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Revolutionizing the Customer Success Journey with Ryan Ballein
Unlock the secrets to revolutionizing your Customer Success journey with Ryan Ballein, a trailblazer in the CS arena. You'll hear invaluable insights from Ryan's transition from sales to leadership and his expert strategies for building a robust CS function from the ground up. Kristen and Ryan's conversation focuses on implementing digital-first customer engagement, emphasizing automation's role in freeing up CS managers for more meaningful work, thus amplifying customer satisfaction and employee fulfillment.
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, and today I'm joined by Ryan Ballein, who is a seasoned CS leader who's served in a variety of CS management roles since 2016. We're going to be talking about digital first, customer success. And Ryan, welcome to the podcast.
Ryan:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Kristen:Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about your career path and how you ended up in CS leadership?
Ryan:Absolutely. So like many of us who've been in CS for a while, I didn't start my career in Customer Success. While that is the thing you can do today, which is amazing I started in sales Me too, yeah, so a lot of us started in sales and many of the aspects I really enjoyed the discovery, the needs assessment. But I think commonly you'll hear folks that have moved into CS from Sales as they didn't like the transactional nature of it. So I did Sales for many years and stayed within that same organization and then moved into account management. So that's sort of where I learned sort of the foundations of post-sales sort of revenue management. And then in 2016, the founder of a very small startup in Boulder took a chance on me and I was the eighth employee to join the organization and was tasked with building a CS function. So really my first foyer into CS was sort of designing a program from the ground up, taking the bits and pieces I had learned from working in the Fortune 100 space as an account manager.
Kristen:That's fantastic. So I know we're going to be talking about digital first Customer success today. For our audience, can you define what you mean when you say digital first, because digital gets thrown around a whole lot in our field.
Ryan:Yeah. So I would challenge those listening today that digital first Customer Success, in my view, is the future of Customer Success. But in many ways, digital first, or what was previously referred to as scale customer success, started as a one-to-many function, and this sort of came about as SaaS businesses went down market and the ability for CSMs to be assigned to individual accounts became unscalable, and so CS practitioners look to apply CS models in the traditional sense to a more one-to-many approach, leveraging oftentimes marketing tools to try and drive engagement with customers. Now I would go a step further in saying that because digital first customer success started that way doesn't mean it's going to stay that way.
Ryan:In my view, the future of digital first customer success is identifying areas that your CSMs are spending, that are not adding value to the business, to the customer or to their career path. There are a lot of things that we do in our day-to-day that are sort of raw, that don't add value, and so I think the future and I think the challenge to CS leaders is, regardless of the type of customer profile you have, are there areas that you can automate out of the CS process that don't add value? And so that's sort of, I would say, is the proposal that I would make to those listening today is to think about what are the tasks that a human doesn't need to do, and those tasks often are the things that are detractors from their engagement in their work as well.
Kristen:Yeah, I agree and I think that you bring up an interesting point that this isn't just something for one segment of your customer base. This is something for all of the segments of your base and you might implement it differently for different segments. But automation is good and automation. I think we sometimes forget in CS that humans aren't always what customers want, like. Sometimes, customers want some automation and want something to be digital, and that would be a better experience for them than having their hand held all the time by a CSM, and so to accomplish what you're describing, I think we have to sort of also get out of the mindset of digital equals worse than a person. I don't know what are your thoughts on that?
Ryan:Yeah, I think my thought is, as a CS leader, ask your employees what tasks that they have to do on a daily or weekly basis that they don't feel like adds any value to them, and work backwards from there. Is there a report that could be automated? Are there things that they have to review at an account level that could be programmatically run? And what you do with that data whether it's programmatically send it to a customer or just alert a CSM is sort of up to you as the practitioner and leader.
