Speaker 2 (00:00.216)
This episode is sponsored by PlanHat. PlanHat is a customer platform built to acquire, service, and grow lifelong customers. Every year, PlanHat hosts an event called PlanHat Open. PlanHat Open is not your typical conference. It's much less about sitting and listening to presentations all day and way more about ticking things off your bucket list, like surfing or sailing while making lasting connections in a beautiful part of the world.

Last year it was in Malibu, California, and this year they'll be choosing somewhere new. A little birdie told me that it might be in Stockholm. They are giving away a free trip to their next PlanHat Open for one of my lucky listeners. You can enter to win this all-expense paid experience by signing up for a qualified demo at planhat.com forward slash giveaway. Hello, everyone.

I'm your host, Anika Zuber, and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Pro podcast. I'm a Customer Success Executive Leader, award-winning CS strategist, CS coach, and Customer Success fanatic. I help CS leaders and CSMs build and scale world-class CS processes and teams. I'm a strong believer that customer success is not a destination, but a journey. And it can be a tough journey, but don't worry, I'm here to help.

This podcast was created to help make your CS journey a little bit easier to navigate. Join me every month on this podcast where we will dive into the hottest topics in CS, the newest strategies and the best practices in customer success so you can make your CS journey a little bit easier. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts so that you can continue to learn on this CS journey that we are on together.

Speaker 2 (01:52.28)
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're diving into a topic that's top of mind for so many customer success leaders. How to scale your CS team without losing customer value. It's one of the hardest challenges CS leaders face today, especially in fast growing SaaS companies where you're constantly balancing efficiency with delivering real measurable value to your customers. To help us unpack this, I'm thrilled to be joined by Sahil Kakera, a seasoned CS leader who knows this challenge inside and out.

Sahil has spent the last nine years scaling and transforming CS teams in early stage SaaS companies from Seed to Series A and B. He's currently back at Okie where he's restructuring their distributed CS team to support rapid growth. And before his CS career, Sahil actually started in enterprise sales, which gives him his unique commercial lens when it comes to scaling CS as a revenue driver, not just a reactive support function. On top of that, Sahil is the founder of CS Connect.

a no-fluff, results-driven CS community that's navigating the chaos of SaaS startups. Today, we're going to tap into his experience and hear his lessons he's learned in scaling teams and how to get his take on growing your CS org without losing sight of customer value. So welcome, Sahil, to the podcast. I am so very excited to have you as our next guest.

Yes, but before we dive into today's topic, which I think is going to be a really good one. Can you please introduce yourself to my listeners? Tell us a little bit about yourself, your role at Okie. Just give us your spiel.

First of all, Anika, thank you so much for having me the podcast. It's an absolute pleasure. think I've been listening to all of your podcasts since way back in the day when you were also hosting podcasts with PlanHat. So definitely my number one podcast I go to when I want to learn upskill myself about CS as well. So it's sort of like an honor to be on the podcast. A little bit about myself. I've been now in CS for about nine years. I joined CS through their way of being an enterprise sales account executive.

Speaker 1 (03:58.99)
And very quickly realized after working for this company that when you close your biggest account, you also have to really focus on retaining that specific customer. Otherwise your startup is going to go bankrupt. And that was my gateway into customer success. And here I am now nine years later, absolutely enjoying it. I think it's one of the best jobs to be in, in SaaS.

In those nine years, I have built three teams and I really operate and I love the space of C to C, A to C, B sort of a startup. And when I'm not doing that, not taking care of the two kids at home, spending time with the family. I'm also building out this amazing customer success community here in Europe called CS Connect. Some of you may have heard it. If not now, you have heard of it. And what we're essentially doing is building a community that is powered.

backed by CS leaders, for CS leaders. Hopefully we are able to deliver to this community practical, tangible, usable frameworks and skills to level up their own career, but also level up their CS team.

I love this. Also, I love your background into customer success. I also come from similar background, although I was never an AE. I only was an SDR and then an account manager and then in CS, but we both come from sales backgrounds and we saw the value in the customer and the longevity of a customer and how we have to work with them much longer, which is going to be really a great segue into our topic, which is all around customer value and scaling teams. But before we get into that topic, tell me a little bit more about

the current company and team you're a part of right now at OK. You mentioned you've been a part of three startups, which is awesome. No startup is the same. So what is your CS team held accountable to? What does it look like? What are you guys doing within customer success?

Speaker 1 (05:49.966)
Yeah, I think a very good question. So I'm a boomerang hire. I did not know this term or acronym existed. It's basically someone who left the company and then got rehired after a period of time. So that's my story. I joined Okie when we were at 250 customers, primarily only in the Benelux market. I grew that team to around 1300 customers around the world, a team of seven CSMs, including support onboarding, so on and so forth.

