#TDSU Episode 209:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:03 - Seth Dovev’s journey in CS and SaaS

00:01:49 - Hiring CSMs for product alignment

00:02:43 - The challenge of hiring technical CSMs

00:04:54 - The five personas of customer success

00:05:58 - Finding the right career fit in CS

00:08:13 - Identifying the next great CSM

00:09:50 - Lessons from the front lines of CS

00:11:18 - The secret to successful CS hiring

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Seth Dovev:

Seth's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-dovev/

[Seth] (0:00 - 0:20)

And what we found was there was a lot of people in different even phases of the customer journey in support or more of a scaled motion, a case related motion that felt like they had more to give to the customer. And that for me as a CS leader was like, we got someone who kind of gives a mess, maintaining that continuity.

[Dillon] (0:29 - 0:40)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:41 - 0:42)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:46)

And we have Mickey with us. Mickey, can you say hi?

[Mickey] (0:46 - 0:47)

Hi, everybody.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:55)

Co-host Mickey. He's not a guest.

And we have Seth with us. Seth, can you say hi, please?

[Seth] (0:55 - 0:56)

Hey, guys. How are you?

[Dillon] (0:57 - 1:02)

It is so good to see you, Seth. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Seth, can you please introduce yourself?

[Seth] (1:03 - 1:29)

Sure. Well, hi, everybody. My name is Seth Dovev.

I'm currently Director of Customer Success at Zoom Info. For those of you who don't know Zoom Info, we are a go-to market platform to find, acquire, and grow customers. So our mission is to really unlock the growth potential of professionals and businesses.

I've been in SaaS for quite some time and a CS leader for even longer. And I'm really excited to be chatting with you guys.

[Dillon] (1:30 - 1:49)

All right. You're going to have to explain CS leader longer than you've been in SaaS, because I like to think that SaaS invented CS. Tell me how I'm wrong.

But Seth, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. Can you tell us what that is for you?

[Seth] (1:49 - 2:02)

Sure. So I think that what's coming to mind is really wanting to hear and have a discussion about hiring CSMs for product alignment and customer journey fit. What do you guys think?

[Mickey] (2:03 - 2:05)

I'm chuckling because of Reddit.

[Dillon] (2:07 - 2:19)

We had a discussion about Reddit previously where they pooh-poohed the idea of the entire CSM hiring process. This sounds like...

[VO] (2:19 - 2:20)

Topical. Yeah.

[Dillon] (2:20 - 2:42)

Well, always, always, particularly in this environment. This sounds a lot like previous conversations we've had with Mr. Steven Wise, where he talked about hiring CSMs for personas, your customer personas. So I'm interested to hear how you think about this, Seth, and maybe similar or slightly different, and we can add a little bit of color to the idea.

[Seth] (2:43 - 4:53)

Sure. Thinking back even prior to Zoom, I thought I was head of CS at Chili Piper, scheduling and lead distribution automation technology. A lot of buzzwords, but we actually ran into this.

We had a highly technical role that we had to fill. And we were really thinking about as we were building this, what is the type of person we want? And how do we even really fit that into what we're trying to do?

And the way that we were approaching it that I thought was pretty interesting was first, obviously, we need to get our ducks in a row and understand what customer journey was. And then we were really trying to think about not only just the customer journey and aligning in terms of, well, what does that mean for the CSM, but what are the defining key motions we're asking them to do? And I think that historically, even prior to SaaS and client services and other different words for the same, I think, meat is really just trying to make sure that we can actually allow CSMs to be successful in doing that.

And if you have PLG motion, that puts another variable in there. So there's a lot of variables to consider in terms of hiring the right person. And what we found is with Chili Piper, we were responsible for implementation and onboarding.

So onboarding as a general phase, implementation, more technical in nature, and then also adoption and value realization. That's a lot for a specific person to do. And how do you hire them?

So do you go into the standard agreement of CSMs in the SaaS world? Maybe they are not onboarding or implementation specialists, but how do you then allow them to be successful if it's highly technical? So the one thing that we were trying to do is just like, let's broaden our horizon.

Let's look at similar traits or responsibilities that other, let's say, types of roles would fit and see if there is some potential alignment. And we were lucky enough to look in the technical account management role or even really soft skill CSMs, but had shown some experience or really like focus in their own professional development to kind of one-up themselves and upscale themselves in that technical acumen. So we were pretty successful with it, but I wanted to get your thoughts too, guys.

[Dillon] (4:54 - 5:58)

We've talked about this previously, and Rob, I'm going to let you jump in here in a minute. Rob talks a lot about the five personas of customer success. And as far as I understand it, it's still a bit of a work in progress.

But one of the ones I think stands out is this project management persona of you're just responsible for seeing through several different multi-step processes that often require you to marshal resources and hold people accountable, which to me is kind of like the very generic definition of a project manager. You start to, I mean, look, you're lucky in that they weren't also responsible for commercial because that's a completely different sort of persona. And you see that so often where it's like, hey, we're an early stage startup, so you got to wear a lot of hats.

And we want you to do things that are just sort of like definitionally not the same person. They just very rarely are the same person. It's really like a CEO.

