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SAP's Lakshmi Neelakantan on Delivering Customer Value through Platform as a Service
Unlock the secrets of customer value with Lakshmi Neelakantan from SAP, as we delve into the world of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Lakshmi has an extensive background in computer science and offers valuable insights, from leveraging the SAP Business Technology Platform to accelerating the journey of value realization for customers.
Listen as we discuss fostering customer relationships that make renewals second nature. With Lakshmi's expertise, this episode is a journey into the heart of Customer Success in the ever-evolving platform ecosystem.
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 Kristen Hayer and I'm the host of Innovations in Leadership and the founder and CEO of The Success League. Today, I'm joined by Lakshmi Neelakantan, who is the director of Customer Success from SAP. Today, we're going to be talking about ways to deliver customer value through platform as a service. Lakshmi, welcome to the podcast today.
Lakshmi:Thank you so much, Kristen. Thanks for having me here.
Kristen:Tell me about your career path. How did you end up in customer success at SAP?
Lakshmi:I started my career in startup after my graduation in computer science engineering, so I was fortunate to get a lot of industry exposure early in my career, starting from product development. I did product development. I also did business development, pre-sales and I was also in the sales organization in my startup and then I got an opportunity to join SAP. I joined SAP in the development organization but then I moved on to the pre-sales where I spent most of my time, and during my time in pre-sales I did a fellowship in the product management team which actually landed me the job and the customer success for that particular product which I was doing fellowship for. So that's how I landed in the Customer Success field, and I must also mention that I was new to customer success and I had no background about customer success when I got this role. I got this role purely based on the product knowledge that I had and my ability to network within SAP. And I must say that I was greatly benefited from one of your workshops where I learned few techniques and I still use those techniques.
Kristen:Oh, that's fantastic. Thanks for sharing that. I love hearing success stories. Tell us a little bit about your division at SAP. It's a huge company, of course, so you're one of many directors there. Tell us a little bit more about your role and your team specifically.
Lakshmi:Sure, so my team is part of the Customer Success board area. Within customer success board area, we have different organizations. I'm part of the organization which is focused on driving adoption and consumption and I'm part of the platform Customer Success team. So SAP, as you mentioned, is solutions for all the businesses, all the business needs and its feature reach and we have a lot of products. And I'm part of the Platform Customer Success team and I actually lead two customer success teams within. One is focused on the regulated industries segment, basically all the customers that you have in federal, state government utilities, basically the customer segment which basically runs our country. And another segment is the Acceleration Customer Success team, which is focused on engaging with the customer for the fixed duration of time, like four to six months, but accelerate the journey and making sure that they realize value quickly and exit. So these are the two Customer Success team I manage in SAP.
Kristen:So today we're going to be talking about how you can deliver customer success value through a platform as a service offering, which is a little different than software as a service. But before we dive into all the specifics around that, can you describe for our audience what you mean when you say platform as a service?
Lakshmi:Yeah, for sure. I think one thing which I wanted to mention is you have a lot of frameworks that are available for a software as a service, so we know how to make sure a customer in a SaaS model is successful. But then platform as a service is very different from SaaS and this question is very relevant to understand how it is different. So imagine you're building a sandcastle. Instead of you bringing your own sand, water and shovel and bucket, there's sandbox that is already available for you so you can start building a casual immediately. That's what is platform as a service is offering. It's like more like a sandbox. It offers all the tools and capabilities we need to solve a particular business problem or to build an application. So all the tools, like the sand, water and shovel and bucket we can get started in building the application or solving a problem instantly, without waiting to procure the sand or worry about all the basic components.
Kristen:Really like that analogy. I think that's great. It makes it so easy to understand.
Lakshmi:And, of course, the main objective of PaaS is to make the work of building applications a lot easier, and the team that I'm part of within SAP is a platform customer-sixth team and our product is basically called as Business Technology Platform, which is catered to SAP applications, so it makes extension of SAP applications and integration between SAP applications easier with the platform capabilities.
Kristen:That's fantastic. What do you see as the biggest differences between software as a service and platform as a service inside CS?
