The Customer Success Playbook
Welcome to “The Customer Success Playbook,” a fresh podcast initiative spearheaded by Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon. Immerse yourself with us in the dynamic realm of customer success, where we unravel the latest insights, inspirations, and wisdom from recognized leaders in the Customer Success domain.
Our journey began with a simple yet profound belief: that meaningful conversations can significantly impact our professional trajectory. With this ethos, we’ve embarked on a mission to bring to you the voices of seasoned and revered professionals in the field. Our episodes have seen the likes of Sue Nabeth Moore, Greg Daines, Jeff Heclker, James Scott, David Ellin, and David Jackson, who have generously shared their expertise on a variety of pertinent topics.
We’ve delved into the intricacies of Profit and Loss Statements in Customer Success with Dave Jacksson, explored the potential of Customer Success Platforms with Dave Ellin, and unravelled the role of AI in Customer Success with all guests. With Sue, we navigated the waters of Organizational Alignment, while Greg brought to light strategies for Reducing Churn. Not to be missed is James insightful discourse on the Current Trends in Customer Success and Jeff’s thoughts on Service Delivery in CS.
Each episode is crafted with the intention to ignite curiosity and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement among customer success professionals. Our discussions transcend the conventional, probing into the proactive approach, and the evolving landscape of customer success.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the industry, our goal is to propel your customer success prowess to greater heights. The rich tapestry of topics we cover ensures there’s something for everyone, from the fundamentals to the advanced strategies that shape the modern customer success playbook.
Our upcoming episodes promise a wealth of knowledge with topics like CS Math, Training, AI, Getting hired in CS, and CS Tool reviews, ensuring our listeners stay ahead of the curve in this fast-evolving field. The roadmap ahead is laden with engaging dialogues with yet more industry mavens, aimed at equipping you with the acumen to excel in your customer success journey.
At “The Customer Success Playbook,” our zeal for aiding others and disseminating our expertise to the community fuels our endeavor. Embark on this enlightening voyage with us, and escalate your customer success game to unparalleled levels.
Join us on this quest for knowledge, engage with a community of like-minded professionals, and elevate your customer success game to the next level. Your journey towards mastering customer success begins here, at “The Customer Success Playbook.” Keep On Playing!!
The Customer Success Playbook
CSP S3 E16 - Eleni Vorvis - Product management- Communication and Strong Relationships
In this compelling episode of The Customer Success Playbook, Eleni Vorvis, a fractional CS leader and consultant, shares invaluable insights on fostering effective collaboration between Customer Success and Product Management teams. She emphasizes the crucial importance of building strong relationships and understanding mutual goals before diving into feature requests and roadmap discussions. The conversation reveals practical strategies for breaking down silos and creating alignment between these two critical departments.
Detailed Analysis
The discussion delves deep into the fundamentals of cross-functional collaboration in SaaS organizations. Vorvis presents a methodical approach to building effective partnerships between Customer Success and Product Management teams, highlighting two essential strategies:
First, she emphasizes the importance of establishing alignment on basic definitions and metrics. Before jumping into feature requests or roadmap discussions, CS leaders should invest time in understanding how the Product Management team operates, their goals around usage and adoption, and how they measure success. This foundational work ensures both teams speak the same language and work toward common objectives.
Second, Vorvis advocates for direct communication about collaboration preferences. She challenges the common assumption that Product teams are too busy to engage with customers directly. Instead, she recommends explicitly asking Product Management about their preferred level of customer interaction, which often reveals they want more direct customer contact than CS teams might assume.
The episode illuminates how these strategies can lead to more effective product development and customer satisfaction. It becomes clear that both teams ultimately share the same goal: building software that delivers genuine value and outcomes for customers. The key lies in creating structured approaches to communication and collaboration that serve both departments' needs.
The discussion also touches on the importance of timing and context in these interactions, suggesting that while Product Management's direct involvement might not be necessary for all customer interactions (such as bug fixes), their participation is crucial for strategic discussions about product roadmap and version transitions.
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YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
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Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.
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Roman Trebon on Linked In.
The Energetic Women, they got the game. Customer success is their claim to fame.
Roman Trebon:Hi everyone and welcome to the customer success playbook podcast, where we bring you actionable insights and fresh strategies for driving customer success. I'm your host, Roman Trebon, joined by my co host, Kevin Metzger. It's another great week, and we have a fantastic guest lined up. Kev, how are you doing this evening?
