The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook Season 2 Episode 42- Vitor Meira - Scaling Customer Success

• Kevin Metzger • Season 2 • Episode 42

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In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger engage with Vitor Meira, a senior customer success manager at Zendesk, to explore the intricacies of managing large-scale customer success operations. Vitor shares his expertise in managing a portfolio of 200+ B2B customers, discussing strategies for balancing personalized attention with scalable group activities, leveraging data analytics for customer health monitoring, and implementing effective cross-functional collaboration.

Key Business Insights

Portfolio Management Strategies

  • Hybrid engagement model combining one-on-one meetings with group activities
  • Data-driven prioritization using customer health scores
  • Strategic use of automation tools for efficient customer outreach
  • Focus on quick relationship building due to limited touchpoint opportunities

Operational Excellence

  • Implementation of both personalized and group-based customer success programs
  • Utilization of data analytics for identifying customer health patterns
  • Integration of tools like Outreach and Gainsite for streamlined communication
  • Development of targeted campaigns based on customer segmentation

Cross-functional Collaboration

  • Strong emphasis on alignment with sales teams for qualified lead generation
  • Strategic partnerships with marketing for success story development
  • Integration with technical teams for enhanced customer support
  • Regular coordination with product teams for feature adoption insights

Future of Customer Success

  • Integration of AI for enhanced productivity and content creation
  • Potential for AI-driven customer insights and recommendation systems
  • Evolution towards more data-informed customer interactions
  • Focus on efficiency through automated processes while maintaining personal touch

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Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Roman Trebon:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Roman Trebon and here with me, my co host Kevin Metzger. As always, we appreciate if you could rate, subscribe and share the show with your network. Kevin, we've got a great show lined up today. I'm excited about this. We're going to be talking about the challenges of scaling customer success organizations. What do you think, Kev? What are some strategies you think help in terms of scaling operations?

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, Roman, I think of scaling in a by part process. You've got customer segmentation. You've got self service. You got a CSM specialization making data driven decisions. And then finally, automation and I, and I think today's guests going to help us dive into these topics for scaling. I'm excited to Talk with Vitor Mira and welcome him to today's show. Vitor is a senior customer success manager at Zendesk, where he manages a substantial portfolio of B2B commercial and enterprise customers. With nearly a decade of experience spanning customer service, product marketing, and sales strategy across both startups and multinational companies, Vitor brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. His expertise in scaled customer success coupled with his passion for education and innovation makes him uniquely qualified to discuss the intricacies of portfolio management in the customer success space. In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook, we'll be diving into the critical role of customer success managers in effective portfolio management. We'll explore how CSMs can balance the needs of a large customer base while delivering personalized experiences at scale. Our guests will share insights on leveraging data driven strategies, conducting one on one and group engagements, and utilizing digital tools to manage and grow a diverse book of business. We'll discuss the importance of cross functional collaboration continuous learning and driving customer success across a broad portfolio. Vitor, welcome to the show.

Vitor Meira:

Hi, Kevin. I'm happy to be here.

Kevin Metzger:

We're excited to have you and let's get started with the first question. Can you walk us through your approach to managing a large portfolio of customers? How do you prioritize and balance individual needs with group activities?

Vitor Meira:

So just one step back, we as scaled CSMs, manage large portfolios of around 200 customers, each CSM. So the main goal is when we look at this portfolio of customers with 200 accounts, different industries, company sizes, use cases, how we're going to prioritize those engagements. So when it comes to our scale approach, we use both one on one activities and group activities. they work together. not one or the other, we have one on one engagements where we provide personalized and tailored recommendations to the customers so they can use the solution the group activities, run more as a program where we have bi weekly sessions And customers can join to learn general topics, including product updates, roadmap sessions, and best practices. So when we have like a large portfolio, when we are meeting with one unique account, you know, one on one engagement, that account sometimes we want to meet you more often. And that's the case where you send them to the group activities where they can manage from the webinars. That's kind of how we, we blend both approach to deliver value to the entire book of business.

Roman Trebon:

Vitor, I love that. when you have a portfolio of 200 plus customers, what are the key metrics you focus on when you're accessing the health and potential of those accounts in that large portfolio?

