How customer success impacts GTM with Akash Singh

Grace: Hello everyone. Welcome to the CS School Podcast. This is the podcast where we speak with CS professionals from all over the world. We learn about the hottest topics in customer success and um, what we really try to do is strip them back to basics and discover how best to apply these strategies in practice. Um, and today on the podcast I'm delighted to be joined by Akash Singh. He's the head of customer success at uh, Asia Pacific and Japan at Software Ag. Thank you very much for joining me. Akash, how are you doing?

Akash Singh: Hey Grace. Um, well thanks, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Grace: Oh, thank you so much for joining me. You're um, you're down under and we were recording this at different times. So thank you so much for taking the time. I think it's late in the day for you, but thank you so much. I'm m really excited to have you on the podcast for a long time now. So thank goodness we've made it, made it work.

Akash Singh: I know, right? Thank you so much.

Grace: Yeah, so thank you, thank you for joining me. Because we're in this episode we're going to be talking about something that you, you've spoken about quite a lot in the past and I'm so excited to uh, to get you on the podcast talking about this. I think we were talking in the, in the introduction call about the importance of, you know, uh, well this is something we talk about a lot at uh, the Customer Success Collective, you know, is sort of cross functional alignment, um, and we talk about customer success and sales, we talk about customer success and support, we product marketing, but we haven't really spoken about before, uh, customer success and go to market strategy. And um, this is something that we're going to be delving into on this episode. So, um, but before we go into this, um, would you mind telling me a little bit about your customer success journey to date and um, what kind of um, your current role really entails at Software Ag?

Akash Singh: Yeah, sure thing. So look, I've been around in the tech industry for the last 20 years in some varied roles. I was a computer science grad and my early days were spent in Oracle Tech at Telstra, which you may know is a large telecom in Australia. Um, and about six years later I did my MBA and it kind of changed the focus from tech to more business development. So I moved to a direct sales role closing business selling enterprise software. But I wanted to challenge myself more so I went to us I was kind of good timing because it was 2014 and if you remember, customer success was in its early Stages and I worked for a startup and I learned by networking and attending meetups, trying new things and building that startup CSM function. And I absolutely loved it. I could see how it impacts the customer journey. Just thinking why customers buy, stay and use more. A few years later I came back to Australia. I worked for Adobe and Dynatrace, a software intelligence vendor. And you know, I built their CS practices and now I'm at Software Ag. I run their customer success team. As you know in Asia Pacific and Japan region. Now we have a very mature customer base here. So I lead a team of senior CSMs who all were technical architects and senior consultants in their past careers. So I'm responsible to build that culture and deliver those go to market goals from CS perspective, which means really delivering that desired experience and improving the return on investment for our customers, which in turn impacts our renewal rates and incremental business. Yeah, hope that gives you a little.

Grace: Brilliant. Thank you. Yeah. And um, yeah, thank you very much for explaining that. I think that's going to really set the scene for this episode. Um, so thanks very much for sharing. Very varied and I love hearing about how people go into customer success. I really love it. Um, so let's, let's kick off actually. Um, so I think in this episode I think it's going to be really helpful to sort of talk about the different, yeah, the different ways custom success again, the different ways custom success strategies impacts the sort of the gtm, uh, function. So let's, should we start off with, for the purpose of this episode, talking about driving adoption? Um, you know, there are, there are obviously incredible amount of hurdles when it comes to driving product adoption. You know, you've got, you've got compliance issues, you've got diverse product deployments. Um, but what kind of innovative strategies have, would you say have what have proven most effective for your organization? Because this is something I think a lot of people will be kind of thinking about, you know, if they're, you know. Um, and I think, yeah, I was wondering, would you be able to share a success story where you might have overcome those obstacles to exceed your GTM goals?

Akash Singh: Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, so look, driving adoption is what we do for a living in the CSM team. And let me give you an example from our own company's uh, case. So when it comes to driving go to market goals, we had serious challenges and you touched on a few, right? Like number one, we have a mature customer base. It's a complex environment. We have multiple products with different use cases and designs. We also have multiple deployment options. Um, solutions are deployed in the cloud and they are on premise as well. And due to compliance we have no visibility of how our customers are using our products. We needed to step back and think creatively. We built uh our go to market strategy with a customer success first approach and just at a high level. We focused on five things. Firstly, we use Gainsight to proactively evaluate data to drive adoption and it is our customer success management platform. So number one, to deal with compliance when usage data is invisible, we started to use capability adoption scores in Gainsight and with that we could still score customers health for each capability customer is licensed for and still drive adoption according to customers requirements even though no usage reported was reported to us automatically. Second, we looked at product usage data. It's great but it doesn't show us why the data is changing and where the customer is using the product. So we decided to use and look at telemetry data. We use our own web methods IO integration platform to push data transaction counts into Gainsight platform and this helped us to see where the customer is using it whether it's the dev tenant test or prod and truly measure adoption rather than just looking at usage spikes which can be misleading. Third, look, our risks were identified late and so we formalized the way to catch risks early. We worked out an internal process to track sponsors automatically in Gainsight and also we worked out a workflow so we could mitigate risks within the go to market pod as in team and this allowed us to escalate proactively, get the right help at the right time to resolve risks early. Number four, for our incremental business we needed to better qualify expansion opportunities. So we started to qualify opportunities at customer success level or in other words as they say CSQLS by leveraging the success plans and also the health scores which I was talking about earlier. And lastly, look, customer success culture wasn't aligned with the go to market. So we had teams working in silos, there were redundancies, there were missed opportunities and so on and so forth. So we really needed to align our compensation targets for go to market teams so we all have a single goal and we had a really good outcome. These efforts had led us to work collectively impact our go to market goals, be it improving our retention rates or incremental business. Worked out pretty well actually.

