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
Customer Success Playbook Podcast S3 E61 - John Huber - Blueprint for Strategic Alignment
Summary
This episode kicks off a compelling three-part series featuring John Huber, founder of Customer Success Architects, who brings two decades of experience building CS functions across five different SaaS companies. The conversation centers on the fundamental question every growing business faces: how do you launch a customer success function that actually drives results? John shares his battle-tested approach, emphasizing the critical importance of aligning CS initiatives with company-wide strategic objectives rather than jumping straight into tactical execution. Through a fascinating case study involving a massive platform transformation for enterprise pharmaceutical and high-tech manufacturing clients, he demonstrates how proper alignment enabled a successful four-and-a-half-year migration from on-premise to cloud infrastructure without losing a single customer. This customer success playbook episode provides essential groundwork for any organization looking to build or rebuild their CS foundation.
Detailed Analysis
The discussion reveals several strategic insights that challenge conventional CS wisdom. Rather than immediately focusing on hiring CSMs or implementing technology platforms, John advocates for a "strategy-first" approach that ensures every CS initiative ladders up to broader business objectives. This methodology becomes particularly powerful when managing complex transformational projects, as evidenced by his experience migrating enterprise clients from legacy on-premise systems to modern cloud platforms.
The episode highlights three critical success factors for new CS functions: strategic alignment with three-year company vision, cross-functional collaboration (especially with legal and finance teams), and allowing significantly more time than initially estimated for complex transitions. John's approach to contractual restructuring during platform migrations offers valuable lessons for companies navigating similar transformations, particularly the importance of providing financial incentives and flexible contract structures during transition periods.
The conversation also underscores how customer success professionals must evolve beyond traditional support roles to become strategic business partners. John's team successfully positioned platform limitations as innovation opportunities, demonstrating the communication skills necessary to maintain customer relationships during potentially disruptive changes.
For CS leaders and executives, this episode provides a practical framework for launching CS initiatives that deliver measurable business impact while maintaining strong customer relationships throughout complex organizational changes.
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Customer success.
Kevin Metzger:Hello everyone and welcome to the Customer Success Playbook podcast, where we bring you the actionable insights and fresh strategies for driving customer success. I'm your host, Kevin Metzger. Roman was unable to join us today, but we've got a fantastic guest lined up for you, so let's dive in. Today we're thrilled to welcome John er, founder and managing partner of Customer Success Architects, a seasoned leader who's helped dozens of SaaS companies design and scale high impact CS teams. John, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Pleasure to be here. Fill us in on anything else about you and what you do. Yeah.
John Huber:20 years building and leading customer success functions at five different SaaS companies, public, private startup companies. So I feel like I've seen a lot. After my last company was acquired and taken private by a, a PE company, I took that as an opportunity to start customer success architects. You know, I found I've really enjoyed kind of the building and the optimizing process of different cs, uh, functions, and I saw it as an opportunity to be able to help more companies. So I was excited to launch the business earlier this year.
Kevin Metzger:Awesome. Helping companies and. So we're gonna start with the number one tip. If you've got a business that's rebooting or starting up a customer success function from scratch, what's your number one tip for how they should kind of start?
John Huber:I. Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, there's so many places to start. Um, I've, a couple of the roles that I've, uh, been in, I've walked into the opportunity to build a CS team from scratch, and the thing that I've learned is you always start by aligning to the company's objectives. You know, one thing that I've noticed is most companies will have a three year strategy. And so by aligning to that, once you do that and you align with. Kind of the, the vision that the executive team has set forth. Everything else is easy. Everything else falls into place, such as mapping the customer journey, segmenting customers, hiring your CSM team, and then developing your engagement model and really going forward. So I. You know, one tip. I think that's just something that I would, uh, I would recommend to folks.
Kevin Metzger:John, when you're trying to align with the three year strategy and looking at it, kind of, how do you develop the charter around that and really understand what the vision is, what's, what's that look like?
John Huber:Yeah, I'll, I'll actually share, uh, an example. Uh, the last company I was at, we were undertaking a pretty significant platform transformation. And so this was an enterprise class, uh, software platform where we were actually moving our customers from on-premise. To our cloud, and these were some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and, uh, high tech manufacturers. And so in order to do this and not disrupt their business, we had to be, you know, very precise with, you know, not only that, that technical motion, but that. Evolving that customer experience and how they engage with us as well. You know, moving from, because we're taking kind of the control from their environment, being on-prem to our environment, being in our cloud, and it, it was a, it was a risky undertaking. You know, there was concern that we could lose customers through this journey. Um, you know, luckily we, we didn't, and it took about a four and a half year process to migrate everybody to the cloud, but, uh, we did it fairly successfully.
Kevin Metzger:Were you able to kind of anticipate some of the challenges through that journey? Um.
John Huber:Yeah, we were, I'd, I'd say one of the big challenges was the control of, you know, the, the software itself, right? In an on-premise instance, you can control it, you can develop your own code and really customize and tailor it to your need. That goes away when you move to the cloud, and that was, you know, that, that. Kind of communication, if you will, fell to my team to share that and, but also articulate the benefits, right? If we can get everybody to a common code line, it allows us to innovate much quicker and deliver more capabilities, uh, versus what we could do in the old model.
Kevin Metzger:Yeah. Um, I, I know one of the other kind of issues, when you're going from a traditional on-prem model to now a cloud-based model, a true SaaS based model is your billing model, right? So your billing model changes and trying to drive through those billing model changes oftentimes causes a lot of conflict and issues. How did you approach that?
John Huber:Yeah, I, I think it's, you know, it was having. You know, clear and upfront conversations with our customers. Obviously we needed to provide a financial incentive to make the move. Those transitions itself often took, you know, 12 to 24 months, so you can't kind of start the billing right upfront. And so we would ease into that. But I think we also were fairly flexible in terms of the contract structure. And what we found interesting was sometimes you're going from. You know, a contract that was 10 to 15 years old that really wasn't representative of how we do business today to evolving to that. So, um, you know, it, it certainly took a, you know, a cross-functional effort. Spent a lot of time with our friends in legal and finance, but you know, as. I'd say that the one learning was give yourself plenty of time and really more time than you think you do to, to navigate the contractual conversation.
Kevin Metzger:That's fantastic. And Roman always comments on how we end up with more than one big tip generally from our initial conversation. I think, uh, we did it again today. So thank you, John for the powerful tip. Looking at how you understand how to kind of fundamentally start the csfa, uh, function in making sure that you have alignment with with management. We're looking forward to you joining us on Wednesday. You gonna come back? Absolutely. Looking forward to it. All right. Yeah. So on Wednesday we're gonna tackle one big question about who should really own expansion sales or cs. And until then on.
