A crash course on founder-led customer success — lessons from Catalyst & InVision

 My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

 So I thought one place we could kind of get going, might be talking about customer success in the early days. progressively talking, about scaling customer success over time as an organization starts to mature. and so I'm curious, what do you think, um, that early function or work should look like 

And I think, you know, what's been written about and shared a lot is how to think about founder led sales

 the importance of doing that well in the first year, but there's been a lot less written about founder led customer success. How to think about that work in the early days, and maybe how to think about when to hire the first person in that function.

And so I'm curious, kind of in that vein, what, what have you kind of figured out.

 Yeah, I think, um, you know, really if a, a CEO and founder, co-founder start with the mentality of CS at the center of your organization. I think investing in that early is critically important because you know, CS really can be the nucleus and the central communications center for the broader business, in terms of helping sales, understand how to effectively set expectations with customers and how they can be successful using the product to help product and engineering, understand, you know, what is it about the product that's built today, that's driving value or where there's additional value to be met.

And also from the go to market engine, uh, when you think of like marketing and demand gen efforts and, and how to make sure that, you know, early and often we're bringing in, uh, a right kind of profile of. that meets the, the criteria of what the product can offer and can make them successful. Uh, those early customers are always the, the gamblers, the ones that are willing to, to take a leap of faith on some new technology, but they can also be your most powerful advocates and really kind of amplify that founder led sale that you were talking about as well.

 So maybe before a given founder thinks about hiring their first CS person, what are the rituals or activities a founder and CEO should be doing? You know, when they have the first call it five customers using their product in their early days.

 Yeah, I think it's staying incredibly close to those customers, right? Having those routine engagements, those conversations, uh, with the customer, um, making sure that they're getting full value from the product. I think, you know, particularly in those early days, you're having those routine calls on the calendar, making sure that they're really understanding the full value of the product, adopting it, measuring that adoption and articulating that value.

Those early customers are also integral in helping to keep that pulse. Um, and I think it it's common and, and appropriate to kind of overinvest in those customers, um, because they are generally taking a leap of faith with the intention of being heavily influential in your business specifically, and they can really help shape, uh, and, and help you scope.

What kind of evolution you ultimately see in customer success? So I think it, it is truly those engagements of. probably biweekly check-ins bare minimum at that point in time, um, to understand why they bought, what is it that they're, you know, using the product for today? How are they communicating that value back to their business?

Um, and what is it about, uh, the product that isn't, or isn't there today that would continue to make them a stickier customer, if that was, uh, evolved and introduced

 And so if, if we kind of. Zoom in on, let's call it a biweekly check in. You sort of mentioned some of the things you're getting at. How, how do you run that well, or, or how do you keep it useful for you and interesting to the early customers such that you're not just going through the motions every other week 

 Yeah. So what I always love, like one of my favorite questions when I was a CSM, is I tell, tell my customers, I wanna be the best CSM that you've ever worked with. Um, and in order for me to achieve that level of recognition, what, what is it of value that I can bring to each and every engagement, that would make our, our conversations high value and something you would want to, to routinely have.

And there was a very, very consistent theme that I got from every single customer. And that was bring to the table. Something that I don't know that you know and that could be knowledge of our product that could be use cases on how it could be applied. Often. It was me doing analysis of how they were adopting the product and coming with insights of like, Hey, my understanding of your business goals of why you purchased us was ABC , uh, based on how I've analyzed, how you're using our product, you are achieving it for a and B, but you're missing on C here's what you can be doing in the product 

And, um, that would really help kind of drive the strategic value of the conversation. It would allow customers to feel like in every engagement that they were having with me, they were going to get something that they didn't otherwise have. Um, and that to me also just opened up a really great,

Bidirectional communication with the customer. When I set the tone and expectation of like my only goal is their success and wanting to be, uh, someone that they, you know, truly got extensive value from in each and every one of their engagements. So I often leaned into the customer to help dictate to me if I was gonna, you know, invest the calories to add value to them.

What is it from their perspective that would be of highest value. And that really helped me streamline my, my focus and attention as well.