Grace: Oh brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's a thank you for going to such detail as well. I think that's really interesting to me and I think a lot of people listening will Be quite interested to know how that you've gone about that. Um, thank you very much for sharing that Akash. Um, so let's, let's sort of segue on um, talk. We spoke just touched on that briefly about uh, you know navigating compliance and user privacy and this is something you just touched on before but obviously there are significant challenges um with privacy regulations, um user opt outs. These are all challenges that CSMs and businesses as a whole uh, facing when uh having new customers. Um, so um, could you delve into how your team@software AG navigates these, these quite significant challenges while respecting user privacy and still managing to gather meaningful adoption data which is obviously so crucial. So that for me that's a bit of a uh yeah, I can't quite get my head around m that. So would you mind explaining to us?

Akash Singh: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Um, great question by the way Grace. I'm glad you asked because I wanted to go a little bit deeper on this topic of compliance. You know compliance is a big problem. We don't have any visibility when the users don't disclose. Right. We didn't know how users are using the product. We didn't know whether they are struggling when to offer help. And like I said earlier we started to look into capability adoption scores and gainsight and you can use this uh sorry the viewers can see a slide in the show notes. Um, uh if possible we used the capability adoption scores to tackle compliance and privacy issues. Let me explain a bit more. What you see in that slide is a scorecard. It's a visualization tool for ebr. That's how we used initially um our csms because we needed a way to explain to our customers what you own versus rest of the other capabilities. But we realized we could do a lot more. We devised a scoring scheme. If the customer is licensed for that capability we auto populated it using a gainsight rule and set the score to. And that allowed the CSMs to have a discussion with the customer and update them with their notes. You know we had set it to zero when the customer was not using and does not have any plans to which clearly identifies it as a shelf where a true risk. We set it as 25 when not using but plans to someday and it's a great opportunity to bring in uh a demo, a uh show, some tutorial, offer some training and help identify a project, add it to the success plan drive adoption or 75. You set it 75 when they're using it but not to the full extent but they plan to and that's a great opportunity to bring in a product evangelist or sell some consulting service to extend their capability and take it to the next level. And finally you set it to 100. When they are, when they are using it fully as they intended to. Well, that's the goal. We all have one, right? Look, there are opportunities here not only for the CSM but for other teams as well, using this scorecard. Because you could use it to identify beta testers, um, even event presenters. I remember we were running an API management event a couple of months ago and the marketing manager, uh, reached out to me, hey, could you suggest a speaker for that event? And I ran a report just to identify the customers were top scored for API management capability. And then I passed on a few names to the marketeer. Now, because it's a scorecard, we could also, um, write some notes in it and see the history of each capability. I think this was really useful in assessing adoption risks. One of the bonus points here is that if you don't have any dedicated CSM m, you could use it in a survey. You could capture all the adoption levels by sending it out, um, to the client in a survey and still be able to record the scoring and still drive adoption. All of this was working wonders for us as we had multiple products, like I was saying earlier, but it was all apples to apples for us now. Right? So we could apply the same scoring to the other business units, to the other business products as well, and we could achieve one holistic health score for a customer. So I hope that explains how we were able to, um, overcome the challenges around compliance and privacy and still drive adoption.

Grace: That's fantastic. Thank you. Thanks so much for that. Definitely share the show. Note of that, um, of that visual for anyone listening. It's incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. That's really, really interesting. Um, and you mentioned that product usage alone doesn't fully capture customer adoption. Um, this is interesting to me. Um, would you be able to perhaps elaborate on this perspective? Um, I don't know, perhaps an example that for listeners, um, who, you know, an example that perhaps. Yeah. Illustrates a more holistic approach to measuring true adoption.