Another joined back the company, we are almost at two and a half thousand customers globally. We have a full support team of two technical support managers onboarding CSMs, one cam and we are growing. And how this role has changed is we've started to go more towards luxury chain, bigger accounts, more enterprise level hotel chains from where we started off only selling to independent hotels. So we've gone upstream.

And with that, of course, the CS motion, the go-to-market motion has to change. So we have had to level up across the board in terms of what we've been doing and also where we are going towards, which is again, we are taking a step even deeper into the ICP that we really want to serve, which is ultra high-end luxury chains. across the board product, we are all trying to now level up.

Yeah, I love that because you not only scaled in the number of customers, which is huge. Congratulations to you and your team and the business, but you now have this added complexity of super high touch enterprise companies, but maybe some of your customers are also maybe not that original enterprise, those grandfathered in customers that you had back when you only had 200 or so. So I can't wait to dive into it, but you also mentioned CS Connect and I want to spend some time.

on that as well. I love the customer success community. think it's amazing. All the communities around the world. I personally lean into them so much. know I now have what I consider a friend. I consider you a friend now because I get to actually message you and talk to you about all things CS and life as well. But what inspired you to build out CS Connect? What is it about? You kind of mentioned the whole frameworks, non fluff kind of thing, but

Speaker 2 (08:09.57)
What is the point of CS Connect and what inspired you to start working in that space?

Fantastic question. So like I mentioned, when I joined CS, there was not a lot of knowledge available to consume. I always joke and say back then there was one person who made CS extremely popular and famous. His name is Lincoln Murphy. Oh yeah. And it's so ironic that nowadays not a lot of people actually have. Yeah.

Or you Blue Book. Who can forget that? That's the OG of customer service.

But for me, what happened is I had such a disconnect between theory and what I was doing in practice. So I really wanted to connect with other CSMs and understand how they actually operate in CS. And that's how CS Connect sort of evolved. It started off as a meetup where we would, I remember the first one was just three of us in Bar Huxted in Amsterdam and we were complaining about sales or bad sales for about three hours. And then one thing led to another.

And that's how CS Connect grew. over the last, what is it, two years that we've been doing this, what I realized is if we want to develop customer success in general, we ought to now start grooming the next generation of CS leaders, teach them to avoid all the mistakes that we've potentially made over the last decade. And only by doing that, by bringing to the market completely different generation caliber of CS leaders.

Speaker 1 (09:37.208)
We can then level up CS.

Yeah, I love that. That's so true though. We've got to pay it forward. I love that.

Absolutely. And that's the mission we are on. So all the chapter leads who run CS Connect in the nine, 10 different cities, they're all CS leaders done something similar, and they really want to give back to the community.

I love that. I'm going to make sure that we link everything down in the show notes. So if you're listening, if you want to join CS Connect or get connected, it'll be in the show notes. But you seem to have a life of service, I love that. I think customer success is a very service-led industry and role. We're here to serve our customers and make sure they see success with our product.

You're also doing it outside of your nine to five, you even have a family and two young kids. I love that. And it seems like you're doing so much and you really are. Anyone isn't following, so I'll LinkedIn. He's literally doing so much, which is amazing. but I always like to know from my guests on this podcast, kind of what is your big career dream or ambition? you're already a senior level, executive and customer success. So what's really next or the next big thing for you.

Speaker 1 (10:45.964)
been thinking about the same question for the last year. So I don't know the answer to that yet. I do believe with what I'm doing with CS Connect, I've kind of found my Icky guy, if I can literally put it that way. Yeah. Because in my former non-tech, non-CS SaaS life, I used to be a conference organizer, did that for about seven years. I think the biggest conference I organized was for about 7,000 people. So what I'm doing with CS Connect.

is really kind of the intersection of me loving CS, me loving bringing people together, conferences, all these kinds of things. So I'd say I would love to still keep working in a company building out CS, but a major part of that on the side is also bringing this community together and just keep doing cool stuff, meeting cool people like yourself. Yeah, that's something I love to do. Yeah.

And you are going to do great things. just know it. And I just am so excited to chat to you about our specific topic today because I think it's something that hits quite close to home for a lot of people that are listening. There are just so many things we're doing in customer success. And I just feel like in 2025, the number one conversation I have is people are just overwhelmed with everything. even with scaling customer success, it can be very scary, very...

very intimidating when it comes to everything you have to do. Going from the few hundred of customers that you just said to the thousands and to the enterprise, like you still have to deliver value. And that's another super hot topic in 2025 is delivering customer value. But we are going to talk about it at scale because that is what the name of the game is for you and your business and the, and the place you're working right now. But before we get into the like nitty gritty of how you've done this,

Maybe to set the scene for the listeners, what does customer value mean for you and how do you define it as you're scaling a CS team?