Ryan:But I would argue that automation is not a good or a bad thing. It's really about how you layer it in along with the human engagements, right? And can you automate the things that are less valuable so that the people who are building the relationships and the trust when driving the business forward can be spending more time doing that right, spending time with the right customers instead of? You know, I think back to when I was first to see a leader was like let's just call every customer once a month, right? Some customers might need two or three calls and some customers might not need any, right? So how can you truly like feed up to your employees the tasks that are most important for that day or that week, and I think that automation is really important to think about.
Kristen:In your most recent leadership role, you have the opportunity to build out a digital first CS program, which is what we're going to spend the most time today talking about. But before we get into the details, what was the business driver behind taking a digital first approach?
Ryan:I think that's a great question and a good primer. So when I joined SIN7, they had gone through sort of the hockey stick growth that most asked companies had experienced in the, you know, 2020 through kind of 2022. And so there was a large growth of the customer base and at the same time, they had not grown their CS team. There were a handful of people who were doing customer success but were primarily aligned to really the largest customers and actually, after sort of looking at those customers, the least likely to turn or either down sell and so we had to sort of rethink the model and the goal was really how do we start driving engagement with these newer customers who hadn't really achieved a ton of value or a ton of adoption at scale? And to do that we needed to identify a way to not pick up the phone and try and call 8,000 customers one by one and ask them how they're doing, but really understand how are they using the platform, were they getting value out of it and, if not, how could we encourage certain behaviors?
Ryan:And so I think that the primary driver, especially at the beginning, was really how do we get engaged with as many customers as possible, as quickly as possible, and so leveraging a one to many or digital first approach was sort of incumbent on us because, joining the business, I could have said I want to hire 20 people tomorrow, but that would still take more time to ramp people up and get them engaged with the product and understanding how to talk to customers. And so in many ways it was how can we have an impact quickly and how can we have a measurable impact? That's the other thing I think is really cool about digital first customer successes. There's a lot of data behind it. So it was how can we drive results and how can we measure those results in a quick fashion as the business continued to scale?
Kristen:And so then, you've made up your mind, you want to go down this road right, because you've got those drivers. How did you decide to approach the project? Were some of your first steps.
Ryan:I think the first step probably of any CS leader today joining a business is to try and get their hands on as much data as possible and start to define what is the ideal customer, what is a customer who's getting value and what is a customer who isn't.
Ryan:And what we found in a pretty stark way was that customers that had been on the platform for over a year had a hyperpensity to renew, to buy more and use the product more, and customers that were under a year had a really high churn risk, which gave us sort of those initial data points to say this is the cohort we need to go after.
Ryan:And then from there, what we did is we looked at what are the customers that are past year doing that the customers in their first year are not doing right, what are those behaviors, what are the things they've adopted that look different? And we can start to map out the ideal behaviors that take place in the first three, six and nine months. And so that's sort of how we started to approach it is what is that year one journey right and what are the first steps that customers need to take to quickly get to value? And I think that's a pretty normal concept but it was really stark in the business. The majority of the churn was those new customers who just weren't getting up and running and actually we saw that customers who didn't get certain things done in the first six months essentially stopped logging in and were essentially already churned and just waited till the end of that contract to fall off.
Kristen:Got it Okay. I guess I'm curious how long did it take you to get to sort of looking at some of those early results and you know what was the timeline we're talking about here, that you've had to build things out? I think that's one question I always get from people is like, if we go down this road, how long is this all going to take?
Ryan:Yeah. So it's certainly a very iterative process. I think that's part of the fun, right? I don't think you ever roll out a digital first program and then your first swing get it right. You've got to kind of take the lowest common denominator and say what are the things that we think we can measure, capture and target early on right. So find those things that you know are important, that customers do, and start messaging those and know that you're not going to get it perfectly right. And I would even encourage CS leaders to, before you even launch a digital first program, meet with other executive leaders and get buy-in that, hey, these are things that we want our customers to do, right.