And if they were a CEO, then they wouldn't be your freaking $95,000 a year CSM. Anyway, Rob, why don't you jump in?

[Rob] (5:58 - 8:13)

Yeah, you're hitting on existential elements for our whole industry and even like my own personal existential elements with this. I think that part of the reason why I'm so passionate about this topic is a couple of reasons. It starts with like, honestly, my, my origin story, like what I feel like is in my career, where I was at one point when I was like about to graduate college, watching all my friends get jobs.

And I was basically like crippled by the fact that I didn't know what to do with my life. And for months and months and months, it was just this arduous process of trying to figure myself out. And frankly, years, honestly, there was advice that I came across from a psychologist named Steven Pinker, who said, like, don't think about what you want to be.

Think about the motions that you enjoy doing in your daily life. Like, are you the type of person sitting at a keyboard versus being outside? Like, are you the type of person that prefers speaking versus listening?

Are you the type of like, just observe yourself from the third person, and you'll start to eventually find, you know, career paths that that you can abstract out that have those elements. And that was really informative. That was very formative for my, you know, when I ultimately found my career in SaaS, for me helping other people find what was good for them as well.

And we had kind of like a bloated CS charter. We didn't have a CS charter, right? We had a kind of bloated directive back when I was at one company, but we ended up hiring, we did, we had a motion where we would hire people to the support team.

We hired 70 people to the support team at my time there. And fortunately, we had the growth to support this. And sometimes as soon as six months in, we would identify what someone's true potential was within the org, whether it was not even just as a CSM, but it was sometimes as a product manager, sometimes as a sales engineer, sometimes as a QA engineer.

I mean, we had one person on our team. She said to me, she was like, I don't even have a college degree. And here I am, I'm an engineer.

And we were like, wow, that's a cool testimonial. That all started from the fact that she had, you know, this sort of foundational experience on our support team and identified the motions that she was really like, really naturally adept at. So I love this topic.

And I think, you know, I wish more companies could build their own internal feeder school, their own internal bench. Not all of us have that luxury, but the product alignment and the customer journey fit is a really good lens to view amongst many lenses to view where people can find their ultimate fit.

[Seth] (8:13 - 9:45)

I love that. I love that you're talking about using a specific role to vet, you know, that future professional development or direction that that I see is taking. What I found also, like, that has that similarity, maybe some correlation there is like, type of CSM that we were trying to hire had to have some experience, right?

They were not going to be that first out of college, you know, junior level, we were looking for experience in SAS or experience in something, right? So one of the things that I think that when we went through the interview process, we were able to weed out is why this, especially when there wasn't that alignment, right? So they didn't have the CSM skills.

That's okay. Why, why this role? And what we found was there was a lot of people in different, even phases of the customer journey in support, or more of a scaled motion, a case related motion that felt like they had more to give to the customer.

And that for me, as a CS leader was like, we got someone who, you know, kind of gives a mess about, you know, maintaining that continuity. And I love that. And those were those types of like, aha moments or sparks of like, oh, wait a minute, maybe we have something here, then tell me more, tell me more about how you'd be able to do the skill that you weren't, maybe you had the full experience on what we found is people that are doing the extra going above and beyond on their own time, were the type of people with the right behaviors, attitude and mindset that we needed.

[Dillon] (9:45 - 9:50)

Nikki, with the time we have left, why don't you bring us home your final thoughts and go for it.

[Mickey] (9:50 - 11:17)

Shout out to Chili Piper started using it five stars in 2014. Great product, great team. So I think I'm just going to kind of echo at five stars, which was really formative for my career.

Rob and Seth, I saw the same thing happen. People would come in, they're not getting paid the most. It's a hard job.

But what happened is I can, I can't even count on two hands. The number of people that came from five stars that started in support or CS or account management or whatever that are now directors of product VPs, C levels engineers. I barely graduated high school.

I didn't go to college and I have this entire, like I can go through my LinkedIn and just give you example after example, after example. And I think it's sneakily powerful to put people in front of customers, put it in a tough role. Like those are all very tough roles, but then going that extra step as leadership and saying, this person is demonstrating traits that are so valuable that it is a disservice to them and our customers and our company to not allow them to go elsewhere.

So that speaks to Seth as a leader, Rob as a leader, and lots of people that I can point to in my career that have given me that shot and I have failed many times. So I've been fired four times. Kudos to you, Seth and Rob.

I think that's great.

[Dillon] (11:18 - 12:15)

Very cool, Seth. I love it. It's a great topic.

I think what resonates in here for me, maybe more than anything is how important it is for the hiring manager or the hiring team to think very intentionally about what they're doing. I don't know that the sort of companies I've worked at, 200 people and less every single time, have had that luxury. They're usually on the back foot trying to hire.

And if I could give any advice to folks who are going through the process of either being on the hiring manager side or trying to find a job, just try to weed through that because those situations are exponentially more difficult for you to succeed in if the hiring manager or team has not maybe done some of the work up front for you. It can be really, really difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

Seth, love it. You want to come back and dig deeper onto this topic because of course we can keep talking about it. But until that time, you do have to say goodbye.

[Seth] (12:16 - 12:18)

Sounds good. Well, anytime and you guys have a great day.

[VO] (12:24 - 12:55)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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