Akash Singh: Yeah, I think that rhymes really well with the previous point. Usually we see these graphs, bar graphs and these spikes, these pie diagrams about usage data. It's going up, it's going down in this geography, in that geography. But it's just plain usage data. It doesn't tell us much. Our strategy was to see the user's data and understand why it's changing, where it's changing. So we started to use telemetry data. Let me explain a bit more and go a little bit deeper. Uh, the viewers can see the slide in the show notes for the transaction metering. We looked into transaction metering data which was captured through our web methods IO integration platform which pushed data into gainsight. This helped us to measure adoption rather than looking at just pure usage metrics. What we see here is we are reporting number of transactions like API calls, messages, docs files flowing through our integration platform. CSMS found it really useful in understanding customer adoption because we had both SaaS as well as on premise tenants instrumented to send data periodically to Gainsight, be it the accounts, the tenant's name, the server name directly from using WebMethods IE into Gainsight. It was really insightful as now we could not only see just how much but actually where. Let me explain a bit in that diagram in that slide there are three cloud tenants. The light blue is the dev where the users log in and write code. Pink is the test and dark blue is the production. That's the live tenant. The users log into the dev, not into test and prod. And if you were just looking at product usage data, huh, then you will see a downward trend. It is tapering down and you would see, oh, there are adoption risks, there are renewal risk, there would be alarm bells for this customer. But looking at this screen, it's a beautiful trend of dev test and prod. A rise in dev could indicate a new project or uh, use case. A spike in prod indicates more value. The more the value, the more the return on investment. The more the return on investment, there is more stickiness. And the beautiful part was privacy wasn't a problem here because we had a contractual obligation here that the client was disclosing the transaction counts. In fact, we had a bit of an opposite problem. Customers were asking us, hey, could you tell us the name of the API which ran the longest? Can you tell us the transaction name which had the highest number of counts? But we were not collecting this information for our customers benefit so we could disclose this and now you could see that with this we were able to clearly see true usage and exactly where the customer is using it. So we could really drive adoption according to the customer's desired experience rather than just some spikes. I hope that explains a bit, right?

Grace: Oh, that's brilliant. That's a really helpful case study and I'll definitely share this show notes because I think it's integral to your point. Um, but really interesting that you've that you Found that. Thank you so much for sharing. I think m something I'm um, quite keen to talk about. Um, and this is something that um, crops up a lot when I'm doing research, when I'm you know, speaking to guests like you. Um, I'm talking and just listening to what people in the customer success collective community talk about. Um, and this kind of stems to sort of evaluating sort of the, your, your effectiveness of your uh, customer success team, um, in contributing to sort of GTM objectives. Um, and like I guess I'm quite wondering, wondering really how do you assess that uh, performance, you know, are there any, um, are there any insights that you could perhaps share with your knowledge, you know, on sort of the KPIs or metrics that might offer a nice comprehensive view of their performance and impact on achieving and hopefully exceeding those uh, go to market goals? Is that something you want to talk about?

Akash Singh: Hmm. Mhm. Yeah. Look, truly our goal was to drive adoption to improve customers maturity on our platforms, right? So number one, CSMs needed to help improve renewal rates. And for that we needed to catch our risks early and mitigate them. So we started to use Gainsight to automate as much as possible so we could free up time for our CSMs and allow more time for human touch. One example I can give you is our CSMs proactively were proactively tracking all the important contacts at a customer in Gainsight. There's a feature called sponsor tracking. We could use um, that feature to track these contacts and what that meant was that every time this Contact changed their LinkedIn profile with a new job or title, the CSM automatically got notified. This was really useful because we didn't have to rely on rumors when customers move jobs and we were able to catch such risks early. In conjunction with that we also wanted to identify and mitigate the risks and record them. So we were using click to actions in Gainsight to do this. For example, CSMs were flagging um, a churn risk. There's a slide there which you can see in show notes. Um, now in this specific example the CSM has identified a risk as a churn risk. Uh, she not only explains the risk but she also recommends the steps to mitigate them. In this case the part team couldn't mitigate it locally. So the CSM escalated and gets help from the executive management, be it product or sales. And these CTAs are a useful way to track risk. You know you can see it on the right hand side. We can see progress of mitigation plan tracked In a timeline we see activities around. There was no sponsor, no ROI calculation, it gets escalated. The founder sponsor, a CC level meeting is organized. Now this process helped us ensure that everybody in the account team is on the same page. All members of the GTM team, Sales renewal, csm. And we left no stone unturned locally or globally. Probably the most important CSM record sentiment updates. There's another slide in the show notes around CSM sentiment score and update. This is super important because it is like the gut feel of the customer's adoption health. Let me give you an example. If you look into the slide, the CSM scores this customer as 76 and records an update. And if you see there closely the score history, CSM improves it from orange to green, back to orange and back to green in the last 18 weeks. And it is this sort of information that I communicate as a CSM leader to my renewal leader, uh, on a regular basis for all upcoming contracts 24 months in advance. So we can ensure that we catch risks early and mitigate them as relevant. And this helped us improve our renewal rights as we could put a stop to our leaking bucket. But it was not just this right, this is only from the renewal, uh, increasing the renewal perspective. There was also an element of improving the incremental business which CSMs are responsible for. For this we heavily relied on success plans. You know I can give you an example of a success plan there which we store in, which is more like an adoption plan in Gainsight. If you look at it, we are tracking multiple success plans for different use cases our customer is focusing on. It could be the B2B MFT and so on. It's the different capabilities of our uh, integrations platform. If I double click on one of the success plans, you could see a number of activities in that um, success plan which keeps the customer engaged, all aligned to improve their goals, their desired experience. And as we all know, expansion is not sold, it is earned. And when we tally these success plans with usage data, we are able to identify opportunities as customer success level. In other words, customer success qualified leads. If I run a report in Gainsight I see quite a few like opportunities to expand product to the next level, sell some services, sell more transactions and so on on. So yeah, that's how we assess our customer success management team to exceed our go to market goals.

