Success League Radio
Success League Radio
Revolutionizing Customer Success: Integrating AI for Efficiency and Revenue with Pallavi Gadepalli
Unlock the secrets of how AI can revolutionize the customer success space with insights from Pallavi Gadepalli, the dynamic founder and CEO of Stealth AI Startup. Pallavi's fascinating journey from developer to product manager and ultimately to customer success sets the stage for her unique perspective on integrating AI into high and mid-touch customer success roles. Her company's AI assistant, inspired by Jarvis from Ironman, promises to automate repetitive tasks and enhance in-call experiences, making customer success managers not only more efficient but also more effective in their roles.
Prepare to reimagine how your organization handles customer interactions with Pallavi's vision of a unified customer experience. By harmonizing high-touch customer success management with low-touch digital strategies, Pallavi demonstrates how feedback from high-value customers can create a centralized, comprehensive knowledge base. This approach ensures that sales, support, and service teams all work from the same playbook, leading to more cohesive and effective customer journeys. Discover how AI can assist CSMs in preparing for customer interactions by organizing key stages such as kickoff, onboarding, and renewal, making every step of the customer experience more streamlined and impactful.
Tune in for actionable insights from industry leaders and practical strategies for leveraging AI to transform your customer success efforts.
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. We're 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 in this episode I'll be talking with Pallavi Gadepalli, who's the founder and CEO of a new AI startup that is focused on the customer success space. I've known Pallavi for years and I'm excited about what she's been working on, and today we're going to be talking about how she has been thinking about artificial intelligence inside of the customer success space. So welcome to the podcast.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Hi, Kristen, glad to be here.
Kristen Hayer:So, before we dive into AI, tell us a little more about yourself. How did you land in the field of Customer Success?
Pallavi Gadepalli:So for the last 20 years I've been in big tech and my journey has been very similar to most Indians. I'd say I was a developer and then I became a product manager for a long long time and, being in a B2B SaaS world, I realized that my connection with the customer was waning. I didn't really truly deeply know them, which is why I changed my role to be specific role called product success. That's how I got into the whole customer success world. I didn't go back to product and come back to customer success. So my journey has kind of interwoven. It's a mesh between product and customer success.
Kristen Hayer:I think it's interesting because so many people get into this field in so many different ways, and so, while you say that's a common way to get in, I don't know that it necessarily is. I've talked to people that have gotten in from music and from urban studies. There's like so many places you can come into this field from. I think that's one of the things that makes it really interesting.
Pallavi Gadepalli:I love it, and I've also found that this role probably is the most diverse that I have been in, and I've met a lot of people from different walks, just like you said. But yes, you're correct.
Kristen Hayer:I think that's one of the things that makes it exciting. I want to talk about your company. I know you've been in stealth mode for a while now. Can you tell us a little bit about the company? Are you ready for that?
Pallavi Gadepalli:Yes, I think I am. So we finally have a beta product. We are really excited about it. We are onboarding our first customer. I can't share the name yet, but my company is focused on making high and mid-touch customer success managers highly productive. Originally I started out with the idea that I wanted to make the in-call experience stellar. That was my whole idea and I wanted to make them subject matter experts in the product. I wanted to make them the management consultants, like McKinsey. So I wanted to provide an in-call experience. But over time I've improved and expanded my strategy a little bit to make them productive pre-call, in-call and post-call and my first focus is in-call and post-call because many customers have asked me for that. What I'm doing is providing an assistant, like a Jarvis for your Ironman, if you must. So I'm providing my Jarvis to customer success managers to be their best selves and to be highly productive.
Kristen Hayer:I know we're going to get into more details on this in a minute, but before we get into kind of the details on how you think about AI specifically, I'd love to talk about it in customer success in general. I know some people get nervous that AI is going to automate away a lot of the jobs in our field, and I think a lot of the focus has been on the kinds of activities that will take away that kind of work. But why do you think that, as CS professionals, we need to consider and embrace what AI could do for us?
Pallavi Gadepalli:So let me give you an example. You know how we were just talking about Chat GPT. Yeah, it just elevates what we have to do, right? So there's a baseline and I don't have to focus on baseline anymore. I can actually focus on the add-on.