 Do do you find it's easy to get on the calendar and have these syncs, or do you look for a subset of customers that, that are willing to kind of engage more deeply in those first few months? Or do you have any sort of lessons learned about actually trying to engage and get high quality feedback? And one of the reasons that I asked that I was talking to one of our CEOs, who's kind of six months in and building, you know, call it a developer tool.

And they found that just like really engaging in getting high quality feedback from some of the people that are tinkering with their product in the early days is actually not that easy. Particularly with when you're selling to developers who often don't like getting together and, and

 Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I honestly believe just based on my experience. I mean, I've sold to customer success, professionals, marketers, um, you know, designers, engineers, like in terms of the, the companies I've been a part of that we've sold to. And there is definitely a persona spectrum of the eagerness.

I mean, it's so fortunate, a catalyst, you know, selling to, to CS professionals and they being peers to myself in the market, like very often and eager to get on calls, give feedback because that's their day to day job. Right. They understand how critically important it is to gather that feedback and how influential that can be and helping us at catalyst evolve our processes to add even more value to them.

So, uh, I do, I'm not surprised when you say that, you know, you've worked with someone in the developer space and there is a resistance to that. Um, but I do believe it is asking the right question. And I remember, uh, it was early days in my career working for a company called influ and we were an advocate marketing platform and we had customers that sold to engineers.

Um, we had folks that sold to marketers and, and sales. And what we realized is like, if you asked engineers, what was a value to them? Oftentimes there was like, Hey, don't try and like gamify something for me, just like, give me the straight up facts and give me access to, you know, the product roadmap once a quarter where I have influence in shaping kind of that discussion and, and having an influence in the direction that you go in.

And that was the, the cadence that they wanted. That was the high value activity that they wanted to partake in. So I do think they're striking the right balance of knowing your audience, understanding what is, and is not a value to them. What's the channel and forum and the cadence by which they find value in those engagements.

Oftentimes in CS, like just even at catalyst, right? We have. Um, customers who are like we wanna meet, you know, every week. And in reality, not much can be accomplished in a week's time from call to call to call. So it's like, it's actually better that we have more distance between the calls, but make sure that each call is a high impact high value call.

So that between our, you know, three weeks of, of connecting on an actual call together progress is made, but it's the highest impact progress that can be achieved.

 Are there other questions that you've leaned on over the years, or just find that asking in those catch ups tend to be just particularly illuminating.

 for me it's often, um, Look at the end of the day, straight up success for me is that you renew, uh, one year from now, uh, when your contract's up for renewal, what needs to be true in order for us to be in a position for you two with no hesitation, say you would absolutely renew and you know, what would get in our way of, you know, potentially hindering your positivity and enthusiasm for that renewal and how we can get ahead of it.

 Uh, one of my go-to, uh, questions, as well as the CSM was like at any given time asking the customer, if your renewal was tomorrow, would your renew. And it was a super direct question. Um, but I loved it because I often got a very direct answer and it was, yes. And at which point I would follow up and ask the customer to walk me through why?

Like, what did they justify in their mind to have the confidence to say that they would renew? And if they were like, no, that was equally as important because I said, you know, Help me understand what needs to be true for you to say, yes, I'd absolutely renew. And oftentimes, uh, at that point I could assess like, Hey, are there reasons that they are saying they were not renewed today within our control and reasonable for us to be able to change?

Or is it like truly inevitable that they, they may not be a good fit customer? And it might actually just be an unfortunate situation where the, the best path forward is two part ways ultimately when their renewal transpires, but we obviously take that data and that learning to go. What was it about this customer that ultimately proved to not be successful in their ability to sustain and grow with us as a business?

 So that's a really interesting point. How do you think about specifically in the very early days? If, if you have a product problem or a customer problem?

 mm that's a tricky one. Um, and I think this is where, one of the early kind of strategies you can deploy is, is kind of data and the systems and the tracking of this information. Um, and I'll give you an example. So early days when I joined at catalyst, you know, we hadn't. Churn customers because a a year had not passed basically in terms of the, the annual contracts that we had put in place with our early day customers.

