The Relationship Between Sales and Customer Success

Speaker A: CCX is usually thought of as the mandate of, uh, the customer success or the customer support team. But there's another team in certain organizations that plays a critical role in delivering that VIP customer experience. And it's the sales team. Here to talk more about this today is our guest, Jeff Perry, the CRO at Carta. Let's dive into the conversation. Thanks so much for joining us, Jeff.

Speaker B: Yeah, Perry, thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Uh, I'm so thrilled by your last name and I'm always happy to work with another, another Perry. Granted, spelled a different way.

Speaker B: Yeah, apparently I spell it wrong, but I'm, uh, glad we got connected through this.

Speaker A: I will say that usually I get P, E, R, R, Y. It's very rare that somebody guesses how to spell my, my first name correctly the first time around. So I think you actually have it right.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you. I frequently get people calling me Jerry because they blend Jeff and Perry together.

Speaker A: Oh my God. Okay, let's hope I don't do that to you in this podcast today, Jeff. It's very tempting.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Said it. Um, all right, well, Jeff, we're so grateful to have you here today. I'm actually, I'm really excited to talk to you because Ada is, ah, a customer of Carta. And nothing brings me more joy than the email I get on the 1st of every month that says, congratulations, you have vested options. Uh, so maybe that's a good way for us to pass it back over to you to tell us a little bit more about Carta and your role there as the CRO.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, well, first of all, thank you for being a customer. And uh, since we're talking about customer success, I hope you've had a positive experience. And all of us also look forward to getting those emails, uh, on a monthly basis, uh, when we vest. And I think it's an important part of what Carta's mission is about. Creating ownership for all, uh, and creating equity for all employees. And uh, everyone from, uh, entry level employees through our CEO receives, uh, that email at Carta and we hope to be able to, uh, transpire that mission through our almost 30,000 customers now as well.

Speaker A: That's incredible. And maybe tell me, uh, a little bit more about your role at Carta as the CRO.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm responsible for all things revenue, uh, and that's everything from first, um, point of lead, through our SDRs, through our customer success organization. And uh, Cardo is a bit complicated because of all the different products that we offer. So we have different business lines within we have a corporations business which is our cap, uh, table software and our compensation product. Uh, we have an LLC product for LLCs and we have a software uh, and services, uh, product for funds and um, VC firms to manage the back office of their investments.

Speaker A: Awesome. Ah, very cool.

Speaker B: And then a whole host of other things that we're working on as well. And all of it starts with we've just gone through a massive uh, rebranding of the company. And um, all of it is about infrastructure, uh, for innovators and becoming a platform for innovators and founders to be able to build off of.

Speaker A: Well, I can definitely feel that as a customer the rebrand is beautiful by the way.

Speaker B: Well thank you. That credit goes to Jane and our uh, Jane Alexander and our marketing team. They did a wonderful job.

Speaker A: I love when the CRO shuts out marketing. That's fantastic. Um, but we're all in it together.

Speaker B: We're all go to market together.

Speaker A: I love it. I love to hear that. Um, okay, so this really brings us to the topic of today, which is about how the sales team plays a role in the customer experience and the relationship between sales, customer success and customer support. So you're right, it's definitely that everyone is all in it together. Um, in a previous conversation you said something really interesting, um, that even though there are people on your team with the title customer success manager, that you believe customer success is the responsibility of everyone in the company. So I want to give you an opportunity to elaborate on that a little bit.

Speaker B: Yeah, I truly believe it. And I'm not exactly sure when the title or term customer success became popular in our industry, but um, I actually believe that it's all of our responsibilities to create customer success. And that's really to me starts at first point of interaction with a prospect, uh, and that starts the tip of the spear with typically our SDRs or companies that prospects that come to us either inbound or as we're doing outbound prospecting as well. And that really creates the brand, uh, that we want to be able to create with our prospect base who eventually have a great experience through our sales process that strengthens the relationship and has us become trusted, uh, advisors and business partners with them and hopefully they become a customer and then they transition to our customer success team that's responsible for the implementation and them being successful, uh, using, using our product customers to where that even opens the door for us to even have the ability to sell additional products to that customer because we've created that great experience from first point of Interaction. So I truly believe it's all of our responsibility to uh, have a hand in customer success. And that's just on the sales side. I think it's, it goes the same for our product teams as well. Like everything they're working on on a daily basis should be about building a better customer experience so that our customers are successful by using Carta products.