Speaker 1 (12:42.178)
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the way I look at what customer value means is putting myself in the shoe of a customer and asking, what is in it for me from this specific product, right? That's the literal simplest definition I can think of. And I think when you are looking at scaling a team, it's about trying to understand who's your ICP because as your product matures, your company matures, you're going from one product to two products.

your ICP will change. And I think one of the things I see a lot of companies doing wrong is never revisiting that ICP, never revalidating what value actually means for that new ICP. And also what is value? It's in the eye of the beholder. You have your economic buyer for them. Value means something different. You have your champion for him. Value means something different. You have your technical user for him or her. Value means something different. So I think it's about

really starting to understand these layers of value. It's like a lasagna, right? You have to keep stacking them up. Sorry, going back to the food reference. But it is like a lasagna. You have to build it up. And only when you have those layers built on top of each other is where you can say, hey, we're actually driving value, not just for a stakeholder, but for the entire organization. And this you can only do by, again, like I said, going back to your ICP, revalidating that and testing

that assumption of value across the new ICP. So you have to have a lot of conversations.

So important though, I think you've just said so many things that are little gold mines, to be honest. And value can mean something so different depending on what maturity level your customers are at and what maturity level your business or product is at, like you were just saying. And I think one of the big struggles that most people see is that customer success isn't something linear. I actually think it's very circular. I love your lasagna reference because it's layers. You're doing it at different times, different pace. But I also think that

Speaker 2 (14:44.598)
You can't just do it once and be done with it in customer success. It's not the way it is. so you mentioned that a lot of times companies don't revisit in ICP. Is that kind of the biggest struggle you think with scaling customer success and value at scale? Or what were some of your struggles, I guess, as you were going from that hundreds to thousands of customers, what were some of the pitfalls or struggles you were facing to make sure you were delivering value?

I would say it does stem with not knowing what customers value, because if you don't know what that value driver is, everything else that you're doing, putting behind that mechanism to drive the value is not going to yield the right results. So I can give an example, like in the company that I was speaking about, the first startup I joined, our product was basically helping customer support agents sell tickets faster. think after about a year of working with

that specific group, we realized that the value of the product is actually a lot different because what does solving a ticket really fast mean? It means your NPS scores are a lot better. And because your NPS scores are a better, probably people are not going to call and cancel their Vodafone subscription. So for us, technical users put value as something different. But the VP of that commercial department, his main metric was NPS. So we then actually had to

reposition a product as a product that doesn't solve tickets faster, but a product that improves NPS that has a better result on sales, customer attention, so on and so forth. Right. So I think doing this at scale is something that is a challenge, but I think how do you also operationalize that learnings that you get from it is one of the biggest challenges that you will foresee and have as you scale. So I think not having

these metrics clearly defined, a team that is very reactive because you're not going out to the market, you're not having these conversations are some of the challenges. How do you make space specifically to have these conversations? Yeah. And in most cases, again, like I said, in the space that I've worked mostly in 90 % of founders are like, yes, we've done these ICP interviews. They've been done two years ago. We don't even know where the file is.

Speaker 1 (17:04.589)
So then how do you know what you're currently doing is valuable for the customer? How do you know the product, the features you're building is valuable for the new customers that you're attracting? And if you think about the last two years, technology changes every single week. So what might have been relevant a year ago for your customer might be irrelevant now. So how do you know what you're doing is driving value? So I think that conversation, the voice of the customer, that's one of the things where I think most companies fail doing.

Definitely, and I think you've nailed it right on the head there because we tend to do something once, especially when it's like a whole organization building a customer value or an ICP or something like that. And then we're like, yeah, of course, we've asked our customers or we've done the exit survey or whatever, but one time is never enough. Because like you said, we live in this fast, fast paced world where literally what I was doing with AI yesterday isn't what I'm doing with AI today. And it's just.

we've got to keep asking the question. And one thing I always say to everyone I work with and all the CSMs I have and everything is like, you've got to ask. Sometimes you just have to ask the question, like, what is valuable to you or what is valuable to your business? And sometimes we really forget to ask those simple questions. And I know you're a long time podcast listener and this is a very tactical, practical type of podcast. So what are some of the things you or your team started to do, especially

as your ICP expanded and as you moved up market to really figure out what value actually meant to, like you said, the executive buyer or the champion or the different stakeholders that you had.

