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Unveiling the Hidden Facets of Customer Success with Dutta Satadip
Join us as we sit down with Duta Sadeep, a veteran in the world of customer success, as he unveils hidden facets of this critical aspect of an organization. Duta shares how he stepped into this influential role and paints a vivid picture of why the true significance of customer success often gets overlooked. He also introduces us to the broader metrics of value - customer lifetime value, CSAT, and NPS, taking us beyond the standard measures.
In the latter part of our chat, Duta stresses on the untapped potential of the paid packages, and how it can strike an ideal balance between customer expectations and vendor offerings. He gives us an insider's perspective on how to supercharge a customer success program based on his own experiences. Duta helps us understand why we need to take into account the opportunity cost of reactive customer work, how to choose the right service model, and ways to quantify the intangible benefits of a customer success program. He wraps up with a profound discussion on expansion, upselling, and cross-selling within the realm of customer success, and the paramount role of referenceability in customer-led growth. This is one episode you'll want to play on repeat for all its enlightening insights.
Welcome to Innovations in Leadership, a Success League radio production. This is a podcast focused on Customer Success and the leaders who are designing and implementing best practices in our field. This podcast is brought to you by the Success League, a consulting and training firm focused on developing customer success programs that drive revenue. My name is Kristin Hayer and I'm the host of Innovations in Leadership and the founder and CEO of the Success League, and today I'd like to welcome Dutta Satadip to the podcast. Dutta is a senior leader in the field of customer success, having served in a variety of executive roles, and I thought he would be the perfect person to share his perspective on how to communicate the value of customer success internally. So, Dutta, welcome to the show.
Dutta Satadip:Thank you, Kristin. It's amazing to be part of the show and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Kristen Hayer:Me too, but before we get started, can you tell us about your career path and how you landed in customer success?
Dutta Satadip:Sure. So, having been around the block, I feel like I can safely say I've had many phases to my careers. But I kind of like to define my career in three phases: Depth phase, a breadth phase and more of a leadership phase. In my depth phase I sort of started really as an engineer, but I quickly moved out of that to do a variety of different roles across different organizations. I spent time at HB, I started then at Google covering everything from product management and sales to operations and consulting.
Dutta Satadip:I started to see some patterns about the concept of keeping customers first, how difficult that is to orchestrate across all the functions, and eventually I took a leadership position in Google, first organizing all the post- sales functions to optimize for delivering a great experience with increasingly complex number of advertising products. And that phase gave me a very good understanding of balancing a few things how do you simplify the customer experience? Number two, how do you really scale things? Because you can do one-on-one the number of customers you have with a company like Google. So how do you scale things employing both digital and a blend of high touch?
Dutta Satadip:And the last one was really being outcome focused who and where do you need to invest in? And eventually that leadership path led me to a role of defining the post sales experience at Pinterest, including growth of different segments at Pinterest, and ultimately I was at Active Campaign where I was the chief customer officer not a lot of the post sales experience, but also looking at the data and the strategy behind understanding end-to-end customer journey. So, yeah, it's been quite a fulfilling career so far, but in a lot of different areas that have all come together in customer success.
Kristen Hayer:That's really exciting that you've kind of come at it from a lot of different angles, and that really leads into our topic. I know that you've experienced firsthand the need for communicating the value of customer success inside of your own organizations that you've worked for. Why do you think that this is an issue for so many customer success leaders today?
Dutta Satadip:I would go back like a few steps, and this is my thesis on why it is difficult. I think a lot of the practice of customer success really started to gain traction and it's a relatively young practice discipline, probably around like 10, 12 years back when SaaS products started to kick in and somebody said, hey, we were used to just selling and kind of going through a shut-it-shut-it, forget-it motion, but we can't do that anymore. We actually have to do something for renewals, right, and that's what sort of like the origins. There was a very clear need that needed to be filled, which was around renewals. But as the practice grew, it became a lot about, in my mind, a pivot towards relationships, high touch and what has sort of been an evolution more than a struggle. An evolution is how do you work to define clear outcomes that the CS teams are looking to drive?