Lakshmi:When it comes to Customer Success, it's about ensuring that the customer realizes value and realizes value quickly. In terms of platform, value realization takes time and platform because platform is feature rich, it's open and that it doesn't have a fixed scope like a SaaS solution you need to use a platform to realize value from it and it can be used in so many different ways. And platform by itself doesn't in most cases doesn't have a project lifecycle on its own, and the only way to drive success of a platform from a customer success context is we need to proliferate the use of platform across different needs, across different projects. So the customers must be using so many different capabilities of a platform to realize value across different projects. If we are buying a platform just to use one specific capability, probably we are not going to realize value. So it's very important for a customer to use all the different capabilities that the platform is offering.
Lakshmi:Basically, proliferate the use of platform to realize value. And in order to proliferate the use of platform, the customer must know how to use the different capabilities of platform. So that is the major difference in terms of from a customer success perspective, and the other major difference from a customer success standpoint is when it comes to platform, the competition is not during the sale. The competition is during the adoption. So it's very important for the platform customer success team to stay involved with the technical architects and the technical vision makers to choose the platform capability when the project is being executed. So that is what we see as a major difference between a platform customer success group or a platform and a software as a service from a customer success standpoint.
Kristen:Just to clarify that last point and I want to make sure I understand it. It sounds like sometimes you get into a project with a group and the biggest competition is from inside the house, like we want to keep doing it the way we've always done it, or we want to build it ourselves in our own way, with our own approach, and not use your platform. Is that what you're saying? I would yeah, both.
Lakshmi:Both are relevant, and I would actually add one more, which is basically when it comes to platform. There are so many options in the market, so the customer would usually have more than one platform in their landscape. They have choices and that decision to use which platform capability. That happens during the project blueprinting stage, so that's when we need to actually ensure that the capabilities of our platform is selected and evaluated.
Kristen:Yeah, so it sounds like a lot more of almost a sales effort is going into managing customers as they choose to do new projects with you.
Lakshmi:Yeah, and it is a kind of sales effort, but with the technical decision makers so the technical architects and the technical decision makers because it's an open-ended product, which meaning it has a lot of capabilities and tools, and it is during the project kickoff is when we decide which tool or capability to use to solve that particular problem. So that's why it's very important to convince the technical audience or the technical decision makers to choose our capability during the project kickoff.
Kristen:Yeah, so tell me about your approach to Customer Success in your platform as a service model. How have you approached that and what have you done? And what does that look like across your team?
Lakshmi:So we actually have a framework called Future Ready Enterprise Engagement Framework to drive adoption and success for platform customers or platform.
Lakshmi:As this is technology platform, any platform does tools and capabilities, and all of these capabilities can be clustered into specific domains. We want the customers to, like I said, in order to realize value from a platform, use the platform across all the different domains and across multiple projects. So what we do with our Future Ready Enterprise Framework is actually we focus on what is the relevant domains for the customer to begin our engagement and we ensure that the customer evolves in maturity for that particular domain. We don't actually stop there. We try to identify there are additional technology domain that would be relevant for the customer, by educating the customer and also explaining to the customer what these capabilities, which they are not using, is capable of and trying to see if there is a roadmap item which can be solved using this particular capability. So we try to evolve our customer's maturity across one specific domain that is relevant for the customer, but then we also try to identify additional domains that could be relevant because the customer already has the license and our objective is to ensure that the customer maximizes the value by using the different tools and capabilities of the platform. So in our Future Ready Enterprise Framework we start with what we call maturity evolution. First we try to anchor what is the relevant domain for the customer. Once we understand, okay, this is the relevant domain, we try to make sure that the customer starts with L0 or L1. So they need to get started with that particular capability. We help the customer get started with a free tier plan and then maybe help them evaluate that particular capability for the project, maybe move to L1 or L2, where we actually do a small POC, ensure that the customer realizes value or understands the value and what the capability can do for them, and then kick off a project. That's basically our level two. Once they realize a value with one specific project, we actually move on to level three. This is where we level up our conversation and make sure that a particular capability is used across different projects. Like, for example, integration is one of our capability and all the platforms offer this kind of capabilities.
Lakshmi:Integration. If it is used only in the context of HR, I think that is still a success, but that's not going to give the customer the maximum value from the platform investment. So we need to use this same capability in finance in CX. So these are user integration in finance, user integration capability in CX. That's the way you actually matured the customers' use of the platform. So that's basically our level three.