But over time, we started to see trends of customers who were renewing customers, who were expanding their investments and customers who were ultimately churning. And we would ask the customers of those who, you know, renewed, like why did they renew? And we would have, uh, themes kind of set out and then when it came to churn the churn reasons and why a customer chose to part ways from, from us was equally as important. So, you know, product wasn't as expected based on what they were sold or, um, that ultimately they, you know, were unable to continue to justify the investment because of their team size, et cetera, et cetera.

So, um, that is how through tracking of these different examples. We were able to identify what the common themes were is it a, um, product situation or is it go, go to market strategy in terms of marketing and sales and O honestly it's been a combination. The two, in terms of my, my learnings across different companies over my career, uh, which is as time goes on And then most partly what are the characteristics and commonalities of customers who were renewing and growing and quickly that shapes kind of, um, a set of characteristics. Identify as an ideal customer profile. So at catalyst, our sales, team's been absolutely amazing in hearing, you know, here are the characteristics of our ideal customer profile, us building a demand gen engine and an SDR motion align to that.

Um, but also knowing that like, Hey, when you're moving up market as an example, and you're continuing to grow and expand your customer base and, and try to tap into a broader total addressable market, you're gonna go through that inevitable stage where, um, you're gonna push the envelope. Right. Is your product ready to go after, uh, this profile of customer?

Yes or no? So we also have. As part of that kind of ideal customer profile characteristics, what we call the gray zone, which is, Hey, this customer may not check all of the boxes of what we know to be the characteristics of a good fit ideal customer profile today. But based on our roadmap, based on their goals, based on the direction we're mutually headed, we feel strongly that they will be a good fit customer.

Um, and then the third kind of level of that is bad fit, which is like, their requirements are not going in the direction of where we're fundamentally taking our roadmap and, or they are possessing some of the characteristics that are commonalities of past churn customers.

And we have a high level of confidence that no matter how much we would invest in them, on the customer success side, they would ultimately not be, uh, a customer that would retain beyond one year.

What have you learned about kind of the training and education piece of very, very early stage customer success? you sort of briefly mentioned this, but maybe we could kind of break apart. When you think about you're a 10 person company, you have five early customers, like how you think about the jobs to be done of CSM. And I'm curious, like when, when you think about getting people deeper in the product or training them or meeting with them and educating them in some. Are there some unlocks you've had or advice you would give to founders who are doing, this work for the first time.

 Yeah, I think that having the CSM role be heavily focused on product education and adoption early is definitely where you want to invest your time and energy. Um, because ultimately that that's where the customer's going to get value from that. Uh, and I think that you. A really great model to start applying early with your customers is the train, the trainer model, which is to, to train once a resource that you're partnering with on the customer side to test your ability to enable them to then train at scale their organization on how to leverage your product.

Um, also getting the foundation early. This is something that catalyst did, and I think it paid off incredibly well for us in our ability to, to provide immediate value to those early day customers, but also help us scale because that can happen very quickly over time, which is building out a technical knowledge base, um, and being able to have those self-serve resources for customers to be able to troubleshoot themselves independently.

If they have questions about the product, I think as you mature kind of the step three is the best practices side, and that's where you're bringing recommendations and a point of view. And I would say that, you know, sometimes there's this. Uh, tricky position in the market that I've seen across different tools, which is like, this is our way or the highway.

You do it, you do it this way or this way only. And then there's the other tools that go on the complete other end of the spectrum, which are a little bit like, um, wild west. And you can, you can do whatever you choose to do with it. And there's no like, kind of. Prescriptive way of how to leverage the product.

I think the middle ground is the best. Ideally you have a product that's robust and flexible, but from a customer success standpoint, this is where I think you can ultimately start owning the narrative of what the best practice and recommendation is to get highest value from the platform.

 On that note. Is there anything that you've learned about building trust in the early days with those early customers that we haven't touched on? I, I thought sort of one of the more interesting things that. was surfaced when I was talking to a CEO recently is one of the things that, that he learned about building trust is this, um, sort of counterintuitive thing that happens when something breaks and a customer reaches out to you.