Dutta Satadip:In today's environment specifically, it has become a really big issue because that outcome often is not as clear and it's not singly attributed. Now, it doesn't mean every outcome has to be singly attributed, but I think that is what has caused a lot of the confusion where a lot of people say, well, what does CS really do and why is it so important. I can't get the renewals thing, but how do you do it? And we've sort of gone away from that clear comp. Hey, we are responsible for renewals, we are responsible for nurturing the customers so that you can drive more expansions. Driving more expansions both in case of SaaS, right by upselling, if you're in a consumption model more seeds, more users, whatever or you are in the business of doing cross-sells and there's been a lot of talk around CSQLs and everything else. But I feel like that outcome is something we need to define very clearly of what we are driving, and our inability to do that consistently across as a practice I think has led to a lot of confusion.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I agree. I think there's other ways to measure value too. I think value can mean a lot of different things. What kind of things do you think about outside of renewals when you think about value?
Dutta Satadip:I think one of the things which I feel is extremely important at this point in time is to be able to sort of unpack how you're driving overall customer lifetime value, and that's not just in terms of retention and renewals. It's like how long does a customer stay with you? How much money do they spend over a course of time? If you do customer success right, you're probably driving good product adoption. You'll probably have great collaboration with your product counterparts to help develop features, help develop new functionality based on customer feedback. That's helping you even getting bigger customers, and those customers that are with you are staying longer.
Dutta Satadip:So I think there is a good way to sort of be able to pivot from pure, just top line numbers to looking at things like customer lifetime value as an example. I do believe things like CSAT and NPS are sort of table stakes, but again they tend to be more backward-looking metrics versus forward-looking metrics. And another one I would also say is really having a good understanding of the customer health. If you're going to talk about customer health, it is not just hey, is somebody logging into the product, which is basic utilization, but how do they feel about the product, which areas are they using? So giving a good sense of customer health is also another semi-quantified value, but a value that is very valuable in helping predictability forecastability of the business.
Kristen Hayer:It's interesting. The other one that I sort of think about sometimes is reference ability. That's becoming so important. I mean, I think customers sort of sell themselves on you before they actually even talk to your salespeople, a lot of times just by talking to their peers and talking to other organizations, and so that's another thing that I think you can quantify that and put some value around that, and that's pretty meaningful as well.
Dutta Satadip:I would 100% agree with you. There is more and more of a focus on customer-led growth by many, many companies. Some of them have taken it really to the next level, especially looking at sales-led growth motions. I think Gong is a great example of that. If you go to Gong's website, every single value proposition, if you go and look at a functionality, is matched with a customer code. That's reference ability.
Dutta Satadip:If you go to their YouTube channel, they have been around for some time and it's not like apples to apples comparison, but they have over 50, 60 customer stories and they publish them on a regular basis. So somebody is in the market for that suite of products. They're probably doing some research, they're probably going around looking at different channels, but you're going to get a very 360 echo chamber that says, wow, all of these people are having success and you may know some of them, you may talk about some of them. So I 100% agree with you. Second, with you, reference ability is a big one and it is an actual growth strategy and customer success can play a very important role in that growth strategy.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, absolutely. Well, kind of keeping on that theme, let's talk about expansion specifically. I know many CS leaders don't see upselling or cross-selling as the role of customer success. What are your thoughts on that? I think customer success.
Dutta Satadip:This is my opinion. Obviously this is what I was talking to, a little bit sort of like outcomes versus non-outcomes and my previous sort of response. Ultimately, we are in a situation where every CFO, every CEO is looking at every person in the organization and saying what is the specific value they are driving in the business? That's the honest state of affairs, what I see as I talk to people. Now, in that honest state of affairs, there is a legit question If you're talking to somebody, is it going to help drive more business for them or is it just a nice, interesting conversation? They were going to stay regardless. There are many categories of software where they're going to stay there regardless and you probably don't need to expend as much energy and effort that you are doing.
Dutta Satadip:Currently, outcomes and effort are not necessarily in sync. My personal opinion is CS absolutely needs to play a role in both upselling and cross-selling. Now, I'm not saying that there has to be the closers, but they definitely need to be the identifiers of those leads, those opportunities. There is a very simple reason the purpose of customer success is to be able to make the customer successful with the product they have. But the product is bought at a point in time and the product always evolves. CS is probably the best position to understand. Do those new use cases benefit the customer? If they do, they need to be able to produce some qualified lead that, if they're not willing or able or they don't have the skills to close it within that group, they're at least able to work in conjunction with sales and pass them along.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you over here. I wish I could fist bump you on that. It's such an important part. I think that CS professionals are positioned really well to at the very least generate those leads, At best actually do the closing, because it's less of a weird hard close because you already have a relationship with the client. It feels awkward sometimes to bring in some separate salesperson who doesn't really know the customer that well, to quote, unquote, close things. It feels weird to me. I'm glad to hear you say that because I feel pretty strongly about that.