Speaker A: I can absolutely relate to this. I think we talk a lot about um, at Aida, that the customer experience is the sum of all of your interactions. And it really does start the first time someone, uh, like an SDR reaches out to that person or they inbound to you from your website. And that's it, that's the first touch. And everything after that, every single interaction that they have with anyone in your company is going to roll up into their broader customer experience. So I can totally relate to that.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it's really difficult because we literally have thousands of interactions almost on a daily basis and not, um, all of them go perfectly. Uh, but you know, our goal is to make sure that we're here to serve a prospect to become a customer and uh, that we've created that great experience for them along the way.

Speaker A: Now something I noticed, uh, as you were sharing, you know, what the customer journey is at Carta, is that there's a number of handoffs. And I can relate to this at Aida too. Right? You have an sdr, you get handed off to your account executive, you get handed off to your implementation team and then again to customer success. Um, and I've been in that cycle as well as a CSM in a, in a prior role. And so I'm curious to hear from you. As someone who has such a broad mandate date that oversees sales and customer success, how do you make sure that that experience is consistent across all of those touch points? I know you mentioned doesn't always go perfectly, but um, practically what are you doing to make sure that there's some consistency in those experiences?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, there are several handoffs, um, and that requires, uh, communication on our part with the customer, uh, and making sure that we're listening and understanding the timing and the needs of the customer. Um, and really like when you have 30,000 customers, it's impossible to create human touch with every single one. There has to be some automation that becomes part of that. But our goal is to make sure that we've automated what are the most simple tasks that need to be done to help serve the customer and then still remain consistent, uh, with that human touch as well. So that Especially it's so critical what we do, managing a company's cap table that is the core to the ownership of their company. Um, I understand the need for a founder or CEO or CFO to want to have a relationship with someone at Carta or someone that they can get in touch with immediately to help with whatever needs that they have. So we try and make sure that we do a uh, handoff between sales, uh, to implementation, to customer success. Um, we also have a support function as well in case there are any other needs there but that there's a uh, consistent team supporting the customer base. And I also believe that like that model, the model that we have right now, having customer success as part of the revenue organization, it might not work for all companies but for our size and stage and where we're at and how to support the customers at this moment in time, uh, is best fit. There could be a world in the future here where um, the model needs to shift based on how we can be able to have best customer touch, uh, while also being able to set us up to be successful and have an opportunity, as I mentioned earlier, to be able to cross sell additional products into the customer base. So our model works for us right now. But I think in growing businesses we'll always have to be open to evolving based on the needs of the customer.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've seen that happen in real time too. The CS team was not always part of our revenue function. Today it is, um, but yeah, I can relate. I think it depends on the needs of the customer and also the needs of the product and the expectations of people in the business um, and the relationships that they ought to have with their customers. So it'll be interesting to see if this model uh, remains the same or if there's sort of a spinoff that happens.

Speaker B: Um, but our current model has us um, structured in a way where our CSMs are responsible for mitigating uh, churn uh, and creating sticky customers. But then also there's an upsell revenue component to their role. Uh, there's a potential future world where uh, the upsell piece doesn't uh, play into that and it's more about new uh, product adoption. Um, and so we always are going to be exploring different ways to make sure that we're supporting the customers and, and prospects.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes complete sense. Um, and just a practical follow up question here, are there any tools or software that you're using to facilitate transitions between teams from SDR to an account, executive, csm, et cetera?

Speaker B: Uh, the tools for the Handoff? No, but I know that our CSM teams, uh, most recently have been using Tatango to help with finding these critical moments in our customers growth journey for us to be able to best understand when it's appropriate for us to be reaching out to them about potential cross sell.