 And one often thinks that something breaking or not working destroys trust. But actually if you respond in 30 minutes and say, engineer X, fix this problem at chip to production, just confirming it, worked that in, in a bizarre way, that the way in which you respond and the speed at which you respond, oftentimes increases trust in the relationship is opposed to decreases trust in the relationship.

But I'm curious if you think about that as kind of a, an important area and there's specific things that you do given what you've learned about building trust.

 First of all, I always say to customers like our job, our priority is to make you a successful customer success for us is that you're a raving advocate. 

 And I think that that's something, you know, from a, a CEO's perspective and that, you know, CS team, like what is the experience you want your customers to be able to describe when interacting and engaging with you? And I think to your point of trust that that is a hundred percent. An example of it, I was talking to Abe who, uh, who leads customer success at cockroach the other day.

And he's like, true partnerships are tested in the toughest of times when the platform goes down, when there's a bug, when there's a compelling event and someone needs something and it's time sensitive, do you have a partner there to support you? That's there to jump on a call to listen to the situation, to immediately take action and do everything within their control to be able to address it.

Um, I think that a hundred percent goes a long way. I think also just giving an open forum of, if we don't know something's broken, we can't fix it. So we are trusting in you to raise any concerns. one of the models that we use in customer success at catalyst, it's actually a, a feedback framework that I got during my envision days.

And it's called diamonds and spades. And basically it's a feedback model moving away from just kind of the generic that was great, or that could have been better. It's giving feedback with a level of specificity. And so we include this in our engagements with customers when we are doing, um, our executive business reviews or even our monthly check-ins, which is like, Hey, just wanted to take a quick pulse on how you're feeling about our relationship and our partnership.

Right now, we use a feedback model called diamonds and spades with specificity. What do you feel is the highest value engagements that you're getting from catalyst today that we should continue to double down on? Because that's feeling good. It's delivering the value that you're after it's adding.

Significant strength to our partnership and spades, like if we could change anything or do something differently, what would that be in order for us to drive even further value for our relationship? And just honestly having that as part of the DNA and the discipline of the routine engagements you have with your customers is heavily, heavily influential, um, in kind of building that trust and that ongoing kind of reciprocity of, of feedback.

 So looping back a minute ago, you talked about the idea of training the trainer and starting to build out a technical knowledge base, and then kind of eventually you might graduate into best practices. Any thoughts on where to start with any of those programs? Like, let's say you wanted to start building out a technical knowledge base, how to begin that because a lot of those things I think can seem a bit overwhelming, uh, particularly when you're a 10 person team.

 Yeah, definitely. So I think it goes back to start with your early day customers, right? Um, there's gonna be a, a handful of customers or two that have come in with, with nothing. And I think it's starting with them. What didn't you have that if you had it, you would, you would've gotten faster time to value, been more, self-sufficient feeling more confident about the product.

 The other piece is on a more reactionary standpoint, looking at the incoming themes associated with customer inquiries, uh, to, to the customer success team support, or even to the founder, like what are those routine questions that are being asked over and over and over again?

having a, a resource that is a, a one, one to many that, uh, will, achieve, uh, mass scale in your ability to distribute that and answer the questions that the, the customers need support on.

 Continuing to build on sort of this, this sort of theme of CS in the early days. How do you think about connecting those insights and conversations that are happening between, you know, a CSM, maybe your first customer success person and the product team and your product roadmap?

 Yeah, really important, important system to have in place. Uh, I think that again, enabling your customer success team to lean into bringing product to the customer, I think is critically important. a system to invest in early is that product, um, feature request from customers, which is I'm a CSM, maybe the, maybe the only CSM and I'm hearing, you know, these are what customers are after.

Um, And, and making sure that there is a system that funnels that information through to product to help inform the roadmap. Um, I think like one of the. Strategies I've seen here, even in like the earliest of days is partnering with product on what information they need in order to take a feature request from a customer and be able to make it actionable.

We actually a catalyst partnered with our product team to scope what a template would look like. Uh, a note template to say like, okay, CSM you're on the front lines. And a customer says, I want this feature. Here are the three discovery questions that we need you to conduct in that conversation in order to drive that feature, request into our system and allow it for it to be actionable and not have substantial back and forth with the customer.