Dutta Satadip:I think this is like a pivot that we're going to see either organizations make a lot more directly as time goes on, because everybody's going to look for efficiency of the resources being deployed rightfully. So every company is under pressure to at least make the rule of 40, if not break it. I think you're absolutely right. You have the context. You know the exact business. What's the purpose of adding a new person into the mix? Because again you'll have to go through scheduling. You have to introduce them. They may or may not know the full context. Having those skills to close, is probably the most ideal situation.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I agree. Another area that I see called in the question by both CS leaders and company executives is the idea of paid services packages. Personally, I see pros and cons to billing for services and I have a framework for making those kinds of decisions for myself and for our customers, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on services revenue and services value.
Dutta Satadip:Having gone through both situations in the past, here is my top line when you pay for something, you feel like using it and it actually just generated value for you. I know it is absolutely ridiculous, but it's how I have observed things to work. Let me feel back a little bit and talk about Pete's service packages in general. I am a big fan of actually providing some for free. Some companies are gone to the extreme where, if you're on certain plans, your support channel is some live public forum. I don't think I'm that extreme, but things I would consider being paid for. Hey, listen, if you're always demanding same business day answers for the most reactive questions you want, like weekend support and everything else, like you got to pay for it. If your business is really that critical and this software is that critical, we should be able to exchange some value and it shouldn't be free. Now, every company is going to be different, so that's like one end of it.
Dutta Satadip:On the proactive side of things, my experience has been people sign up and they literally do not set up the product correctly. It happens over and over again. Then, six months, nine months down the road, the product is not delivering what it needs to. It was never set up properly or completely, or the use cases that they thought they were going to put in. They never really did it. I feel creating some incentives to actually do that up front is important and necessary for the long-term value of the business.
Dutta Satadip:In many cases, I feel like a paid package accomplishes two things Less than offsetting the cost. I think it creates some sense of urgency, but also some sense of time, like, hey, I have like three months and I've paid this much of money. I got to get this done. I feel that urgency and that accountability that comes with paying for something, especially for, like, onboarding and other types of services I think is important. Then, for, like, ongoing services, sure, like depending on the size of the customer and everything else.
Dutta Satadip:If you're signing up for like a QBR or other things, that's great, but once you start to scale up, I think it is absolutely appropriate to charge for certain types of sessions. If you want to have an exploratory conversation around how to do certain types of set up or integrations or whatever. It's not going to be a support call, it's going to be something a little bit more expensive and you should be able to pay. I'm not saying something that is marked up to a huge premium, but something reasonable that somebody can join and exchange that value. But again you have people that are a little bit more serious coming through the pipes.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think it's the covering your costs. When you give everything away for free, to your point, the customer doesn't see as much value in it. Then also, you aren't covering your costs for providing that service. So one thing I think about when I'm trying to help our customers with this is like is it something you could do yourself if you had the time and patience and energy to do it, or is it something that you couldn't do for yourself because it requires some back end work on the system, or something that you literally could not do as a customer? If you could not do it, that's something that the customers should be provided with. If you could do it, but you're choosing to have someone help you with it, or you want somebody to take over on the project and run the project for you, then you should pay for it.
Dutta Satadip:Chris, I'll give a little bit of a supporting argument to why it should be charged to some degree and why it is necessary. Let's rewind back time Again. I've been in this business for a long time. I have been in the time where there was no subscription. People were selling like actual master services.
Kristen Hayer:Lobby disks back in the day.
Dutta Satadip:Yeah right, master services agreement, but guess what used to happen at that point in time? You would buy your software and the owners would be on the decision maker to actually get training done, get it implemented, and it was absolutely normal for people to absorb the costs. That was part of the deal, in fact.
Kristen Hayer:I know, I remember that was back in the day.
Dutta Satadip:Right.