Ryan:So at SIN7, it was getting your products uploaded as simple as that seems. A lot of customers didn't do that right away. Setting up your sales channels and then setting up an accounting integration we're the first three things. Then, from there, activating a sales channel and seeing just that first order come through. For those of you that don't know, since seven it's an inventory and order management Cloud technology that allows product sellers to sell in a variety of digital ways Through Amazon Shopify. The first step was just get one sales channel set up. Have the sales go through it, have it automatically send to the warehouse and then have it reconcile back to your accounting. All of a sudden, there's this light bulb moment. While that made perfect sense to us and almost seems obvious, the setup wasn't obvious to the customer. The approach was how do we get them to take baby steps and guide them through this? And then I think the second piece is really understanding what is the tech stack you have today. You may have a lot of data, but it may be unorganized. So we had Salesforce, we had Snowflake, we had Pendo and we chose to bring in ChurnZ ero to be sort of that central hub where we could start to build out customer profiles, whether it's looking at tenure or spend or geo. You can layer in a variety of different things, but that became sort of our central hub for sending out messages or campaigns and then being able to measure against them.
Ryan:But before we even started that, I think it's really important to get the business to the line on what do we want to encourage customers to do more of? And usually that's not part of a conversation if you have it up front, and so then when you're presenting results or talking about what you're working on. It's under the guise of we all have a shared desire to see customers do more of this and less of that, and so I think that sort of has to be an impetus. Or the start of the program is hey, we're gonna try and drive customers to do more of X and Y and less of Z, and do we all agree?
Ryan:Products engineering do we agree on this? Yes, cool, okay, now we're gonna go try and attack this thing. So I would encourage CS leaders to not do this in a bubble, right, don't do it in a corner. Start with buy-in from the rest of the organization and oftentimes, because this is an opportunity to drive efficiency and drive greater reach and connectivity to customers, most people are willing to say, yeah, let's give it a shot.
Kristen:Yeah, and I think too, if you have some disagreement amongst your peers, you can always kind of fall back on like, well, let's test it and see what the data says, and then try maybe try a couple of different messages or a couple of different paths and see which results in more revenue and less churn, and that's a great way to kind of tackle it. But you can't do that if you don't have the information from the other leaders on what they think drives customer behavior. I'm so glad you call that out because I think cross-functional leadership for CS leaders is so important. Looping in those other groups is critical. So we were talking about the digital parts of this program. What role, if any, did your CSMs play in this?
Ryan:I think that's something important that you can't overlook is, just because you want to start a digital first methodology or approach, the people that you really have to get buy-in from are the CSMs. The way that I would encourage leaders to talk about this is to think about driving the right type of engagement. So if we know that login, for example, is something that we want to track and a customer doesn't log in for, say, seven days, the CSM has to send an email out every time that happens. That can be taxing, and so the goal was really what are the things that you feel like take a lot of your time, that aren't driving value and can we flip it on its head? So, rather than you reaching out every time we see a customer not logging in with the recency we'd expect, let's send them a message and maybe 50% of them will see that and start logging in again, and then we've cut down that cohort in half and now you have a smaller list of customers that you're then going to reach out to, because you know they saw the message and they're still not logging in. So what it really does is it starts to create a funnel, in my perspective, where you can get a large majority of your customers to start doing things without requiring people to pick up the phone sort of willy nilly and then it starts to refine the list of the customers who are really most at risk because they're not actually doing the thing that you're asking them to do, which is ultimately use the product.
Ryan:So that type of buy-in from the CS team is important, and then I think the second thing is invite them into the process. Invite CSMs into helping write initial campaigns. If one of your CSMs is an expert on a certain part of the product that you want to get more customers to use, give them the task of starting to write the initial copy. Okay, I'm not a great at writing copy. It's not a strength of mine. So if I have someone on my team who wants to jump in and help write a campaign like, let's do that right.
Ryan:Obviously, you have to have checks and balances. You don't want just CSMs creating digital campaigns that they feel are right. They have to be aligned to strategies. But I think the concept of aligning people to strategies as opposed to just customers is sort of a new concept, and so that was sort of our initial past.