Vitor Meira:

we have a data analytics team that supports our scale success organization. And this team is responsible to analyze some metrics around those customers, including feature adoption, product, product and seed utilization, type of plan, if those accounts had or not a human touch, things like that. And they factor those metrics into a customer health score. And this metric is going to guide us through our engagements in the one on one perspective. So by having these scores, when we have, for example, call to actions to prioritize certain accounts, these scores are taken into account that will say that I should talk to Kevin, but not talk to Roman because Kevin is in a bad stand. They are not utilizing the product. They have seats available while Roman is like. Using the product. They don't have seats available and the account is help. So these are some of the metrics that ideally is going to tell us. The risk on that account and the account that we should be focusing on.

Kevin Metzger:

So are you using those to drive into, you mentioned that you do both one on one and group. Are you using it to determine how you go into the one on ones, but is there also information related to how you go into group in those metrics or how customers are attending the group,

Vitor Meira:

Great question. For the group activities, we are inviting all the customers in our book of business to join that session. There is no restriction because we have the capacity. It's a scaled motion. we can have a room with around 50, 60 customers at once, and they can ban it from that session. So we are not tracking the health score for those customers who are joining the group activities.

Kevin Metzger:

Are you tracking who joins the group activities

Vitor Meira:

we are trying to build a model. For example, when we have a group activity and a customer joined that session, plus if that customer had a one on one engagement with us, plus they had a self service experience reading some documentation, are we having expansions and better training contraction rates with those cohorts? That's the model we're trying to build with a bunch of touch points, both in one on one, one to feel, and self service.

Roman Trebon:

So, Vitor, a question I have is when you have a large group of clients and an analytics team helping with some of the insights, the engagement, how often they're using the product. Do you have an example of how you or the teams have been able to identify a trend or an opportunity across that segment of clients? Where you've been able to turn it into actionable insight for many.

Vitor Meira:

yeah, we do. And actually, it's not rocket science, it's pretty, it's really straightforward. When a CSM, for example, look at a book of business. We can see, for example, a person of those customers who have never had a human touch with the CSM. We, the so called ghost accounts. So for that person of accounts, we can create target campaigns with videos explaining that they have a scaled CSM as a resource. we can create those campaigns and try to un ghost those. Another type of campaign that we could create around those metrics are around, for example, customers who are using legacy setups like legacy plans against customers who need to be migrated to the latest version of our software. With legacy plans create a target campaign around the benefits that they will have to migrate to the newest version. That's a great trigger to entice, their attention and secure a meeting. we took quick wins in terms of targeting things that we can easily drew down the book of business

Roman Trebon:

I like that.

Kevin Metzger:

So, when you're trying to do this across a lot of customers, you've got to be using some tools to help manage this. What are the tools that are using to help you understand and manage where you need to do the outreach and where the customer opportunities are.

Vitor Meira:

In terms of tooling we are using outreach to secure the meetings, which is a tool that we can use to streamline the process of getting the meeting booked on finding the customer and sending sequences automatically. Another tool that we use is game site where we have some workflows running the back end and sending automatic messages. And this to also help us to prioritize which accounts that we have to meet in a given quarter, can you imagine we have 200 accounts in a given quarter, we have a bucket. of accounts that are our priority. These two in terms of efficiency and scale. when we think about personalization it usually depends on the CSM, recording short videos with warm intros, To introduce yourself for the 1st time so that you can explain the program. You can share your screen during the, during the video to explain, what the customer can expect if they're going to pay or not, it's no fee because it's a resource. We're not from sales. We explain all the, all the things with a human touch with warm intros with video recording. These are some of the tools that we are using nowadays. And I will touch more on AI in a minute.

Roman Trebon:

Kev's going to get to that. Kev's going to hit you up later on in that one. Just remind

Vitor Meira:

me about that.

Roman Trebon:

I know a lot of us in customer success have the title customer success, right? But there's so many different groups in an organization that have a play a role in making a customer successful. So, I'd love for you, if you can, maybe lift up the veil a little bit behind the scenes. I'd love to hear how you're working with all of these multiple teams to drive success. The product team, technical teams, marketing sales, cause you're probably getting so much Intel from customers all the time. How do you, operation support all of it, how do you disseminate that information? How do you make sure all those different units are on the same page, driving long term success for the customers?

