Based on my experience leading Service Organizations worldwide and for the past three years advising to various Tech companies on Service Strategy and Customer Success, the common challenge facing business leaders today is still confusion over the role and definition of Customer Success. Questions like “What do Customer Success people do?” and “To charge or not to charge for Customer Success?” are still being asked often. The pressure is on to make XaaS (meaning Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, etc.… subscription companies) business models more profitable. Most organizations are working on connecting Customer Success to revenue. Even if you never charged for Customer Success, it is essential to be able to prove a real, measurable increase in profitability to your clients and your organization.     What do Customer Success people do? Love the work of Lincoln Murphy on Customer Success, and he described the mission of CS the best - "Customer Success is when customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company". Looking at the customer it means you identify the opportunities for increasing their profits, their productivity and you work with them directly to attain those goals Support Services is all about break/fix – if something breaks, you fix it. Customer Success is all about looking at where the clients are, identifying where they want to be, developing Customer Success plans to take them there and stepping in as a right strategic advisor to the clients. The difference between Customer Success and Sales is quite straight forward. Salespeople hunt, they want to be in front of the prospects making a new sale. As they say, fighter pilot and the salesman have a lot in common. Customer Success people can work very effectively with Sales if you do a controller for a fighter operation. You share what the target looks like; the questions prospects might ask, the benefits they want to receive, ideal customer profile, the way to recognize those customers and to talk to them. So, the salespeople go out, and they close, and at this point, Customer Success takes over. In some companies, Customer Success groups are getting involved much earlier in the process. I’ve seen CS working as Sales Engineers, and it is an exciting model to consider as it allows access to all the relevant information and documents on everything that happened during the sales cycle. The customer transition, on-boarding, and Success Plans development go much smoother as a result.   To charge or not to charge for Customer Success? Customer Success in many companies starts as ad-hoc churn fighting group, so you’ve got a lot of history and people who think they know what is expected. It comes as a surprise when they are told we’re doing more than that. The key is to have data. Robust analytics capability is crucial; you need to have a clear view of who the clients are and where the time is going. Look to establish your basic cost structure of what your utilization of your Customer Success Managers is, in other words, what the billing rate is. You can then dig deeper into data on profitability per client, ROI per project, and develop mutually beneficial offerings. The key is selling value. Many companies are hesitant to charge for Customer Success. It is especially prevailing in SaaS, where the plans were to make it quick and easy. We’ll flip a few buttons and get running. But don’t forget about full implementation and effective adoption of the product, to roll it out throughout the entire organization, it takes guidance, and that guidance has a lot of value. Why not break off pieces of implementation aligned with adoption life-cycle and offer specialized training at cost. Consider:

• Up-sell: Additional seats, usage, etc.
• Cross-Sells of Support, Training,
• Renewal income
• Paid On-boarding
• Professional Services/Customization