Speaker A: Ah, uh, that's very smart. Okay, I'm logging that one for later. Yeah. The most uh, notable example I can share was early days at ada. I remember we had a very small CSM team and whenever an account would move, whenever they sign on the dotted line, right. You ring the bell, you're so excited. Um, the sales team would be like great, everything you need is in the CRM. And the CSM would say, but where? Like it's everywhere and obviously the data is in there, it's just distributed. And um, half of it is also still in the salesperson's brain. Um, and so we ended up coming up with a, we used an automated form. You could click a button and it would pull fields from all different places in Salesforce and make a new form that was tailored to the csm. And so all the data was there. It was just about consolidating it and not making a human do it. So uh, that was how we kind of figured it out, at least in the early days at ada. It's much more robust now, I can promise you that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, well, it's interesting, um, over the last year, um, we're spending a lot of time and resources and actually dedicating a role now, um, inside the company to helping us streamline all the systems and tools that we use. You know, Carta has been around for 10 years and really the last five or six years the uh, growth has just been explosive and with that comes everyone wanting a different tool to be able to implement for the need of their specific business. And then all of a sudden you end up with several hundred different softwares that uh, aren't talking together. And so we're doing a big project right now to make sure that we're trying to streamline as much of that as possible and figure out what helps us best manage and run the business to be able to serve our customers in the best possible way.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, this is a very hot topic right now. And especially what tools can serve the needs of multiple teams? Right. What can the sales team use that the CSM team can also use? And so we don't have to do

Speaker B: double duty, uh, while also managing all of the requests of new tools that people want to sell to us. Right?

Speaker A: Yes. There's a lot of software out there. I think it's about getting the right mix to make sure that you're achieving what you want to achieve. Um, something you mentioned earlier I wanted to ask you about is that you have a customer success team and you have a customer support team. So can you explain how you differentiate between the two of these teams and what uh, they're responsible for?

Speaker B: Yeah. So the support team, uh, is part of our delivery organization. It's not part of my um, um, direct reporting structure. Um, and that team, uh, they field thousands of requests. Everything from this page is broken to lost password. Uh, and those are a lot of things that we work toward. Automating that to me is a very different role than what the customer success team is responsible for. Ultimately they are responsible for making sure that our customers have a great experience and that they do not want to leave Carta. And we can best do that by staying in constant communication with them and being supportive of them. And also we have a responsibility as CARTA to be educating founders and CEOs of smaller companies on what products and services can we provide that help them through their growth journey. If you think about starting a company, uh, most founders have not done it before and they don't know the steps that need to be taken in fundraising and hiring and everything that goes in behind that. And we have an opportunity to be able to educate our customer base on how to do that and support them through their growth journey. And that's everything from managing their cap table to uh, our Carta total compensation product that helps them with benchmarking and leveling of employees within and making sure that they have, are paying um, employees in an equitable way and also protecting their cap table and how much equity they're giving out based on market signals. We have all this data in our platform that we've now turned into a product to help those founders, uh, and early stage companies and then all the way to if they want to create liquidity for their employees and do a tender offer, we can provide that as well. So we really want to be starting with them as they begin two founders and a dog in a garage to hopefully multiple thousands of employees and us being able to support them through their growth journey.

Speaker A: Yeah, got to have the dog in the garage. I totally agree.