Dutta Satadip:I don't think anyone remembers that, but maybe you and me did, yeah, so like organizations always absorb the cost in one form or the other, which says what became sort of fashionable was all of the adoption costs all of a sudden became the problem of the vendor. Hey, I signed up for blah blah blah. Now it's your job to get it adopted. Go through my digital transformation or whatever transformation I'm going through, but that's your problem, and I think we're coming to a point where maybe there is a healthier balance, and paid packages, as you have outlined in your framework, is a way to get to that better balance. We're just shared accountability between somebody who is buying the product and the person who is selling the product I mean person that's in the company to work together to come and figure out how do we become partners, versus 100% delegate the cost onto one party or the other.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I agree. I think another aspect of value is driving efficiency and effectiveness across the CS program. I think that's definitely less sexy than what we're talking about, which is driving revenue, but how should you go about communicating the cost savings aspect of value inside the company?
Dutta Satadip:I have a simple sort of tactic. I'm not saying it's the great tactic or not right, but it's the tactic I have used in the past. It is a version of the following I usually try to do some sort of like an informal time study survey or whatever that baselines what was it before before you launch. Whenever you do it, after you launch, whatever you feel is the time three months, six months run that same survey again and see if it made a difference. Most of times it makes a difference because we really thought through this and you're driving some efficiency, whether it's how you're reaching out people, how many more things you're doing.
Dutta Satadip:The way for me to quantify something like that has been FDE saved how much time, and you can divide it and get to how many people's worth of work you're saving. That's, I think that's very concrete way. It's on the precision scale, not as precise as, let's say, logging in and counting logins and all of that stuff. It still gives you a directional sense is it working, is it not working? The second thing is if we save some time, what else did we do with that time? In some cases, we are able to talk to more customers. In some cases, we are able to do certain other things like hey, we were actually able to work more with product and able to get something out I think those stories also become equally important.
Kristen Hayer:I agree. I think there's a huge opportunity cost that we forget about sometimes in CS, where the time we spend working with customers, could you spend that on something better? There's a tendency, I think, because it's a very customer-driven role, to get caught up in the reactive work that we all do, but I think everyone forgets about the fact that if you're doing that, you're missing out on opportunities to do other things that could be way more valuable. I appreciate you calling that out. Tell me how does choosing the right service model play a role in right-sizing costs for a CS team?
Dutta Satadip:I think it's probably one of the biggest topics on everybody's mind at this point in time. Kristen, we should, as leaders all of us should take a very hard look at how we are segmenting our customers and what is the menu of service that is actually required. I, at a high level, like to think of a two-byte. The two-byte two is on one axis. You can think of high-value customers and you can define value with revenue or whatever, a high value and not so high value. I wouldn't say low value but say stable, stable and high value. There's no low value customers and all customers are very valuable. But whatever you define as value revenue etc. On the other side is ability to impact and drive growth. If you do that in a second a high impact and low impact you may find there are customers who are extremely high value, producing good revenue, but they're generally penetrated for the segment of the products you offer. If those are folks in that bucket, I would recommend a menu of services that looks more like a maintenance menu of services. You probably want to leverage some digital touchpoints along with some interspersed in-person. Now, if somebody is high value and, let's say, high growth potential, you should absolutely put some versions of relationship-centric CS. On the other side of it, I would go with almost 100 percent digital or digital interspersed, with a few in-person in touches.
Dutta Satadip:As an example, one of the things that I have done in my previous companies, both at Pinterest and Active Campaign, have been more around identifying signals and data about the customers and then reaching them out via different campaigns. As an example that Active Campaign, we had a lot of customers who had integrated with Shopify but they had actually not activated those integrations. They had connected with them. In some cases they had a Shopify store and they didn't connect with them.
Dutta Satadip:But our entire value proposition was hey, if you put in a few things like abandoned cart, when your next order is going to come in, do product launches and basically marketing automation best practices that they hadn't done it? There was a lot of people. We would run campaigns specifically and we would time them around key moments around e-commerce, like around this time of the year because the Black Friday is coming up. Hopefully this gives you a little bit of sense. You have some data. You know there are customers who could benefit, instead of just going and saying, hey, I'm your CSM, let me check in, create campaigns, create other digital modes of reaching out and gauging interest and offer them like a one-hour Zoom session to do an account review and see how they can leverage the product a little bit better.
Kristen Hayer:I love that. It's really practical and would be something that would provide a ton of value to the client. I know there's softer values that CS also delivers, like building customer advocates and providing product guidance like that. When you're talking internally about your CS program and the value you're bringing to your company, how should you quantify those soft benefits of the CS program?