Lakshmi:Level four is basically scalable execution for us, which is basically ensuring that the customer not just uses the platform but also understands what is the best practice, how they can use this capability enterprise-wide. And the final target of our maturity evolution is basically center of excellence. We want the customers to achieve self-sufficiency, because once they achieve self-sufficiency, they know how to maximize the value from the platform. So that is the stage where we want all of our customers to achieve across all the different domains, not just one domain. In this example we took integration, but then platform has so many different technology domains. So we want to focus on all the domains that would be relevant for the customer and evolve their maturity from getting started to achieving a center of excellence.
Kristen:That's fantastic and I think what's interesting about it is it does require CSMs who have some special skill sets. I think Like you need to be a bit of a consultant, you need to understand business models and the customer's business structure and you need to have a pretty strong technology background so that you can be having conversations with technology experts. It's really interesting.
Lakshmi:Absolutely, and the framework actually not only helps customers evolve maturity, but it also helps the customer success executives to actually apply this framework, because not everybody is a consultant, not everybody has a consulting background, but the framework is designed in such a way that every customer success executive can ask the right questions and advice based on what the customer needs. So we have actually have a domain which is basically the capability of a platform, but then we have developed a dimension across all these domains, like, for example, the strategy is a dimension, knowledge is a dimension, roadmap is a dimension and capability delivery capability is a dimension and IT operations is a dimension. When we do this, maturity evolution. So we actually have a technique called maturity assessment. So we get into a conversation with the customer. We actually say this is a relevant domain for you and you are going to use this particular capability in such and such way, but this is not going to give you the maximum value. We need to actually understand how you're going to use this capability. Do you have anything in the roadmap that could use this capability? How is your knowledge? Are you using the entire product capability, like, for example, the portfolio success? Are you leveraging the breadth and depth of the product or are you just using a small piece in the product? So these are the different dimensions in which we evaluate the customer.
Lakshmi:So the customers actually, when they respond, when they start to respond, we try to map it to the current level and we actually validate with the customer and we also try to understand where the customer wants to be.
Lakshmi:If the customer says, right now, I'm going to use this capability just for one project, I don't see a use for this capability in my roadmap, then I think the target also this L2, the current status L2 and the target is L2.
Lakshmi:So there's nothing much we can do for this customer to drive further value. So if the customer says, okay, my current usage is just for this project, but have plans to use this across my enterprise, so, and I want to establish a center of excellence, so the current maturity is L2, but then the target maturity becomes L5. We as a customer success team, we take that back as a feedback and we come up with a list of activities and we lay it out in our roadmap and say these are the activities that we are going to offer from a customer success organization to you on these timelines, which is why we call it as a roadmap. So once we actually share that plan with the customer, once they agree that, okay, this is what we are going to do, then that becomes our success plan, our engagement plan with the customers.
Kristen:That's fantastic. I like that. It's systematic. I think if I was a CSM on your team, I would be excited to know that there's a really planned out approach to how I'm going to help my customer see value. It would make your CS professionals jobs much easier, I think, because there's kind of a consistent plan. What are some of the results that you've seen from this approach at SAP?
Lakshmi:First of all, this particular model actually is greatly beneficial for the customer. The customer really likes this kind of model and the objective or our purpose is to evolve the customer's maturity so they become self-sufficient. One of the biggest benefit that we see so far is the customer's maturity evolution and having a structured way, a customer success engagement model for a platform. First of all, when we started to share this with the customers, customers thought that they need to pay for such a great framework and engagement. Then we said no, this part of our customer success offering. They all liked it because all of our customers want the engagement to be very structured and it is relevant for them.
Lakshmi:This framework helps us evolve customer's maturity. It gives us structure. We can actually see where the customers today and where they want to be in the future. The future is not for us, it's like three to six months. We can actually see where they want to go and how quickly they want to go and what would be relevant for them in the future. It gives us a structured way of segmenting the customer based on their maturity and it gives us a framework and a model to evolve customer's maturity and come up with a list of activities based on what they want to achieve. It's not based on what we want the customers to achieve, but what the customer wants.