So I think one of the things we did really well across our go-to-market team is to have really in-depth conversations with our biggest customers, but also our smallest customers to really understand what is that spectrum of value and also across the different users that we interact and use our product. And once we have that mapped out, really try within our team to speak to those people at that level. So a VP level will probably extract different value from the product.

Speaker 1 (19:09.676)
versus an area revenue director at the Benelux market. And that's how we are slowly trying or have been trying. And this is never like a one-time done thing. You have to constantly keep working on it. So that's what we are currently doing on a one-to-one basis. But more about scale, we are also looking at using a customer success software provider to really help us segment the different customers that we work with.

essentially also the users within the customer base and then cater this communication to them. Because that's one way where we can at scale deliver value. And what we are trying to now experiment in phase two of implementing the CSP is to show how we could do this on a more recurring basis and a more asynchronous basis. So not waiting until that check-in moment or the QBR moment, but to do it on a more ongoing basis. one of the...

examples what we would love to do is every time a customer meets a specific milestone, we want to shoot out a message automatically that goes and says, Hey, by the way, you've been using our product for the last two years, but today is the day you hit this milestone metric with our product. And that's how, again, by adding that layer or those layers of value, you should essentially have a renewal that happens as a no brainer.

Because throughout that customer journey in the life cycle, you've been telling them, this is the value you've been getting from the product. One very good example of this is Canva. I absolutely love how they do this. Every time you're on the pro module and you download something that is on the paid version, they will tell you, you just saved two euros by downloading that from the pro module.

wow, that's so good. They do ROI in every del- I have promo- I haven't even seen that, but I'm definitely gonna look at that now. But I love this. think B2C products do it so much better than B2B, if I'm honest. I always think of Spotify when I think of the ROI piece. It's at Spotify wrapped. I'm never questioning how much I'm spending on Spotify throughout the year, which is a lot because I have like the family plan thing. I never- at the end of the year when I get my little Spotify wrap, I'm always like-

Speaker 2 (21:23.392)
yeah, I listened to so many songs and I downloaded so many podcasts. Of course it's worth it to continue paying for it for the next year or whatever. And so I love that Canva does that too, but did you guys start to do something similar where you were showing ROI at scale at all? Or, cause I know some, for some leaders or any CS professional listening today, they're probably trying to think, how am going even start? Like, how do I start to scale value? What did you guys start?

think it's just starting to work with what you have. So we're going through a phase where we had sort of a semi-functional data warehouse, let's put it that way. So we extracted whatever data we could get and start working with what we had. think one of the pitfalls a lot of CS leaders would get into is trying to have this ideal list of data points they want to have in order to show the value of the product, right? Engineering teams have such limited resources and I still have to meet

a startup where their data is in order.

Yeah, I have yet to join a company where the data is in some sort of good way.

Exactly. So you have to see what you can get, what, what story you can frame based on the data points you have and how you can showcase that as value adding to the customer. Right. And you start with that and you build you iterate because it could be that version one, when you send out to customers, it won't land right. But that's again, about the conversation with the customers to say, okay, how would you then reframe this as a value? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:53.518)
But you gotta try. think that's what you're saying. You just have to try, which is what I think we get so scared about sometimes. And especially when we're scaling, it feels even more intimidating when it's thousands instead of hundreds. But if you're not trying, you're never gonna know, which is like what you're saying, which I love.

And to dive in on this specific topic, value could also be very personal that is not necessarily product driven. So one of the questions I love to ask customers and it is a bit uncomfortable to ask is what would we have to do in order for you to get a promotion with our product?

I love that question. That's so personal and so important. I love the, do we have to do to get you to renew? But that makes it even, that makes you double click on like, actually, that's a really great question. Anyone listening, take note because you should be asking your customers that question.

Yeah. Because that's, that's exactly the thing, right? What is in it for me? Yeah. In this case, sure, the company made whatever three, five million, but what is in it for me as a champion to drive your product? And if you can get that, that's then your personal value, right? And that is also what I think CSM should think about driving. Because at the end of the day, you can call it B2B, B2C, B2B2C, whatever. But we are in the human to human business. And as a CSM, if we can build that rapport.

and drive bad for that champion, you're golden because if you're in an industry where turnover rates are fairly high, this champion is going to take you to the next business that he goes to. Yep. And that is what I like to think about customer value. So it's not just customer as in the organization, the person you're working with.