Dutta Satadip:I think there's a lot of soft benefits. One of them, as you have very correctly identified, is reference ability, ability to generate advocates, and some simple, some numerical. Obviously, of course, csat, nps, all of those things are table stakes. But one of the things you could talk about quantifying which we did in at least an active campaign was things like how many people are submitting reviews in G2 or something else. I feel like that is an important quantification mechanism in terms of reference ability. The other one could be case studies and other things that you're generating internally. Other things could be hey, are you able to provide deeper organizational context?
Dutta Satadip:One of the things that I observed, at least in my time looking at churn deeply. A lot of time customers churn not because something is wrong in the product or the product didn't deliver value. It's because management changed. It's because the company got acquired and the new management came in and they just wanted something, what they're familiar with, etc. One of the softer things CSAT can provide is organizational, structural insights, what's happening in the company, which gives an ability for the incumbent to proactively go up and make those relationships with the new executives. Now, it's a softer thing, but it's an absolutely valid way to manage renewals, manage expansions, manage and increase the overall customer lifetime value.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I agree. I think that that's something that's important to call out. You may, if you're talking to your leadership, need to call it out just anecdotally, but I think that it's still important to call it out. If there's a CS leader who's listening to this and they're struggling to communicate the value of their program inside their organization, what would your first piece of advice be to them?
Dutta Satadip:I think the first piece of advice would be to make sure that everybody understands what outcomes is this organization optimized for, and preferably quantifiable, but if not quantifiable, at least anecdotally. What is what you need to sort of say you're going to provide? If it's quantifiable, then obviously there is going to be some way to kind of produce this on a relatively regular basis short and graphs and charts, all of that good stuff. If it's anecdotal, this is where sort of like the challenge creeps in. I feel like if it's anecdotal, people do it once and then they don't do it enough. If your value is going to be anecdotal, you definitely want to invest in doubling up your cadence, because then it's up to you to be able to tell those stories, not of that one customer that happened four months back, but something that is happening every single month, every other week. The onus of communication is really centered on their leader. To drive home that point.
Kristen Hayer:I agree, and I think that you have to sort of pick your stories too. The thing that you're talking about might be happening across 15, 20 companies, but pick the best story and convey that story and then say and also, we're hearing this from 20 other companies. Don't try to tell every single story, choose the story with the best impact.
Dutta Satadip:I think Can I say one more thing, Kristen, Sure, that is super important.
Dutta Satadip:As leaders, you are tuned in also what the company is trying to do. Maybe they're trying to launch a new product and marketing needs actual case studies. Now what a great opportunity. You may have 10 things that happen. Pick the ones for that month or that two weeks time frame to be the customers that are exactly talking about, the things that stop on line for everybody. There's this element of connectivity. I've seen like leaders go ahead and select four customers that we saved and they keep talking about customer save, where maybe people have understood that concept. But they want to understand the concept of growth, the concept of referenceability, the concept of expansion and how that was driven and what was the story behind it. I think variety of stories and then connecting them with what's going on in the company and what's on top of the mind of the executive leadership team. I think super important.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I love that. It makes you sort of as the leader. You're the PR person for your department. You need to be that. Last question this is a chance to off-road a little bit Duta. What do you see as the biggest trend in CS right now and why?
Dutta Satadip:I think my first little observation is everybody wants to focus on growth and understand how CS will contribute to driving growth. I think CSQL there's a lot of discussions around CSQL and things like that. I think that's just the beginning. Having your team have the ability to not just identify but identify and close, I think, is what's going to be a big driver of success. Things like digital, CS and being more efficient they're all stable stakes in any running off of business. You have to get more efficient. You have to deploy your resources wisely. As all senior leaders, this is like our responsibility to our companies. In terms of the trend, it's definitely going to be much more top-line focused, at least in the next coming years.
Kristen Hayer:I agree with you. I think that's fantastic. Well, Dutta, thank you so much for sharing your ideas on communicating the value of customer success inside your organization. I know this is very top of mind for a lot of leaders right now. If someone wanted to connect with you directly, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Dutta Satadip:I'm usually pretty responsible. On LinkedIn, I would say feel free to connect with me. My handle is Dutta S D-U-T-T-A-S. I'm looking forward to engaging with your listeners. Hopefully I can share some tips from my experience that would help everybody.
Kristen Hayer:Dutta, t hanks so much again. I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at AuraFirm Audio. This podcast is a production of Success League Radio. To learn more about the Success League's consulting and training offerings, please visit our website, thesuccessleague. io. For more great customer success content. Follow the Success League on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, Google, Amazon or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.