you need to be the one driving forward and yada, yada, yada. I don't know that that is always possible, right?

I think we can very quickly veer into the world of influencer BS by saying like, you hold the power. In a lot of cases, you don't. And everybody knows, I think that from a company standpoint, like, yeah.

In the same way, the job search is a lot of times rigged against you. You don't always hold all the keys to your career growth. I think it's important to always be thinking about it.

And I love that you took what could have been an offhanded comment and said, no, I believe in that too. I've got to become more well-rounded. You think about how siloed customer success can get.

I could just as easily interpret that person's comment as, you got to get out of the echo chamber, like you can't live in the echo chamber. If you want to be a multidisciplinary leader, you want to lead multiple groups of people. So I love this.

It was not at all what I was expecting from you, Brittany. I just assumed we would talk about Halloween carving pumpkins. No, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. But we are out of time. Thank you so much, Brittany.

Always love talking to you. Would love for you to come back in the future. Tell us how your kids are doing, how the career is going.

But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

[Brittany] (13:55 - 14:03)

Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure, guys. And you all smell like success and cinnamon, right, Jean-Pierre?

[Voiceover] (14:11 - 14:42)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

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