Ryan:I had five CSMs, and so each one of them was assigned to a different campaign, targeting a different segment of customers and a different behavior, so that if a cohort of those customers didn't achieve that goal or that outcome we were looking for, they then had a short list at the beginning of the week to say these are the customers I'm not going to go engage with, who didn't interact with that message that I helped build right. And so it's really inviting the CS team into the innovation process, as opposed to as a leader, saying I'm the innovator and you're just the doers, right, and so that's, I think, a little bit of both leadership philosophy as well as just what do you do when you have a small team and you have a big mountain to climb? It's a lot easier to climb, yeah.
Kristen:Yeah, you have to be a little scrappy. I think when you have a small team and that drives a lot of really cool innovation, it's stressful, but it also can be really great if you're leveraging those team members and not just feeling like you have to tell them what to do. People are smart. They come up with great things on their own. It kind of brings me, though, to my next question, which is sort of you know, you've got this program you've designed, and we all know that programs don't exist in vacuums and that there's a lot that has to change surrounding the program to make it work. What are some other changes that you needed to make surrounding the program itself? I'm thinking like did you have to change the profile of the people that you were hiring, or did you need to educate your team differently, or change how you engage with other groups in the organization that all surrounded the implementation of this program?
Ryan:I think that maybe the biggest challenge of digital transformation and change is getting stakeholder buy-in. I think the first step was really getting our platform team that held a lot of the data that ultimately told us what customers were doing, and our product teams aligned in the vision to agree that, hey, we're going to centralize our data. I think oftentimes you find in organizations data is siloed, and breaking down those walls is important, and really starting with the why one of my favorite Simon Sinek books is a good way to start with that. Why are we doing this? Sharing that we had to change the technology we were using. We brought in Insurance Zero, as I had shared, but I think that the biggest change was actually the type of individual we were hiring. We had more seasoned CSMs initially on the team, and so with this digital first strategy, we actually brought in more junior, more younger CSMs into the team and really we're able to hire more and place people throughout the world. So my team had folks in Europe, India, New Zealand and in the US, and so that really gave us global coverage. And then it was important to really change the mindset around owning my inbox versus sort of the shared inboxes as well, and so the biggest sort of shift was this concept of collaboration right, rather than it being my book of business I own 30 customers, it's I own the strategy, but throughout a year or two years, different individuals may interact with that customer. So I think those are some of the challenges that we faced and it took time, right.
Ryan:I think you don't get buy-in initially, and I think the biggest turning point was really when the CS team started seeing the results right.
Ryan:I think one of the most important things you have to do as a leader is make people feel like they're having an impact, and when you set this up initially, it's all based on sort of a vision, and it's really when that vision becomes sort of rooted in oh, I'm actually having more calls with customers and I'm spending less time receiving tickets and I come in on, you know, on a Monday and I know the customers I need to engage with. I feel impactful, I feel like I'm making a difference. That's really where you see the change and you have to ask for trust in that vision, and so it takes time. It took us the better part of six months to really get the thing fully stood up, but that we didn't start fully stood up right. It's you start with a couple of campaigns and you sort of test it out and you kind of have to start small and sort of grow from there, if that makes sense.
Kristen:I agree with that so much. I think where I see teams get stuck is when they're trying to really design a very robust program right from the start and they want everything to be perfect right off the bat Instead of just starting small, with a few campaigns. Growing and iterating over time is definitely the best way to do it, both because it's easier to build a program that way and also it does create more of a buffer for your team as they're going through that change management process of learning to do things differently?
Ryan:Absolutely, and I'll add just one thought, which is you start small and you start with just a test cohort, you have the opportunity to learn and adapt more quickly than if you try and launch a big program. And if that big program that took a year to build doesn't work, there's a lot of invested time already that you've lost. And so if you start small, with a few key campaigns, and build off of that and learn from it, it gives you the opportunity to continue to adapt.