Speaker 2 (24:39.32)
Hey, CS pros, I want to quickly jump in and let you know if you are enjoying this episode but wondering how you too can become a revenue-focused CS pro, then I have the answer for you. Some of you might not know this, but I run a cohort-based coaching program that walks you through step-by-step on how to align customer success strategies with revenue. CSM RevUp Academy is my complete step-by-step coaching program that helps you elevate your skills and mindset.

to focus on driving revenue for both your customers and your customer. As this is a live coaching program, we only open doors for enrollment a few times a year. So if you are interested, go to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash rev up to sign up for the wait list. How are you making sure that this is scaling? Because I know we just talked about it where it's like, ask the VP versus the champion the question. I know I personally just get on the phone and ask and

Sometimes that's not easiest, but most direct way. But when you have hundreds and thousands of customers globally, it's not like you can just pick up the phone for everyone. I mean, you can, but this has to be done regularly. Like we said, we can't just do it once and be done with it. How do you ensure that you're getting that personal touch, like you just said, but when you're doing it with thousands of customers, how do you make sure that that stays personal?

Yeah, so we have a very interesting dynamic where we have a parent account and a children account essentially. So for us, an account is one of the hotel groups. They want to name names. our key account manager works with them at the central level. And the hotels are then essentially all on a one to multiple or a digital model. So what we do in our team is we have a bi-weekly portfolio review. I call it a customer canvas.

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1 (26:28.718)
And one of the things I always get the CSMs to ask their customer is, what is the one metric that matters for them in their business? And what is the one metric that matters for them, personally speaking?

Yeah, like, that one that we just talked about about getting a promotion.

Exactly. And that is what we then cover every two weeks. Okay, how are we making progress? Or we are not making progress. What are the bottlenecks? How do we kind of get in different stakeholders to move the needle for them, either personally or on the business level? So again, at the end of the year, what I'm expecting from the team or the CSMs is for all of their top tier accounts, they should know these numbers tip of their tongue. For customer X, this is the one metric personally, business wise, how are we tracking?

Got it, awesome. And I love that you're doing it at scale, but sometimes, especially as you grow as a business, you probably have felt this at the number of startups you feel. It feels overwhelming. It feels like a lot to do. And I think some people are listening like, this sounds great. Like get your data in order, get a CS tool, email or message your customerize these personal messages. All sounds really great, but sometimes, and I know CSMs are feeling it in today's world, it can be very.

overwhelming, overloading, it can be a lot. And I know we ask a lot, honestly, CSMs are heroes. I think every CSM listening to this, if you're working with lots of customers, you're an absolute hero. But how do you make sure you're managing that engagement that you've just said and personalizing at scale without overwhelming your team? Because it sounds like, I mean, you have like seven or eight CSMs. It's not the biggest team, but you clearly have optimized and operationalized this really, really well.

Speaker 2 (28:09.474)
So how are you doing it without overwhelming your CSMs?

I think what we are trying to do, and I'm speaking only from my personal experience here, is really trying to segment out the customers. That's one. So we are driving towards which customer should get lot more of the creative brain cells from our CSMs versus the ones that can be put on a no touch model. And the second one I would say is really trying to systemize what we do. So we don't want to have

15 versions of a QBR deck. We really want to have one that can be scaled across every single customer. We can pull it out at a push of a button. So these are two things that we're looking at trying to do at scale, essentially, and trying our best to figure out if we can track all of these leading indicators that can show us the value. And I know, like you said, maybe for some companies that might not be the case, but I also argue and say,

If you are speaking to customers, is this something you should know what within the product drives value? it, it could also be as simple as they have a really good champion. And he's carrying on this load on himself or herself to drive your product in the business. How can you essentially work within your GTM team to see, for all new customers, how do we ensure we have a champion supporting the product? So I think it's not just within CS, but it's also working within the GTM team.

potential so with your product team and say, can you build me an SQL script? I need these four data points being dumped every week and the rest I will do in terms of figuring out my own reporting.

Speaker 2 (29:47.822)
I love that, but I also think it's so important to have so many other teams. Like I said, we have this hero complex in CS where it's like, we've got to do it all. And yes, we do a lot, but you should be tapping the shoulder of your counterparts, whether it's in the go-to market team. But something that just came up as you were saying that, and I was just thinking about it, is like, we should be tapping into product. Like what you said about Canva, the way when we downloaded it, shows you've just saved two euros or two dollars or whatever. That was product.

building that in that wasn't a customer success manager. Maybe the customer success manager had the idea, but that is built into a product. And I do think that as your business scales and as your customer base scales and you starting to do all this scaling in order to not lose the personalization, it has to be built into the product and it can't just be, you know, the go to market pushing, pushing, pushing value. has to be the whole company pushing value.