Grace: Oh, thanks so much Akash. That's a really interesting use of Gainsight and I think such a, I think such, I think, I think listeners and, and viewers of this podcast are going to be really Really I think they're going to be made up because this is such a thorough um, practical step by step kind of guide about how you've gone about this and just you know, going way beyond the theory. So thank you so much for, for sharing this with us. Um, I think um, sort of drawing slightly um, sad to say to a close. I'd like to um, sort of ask you how at Software Ag and your just wider experience in general, you know, aligning CS compensation with go to market culture, um, you know that's crucial for fostering a unified approach to customer success across an organization.

Akash Singh: Yeah.

Grace: But would you elaborate?

Akash Singh: Mhm.

Grace: How this alignment is implemented within your organization and I know the impact it's had on both your team motivation and also most importantly, customer satisfaction.

Akash Singh: Yeah, totally. Grace, um, aligning efforts is super important for the complete go to market team. Sales, Pre sales, renewals, CSMs and anybody else is relevant. Right. Let me tell you how we did it. Right. We wanted a KPI which is easy to measure. Right. We didn't want to just pick up a KPI like adoption or NPS or some CSM activity like number of onboardings done. We needed something which drives the top line at best. And for us it was NRR net revenue retention. And as we all know, right, there's a correlation between NRR and valuation for some. For a lot of public companies as NRR grows clearly so does the valuation. So we needed to be on the same page as the go to market team and influence the behaviors positively. And look again, I'm not suggesting we compensated by 70, 30 or 80, 20. The important thing is that customer success org needs to have their skin in the game and we all needed to be compensated on a single metric. It was really important for the whole go to market team and we were continuously measuring it. If it didn't work we would change it immediately. Also coming to our intentions, what did it led to? Our intentions were pretty clear about it. We wanted to work like a unit with the go to market team. We wanted to deliver a consistent message. We wanted to build culture, improve camaraderie between players and the outcome of all this was great. Our communication was seamless. Within that go to market part there were opportunities identified for new demos, services and so on and so forth. We were able to flag risks, influence, motivate and also avoid redundancy. So really all in all I think it would work really well for us having that um, go to market aligned around compensation targets.

Grace: M oh brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing that. Um, yeah, it's been a phenomenal podcast and you've really touched on some, I think, things that people in the wider customer success community will be struggling with and it's why it's so great I get to talk to people like you because you've walked that walk. Um, and lots of people, I don't know whether they're in sort of early stage, uh, you know, or building out a customer success function of their own and looking to GCM strategies. Um, this is going to be so useful having like a. Yeah. Listening to somebody like yourself who, yeah, has, has, has gone through that. So thank you very much. Um, and thanks so much for taking the time to go through this because it's such an important topic. Um, that, yeah, we, you know, we haven't, we haven't ourselves covered, uh, on, in huge detail, especially not on this podcast. So I really, really want to thank you, Akash, for taking the time to walk us through that.

Akash Singh: Thank you, Grace. It was my, yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Right. I think it was great talking about just customer success in general and the different strategies. Think Customer Success Collective is doing an amazing job.

Grace: Um, oh, thank you very much for saying that. And yeah, it's, it's all, it's all, it's all down to people, you know, folks like yourself who've taken the time to share their experience because we couldn't, you know, we couldn't do this alone. It's really down to you that, that makes this, makes this collective work. So thanks so very much, Akash and um, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Akash Singh: Thanks Grace. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Grace: Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to check out our other episodes and go to the Customer Success collection for even more customer Success related content. You can also join our global community on Slack and can find the link to that on the CSC website. But until then, see you next time.