Speaker B: Mine's on right now.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, I would say that the measure of success of a CSM is when the customer starts asking you about more than just how to do good things in your product or what the best practices are on the product. If you're a CSM and the customer is coming to you to say, who's the best person to make manage this tool? Like who. Who is best to manage aid at my company? What skills and experience do they have? How can I, you know, leverage insights from this product to inform other parts of the business? Like, I think once you go beyond, um, like setting someone up for success in your product, that, that is a measure of success for a csm, in my opinion. And I think you, you've really articulated this better than I just did. Um, that it is about consulting, building that relationship.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is. And it's uh, it's almost like us thinking on behalf of the founder of things that might be coming to them. And a perfect example of that is a new product that we're working on, which is our tax product. And so if you think about an employee's journey and they join a company and many of them are early stage or even right out of college and don't understand what the value of equity is. And so they receive that grant and then that grant starts to vest and then do they exercise that? And if they did exercise the equity, what are the tax implications of that? Or if they had an opportunity to not just exercise, but liquidate it, then what are the implications there? So we're thinking on behalf of the founder now, creating a tax product that our company, our customers, can now offer as a benefit to their employees to give them tax services based off of us knowing that we've granted the equity off of their cap table at their first point of employment. And hopefully they've also gotten their equity, uh, through a offer letter that comes through our total compensation product. So we're trying to do all of these things to help the founder create a great employee experience for their employee base as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, when you have 30,000 customers, you have a lot of data. Right. You can advise a smaller company about what's going to happen four years from now when people are fully vested and they decide to IPO or there's um, some other taxable event. Um, we see the same thing here. It's very interesting. Um, okay, I have one final question for you here, which is, um, interesting to me that your CS team sits under revenue, even though customer success was maybe traditionally viewed as a cost center. And I think we've kind of hit on this earlier. This idea that the CSM team is actually not just about preventing, um, churn, but potentially upsell as well. So it's not just about maintaining the existing business. It's about expanding it. Um, and obviously a measure of success for a CSM is that the customer is going to stay longer, be more likely to expand. And so it makes sense that um, the team is reporting up to the revenue revenue team today. Can you tell me a little bit more about how this decision came to be at Carta? What was the influence from uh, from other teams in the business to, to inform where CSMs would report up?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it uh, it was an evolution of what we needed, to be honest. It was um, there was a time even prior to me getting at Carto where um, our account executives were too busy, they had too many demos in their day because we didn't have a large enough team and we were just trying to field as many demos as we possibly could.

Speaker A: That's a good problem. M. To have too many. Love to hear that.

Speaker B: I seem to never hit that window but I'm here now and of course like we continue to grow. Uh, and then you reach a point where you understand the um, total life cycle, um, of a customer and how long we can retain that customer and the best way to be able to do that. So when I started here, we had a team of four relationship managers and the uh, so of course in my first week I met with the four relationship managers and just ask them about their day and what they did. And basically they were just fielding uh, inbound emails from customers that didn't have a great experience in one way or another or just. And so they just tried to troubleshoot and help make them a happier customer. I asked if they had any relationships and their answer was, well, not really. I just helped them with the emails. So ironically, the person with relationship manager in their title had no relationships with customers. Not to a fault of theirs by the way, but just the system and the structure didn't, wasn't set up for that. Uh, and so now four years later we have a CSM organization of 100 people plus that are uh, segmented by size of company or industry, uh, or product line, really supporting our customer base. And actually I can honestly say owning customer relationships, even though that's no longer part of the title. Uh, and we believe that's because owning the relationship should be part of our helping our customers have successful.

Speaker A: Oh, it's so interesting to hear about that transition. Um, and it goes back to a point you made earlier about um, really having relationships and consulting people. It's not just about reacting to a problem in the product, it's about uh, helping people get the most out of your product. For their business. And the best way to do that is to have a relationship with them, understand what keeps them up at night, what would help them get promoted, what do they need to share back with their organization to be most successful. So I think you've done that really well.

Speaker B: Well, thank you. Thank you. We have a. I think I'm biased, of course, but I think we have a great team at Carta across the company. Um, I'm really biased about the CSM organization that we've built here as well. Uh, and I'm proud of the work that they've done in serving our customers.

Speaker A: Nice shout out to the CSM team, Ricardo. All right, we're at the section of the show where I like to ask all of our guests the same two questions. Uh, the first is, without naming any names, what is one of the worst interactions you've ever had with a brand? And, uh, what made it so bad?