Yeah. And I completely agree with that. always like internally with within our board and also like management team, what I always say is the direction I want to try and take our CS team to us is trying to productize what we do. So everything that we do as the CS team should be sitting in the product, right? Like a lot of these insights we are trying to deliver should be there. Like Canva does it, for example, in this specific case, you save two euros. So I think that is the direction to like

truly be able to value at scale with customers because you can't keep adding more headcount to have more QBRs with customers. So this has to sit in the product. And you're absolutely right. There is no other way but to work with the product team to say, how do we build this back into the product? And by doing some of this stuff in a non-scalable way, you are essentially able to validate that with customers. And once you can prove the outcome of that,

That's when you go back to your go-to-market team, your product team and say, hey, we've tried this non-scalable way of delivering value. Look, it clearly works because of these touch points, because of this articulation of the value. They're buying more, they're renewing. Now, how do we bring that back into our sales pitch, for example, but also back into the product? And that's the only way we can really scale more ARR per CSM.

Speaker 2 (32:02.69)
I love that, but I think you've just said something that I really want to double click on is like, how did you determine when it's time to hire more CSMs versus optimize existing processes? You just mentioned one, which is like, we've got to build things into product rather than just hire another CSM. And I think a lot of SaaS businesses and a lot of people working within SaaS businesses, the last few years have been tough. We can't hire more. We can't just put a bum on a seat and expect more, more, more, more, more. If anything, it's the opposite. It's like, you've got to do more with less.

And I know leaders feel this pinch point as well because your CSMs are coming to you and they're saying, I can't do anymore. Can you please help me or get more help in? And your hands are tied because your CFO is telling you, heck, you can't hire anymore. Like this is, we're at budget here. So how do you determine when it's time to hire versus optimize either the product or processes that you have already?

It's a fine balance. definitely don't want to say we got it right. I think there's always a challenge also in CS where you want to try and hire a bit early because it takes depending on your product anywhere from a three month to eight, nine month ramp for the CSM.

to become a product and expert and also feel comfortable speaking to the customers you have to speak to.

Absolutely. So I think that adds another layer of complexity in our specific case, like every other company last year had this phase where we had to rebalance the team to a certain extent. The way I approach this is again, working very closely within the GTM team with the sales counterpart to understand what are we projecting in terms of next year's revenue? What is the growth? Can we apply some sort of a haircut to that? Because of course sales numbers always forecast it really high.

Speaker 1 (33:53.036)
Reality might be different. And then based on that, to go back to onboarding, support, CSMs, and to really understand what is our unit effort to onboard, support, a customer, and then figure out, in this big Google Sheet, is to really look at, what are the non-value-adding tasks that we're currently doing? Can we outsource those specific tasks? Can we use agent AI to kind of do some of those things?

Hey.

Actually, we can do a lot of these things with our CSP. We're actually not using this AI feature in intercom. So it's really then starting to look at line item by line item and saying, okay, let's eliminate this and you have a bit more breathing room to actually work with more accounts. And it's also like you said, not necessarily working on more accounts is about writing or it's about working on the right accounts. So again, going back to the CSM saying, okay, which accounts have the most expansion opportunities, other ones.

Park them, be very transparent with them. Hey, we are going through resource challenges and issues. We'll get back to you. Please bear with us. And luckily for us, our customers went through that same pain point during the pandemic. So we could use that as a way to kind of connect with them. Right. So that worked really well with us. So in theory, we didn't really add a lot of headcount last year, though we grew about 40 % in business.

And this year we are a little bit more confident about the industry, the direction the business is going towards. So now we are in a position where we could potentially hire three people ahead of the sales forecast.

Speaker 2 (35:34.734)
Got it. Okay. But you had to be very, very aware, I would say, of the situation and really use the different resources. Like you said, it's not just a human resource that you were after. It was a tool or a software or even the use of your other leaders to really lean into you guys building something together to determine the right time to hire versus, again, optimize. So it's amazing that you guys were able to grow so much while still

keeping, I guess, the human cost quite low, because as we know that that can get very pricey very quickly. And yes, we want to serve our customers. But one other thing that you really did say right now was we needed to figure out what's valuable to the CSMs time as well. And I like to say this to all CSMs that I work with and that I coach is that you've got to really figure out what's valuable not only to your customers time, but to your time. Not all your customers hold the same value and doing white space analysis or really understanding which segment of your customers.

to actually focus on and to spend your time is, think, a skill and a trait that if you are a CS Pro listening, something you should really practice because we are always going to be told more. Like, I just think back of the days where we didn't even have Slack or emails on our phones or things like this. Like, we weren't reachable, but now we are, and it's never going back. So we're only going to do more, right? And I think, as unfortunate as it sounds, we are going to always be asked to level up and do more.

and we have to get more aware of what is actually valuable to our time when it comes to customer success, customer segments, revenue value, you name it. But on the scaling piece, you guys scaled so much, did any of this have to do with AI? Because I'm gonna bring it up because it's another thing that we're talking about all the time. As you scale as a business, did AI play any role in scaling for you guys?

full transparency, not last year. But we are banking on that quite heavily this year. So that's one of the mandates we have also from our CEO to really not just investigate, but to actually deploy some form either in the product or within the go-to-market team or specifically within our team in CS. So we are indeed now working with a company who specializes on this topic because we want to accelerate our time to market with what we do with Agent AI. So we are bringing

Speaker 1 (38:02.986)
external resources, experts to help us build up that internal capacity and then improve our go-to-market motion using agent AI. So there's a bunch of stuff happening on that topic. So we hope in 2025.