Uh, and so many cooks in the kitchen. So a very scalable approach and, and those questions. One, like, how does it tie to your business goals relative to your business goals? Is this a critical feature as in like you cannot get value from our product to your desired extent without it? Or is it, Hey, it's not a complete blocker, but this would save me a lot of time and it would be a nice to have as an example.

Um, and then the, the third piece was, um, I think it was a question around, If you did not have this feature and functionality, would it, um, ultimately impact your renewal over time? And that has helped us really kind of scope the prioritization and focus of the product road mapping and understanding what are the themes that are bubbling up across the customers And then you couple that with what sales is getting on the front lines, in terms of, you know, customers that they're winning and also customers that they're losing to, and making sure that, you know, if there's innovation in the product as well, it can also be used as an engine for driving net new revenue from the business 

 On that point, you, you often have high signal coming from sales and in this case, high signal coming from CS and existing customers, given your sort of vantage point in the field of CS kind of working with and collaborating with product. Do you have any thoughts on, as you're starting to get going in the early days, how to balance those inputs to drive the most effective, um, product roadmap.

And do you think it's more maybe art than science?

 Yeah, I, I would agree with that early days, a hundred percent more art than science. And I think it, the reason is because you just don't have data significance at that point. Right. And I think that that's something to get comfortable with of like, it takes time. To get data and track trends and themes associated with customers when you're so early days, Generally speaking, you sign customer onto a contract. It's gonna be a year before, you know, whether or not they're going to really put their money where their mouth is and say like, yeah, I'm gonna continue to renew and, and invest, uh, in your product or I'm not.

 I think that what I've found with the sales. CS motion as it relates to influencing product roadmap is there is oftentimes a lot of overlap. So you can kind of get two birds, one stone when you consolidate both of the collective lists and go like, Hey, you know, we're leaving money on the table in terms of attracting new revenue.

 And we are potentially putting existing customers at risk by not offering ABC features. So I think like that's the low hanging fruit in this situation is where you can achieve both. Um, I will, you know, say that I have seen it get, you know, more challenging when you start to see more disparity between those two.

Lists and themes, um, where all of a sudden CS is like, Hey, we need ABC features to retain these customers. And sales feels like they're on a, a different kind of planet with the list that they have. What I have found to be true as the underlying source of that is there is not enough alignment around what an ideal customer is.

So for example, maybe your initial kind of foundational base is selling into the SMB. And then all of a sudden the sales motion is in a world of, you know, the enterprise, but CS is like, Hey, we're trying to still drive like the, kind of the foundational value for these SMB customers that require this feature set.

So I would say that I've seen when that tension gets a little higher and there's more disparity between the two, that's more of a reflection of like, are we aligned as an organization to go after the right customer profile for this business? Or are we actually operating against two different motions 

 What about how do you communicate product roadmap with customers and what are the most effective ways to do that maybe in kind of year one or two, and as you're starting to really scale in years, maybe three or four.

 Yeah, I would say early days, um, that one to one interaction when you've got a, a handful of customers, I think there it's an appropriate forum to have, you know, your product team on a call with customers in partnership with CS going here's the roadmap. Um, here's why the roadmap, this is what our, our longer term vision is.

This is what's coming. And then, you know, the CSM helping to tie that back to the business goal specifically that the customer's trying to achieve. I think as you start to get into years three year four, um, there's a more scaled approach to it. So like a one to many webinar, uh, recording, for example, may be a great, um, forum.

We use a tool called ewe, which allows it to be kind of like an on demand webinar at any point in time for a customer, but they can also submit questions throughout the webinar. So let's say we recorded and posted the webinar today. two months from now a new customer joins catalyst. they could literally go watch this webinar and also submit questions about the product roadmap that then gets funneled into our team.

So I think there's really great scalable tools out there, um, that allow you to publish once, but have, you know, lasting kind of engagement and interactions with customers. Um, the other thing that I haven't seen done. As often, but is, is unique, is product roadmap by persona. Um, and I think this is when, you know, kind of more dabbling in the year three year four, but you know, really thinking about like, who is the persona that you're going after and what are the features and functionality you're building to them.