Kristen:Cool. I love this. If I was a customer, I would be excited about it too, because I think that it definitely helps to know where you're at as a customer, but I think it also gives customers a vision for where they can go, and customers don't always have that. I think that it's nice that you have a tool that helps them to see where they could be in the future and how much better all of their systems could be if they're using this. I think it's an amazing process and tool that you've developed.
Lakshmi:Definitely, Just because the customer knows where they want to go and they also are aligned with us on our engagement plan or the success plan. One other result that we are seeing is improved adoption and consumption. With improved adoption consumption, we are also seeing better customer attention. We are making renewal and non-event, because adoption and consumption becomes a leading indicator for customer success, because renewal is always considered to be a lagging indicator and we want the customers to start adopting and consuming, and in a very structured method.
Kristen:Yeah, I love it. What advice would you give to a customer success professional who's considering joining an organization like SAP, where there is a platform as a service and maybe an approach or maybe not an approach like yours? What are the questions they should be asking? What skills should they be bringing to the table?
Lakshmi:I think there are some skills which are required to be a Customer Success professional. So of course, that is required for a platform customer success professional as well. But on top of that, it's always good to be technical, have a technical mindset and have an ability to engage with the architects, because it is the technical decision makers and architects who we need to influence wholesale, to use our product, so we need to talk the same language. So it requires good understanding about what the product is capable of and map it to the business problem that it could solve for the customer and connect the dots. This is done by the technical decision maker and that is a very important skill to have to have the technical mindset and to have a product knowledge.
Lakshmi:Platform is feature rich, so there could be so many different services, so sometimes it can be overwhelming for anybody who wants to be a platform customer success professional. So I would say do some research and find out what is the most popular service or popular domain or capability that is common for that particular customer segment and try to level up. You can also apply the same maturity evolution in your own customer success enablement journey as well, so you can start with okay during the level one, you basically want the customer to get started with your service, so focus on that. And maybe in level two, probably you need to provide some advice on how that can be used in a project. So you need to focus on that kind of knowledge. And level three, of course you need to talk to the architects and make sure that the capability is pre-selected and it's included in the blueprint. So maybe that's the point where you need to know how to engage with the architects.
Lakshmi:What is the road? So you need to have the roadmap conversation with the customer. So my advice is, yeah, focus on technical and architecture skills If you want to become a platform as a service customer success professional and of course, you need to have that foundational customer success skills, which is basically the product knowledge, commercial knowledge you need to have. Of course, you need to know how the product is priced, how it's consumed, how is it metered to help the customers and advise the customers and, of course, you need to have the ability to build a relationship with the customer. So that is definitely the foundational skills that is required to be successful.
Kristen:Great. Now shifting to our last question. This is a chance to off-road a little bit if you have different ideas. But what do you see as the biggest trend in Customer Success today, and why?
Lakshmi:That's a great question. For me, I can actually organize this response in as a cultural trend and a technology trend. As a culture, what I see as the biggest trend is Customer Success is starting to become a company culture. With the introduction of product-led growth, it's no longer only about promises made during the sale. We need to deliver on that promise. Therefore, adoption and consumption have become leading indicators for customer retention. This certainly also improves the product and value we deliver for our customers. As we say in Customer Success, the thought about customer success must start during product design and not for sale. Customer Success as a company culture forces that thought process. So that is what I see as a cultural trend. Then, of course, from a technology perspective, when we talk about technology trend, how can we not talk about Gen AI? Even in our organization, we are exploring how we could leverage the power of GenAI LLMs to improve productivity for customer success teams, thus improving both customer and also the employee experience. So these are the two big trends that I see right now in customer success.
Kristen:Very cool. I think AI is such an interesting thing. It is such a trendy topic right now. It's easy to forget that, while there have been a lot of recent, very near-term advances in it, we have been using AI in lots of ways already. In CS, that's what the chatbots have been. It's like rudimentary versions of that. So we've actually been, as a field, on the cutting edge of AI for quite a while. I'm using some of those tools that have been available, but it is really exciting to see what's coming in terms of AI.
Kristen:Well, Lakshmi, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for sharing your perspective on delivering value through Platform as a Service. Thank you so much, Kristen. I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at Auraform 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 or you can join our newsletter on our website. You can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, Google, Amazon or really anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.