Every company is using it in some shape or form. I use it every single day personally and professionally. And so is there anything that you can maybe give us a little share, a little secret of what you guys are doing with the AI space? What is it that you, if anyone's listening who's wanting to scale with AI, what's kind of some things you're working on?

Yeah. So I think there are a few things, right? So one thing, like you mentioned, we are of course using chat shipping, like all the CSMs are using chat shipping to kind of figure out, okay, how do I reframe this email differently? How do I make this a little bit more polite, a little bit more strict? What would be, so that a hundred percent, we're all doing that day in, day out. What we are currently investigating is, there are certain things that you simply won't be able to automate or it won't be worth

your engineering team is time to invest in terms of automating, right? But these could be the things that are absolute bottlenecks for your team. And with agent AIS or something like a UI path or something like a replate or something like make.com, a lot of these things should be able to be automated, right? So in our team, what we are trying to do, if you think about onboarding, again, if it's enterprise level software, then there's a lot of components that needs to be configured.

One of things we are looking at is saying, can we achieve a zero touch onboarding? Which literally means productizing going B to C in terms of onboarding. You sign up and your product is ready, including integrations and everything, right? It's a big dream, it's a big goal, but we're trying to look at it from a whole workflow perspective and say, okay, what is the biggest bottleneck? We've kind of identified that bottleneck and it's one very specific part of our entire onboarding flow. And if using one of these technologies that I mentioned earlier,

Speaker 1 (40:03.148)
If we are able to actually achieve that, I think we're almost cutting down our onboarding time by around 30-40%.

What an ambitious goal. love that zero touch onboarding. Could you imagine? Like I know that that's probably when customers have the most questions, right? And it's the most uncertainty. So to really have AI power that is probably going to unlock so much time and just things you could be doing other than answering questions and getting a customer across the line. But that's amazing. Listen, Sahil, I've loved chatting through all of this. You've given so much to my listeners. Thank you so much. But

I would love to know if there have been any mistakes that you've made along the line, because it sounds all great. It sounds all rosy and beautiful. You've been able to scale, but you know, everyone listening is like, man, that sounds amazing, but how am going to do it? But what's the reality of it? So what were some of the mistakes that you've made when you were scaling a company while trying to deliver personalized customer value?

Yeah, I think if I reflect back earlier on in my career, it's not working along with other stakeholders. think that is the first thing you should really do is to work along with other stakeholders, right? Scaling is not only your challenge and problem. The engineering team is probably also going to have challenge as the business scales. So make them your ally and not your foe. That will be the first thing. Work with everybody else. You're in the center of the spider web.

So leverage that in the right way. I would say leverage technology as early as possible. Headcount is definitely not the way to scale with whatever you do, right? But a platform will scale and not advocating for a specific platform. If you're using HubSpot, all good, just try and maximize what you can do with HubSpot. So that will be one piece. And work.

Speaker 1 (41:54.604)
I would say also very closely with your CFO to really understand where the business is going, how you are adding value to the business, because that'll give you insights in terms of, if we tweak CS this way and we are able to get this much more efficient, what value does that bring to the company? And that'll help you then create more leverage. so when you go to ask for resources, you will probably have a much more informed conversation with the rest of the stakeholders.

I love that. It's so true though. think in the years of infancy and even toddler years of customer success, we were so focused on our vertical and how we deliver value to customers and how we grow the customer and how we focus on customers, right? Just like this one part of the business. But at the end of the day, we are business leaders. Every CS professional is a business leader. You helping grow customers is growing a business at the end of the day. And you can't do that alone. Like you've just said, it is so important to remember.

No matter how much of a stellar CS person you are, which there are plenty out there, you definitely can't do it alone. I wouldn't be where I am without asking my sales or finance counterpart, like, hey, help me out here, or even my product or marketing teams as well. So I love that you said that spider web thing. I'm just visualizing. It's so true. You're in the center and you've got to call on other people.