Um, for example, if we look at catalyst end users are the CSMs, so they are the day to day's managing customer accounts. Um, but then we also in our product solve for CS leaders. And you know, what a CS leader is after in terms of trends, insights, analytics, um, is a very different feature set than what a end user is, 

So I think there's a really great opportunity as you mature and have you, as you have more resources to really think intentionally about how you can reach those audiences from a product roadmap standpoint, um, based on the target persona, that's leveraging your product.

 I think it's interesting that the current company that you're helping to build is building a product that you are, the customer 'em are rough.

 And I, and I wonder, I, I, I assume,maybe you've had sort of, kind of flavors of this earlier in your career, but this is obviously like a one to one overlap.

And I was just curious, has it changed the way that you think about customer success in any way? When you're doing customer success for a product that, you know, as well as anyone in the world, which is very different, right? Most of the time somebody doing customer success is doing it for a product they wouldn't use on a daily basis.

 Yeah. Yep. I think it's definitely different. I think one of the, the absolute biggest luxury that I have is being CS at a CS company. There is such a centricity in our DNA of customers first. Um, and you know, I know a lot of companies say that, but then as the CS leader, you've got your like elbows up and you're trying to defend and prove your value and quote, unquote, like seat at the table, if you will.

 it's also a very interesting, um, you know, motion for our CS team, where there is that imposter syndrome of like holy smokes.

 You know, these customers that I'm supporting each and every day are my peers in the industry. Like the, they are doing the exact same thing as I am. And so there's definitely this like re uh, assurance of, um, confidence and also enablement for them to make sure that they feel really good about the best practices and lessons and learnings that they can bring to customers on their calls to help them elevate their CS organizations.

Um, I think the, uh, you know, the, the last piece we kind of touched on was just like the power of. Placing customers at the center. What I, what I underestimated, uh, was just how much that meant, uh, of me being like the communication center for the business. Right. And the emphasis and the importance on the data that I bring to the leadership team each and every Wednesday, when we have our leadership team meeting So I think that, um, it's been an adjustment to me, like leading CS at a CS company where there's a lot more, um, pressure on the data, a lot more, um, pressure on me to be prescriptive and direct with my peers and partners at the leadership level on how their, you know, departments can drive the most value for, for catalyst.

Uh, and I think, you know, for all CEOs, there's always this. Kind of who owns the NR number. And, uh, you know, I will continue to fall back on, like, this is a company number. Uh, it is not a CS number to be owned. It is not a sales number to be owned. It is a collective organizational number to be owned. And to me, net revenue retention and maximizing that is a reflection of our ability to market and sell good fit customers, to be able to build a product that has met the needs of those good fit customers and continues to evolve aligned with their, their needs and for a CS team who can amplify both the right expectation setting on the go to market engine and the, the right kind of product, um, in, in the hands of our customers to make sure that they're getting truly maximum value from what the offering has to provide and are able to articulate that value to those customers.

 I want to kind of follow up on that idea you shared about NR, but, but before that, um, what, what does it look like to be truly customer first 

Are there any other rituals that you think have, have an outsized impact on kind of moving the company in this customer first orientation?

 yes, there is a slack channel that we have at catalyst called bring CS to the center and anyone and everyone across the company is encouraged to put information, insights, learnings in that. Um, and I would say that that is kind of like that nucleus command center for customer wins, customer lessons, learnings.

Um, and I think that just having a steady drum beat in. Channel is incredibly important. Uh, Danny who oversees, uh, our community, a catalyst, he's done an amazing job at funneling G2 crowd reviews, as an example into that channel. And so we are having a steady drumbeat of, of new reviews coming in from customers where we get to see, Hey, what do they love most about catalyst?

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Sydney Strader shares tips from Catalyst & InVision on founder-led customer success, from structuring customer conversations to making the first hire.

A crash course on founder-led customer success

Sydney Strader shares tips from Catalyst & InVision on founder-led customer success, from structuring customer conversations to making a first hire.