Vitor Meira:

Yeah. that's the challenge of the road, right? That's the 1 million question I would say, because there's actually a lot of areas that we are. Constantly working on starting from sales, they are critical in terms of team collaboration. Most of the time the account executives, have an existing relationship with those accounts. And when the CSM is able to be at a great relationship with a ease the aid is help us a lot to secure those meetings and create plans with those accounts. AEs are critical and make our life easier when we have a good relationship with them. as a portfolio CSM, I am, I have a vision in terms of like 200 accounts, like what they are doing, what are the pain points and what are the accounts that are really taking benefits from the product. And I can send those accounts to our marketing team to create some success stories. this is another interesting engine where we can work together. I have recently read research from Bain, saying that customers expect that CSMs have some technical background. CSMs should have a minimum Technical knowledge to provide immediate questions, but you can go to technical if you were not prepared enough. And in that case, we rely on our technical team via Slack channels or quick touch bases to discuss like an architecture, some guidance that that customer needs. Plus the advocacy team, which is always available to help. And it's like very important team that supports the success managers. So in our day by day activities, we are constantly interacting with all those teams and trying to organize all the information that's coming up to put in a business review, what are the key insights from that quarter? And putting in a perspective timeline is important because in a year, there's a lot going on, when we split by quarter and do a reveal on the most important accounts success stories we've built, escalations. And wins with, with the eighties, it's a good way to share, like, how the, the cross functional collaboration really creates value to the organization.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, do you have preset meetings with your marketing teams so that you to review the information that making sure that the communication stays open and stay strong?

Vitor Meira:

Yeah. This is something that I really try to push myself on to keep a cadence of bi weekly calls or monthly calls or early in the quarter to create a quarterly planning with target accounts with marketing team. We are not there yet, but there is a constant push to create those stories for example, with AI, where we have early adopters testing and using the EAPs. with technical teams it's more of a development session that I try to join to learn more about the product and be prepared to have a minimal technical conversation with the customers. Very cool.

Roman Trebon:

Vitor, as someone who is doing this today and, working with so many clients, if one of our listeners is getting into a role where they are, going to be given a book of business that has 200 clients, right? They're going to be managing clients at scale. what are some essential, skills or knowledge areas? I know you touched on technical a little bit, but what do you think is crucial for a CSM to be successful if they have to manage large portfolios?

Vitor Meira:

I think number one is being able to build relationships with customers in a quick way, because as we are in a scale motion, we usually touch the account one or two times a quarter or six months. So we don't have a lot of meetings to build that relationship. So we should be quick enough to set expectations, have a discovery call, and provide some immediate value, in two or three conversations at max. this is skill number one, in my opinion. Skill number two is all about timing management and self management skills, There's a lot going on with a bunch of accounts and cross functional teams. being able to organize yourself and prioritize activities is an essential skill. number three, being open to work cross functionally is very important because the customers, are the same. as an account team, we are constantly talking to each other to create a unique and compelling story for those accounts. if we are only looking at our book of business, we will have some blind spots. From like what's happening in sales, what's happening on the technical side with partners. So being open to create those relationships across the organization, I think it's very, very important and your life will become easier,

Kevin Metzger:

what's your approach for upsells or expansion opportunities within your book of business? if you do own upsell and expansions how do you approach it to make sure you're getting that information to all 200 customers when it's a little different when you don't have the 1 on 1 relationship,

Vitor Meira:

So today we don't have a clear goal in terms of expansions, although we have a shared quota for NRR. the main goal for the CS today is qualifying the lead for the account executive. when we have a one on one interaction with a given account. We had, for example, a discovery call, and then we move to a follow up call to provide some recommendations, which we are going to cover quick wins and long term projects. from that meeting, we have a great opportunity to connect to the AE and start a conversation around upsell and cross sell. we are not crossing that line in closing deals. this is a discussion in the customer success world. But we are focused on having a value conversation. And if we create an opportunity with the AE they will be a huge advocate for us. This is number one and second we're going to show the value of the cross functional collaboration from success and sales. That's how we operate together.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. I like that. Vitor, what's, what's the, you're, I am curious. I've never managed a book this large. So what's the best thing about it? What's the thing you like most about it? What's the toughest thing when you're trying to manage this many clients?

Vitor Meira:

what I like most is that we are meeting with different industries, company sizes company scenarios. So it's a, it's a good learning opportunity to understand different use cases and challenges and how companies approach the solution. Some of those are with it. Some of those are with, like, the business unit, some of those. It's with partners. So understand that broad scenario is very interesting. On the other side of the flip of the coin, we actually have the challenge of not being able to go too deep on those accounts. So, for example, as a scale, I'm not going to be able to touch you like three, four times a month. And depending on the size of the account, that would be the time required for me to have a clear picture of your business goals your architecture and things like that. You have to be really good at prioritizing what are the aspects that the customer wants to focus. Otherwise, you're going to be shallow in all aspects. It's always a decision. But overall, I think for those who are thinking about stepping into the world of customer success. it's a great way to start off and from the scale of success, you can become a manager and you can go to meet in high touch with less accounts. You can go to product. You can go to sales. There are a bunch of possibilities once you are in this role, so this is an upside as well.