Pallavi Gadepalli:So, just like that, what I think my product, or any product, should really do in AI, is that high and mid-touch jobs, the one that are highly customer facing, are not going away anytime soon, which is why contact center software is hot right now. Right, because people want to talk to a real person. Still, the world hasn't evolved to talking to bots just yet. What we want to do is to make the in-call experience probably a lot better and for the person in-call to feel like an expert, to not be as stressed out about being in-call, to make it a personal, personable and a comfortable experience both for their customers and themselves. And that's what I aim to bring to the table, and that's what all AI tools should aim to bring to the table. That's one. Number two is like the menial tasks that you have to do, like crafting an email after call, looking at stats about how your other customers are doing. All that should be automated, right? Shouldn't I be going to a search engine like Google or something else, typing my thoughts into an interface before the call, to say, hey, just tell me what I'm going into.
Pallavi Gadepalli:What is the customer feeling right now? What happened in the world? Maybe they had layoffs? I should tread on this carefully. Just prepare me from my previous calls to this call. What should I start with and where should I go with this customer? That's what I'm trying to build. I'm trying to make life easier and I want everyone just like how you love Chat GPT. I want to create love with AI because it's elevating your role, it's elevating your personality, it's making you high value.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I mean we were just talking just to give the audience some context on what we were talking about with ChatGPT.
Kristen Hayer:We were saying I've been using it more for coming up with some scripts and some things for our website, where it's less important to write a beautiful novel type of a thing for these, more important that the information I'm trying to convey gets conveyed effectively in a way that sounds good and it doesn't require me to think of the idea of a tool that makes it sound amazing, and that's what a tool like AI can do is just make you sound great.
Kristen Hayer:And then, of course, you know, for writing, that is a little more of a thought leadership piece. That should be me, it should be my original content. But I think, by eliminating all the time I'm spending on things that are simpler and don't require me to be a thought leader, if I can cut that time down, it gives me more time to think about the really cool ideas. So you know, that's my kind of eye opener on AI and for me, you know I haven't had a chance to really spend much time with it until this year and it's been a lot of fun and it has freed me up to do things that are more interesting, and so I think it's a great way for people that are CS professionals to be thinking about what they can gain from it versus what they might lose from it.
Pallavi Gadepalli:I completely agree. I do also want to mention one more thing. So for people who are early in the career, who may not have had that experience, to actually look at these minor underlying things that customers say, right Like. Sometimes the customer might say you know, we have a budget deficit, we are still re-evaluating. What does that actually mean? It could mean that it could result in a churn, right Like. There's some underlying things that are coming from that. So it also helps with training.
Pallavi Gadepalli:To be honest with you, what large language do is to understand that underlying emotion and also be able to guide the people to be better. Right, and that's the part that I also want to draw out. Of course, there are experienced professionals like yourself or a senior CSM, but there are other people who are trying to break into the career and they need some guidance along the way. And guided conversations are also a thing, and they improve your performance and outcome, of course, and besides, it helps you get to the next level too. It could be actually a promotion path for you, because EQ is also highly valued. So what I see in CSM world is some people are really good at technology and some people are really good at relationship, and I'm trying to kind of bridge that gap and AI can bridge that gap, and that's the best part. And I'm trying to kind of bridge that gap and AI can bridge that gap.
Kristen Hayer:And that's the best part. Yeah, I think that's really interesting because I think that the places where teams are being cut right now is typically at kind of the lower touch customer level right and that's where often people that were more junior, that were coming into customer success maybe for their first or second role, were getting positioned. And with those roles disappearing and being more automated, there's a need for people to be able to jump in and operate at a more senior level right off the bat, and I think AI can help with that. It can help accelerate people into what would traditionally have been considered maybe a more senior role as their maybe first or second role, even if they have that assistance to help them have those strategic conversations right away.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Exactly. That's exactly where I'm going, because you could still put a kind of a mid to junior CSM in front of a high valued customer if they have the product expertise and the presence executive presence right. So that's what I'm aiming for this tool to do.
Kristen Hayer:That's so great. Well, you know, as we were prepping for this interview, you mentioned that your solution is really focusing on those high touch type of CS programs where it does still matter that there's a person involved. It does seem like a lot of the AI tools out there right now focus on the lower touch or digital CS programs. I think I would love to hear from you how you see AI being important to those high touch programs. I know we touched on a few things just now, but are there other ways that you think it helps in the high touch space?