By owning the revenue streams from sales of the above products, CS can be managed on a P&L basis. All of them require the same domain and product knowledge that already reside in Customer Success.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining a fantastic group of female leaders at Women In Tech Panel presented by infra//STRUCTURE Summit. We were asked to share our personal experiences of gender biases in the workplace and the best way for businesses to address them. I decided to blog and expand on the subject a bit further. Hi, my name is Elya McCleave, and I’m a woman who spent her entire career of 17+ years in tech and let me tell you – it is very challenging to stay in the industry and keep moving forward. Tenacity no doubt is your best friend, but it also can wear out if you don’t build the right support structure around yourself. Lesson 1: Surround yourself with the right people, people that genuinely believe in you and support you. My first experience of gender bias in the workplace surprisingly came from the clients. I was working as a Level 1 Support Engineer, where I spent much time answering calls and tickets. Quite often, if it were a male customer calling, even though he'd already pressed 2 for Tech Support, I would get asked if it was, in fact, Tech Support. When I politely would say “yes”, the client would share how complicated the problem was, suggesting to get him transferred to my male counter-part. Over time, I learned how to make the best out of the conversations like this, put clients at ease and announce the name of the functional unit “Tech Support” as soon as I picked up the phone. Lesson 2: Work hard, upkeep your education, and stay relevant. It’s ok if people don’t take you seriously right away, surprise them and they will pay you back with gratitude and loyalty. As the years went by, and I grew through the leadership ranks, I still struggled to find my true communication style. In certain situations, when I stood my ground, I would get called direct, bold, or borderline masculine. However, when I was nurturing and emphatic, I would get called a “mother,” and my direct reports “dragons.” You know it would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Lesson 3: Not everyone will like you, and it is ok. Remember this is not a popularity contest. Drive positive impact and let your work speak for itself. You might think that I’m discouraged from having gone through all these experiences, but I must say it is quite the opposite - I’m grateful for the journey and people I worked with. I grew stronger and as a result, started a business of my own. It also helped me understand what it meant to treat your staff right and how much support women required in the workplace. Here are things businesses can do to help women strive and succeed in a workplace: - Hire more women for your front-line technical roles - Introduce voluntary “Gender Diversity and Inclusion Program." - Introduce “Executive Sponsorship Program.” This is especially important for women at mid-management level going up. Statistics show that a senior sponsor could make a world of a difference - Introduce “Leadership Development Training” specifically for women in leadership roles - Be transparent – know your numbers and share them with the rest of the company regularly. It has to start at the top. “We need to resist the tyranny of low expectations. We need to open our eyes to the inequality that remains. We won’t unlock the full potential of the workplace until we see how far from equality we really are.” — Sheryl Sandberg

My quick LinkedIn post on Customer Success vs. Customer Support drew thousands of views within a matter of couple days. The subject of blending Sales and Services is indeed fascinating, so I decided to expand on it a bit further. Many argue that the concept of Sales & Services in modern technology was pioneered by IBM in the 1960s when they came up with the first enterprise-grade computers.  And from the 1960s all the way to 1990s Service was typically part of a Sales organization, ran by regional managers.  In the 1990s we went through a process of separating Services from Sales; Support became a global function, Professional Services became a global function, and it lasted all the way to 2017. And now we are looking to bring Sales and Services back together again - build a United customer growth engine. My career in IT started in the late 1990s. As a result, I experienced services being regionally managed. At the time services were unprofitable, of low quality, inconsistent and post-sale resources were pulled continuously to pre-sale activities.  The model was unsustainable and drove poor Customer Experience.  As a result, most companies started segregating service resources into stand-alone independent functional units, pulling them from the regions.  The process of globalization and centralization of services has begun in the early 2000s. I spent many years helping technology companies to centralize and globalize their service organizations. Some great things have been achieved in the process of services being separated from sales - services became more profitable, globally consistent and of much higher quality. The only problem we were not able to address was an extremely disjointed Customer Experience (CX). Sales would take the clients up to a certain point, handoff to Professional Services, handoff to Education Services, handoff to Support Services, etc.  The clients felt like they were dealing with multiple different companies. And don't forget about the "turf wars" between Sales and Services that made Customer Experience (CX) even worst. And now in 2018 we came a full circle with most companies out there already working on bringing Sales and Services back together, but on what terms?  And why they are doing that, you might ask?  The economics of our business models are changing. The ability of a company to drive Adoption, Expansion, Renewal is essential to business success. In the context of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), I can see the traditionally stand-alone service organizations introducing Adoption Charters of Customer Success and developing a robust Adoption framework as the very first step growing closer together with Sales.  If Adoption is done, right Renewal responsibilities will come naturally. As per TSIA research, Sales and Services organizations in the future will still run as two separate entities, but they will come together near the top rolling up to a Chief Revenue Officer or a Chief Customer Officer. Sales will continue being regionally managed, while Services and Success will be highly converged. Services, including Success, will be monetized. Clients will be requesting to talk to people that are responsible for delivering the outcomes before they sign the contracts. As a result, we will see more services experts involved in pre-sale environments. Services will begin to be rewarded and measured on the ability making the company LAER-efficient (Land-Adopt-Expand-Renew), including improving the Land function. Everyone in the company is going to come together in their compensation around a unified set of Customer Health and Growth metrics. I must say I'm super excited about the next stage of service evolution, and seeing Sales and Services working together as real partners.