Kevin Metzger:

how do you see the role of CSM evolving in managing large scale portfolios, especially with how AI is evolving and entering into the space?

Vitor Meira:

I've been using chat TPT very often with my day by day activities. from my experience I think there are two, like one, one game that's already happening is already underway, which is productivity games. We are, we are able to produce like better content, high quality materials with less time. And I see, I see that more like me, the long term, which is kind of, I think the AI promise we are going to be able to, to have the data to have a better conversation with the customer. So, in this scale, the motion, it's in terms of time management, it's hard to have a clear picture of that account. Because it requires time. So you need to understand, you need to look like past data, current plans. What are the goals? And with AI, I really think that we are going to have. pre read material where we are going to have a clear vision of that account and be really accurate on the recommendations that account need. So, this will happen, in the future when we have AI technologies embedded in the, in our platforms with customer data. With a dashboard so we can have that approach. And today it's pretty manual. If you want to build that scenario to have that conversation, it's very time consuming. So two components, one for time saving and one better quality conversations, because we're going to have more data in a very efficient way. These are my takes. Curious to know yours. What are you thinking about it?

Roman Trebon:

can you start?

Kevin Metzger:

You can go ahead and I'll jump in at the end.

Roman Trebon:

So, I see the same things, I would lean on the same things you said, we're already seeing it, we can do more with less because we're just way more efficient, with AI in place and. And, you know, we're probably not at a point yet where we can analyze in mass, To surface up the insights that can drive those deeper, meaningful conversations. I think that's going to be big. honestly, from a technology perspective, too, I think we'll be able to to onboard. I just think we're going to almost go to like our engineering and technical resources will be way more efficient once we start really leveraging the power of AI. I think I may be stealing something from Kevin here, but almost a no tech touch where, just with having those AI resources in place the tech parts, on our end when we onboard clients moving forward, that's going to go away and I think we're going to, that's going to be our speed, the value is going to increase and, and also, I don't know, like, I feel like we're still so new in the AI journey that we're just scratching the surface and we're already seeing huge benefits. we may have you back on next year and there may be the new chat GPT and what's that going to be it's even hard to think ahead because I feel like we're so new on this and it's having such a big impact already.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, I think I think both of your right immediate term where we're at that time is definitely a great time saver. I think one of the things that we should be doing, if you're not doing it, you need to be doing it, you're going to be recording customer conversations, generating notes out of those conversations, that's data you need to have about your customer going forward, because you're going to use that as training data at some point down the road for training agents and LLMs on your customers. And so you're going to have specific customer agents that know your customer so that you can actually have either. I mean, you can consider it as a copilot More advanced type work would be agent type work where you can have conversations with that. You can actually generate tools. I'm excited. We had a conversation. I had a conversation with a future guests that we're going to have on yesterday with a company called cast out app. they'll be early November. they are doing some incredible stuff with agent work. The, the CEO of the company is Dickie Singh, really, really bright guy and understands how to build these agents and how to build LLMs so that they both learn the data. Based off of what's in your CRMs and then unlearn it so it can learn and update, which is is really something that if you as you're studying and learning about AI, you'll see that's how you get hallucinations. If you can't, if you teach it something. It thinks that's the truth forever, right? And if you, you need to teach it what's new so it can learn the new truth of what's what's happening. And I was a kind of a neat conversation. I had with with Dickie yesterday and I think that'll be a great listen down the road November. It's crazy how fast we're moving through

Vitor Meira:

what's that? Yeah. Exciting times.

Roman Trebon:

It is. And Vito, you mentioned training Vitor. So I'm at a small company right now. And we don't have a formal training team. We have a new product that just got released. We're using one of our former guests, Justin Chappelle recommended training AI training software. It's unbelievable. All I need is my team record it one time It takes the transcript you feed it in it comes up with this great training script Take the video put it in then it asks like Do you want the trainer to be an older british gentleman? Do you want it to be a young female? It's unbelievable You can come up with a crisp polished training And then it's like, Oh, wait a second. the red buttons on the left, it needs to be in the right. You make one little change. It's done. It would be such a heavy lift before. it still takes a little bit of work, but like an idiot, like me, Vitor can do it in a day, it's unbelievable how quick you can do this nowadays. It's insane. So super fun stuff. I think we've gotten to the time for the hard hitting questions. Vito, we're gonna do our rapid fire section. I hope you're ready for this. Okay. Alright. let's dive in. Let's go Alright. are you an early bird or are you a night owl?