Kristen:I think that's great advice. Is there anything else that you would have done differently in hindsight that you could share with the group?
Ryan:You can always look back and say I could have done things differently. I think my biggest advice when building out the first iterations of a digital first program is design with the end result. What are the key impacts that you want to measure and make sure that that's really clear. How often do we hear folks outside of CS ask what does CS really do? Or we sort of get that you own, like retention, but like what else? What is CS really doing to drive that right?
Ryan:And so, when you launch those first campaigns, set some targets, set some goals. Hey, we want 50% of customers to engage with this and 30% of them to change their behavior. And if you fall short, you fall short, but set some goals right To measure against so that you know you've got a target, set a target right and I think that's something that you know, you learn along the way. But I wish I would have set more clear targets at the very beginning of this digital campaign's goal. Is this right? And then more transparent about that, or clear with with just everyone on what the goal of each campaign was.
Kristen:There's always some stuff in every project where you're like oh, I would have done that a lot differently, but I appreciate you offering that advice to the audience today, because I think it's helpful for them to know. To start with that end in mind is always good. So that brings me to my last question, which is a chance for you to off-road a little bit. What do you see as the biggest trend in Customer Success right now, and why?
Ryan:I think that you know what are the trends in Customer Success. I think CS leaders need to be really clear about what they own and they need to be very aware of how what they own drives both the growth and efficiency of the business. The concept of Rule of Forty has been around for a while. I think CS leaders need to understand directly how their team has an impact on that and if they're doing things that take up a lot of time that they cannot directly correlate to the efficiency you know improving the cost of serve, for example, or the growth right Whether it's cross-seller upsell or this new concept of CS QLs right If they're not clear on how they're delivering to that, it's going to be really hard for them to continue to make the case to grow their teams and have businesses invest in them.
Ryan:I think in the sort of macro environment we're in today, it's all that much more important for CS leaders to be really clear with that and also be clear with their teams. This is the goal we're marching towards, right, whether it's a retention goal or a gross upsell or whatever that goal is. Filter that down as well. Right, so that you have a shared goal. Don't hold those metrics by yourself and let the CS team not think about it. I think it will empower CS leaders to have a greater impact on businesses.
Kristen:I absolutely agree with that, and if there's anybody who's listening who doesn't know Rule of Forty, you should go look that up. You can just Google it. It's very common practice in SaaS metrics right now and investors really look at that. If you're a CS leader and you have aspirations maybe you're a manager or a director today and you have aspirations to go into the executive ranks and be a VP or a CCO you have to understand that. You have to understand how CS fits into the big picture of a company's business plan and where you fit and what levers you pull. Because you pull a lot of levers.
Kristen:You are there in a lot of spaces and I think sometimes we get kind of thrown into this category of a happiness department by other groups in the organization and we need to really be pushing the message as an industry that that is not what customer success is. Customer Success is a value department and that drives a lot of the major levers for the company. So I appreciate you bringing that up. If you're listening and you don't know what that is, just Google it, you'll find it. It's a common calculation that's being used today. Well, Ryan, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. I really appreciate your perspective on digital first Customer Success and your ideas and examples on how you executed on that at your last organization. So if someone wanted to reach out and get more information from you about what you did, or just wanted to connect, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
Ryan:I'd be more than happy to chat with any CS leader. I think LinkedIn's probably the easiest way to find me. I check it often but, as always, love sharing ideas and love hearing what other people are doing right. That's the cool part about being in this space is it's still relatively new and there's a lot we can still learn from each other.
Kristen:Absolutely Well. Thanks again, and I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at AuraFarm Audio. This podcast is a production of Success League Radio. To learn more about the Success Leagues Consulting and Training offerings, please visit our website, thesuccessleague. io and ff\ more great customer success content, follow The Success League on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter on our website. You can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, Google, Amazon anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.