Pallavi Gadepalli:Yes, I can speak to that a little bit. I've been doing a lot of thinking just based on feedback that I got from my customers. So, typically, if you think about it, high touch CSMs are placed to talk to customers that have greater than a standard net value of entitlements right, like maybe 300K, 500k really high value entitlements and what happens is those top 20 percent of the customers bring in 80 percent of the revenue. It's actually about them being power users of your product and them being able to give you the right product feedback and insight, and also they know your product better than you do sometimes and they can tell you not just how to improve it, but what documentation is actually missing. So the way I look at high-touch feeding into the low-touch digital CS is that all these conversations are golden in terms of product feedback, in terms of identifying missing documentation, in terms of identifying inaccurate documentation.
Pallavi Gadepalli:All these calls can lead to that and over time, you can actually generate your own documentation. You can create your document room, essentially, and that's where I'm going with my idea, which is you're creating a document room while you're in the conversation. So what we intend to do is, based on a conversation, you distill the key questions that maybe 10 customers asked. You know, draw these duplicates, triplicates, whatever the case may be, and then create this FAQ document or KB article in a certain templatized form and already give it to the documentation team to read the draft.
Pallavi Gadepalli:So the high touch model kind of feeds into the low touch model and everyone in an organization can actually come together to that document room to actually view that, contribute to that, absorb that. So you're not creating information silos anymore. So, if you really think about it, sales has their own information silos, support has their own information silos with KB articles. What we are trying to do is remove those silos by creating that document room, which is everyone wants right. What is the customer asking for? Everyone wants to know that, everyone is curious about that. So that's what we are trying to do and I think that's how it's going to feed into the low touch model.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I love that. I think that it's so interesting to look at it that way because everybody should be basically working from the same set of talking points and I think sometimes sales does get awfully siloed when those same talking points would be really useful in customer success and in support and in services, so that from a customer's perspective it's a lot more cohesive journey. So I love the idea of kind of democratizing that a little bit and bringing everything together.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Really, what would be fantastic and ideal is that the sales enablement deck is coming to the CS person at handoff. You know that would be ideal. I am working towards a model like that. I haven't gotten there yet, I will say that. But that is going to be kind of the tying point, like the sales enablement deck with what the customer is saying, meshing that and figuring out where the customer wants to go. So that's, that's the golden year.
Kristen Hayer:Let's talk some specifics, as we were talking about the stages of a high-touch customer contact point. You had mentioned that sort of that pre-call area is an area that you're thinking about. How do you see AI helping a CSM to prepare for a call or for a meeting?
Pallavi Gadepalli:It's a really good question. I want to acknowledge all the people who have written some of the books in this area. So in general, we can classify that customer success has several stages, correct? So it has a kickoff stage, onboarding stage, adoption stage, escalation stage, renewal stage, EBR, I guess. So, based on these stages, it's very easy for someone who has experience in this area to create a framework. The CSM can say I'm going to be in an onboarding call, this is going to be my second or third onboarding call.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Based on all the previous history, can you tell me what else I need to do in this call? That would be a very simple thing but a very valuable thing, Because CSMs are hopping from call to call. They don't even remember what they talked to. The previous customer Book of Business businesses is large, even for an enterprise CSM, you know, and if customer cancels the call like two, three times, maybe they've had a quarter closing. You might've had the call at the beginning of the quarter and so much has happened during this quarter that preparation is worth its weight in gold.
Pallavi Gadepalli:It would be really nice for a CSM to just get prepared five minutes before the meeting. Tell me what do I need to know what is the history, what did the company go through in the last quarter, and kind of go from there Like, again you're increasing your baseline, right, let's just like chat GPT, You're at this level, you suddenly became this level and you appear like a super expert for your customer and they are delighted. I can tell you this much. I have done that and they are absolutely delighted when they say well, you know, let me remind you, we left off here last time and I know you've had some changes in your CEO or whatever the case may be and what we talked about was these were the big challenges. Do you feel like you got over it? Do you feel like you need another type of training for it? You know, those are the kind of conversations for onboarding, For an EBR conversation, you could simply go in with saying I noticed that your product went from sandbox to production, so I'm guessing it's going well, you know.
Pallavi Gadepalli:So every type of conversation requires a different type of line of questioning and that's what we are trying to infuse in the tool, Like we are calling that, call guidance. To be very fair, sales and other functions have this very well-defined. They have, like these very classic frameworks that you can go off of right Medic and Challenger like. Whatever the case may be, they have these classic frameworks. CS is such a new field that we don't have those frameworks just yet. People have made those frameworks but they are non-standardized. So I'm trying to experiment with it and hopefully create like a best practices standardized way for at least one sector of software, for example, cybersecurity or manufacturing or something like that. So that's my goal to be able to create these standards as we go along.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I mean I think you have your work cut out for you for sure. I think the difference between sales and customer success, or one of the biggest differences, is that there are a lot more factors that impact the conversations that you have to have when you're in CS, because you've got the market that you're dealing with, the product, you're dealing with the customers at the various levels of usage that you're dealing with you know you've got different levels of product.
Kristen Hayer:It's just very complex and it's hard to make a model that kind of fits all of that. So I mean I think if there were a chance to build that, it would be using AI. So I hope that it goes well. It'd be nice to have that.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Absolutely, and I think that the potential is immense, which is why I'm so excited about it. But what it does is you can actually look at product documentation or best practices that the company already may have, and this is like for bigger companies, right? You can actually reverse engineer it. You can reverse engineer it to say what type of questions would this kind of documentation answer, and where does it fit into the framework? Is it like early on in the framework or is it like more for upsell?
Pallavi Gadepalli:Like there's a lot of reverse engineering and forward engineering both ways, and AI actually helps with that, and I don't know if people are thinking of it quite like that. So even to create synthetic data, for example, like I'm not with any company right now, it's my own company, right? So in order for me to speculate what that other company may need before using our product, I have to create synthetic data of my own. So it requires research from me, but we have created special prompts and things like that for us to be able to generate the synthetic data for testing. That showed me the possibility. I was like wow, this is really amazing, because I can actually do this without really them even engaging with me at this point.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay, I want to hear about in-call, because I think this is the real power of your solution. So I know a lot of people get into a call or a meeting and they sort of feel like it's their job to be able to own the conversation. They end up kind of winging it A lot of times. It's very focused on them and their product and what they can do for the customer and it's very sort of self-focused, because that's the stuff they know really well. I think that sometimes things get off track because of that. Like, often they get off track because of that. And so how do you see AI being used in the middle of a call to help a CS professional keep the meeting focused on the right things and on the customer?
Pallavi Gadepalli:It's the best question of all, and that's what chatbots don't do today. Okay, so what chatbots expect is I'm asking it a question, it's like a search. I'm asking it a question, it's going to aggregate the data and give me the answer, right, but it doesn't guide me to ask the next question. You know that's what it does not do and that's what I hope that our product enterprise shy. That's what it does. So what happens is assume this like the customer hops into the call, they're kind of really angry because there's an escalation going on and if you're honestly in a touchpoint call, all you're going to talk about is the escalation, not what would come after that. Right, you can get completely derailed because of that reason. My vision is that one, there are battle cards that actually say you're in a touch point call. You want to address not just the challenges now, but what the next steps might look like. That's number one. Number two is listen and answer mindfully, like something like that. Right, like if the customer is really riled up, listen and answer mindfully so they can be prompt like that. Or Like if the customer is really riled up, listen and answer mindfully so they can be prompt like that or take a deep breath, even.
Pallavi Gadepalli:We are also tracking the amount of time the customer is speaking and the amount of time the CSM is speaking, and we actually warn when the CSM is speaking too much and the customer hasn't engaged, probably prompt them to say maybe it's time to slow down and ask if you are understanding the customer correctly. So we're actually tracking the percentage of times and we actually have a relationship score based on that. So what we do is we are calling it guided calls. It's currently still being built right now. All it does is it detects what the customer is asking and giving you the right things to say.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Next, next phase, is going to be guidance, very much like this. So try asking this question because you're in this type of call, maybe let the customers speak now and take a pause. You know that sort of thing. So we are actually going to be providing detailed guidance for that and that actually we found helps new CSMs a lot because they don't show their best performance. But it's sometimes taking a step back and simply just listening to the customer is probably a better idea, and then you can even understand the question deeply to say what are they truly asking for and then get the right answer.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think it takes away that multi-layered thinking that you need to do when you're on a call. That is really hard when you're new because you have to be thinking, okay, where am I trying to take this call, what are the questions that I should ask the customer? Am I listening to the customer while I'm asking those questions? And it's a lot to think about. And I think if you can use artificial intelligence to really kind of assist with that and take away one or two of those layers at the beginning, it can help build those skills so that, as a CSM progresses and they get used to those kinds of conversations, that will be a habit rather than something they necessarily have to rely on AI for. But it takes a while to build those habits.
Pallavi Gadepalli:It can help build confidence more than anything else. It's not as stressful, so I'll give you an example. I tried it. It's something pretty silly. I was meeting a brand new customer and I didn't know their product really well. I just got their documentation online and I said, oh, throw anything at it and we'll see if it works. And literally I did not know about their product. It was a specific product that I had no idea. It was the most amazing thing. It may not have been a hundred percent perfect. It removes that level of anxiety, so I think that that's still worth something.
Kristen Hayer:It's worth a lot. Confidence is worth a lot. I think you know if you sound confident, even if the call isn't perfect, it is going to land much better with the client and that's gold. So we've talked a lot about what AI can do for a CS professional to help before the call getting them ready during the call, helping them with scripting and what to ask and when to ask it. How about AI after a customer engagement of some sort? What can AI do to help with that?
Pallavi Gadepalli:I think that's where the biggest value add is, and that's what the customers are telling me. So what they're saying is post call, can you do some analysis on what you just talked about and create automated KB articles, automated FAQs and just send it for review? So we don't have to create it, the machine creates it and it's fantastic. What the customers don't realize, though, is that someone has to be doing a due diligence on going and looking back at it and approving it, but that is still better than actually sitting and generating it and letting it stay in the backlog of the documentation team. The second thing is what do CSMs do right after the call? Right, what they do is they craft an email and they send out action items and that sort of thing. What can AI do? They can pre-create and pre-craft this email, so all they have to do is copy and put it in email and send it out. Right? The third is to actually start creating, over the long-term, the customer journey so you can map out the journey On this date, I had this chat with the customer and this is where the customer is at and show a map of the customer journey and the sentiment in each call so you can tell. If the sentiment went up and down, maybe you want to have a little bit more focus on that customer. If the sentiment didn't go that much up and down, maybe it's good to have early renewal conversations, right. So that seeing that map visually is something that I'm really working on and I really believe that that's going to be a lot of value to the customer success managers.
Pallavi Gadepalli:There are two other things which people don't normally think about but should think about, which is the executive summary. So I remember my CPO would come and say oh, I'm going on a meeting with, like a top customer, where did you leave off last? So that dashboard or the executive summary would be great with every call. So I can say in the most recent call, the executive summary was this and it has like a very cool visual graph of relationship index, sentiment analysis. Were there any competitors that were mentioned? You know that sort of thing, and just be able to send it off to my CPO or my VP of product to say this is the conversation I had with the customer instead of them waiting on it, right? So I thought all those things are super low hanging fruit that can be done today. That's the crazy part. It can be done today and it can be input into the workflow. So I think the post call thing is probably the most valuable to people right now.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think the other thing that I've seen recently post a customer call is to build a customer success plan like an actual goal plan from the transcript of a strategic business review, and I think that's something that can be a fantastic way to build something that can be kind of hard to build.
Kristen Hayer:It's hard to build a goal plan with a client Clients aren't always very focused on goals. But if you can take sort of the sentiment and the objectives of a customer and turn them into actual goals and create whatever format I mean we have our format. Everybody's got their own format for success plans. But put it into your own format and, you know, give it a once over that takes away hours of work. You know it takes a long time to think up what should a success plan look like, run it back and forth with the customer, and it is something that if you've had a really good conversation and perhaps you've had AI kind of coaching you through that conversation to make it more strategic, you can then just use this tool to create a plan that will resonate better with customers. And so I think that's another interesting thing I've seen sort of post-call people do and be really effective.
Pallavi Gadepalli:I love that. That's brilliant. I've been talking to somebody about it. Currently it's in the works, but we haven't built it yet. So that's brilliant. I actually forgot about it, but thank you for bringing it up.
Kristen Hayer:I love it and, like you, could do it today by plugging stuff into Chat GPT, but it would be nice to have it in a system that was a little more formatted for your company, you know, and organized in that way Shifting gears. Tell me a little bit more about how you started your company and what compelled you to do this and what have you learned from doing it. I think it's always interesting to our audience to hear about how people started things.
Pallavi Gadepalli:I've been toying with ideas for the last 10 years. You know I've just kind of thought about different ideas. I've run it by. People didn't really have the traction, people weren't excited about it, that sort of thing. And last June I had this really big awakening. I had a you know, health issue that I was dealing with and I I came out of it, obviously successfully, but I started to question where I'm going, what I'm doing, where do I want to make my place in this world? I started toying with three different ideas and I started interviewing people about these ideas and I knew that where I wanted to go was I wanted to do something bigger. I wanted to have a mission in life and my mission in life was to really elevate the role that customer success has.
Pallavi Gadepalli:And it was really sad that I actually saw this meme on TikTok by this individual who said it's where the bad salespeople go to die CSMs. You know, I hate that and I hate that. I hate that I just couldn't deal with it Like I thought about it so much and then I said, and then I heard all I hate that I just couldn't deal with it Like I thought about it so much and then I said, and then I heard all these layoffs happening. You know, I met all these CSMs who came to the meetup and a lot of them had lost their jobs. So it kind of stuck with me and I was working on three different ideas, I'll be honest, but this was the idea that I felt more, most passionate about.
Pallavi Gadepalli:And something big happened during that time Sam Altman gave his OpenAI conference, databricks had their conference and I just felt like, oh my God, ai can solve this thing and I want to be in this wave. I want to ride this wave. I want to be the water skier on this wave, whatever you might want to call it. I need to be in AI and I need to understand it really well. So, very timely, microsoft Roadshow came into the picture on January 5th. I need to be in AI and I need to understand it really well. So, very timely, microsoft Roadshow came into the picture on January 5th. I still recall the date really clearly and I got a ticket. It's like a pretty expensive ticket and I got it for free. Someone texted me in the morning are you coming to San Francisco for this thing? And I hadn't even really thought about doing my company, like I was just starting, you know, and I was like, okay, I'll, I'll show up.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Well, I went crazy in that conference. Like every talk, every room was exciting. I just couldn't get enough of it and I started experimenting. Then I started running Microsoft hackathons and I just really got into it Like it was this craziness.
Pallavi Gadepalli:It was this madness, like when you're crazy about something, you just want to jump in like full on and do nothing else. And that's what I've been doing and started validating an idea. And it was resonating with everybody Pretty much 99% of the people I ran this idea by said, oh my God, I would love something like that, and that's it. That's how the journey took off, and what I've learned from it is the universe is bringing you something when, when you're really excited about it, when you really want to do something and I know it sounds very foofa, so, but when you manifest your vision, people fall from the sky to help you out.
Pallavi Gadepalli:It's insane, like the people that have helped me out during this time advisors, developers, by the way, all my developers are working for me for free. They believe in this vision, they're developing it for me. It's really I can't even explain it. It's like God is watching and showering flowers on you. It's like maybe it's God, maybe it's a higher power. If you don't believe in God, that's okay.
Pallavi Gadepalli:But people have come into my life that I wouldn't have dreamt would have come into my life and advised me and shown me the direction when I was lost. Whenever I'm even a wee bit lost, someone will come in and show me a direction. And the founder community is so sick. In San Francisco, people are out to help you. You just have to ask. It's almost like you're trying to shine above the other people. You're trying to show your worth in corporate and that's how it typically is, but in the founder community it's the complete opposite. Anyone I would ask help from, they would give it in tons. They would give back in tons. Really. So I have loved this journey and I've learned so much. I've learned to build from zero to one. Never built a product in CS, didn't know anything about AI. Till January, you know, learned AI, built something from scratch, got the traction that I need, onboarding my first customer. It's been so exciting. I'm not saying I've cried many times, very high and low. It's a societal wave.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think that's I mean, that was true. Definitely my first year in this business was like a lot of ups and downs and very high, very low. We've been highs and lows over the years. Our business is almost 10 years old. That first year can be especially challenging, but it sounds like you've had a lot of great people come in and help. One of the special things about the startup community and the founder community and Silicon Valley especially, it's like people just want to say yes.
Pallavi Gadepalli:It's really great If you really wanted to go to an event and network. There is one every single day, and I kid you not, there's one every single day twice a day. Today I'm going for two events. If you really wanted to go, you can knock yourself out and network all you want. It's really phenomenal.
Kristen Hayer:All right. Last question this is one that we ask everybody on the show. You know we've been talking about one of the biggest trends in customer success for this whole episode. What else do you see as a big trend in customer success right now, and why?
Pallavi Gadepalli:I'm going to make it non-AI, because we've just talked about AI, so I'm going to make it non-AI.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Just to make it interesting, the biggest trend in customer success right now at least the way I'm seeing it is that it might be folded into sales.
Pallavi Gadepalli:And it's going to be amazing if that happens, because the whole handoff problem competing with sales on renewals is not going to be there anymore. There's not going to be a division and every company does it differently, Like I'm only going to be an indicator of renewal or expansion or I'm doing both and the sales is not doing it and it kind of causes a little bit of a rift. So in order to make it like a hyper collaborative team, I think rolling under the CRO would be the best outcome for the company, because then the customer doesn't have to face a differentiator right? The customer says sales did their job and now they've given it to success and we are going to be fine. So it kind of gives like a mental model to the customer on what their expectations should be. So I think that is the biggest trend in customer success and I feel like that's changed maybe in just the last two years for customer success managers to own renewals fully and own expansions fully and actually be compensated in that way.
Kristen Hayer:So yeah, we've seen it from the beginning. I'll say, like when I started the company 10 years ago, I'd say probably a quarter of CS teams had revenue responsibility and the rest did not, and that has now shifted to be more like, I'd argue, probably 75% have some level of revenue responsibility now, and I think this is a good point to emphasize for those CS leaders out there that are still sort of clinging to the idea that revenue should have no place in customer success. I think it's sort of inevitable that it's going to have a place in customer success and I think it's really important to get on board with that. I think that's what helps keep you being seen as a valuable part of your organization. Every part of a company drives revenue in some way.
Pallavi Gadepalli:I think I agree and feel free to edit this out, but would you rather be in the revenue making team or the cost center team?
Kristen Hayer:It's not non-PC to say that. We've said that a bunch of times on this podcast. I think that it's the reality of business. If you are producing revenue, you will have more resources for your team, You'll be able to help customers more effectively and you will be less at risk of having your team's jobs cut or not being able to hire because you're a cost.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Exactly A cost center behaves that way. You are cutting costs. I mean, that's the job of a cost center, right? So you're making it more efficient, you're making it more digital. Why not be a part of the revenue making stream? I think I was opposed to that. Actually, I'll say this, like originally in my career, I was kind of opposed to that. I was like no, how can you be the real consultant if you had revenue targets on your head? But it's a mindset. And then I talked to a couple of management consultants and investment bankers and that's how they roll right Money is on their head, but they are being consultative.
Kristen Hayer:It's possible. I mean, I think it's a fallacy to say, oh, you can't be a trusted advisor if you are selling something to customers, because the way that salespeople initially sell something to the customer is to be trusted, and so you can be trusted and sell things. You can't be trusted and sell things if you're lying to the customer, if your product's no good, if you know like there's things that would make you not trusted. But if you are being a true consultant for your customer, you're almost doing them a disservice if you don't sell them something that would help them do their jobs better. We have to get very real about that in our field.
Pallavi Gadepalli:Yeah, and I think Bill McDermott, ServiceNow CEO, says it really well Like if you've already built the trust, selling shouldn't be an issue. I think the first step is build trust and then see where it takes you.
Kristen Hayer:Well, Pallavi, thank you so much for being part of our podcast today. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your perspective on artificial intelligence and especially how that can work in more of a high-touch CS environment. I think that's going to be really interesting for our audience. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Pallavi Gadepalli:It's via email or LinkedIn, and email is.
Kristen Hayer:Pallavi at EnterpriseChaicom. Okay, great Well, Pallavi. Thank you so much again, and I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at Aura Forum 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, thesuccessleagueio. For more great customer success content. You can follow The Success League on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter on the website. 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.