Vitor Meira:

An early bird. Early bird. How early? what is that example?

Roman Trebon:

early are you typically getting up? What times? What's the early, what's the time you typically getting up? I'm sorry.

Vitor Meira:

Sorry. I'm the opposite. I'm not an early bird. Oh, you're night

Roman Trebon:

You're staying up late. All right. Gotcha,

Vitor Meira:

Sorry.

Roman Trebon:

Gotcha.

Kevin Metzger:

do you like to cook? This has been one of my favorite questions lately.

Vitor Meira:

I don't, but I'm trying to learn that skill. But sometimes I really order a bunch of food because when I prepare it, it's like. not decent So what's your favorite thing to eat then? I really like Japanese food. like sushi and stuff like that, but it's very hard to prepare. So for this specific food, I usually go to some restaurants around here.

Roman Trebon:

You're getting me in the mood for some sushi, so

Vitor Meira:

Need to work.

Roman Trebon:

Where are you located?

Vitor Meira:

in Brazil, Sao Paulo,

Roman Trebon:

Sao Paulo. Okay. So if Kevin and I make a trip out to Sao Paulo, where are we visiting? What's the one tourist attraction we got to do in Sao Paulo?

Vitor Meira:

Yeah, that's a great question. I would go to the Paulista Avenue. Where we have a lot of buildings and great restaurants and some museums. So you can see the heart of Sao Paulo. I would say something like this. That would be awesome.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, that

Kevin Metzger:

would be awesome.

Roman Trebon:

August

Vitor Meira:

Avenue.

Kevin Metzger:

what's a book, movie or TV show that you would recommend,

Vitor Meira:

Oh my gosh, this is tough. So book, like following our conversation on AI, I would recommend COINTELLIGENCE. From Ethan Mollick, It's a research scientist from MIT and he, he wrote very viewpoint on AI, very interesting for everyone curious to learn more about that. And TV show, I would recommend kind of off business, but White Lotus.

Roman Trebon:

that's a good show.

Vitor Meira:

I have really liked that one. I am not like so much of shows and Netflix, but or HBO or something, but that one really captured my attention.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, no, that's a great one. My wife. Well, I'm not a big TV guy, either Vitor. And she's like, we've got to watch something together. She's put up white Lotus and it was good. I'll enjoy it.

Kevin Metzger:

I don't think I've seen it yet. I'm going to have to check that one out.

Roman Trebon:

get on the bandwagon cab. We got a follow up episode. We'll do a white Lotus, follow up episode. All right. Vitor, where can our audience find more about you? What's your LinkedIn profile? Where else can they learn more about what you have going on?

Vitor Meira:

Yeah. So my LinkedIn profile is Vitor Meira. I can send you the link so you can hyperlink on the video. And I think this is it. This is my, I am, I don't have a strong social presence yet. I am planning to build that over time. you are one of the first Podcasts I'm recording. I started with the CSM practice with Irish, you want the second one. So hopefully I can record quite a few more to share some experiences around customer success. All the things in between, you've been a great house.

Roman Trebon:

I was going to say, if this is your 2nd, I have, I'm looking at my crystal ball. This won't be your last. you knock that great conversation. So Thanks so much for joining us. I really care about. I don't speak for you, but I know we really enjoyed it.

Kevin Metzger:

Absolutely.

Roman Trebon:

all right,

Vitor Meira:

thanks, Kevin.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, so our audience thank you as always for listening. You can find us on LinkedIn at Roman Trebon at Kevin Metzger, check out our customer success playbook page on LinkedIn as well. A note to our audience. We are now we've brought back the post game show. So we are doing our post game debrief. we'll have an AI generated recap of our conversation with Vitor, we get a lot of questions, Vitor, about what is AI? How can you use it? I think it's super cool.

Kevin Metzger:

it's a really neat we're using notebook LLM notebook LLM is built looking at the show notes and the conversation and building out a post game conversation for us, that's really interesting because it's two hosts talking back and forth about the show. they give great insights. Sometimes better than Roman and I can do on a post game show. It's pretty impressive.

Roman Trebon:

That's the only downside. I'm jealous of the AI co host, because they knock it out of the ballpark, but I'm still in the top four best customer success playbook hosts. We have cab, so I'll take it. all right, audience, as always, thanks for listening reach out, connect with us. let us know which guests and topics you want us to talk about. And as always, thanks for listening and

Kevin Metzger:

keep on playing.

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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