Speaker B: Uh, I will leave the name out, but I actually had one last week. And, uh, I can sum it by this. Um, I think no matter, uh, what the industry is, whether you're in software sales or retail, whatever it might be, um, a customer pays for a service or a product and they expect that that product works and they're getting the value out of what they paid for. Uh, and when you don't get that, and then you attempt to try and get that corrected or resolved or fixed, you don't want to just feel like a number somewhere in a long waiting queue line. And you want to feel like you have the ability to be able to connect with someone to help support you. And this was my experience was with the larger company, but I can relate it so much to, like, how any of our customers might feel. And you don't want to feel like a number. You want to feel like you have someone that you can contact and that someone actually somewhere down there cares about you either being successful with the product or getting the value out of what you paid for the product.

Speaker A: Yeah, you've made a good point about it being personalized. Right. You want to be able to speak with a human being, get your problem solved. Um, but also this idea of empathy, that maybe somebody deep down really cares.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that, you know, like, everyone has separates work and outside life and do they really care? But I found I was having a terrible experience until I found the right person that had a little empathy with what I was going through and by the way, how long it had gone on. And I just needed someone to dig in and try and help me get this Resolved. And that made me feel a bit better about the experience.

Speaker A: So maybe this is a good segue to the next question, which is, what is one of the best interactions you've had with a brand recently? What made it so special? And you can name the brand if you want to.

Speaker B: Hmm. M. Um, I won't name, but I feel like it's almost the. The reverse of what I just shared. Like, um, you go into a store and actually you're a familiar face and that person recognizes you as, you know, even through just eye contact and says hello. Like, I know you've been here before. I know you're a repeat customer. That the hello and the acknowledgement was like the thank you for being a customer and keep coming back. And we want to make sure that we've created a great experience for you.

Speaker A: The acknowledgement is really nice, especially if this was an in person experience, which we didn't have for so long.

Speaker B: That's true. So maybe that helped. I was cheating a little bit. But, um, yeah, I think it's so important. Like, ultimately, you know, business is about people and people want to feel like they have a connectivity through the product to someone that cares about, you know, how they're using it and that they're getting the value from it. So we're in a people business even though we're selling software.

Speaker A: I honestly think that theme has resonated throughout our entire conversation. Your focus on making sure that your employees are set up for success, that they can build relationships with people, and that they're going beyond best practices in your product to think about what your buyer, like a CEO or a co founder, is going to be up against in the next few years. Um, it's. It's obvious to me that you're. You're leading a team who is deeply empathetic and cares about the people that they support. So well done.

Speaker B: Well, thank you. You actually bring up an interesting point because if, if the people that are part of our team aren't feeling like they're set up to be successful or that they don't have some type of. Of happiness in their role, then how could we actually expect them to try and go make a customer happy too? And so I think it starts from within and creating that culture across the team M To where people feel excited and motivated about what they're doing and the work that they're doing that then goes and translates into how they actually work with our customers.

Speaker A: That's brilliant. I really appreciate your insight there, Jeff. Before we wrap up, I did want to Highlight some of the key takeaways from our discussion. Number one, customer experience is the sum of all of the interactions that a customer has with your brand, starting as early as their first visit to your website or an email from an sdr, and following them all the way to renewal with your csm. Number two, leverage automation for simple, repetitive interactions so that your CSM can focus on what really matters, which is building relationships and consulting your customers far beyond simply best practices with your product. And finally, I think Jeff said it best that any business is really a, uh, people business. Make sure your people are set up for success so that they can provide the greatest possible experience for your customers. Thank you so much for being on the show with me today, Jeff. It was a pleasure having you. How can people get in touch with you?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation and you can find me on LinkedIn. Jeff Perry. I'm, um, the CRO of Carta. Uh, you can email me jeff perryarda.com. i'm on, um, Twitter as well. Not very frequently, but I am on there and can be found there. So, um, you can find me through primarily LinkedIn or just email me directly.

Speaker A: Awesome. And that's Jerry, not Jeff? No, it's Jeff Perry, not Jerry.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jeff Perry.

Speaker A: Yes. Uh, I promise I planned that, Jeff. Uh, and if you'd like to connect with me, you can Find me on LinkedIn. Uh, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Now Brands Talk. If you have any burning brand interaction questions or you'd like to share some feedback, you can send an email to Podcastda Support. We'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to hear more conversations about closing the brand interaction gap, subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts.