It's all about perspective | Carolyn Glassberg | The Daily Standup Ep. 69

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I love rolls. Cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, all kinds of rolls. So when I first heard that, I was like, mm, mm, that sounds really good.

Love rolls. But of course, I think my favorite role so far is the CSM role, right? All right, you guys ready? What's up, lifers? And welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new perspectives about customer success every single day. I've got my man, JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? Hello. I've got my man, Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up? And we've got Carolyn here.

Carolyn, do you want to say hi? Hello. Hello. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Carolyn, thank you so much for being here. Would you introduce yourself, please? Sure.

Thank you so much for having me. My name is Carolyn Glassberg. I'm a customer success director at Numerator, which is a data and technology company in the market research space.

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And for my career, I've always worked in the market research space, but first as an account director and at another organization, and now at Numerator as a customer success director. Very cool. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much for being here, Carolyn. You know what we do here, because you are our sole daily listener, as we learned before we hit the record button. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. We ask one single question- For all y'all that listen to us, thank you. Yes, yes, absolutely.

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I'm sure there are other people, we appreciate you too. Thank you, JP, for keeping me on my toes and making sure everybody knows we love them. Carolyn, we ask every guest one single question.

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What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Why don't you tell us what that is? Sure. What's been on my mind lately is how the role of a customer success manager or director really changes based on who you report into. And this came to my attention when my organization went through a little bit of a structural change.

And what resulted was three separate groups of customer success folks all have evolved into different sort of mandates. So there's one team that I'm a part of that focuses on our strategic clients. And so we are focused really on relationships and growing that partnership.

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Then there's another group that reports into product essentially and focuses on the product. And so they focus more as kind of analysts and support for that product. And then there's another group that's kind of a hybrid of the two.

So we've all kind of evolved and separated in terms of what our real structure is, what our day-to-day is like, what our annual goals are. So that's been on my mind. Can I ask, do you get compensated differently? Do you know? Well, that has been a subject of conversation.

Our MBOs for the year differ in terms of timing and percent of payout based on those goals. And the goals are different between the teams too. So it's a topic of conversation.

Is it a topic of dissent? Not with me, but maybe with others. Well, that's just the first place my head goes is like, well, that's really hard, man. If you're all supposed to be kind of like doing the same thing, even if at the end of the day, you're moving numbers in different directions or the number you're responsible for is slightly different.

Well, if I used to report to the sales guy or I was compensated on additional expansion NRR overall maybe, and now it's like pure satisfaction, I'd probably be not in love with that change. If I were somebody who was excelling in that other structure, it could also go in the opposite direction. If I wasn't excelling and I wanted a little bit of air cover, then maybe satisfaction is easier for me.

I don't know. That's the first place my head is going. And there's no real answer to that.

But JP, you made a pleased sound and Carolyn brought up this topic. I'd love to hear kind of like what you were thinking when she brought that up. And is this something you've experienced? Yeah.

First of all, I love rolls, cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, all kinds of rolls. So when I first heard that, I was like, mm, mm, that sound. Rolls, yum.

I love rolls. But of course, I think my favorite roll so far is the CSM roll. And so it's been really interesting to think about, all right, which bakery are we shifting to? Are we going to Arbonne Pain, the large chain, or are we going to Toulouse Jour, the place down the street that's got that niche sort of thing? And when I thought about that, I was like, wow, how fascinating that you have these sort of different focuses where I've never heard of CS just focused on reporting to product.

Now, at my gut, I'm like, that sounds really cool. That sounds like a really good idea. If the organization can support that kind of niche specificity, why not? Because sometimes CS is like the Wild West show.

It's a rodeo. You're coming in, people have product requests, they have this. I find that when I'm diagnosing something with a customer, I'm going to so many different places where things could have maybe gone awry or where things could be better.

So having that focus, I think, is really cool. And I think it also makes it so you can hire people who, again, are more specialized and maybe can focus on it. So that's really the combination of those two things is why I made that sound.

And I think that's something that now I think about how many places do that? I'm used to, of course, we have different segments, different teams by segment. So you have an enterprise team or you have a commercial team, scale team. I'm very used to that.

But having somebody at the reporting and marketing, it's fascinating to think about as CS evolves. So that was just my few thoughts on it. Carolyn, really quick before Rob jumps in here, do they all have the same title? Is it CSM? Yeah.

CSM. CSD. Yeah.

I'm confounded by this because I'm a pretty black and white guy. It just seems like it would create so much agita. But Rob, on that point, that's an Italian word, right? I bet.

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You would throw it to me right after agita. I was going to say, I had to pull up a picture because JP, you know who loved roles? This kid right here. He loved his role.

This kid would go out his way to find a Cinnabon in any mall. That was Rob showing a slightly chubbier, younger Rob. I guess not slightly chubbier because you're a kid.

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I'd be at 13. It was dope. Anyway.

No, actually, this is a great topic, Carolyn. And it came up as recently as this morning. I was talking to somebody.

She's in a CS team. And that company that she's at just merged with their sister company. And they were like, why don't we just stuff the two CS teams together? Oh, and then let's take this director of sales.

And we're going to make these, this director of sales who's never done customer success, mind you. And we're going to put both CS teams under this director of sales. And so now everybody's coming at this with a different charter.

And I asked, I was like, is there any sort of documented charter for what the customer success team is doing? Because some of them are coming to their manager. Hey, look, our NPS scores are improving. And the response they're getting is I don't care about NPS.

I don't care about the usage metrics. Enjoy. That's fine.

I've seen this movie, by the way. Yeah, it's like those NPS scores, like they might as well be a macaroni picture that we're putting up on the fridge and just saying, okay, great work. Because I don't care about that.

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I'm extrapolating. This is not exactly what I was told. Not apparent.

Rob's not apparent. You can tell. That's the greatest piece of art you'll ever receive.

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But Rob does like macaroni. Now. Elbow macaroni.

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I'm not an amateur. Come on. I don't know if it matters.

Anyway, so my point is to say, I think what's really interesting, this came up at a conference a few months ago. If you ask people how many people have a documented charter for their CS org, it's very few. And while I actually have not formally documented that charter, I've seen the impact of it.

Because I think back to my first job that I called Customer Success, where it was me and one other person, we started the team. And we said, this has to be the revenue generating function of the team. We have never made a single dollar yet on this team.

But this will have to long term be the revenue generating engine of the team. And by the time I left, CS was making up two thirds of net new revenue, which was really cool. But it all started because of that conversation that we had.

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And obviously support from the founders, which was really helpful. But it would be hugely different if we didn't say that, if we didn't have that identity point early on. Go off, Rob.

Go off. Macaroni Rob, thank you for your contributions. Carolyn, I'm interested maybe after I've made some comments and JP and Rob too, I'm interested to know maybe like second level details about this and how your company is handling it.

Because I'm just, I'm stressed out even hearing about it. I just wonder how you guys have handled it, what the conversations have been like, how long has it been? What's the performance been like now that the shift has occurred? I just I want to know more. Well, I think that it is still evolving.

I mean, I think that's one of the great things about our specific role is that it's so dynamic and flexible. And I think each group and especially I have felt very empowered to make the role what I need it to be in order to serve the clients in the best way, because our clients are very different too between the three groups. So is it a source of tension? Again, not for me.

And I think that maybe it's a problem for organizations in general to be siloed like this, where we're all kind of talking to ourselves. And then when we come together, we realize that we're doing things differently. We have different goals, different focuses.

But until there's no team lead over all of customer success right now. How big is Numerator? As far as people? How many customers do you have? We have hundreds of customers. As far as customer success, folks, we're maybe about 20 in total.

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It sounds like you guys just went about the specialization process in a slightly different way. We actually recently had a conversation in the past few weeks with someone talking about creating a pure liaison between the CS department and the product department. And it sounds like just as an example, in that case, you guys actually just moved some CS folks to live under product or to report to product.

And so I think it probably accomplishes a lot of the same goals of creating a much stronger channel between customers and product, but just through a different method. So that's sort of what it sounds like to me. I'm trying to talk myself off the ledge of what this looks like there.

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I don't want to misspeak. They don't report into the product function. They report to the GM of this specific platform product.

We all ultimately ladder up to sales, but our individual managers, there's a couple of layers between who we report up to and that sales lead. So they're much more closely tied to one product. Sorry, JP.

What? I'm just saying like any good role, there's multiple layers, right? Like you need to... Yeah, right. Like a croissant. Is that where you're going with that? Do you think a croissant is a role? You know what my name is? JP? He's implying he likes French things.

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Oh, I got you. I got you. All right.

Well, that's our time, guys. Magnifique. Carolyn, this is super interesting to me.

I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of the day. I may reach out to you separately and just want to understand it better. I feel like my head is, or my brain is a bit of a pretzel right now.

That's not a role. I wish I could make this into another role analogy for you, JP. Deus ex agita.

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Carolyn, thank you so much for bringing this to us. Thank you. I'd love to have a customer success therapy session with you whenever.

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Well, look, I get therapy in a lot of ways. I could use all of the options. Presented to me.

So that's our time. Thank you so much. We'll definitely have you back for a second round, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

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Great. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure talking to all of you today.

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You too. Thanks, Carolyn. Thanks.