Kevin Metzger:Roman, I'm doing great, and I'm very excited about today's guest. We're excited to have Eleni Vorvis, a fractional CS leader, advisor, and consultant working with SaaS startups. She's also the co founder of Boston's Founders Forum, and a Woman in Revenue Mentor. Eleni is here to share her expertise on customer success collaborating with product management. Welcome to the show.
Eleni Vorvis:Thank you. Well, Eleni, let's jump right in. I want to hear your number one tip for collaborating with product management team. You know, we all know it can be hard to ensure customers needs are getting communicated to the right people in the company. So, how do you see customer success enabling this? And driving customer feedback into the product road map. Great question. before you can start to work closely with product on things like measuring adoption and usage and sharing feedback, right, that will make its way into the road map, right? That's the end goal. My first tip for everybody is to build the relationship with product. every time I join a new organization or I consult with startups, I make it one of my top priorities to understand how the product management team operates. something as simple as asking them. If they have any goals as a department around usage and adoption and how they define those metrics, depending on the size of the organization, you'll find their goals and CS goals may not directly align. So the first step is, are you in alignment with the definition of usage? Who's going to be tracking it? What tools are we going to be using? Build that relationship and you will find great things will come from that collaboration, rather than just jumping in and demanding, time. Let's take a step back and learn how each other operates and work on some shared goals or KPIs to move the needle forward.
Kevin Metzger:what a great tip and I guess that's probably not only true for product management, but when you're coming in as a new leader, especially in CS and looking to drive customer success, really want to take a minute to establish. With all of the people involved in customer facing activities, what their goals are to make sure that they're aligned in a way that makes sense and that your new CS org or new goals for the org are going to align with them as well.
Eleni Vorvis:Absolutely. We spend a lot of time in doing that with sales or talking about how it's really important to align with sales and to have that hand over. It's equally as important because we spend a lot of time with the product team and they in turn are wanting to spend time with our customers or with CSMs. And so it really just starts with let's understand how we can best work together because at the end of the day, Everybody wants to build software that customers want to use that delivers an outcome. No one is sitting there being like, I hope they use these features or it would be nice if we get some traction. They're not wanting to build things that aren't going to deliver value. So we all want the same thing. It sometimes gets challenging to articulate or have a shared even nomenclature around what those things may be.
Roman Trebon:I think it's so important as you're communicating to clients, what takes priority and what doesn't, if you don't know that alignment, I've seen this in organizations, the communication around product and development and features and what gets priority, what gets put on the roadmap can be quite the challenge. Eleni, we usually don't do this, but do you have a number two tip for this Monday?
Eleni Vorvis:Oh, a number two tip, I like that.
Roman Trebon:but the number one was so great, I want to see if we can squeeze a number two tip out.
Eleni Vorvis:Yes, the second tip is really asking the product management team how they want to collaborate with customers. don't make assumptions. I think sometimes we think, oh, they're super busy. We're super busy. I might be asking too much of them to get them on a call. my number two tip is let's cut through that noise and figure out How they want to interact in many cases? They do want to talk directly to the customer and we pose a roadblock or being a gatekeeper when they really just want to talk to them. So figuring out what is the best rules of engagement for when you bring them in for an interaction? What are times maybe that we might not want to bring product closely? Because if it relates to things like bug fixes, You may go down rabbit holes if you're bringing in the product person, but when it comes to road map or you're working on a legacy product and you're transitioning to the latest version of the software, it's important that they speak to them directly because the way that product ask questions can be different the way in which a CSM or CS leader is asking questions.
Roman Trebon:Eleni, this is fantastic. Thank you for giving us a second tip, a bonus tip today. your tips on driving collaboration between customer success and product management. Both tips were amazing. You're coming back. On Wednesday, we're going to dive deeper into our one big question segment. We're going to look at product adaption, the number and how they get communicated to product management. So for our audience, make sure you subscribe. You don't want to miss an episode. The first show is already out, So when the Wednesday episode comes out, if you're subscribed, you'll get a notification on your phone. New episode, the one big question. So make sure you subscribe, like us, comment. And on Wednesday, we'll be back. Until then, Kevin, keep on playing.
Let's dive deeper into the playbook. The secrets they share, no need to look. From onboarding to retention, they've got it all. Success is the goal, gonna stand tall.