I'm just going to add one more thing that popped in my mind. think as you scale, the one other thing you should really focus on is your human capital, which is your CS team. Yeah. Don't leave them behind. You also have to really think about how you're scaling the people who are in touch with the customers, right? Like how are you helping them level up? Because you can scale the rest of the stuff. You can add Gen.ai or whatever, but if the people, are not being upscaled, your strategy is simply not going to work. Right?

Love it, yes,

Speaker 1 (43:44.917)
Invest time and effort into your team as well.

Yes, enablement for customer success. If I could advocate for that, I just, there's so much, know you and I both come from sales. There's so much sales enablement out there. I remember I had scripts, I had slides, I had things that told me what to be a great SDR and account manager, but I just think that we definitely need to help our CS teams. And I know you do that with CS Connect and enable and help them out, but it's so important as leaders, as people who are working in these companies that you provide the same level of enablement.

for customer success as you do sales. I love that. Thanks for adding it. What a great ad. Listen, before we go into Quickfire, one more question, which is, what do you think is the future of value in customer success? Like for our listeners, what trends should we be preparing for when it comes to delivering customer value at scale?

That's a very good question. think the future really has to be hyper personalization is to really understand every single user, their specific attributes and how your product can drive value for them. And I do think, Gen.ai will play a huge part in that hyper personalization and that overall will improve the retention or stickiness of your product and will drive more value for the business and for the user. Now, how you operationalize all of that?

that's going to be the challenge and the trick. think a lot of companies will try to figure out this stuff in-house. I think that the challenge here is, can you try and accelerate that by getting partners who are experts in this topic and improving your go-to-market speed or velocity, right? This is something you should not waste time capitalizing on. It's now or never. So make resources, make the budget work with your...

Speaker 2 (45:34.69)
Make it happen.

and really go all into this.

Yeah, love it. Amazing. Listen, style, you've been amazing. You've shared so many, so many goldmine of information, but we're going to move into our quick fire questions, which as a listener, I think you know what this means. It basically means that you've got to answer these next questions in a sentence or less. Are you ready? Let's do it. OK, my first question is if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?

I am, let's go.

Speaker 1 (46:04.206)
Customer value, 100%. I can't even think of any other word or any other topic. I think it's customer value because like we discussed throughout the podcast, the landscape is changing and evolving so dramatically. And with that, what customers expect from us in terms of service, product is going to keep evolving. And that is something teams should really, really focus on.

Okay, next question is which app software do you use every single day or every week, either on your phone or laptop? It doesn't have to be CS related.

notion I would not be able to function without notion honestly.

I live in Notion too. It's my professional and personal organization.

Absolutely. Second brain, that's what I call

Speaker 2 (46:47.918)
what it's called, right? The second frame, exactly. amazing. Next question is, if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be?

I really think we ought to learn how to advocate for ourselves a lot better. I know there are a lot of other organizations in the companies that you operate in do that fantastically well. I think you should learn from them how to do that, how to create more resources for yourself. That is something I would really love to see, us do in general, just like level up. Yeah.

agree. I agree. We need to ring the gong, taking our sales, counterparts, words. But yeah, we've got to advocate more for what we do because it's very important work. And my last question to you is who should be my next podcast guest?

This is going to be hard because I have met so many amazing people over the last one year that it's hard to pick a person. So if I can give a few names. Give me a few. There's a gentleman called James Lawson, Danny Bruda. Not sure if you guys are connected with him. I will, if you want to make the introduction. Yeah. There are some amazing CS leaders. Jennifer Peters comes to mind. Shannon Yaritz from SoSafe in Berlin. You probably will meet her at Artists, by the way. Also Lena.

can give a few, go on.

Speaker 1 (48:03.575)
from Do Instruct. Amazing people. You should definitely have them on the podcast.

I'm looking forward to. Please connect and I'm excited to have them as my next guest. But thank you so much, Sahil, for your time, your energy, your insights. This has been an amazing conversation. If my listeners have any follow-up questions or want to hear more from you, what's the best way to get in contact with you?

LinkedIn. You probably have seen me or will see me anywhere on the feed so go for it.

Amazing. I'll make sure to link CS Connect and Sahil's LinkedIn down in the show notes. Thank you again, Sahil. This has been an absolute treat and I really appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me, my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (48:41.304)
Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Pro podcast today. I hope you learned something new to take back to your team and your company. If you enjoyed today's episode, please can you take one minute to give me a positive review on Apple Podcasts? It takes a lot of time and energy to create an episode and I want to continue to create more for you. But it would be great to know that you are enjoying these episodes. Also, do not forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts as I release a new podcast every month.

And if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss in the future, or you would like to be a guest on this podcast, please feel free to reach out. All my contact details are in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to share it because sharing is caring. Thanks again for listening and tune in next time for more on customer success. Cheers to your CS journey and catch you next time.