Customer Success

Customer Success is a special function, because there is no playbook. There’s a lot of white space to figure out structure, to what extent it makes sense for your company to invest in the function, and which customers to prioritize.

My favorite class in business school was a class called Strategic Management of Technology, taught by Professor Robert Burgelman and Rob Siegel. The model above is a framework for anything – managing your company, your department, yourself.

Here’s how it applies to Customer Success:

Every Customer Success leader needs to understand that your organization lives within the context of the Company, and the Company goals. The relative importance (budget allocation, reporting structure, etc) is a derivative of that.

Cloudflare as a Market Share First Example:

Official Strategy/Mission: Help build a better Internet

Product-Market Position: Think Clay Christensen and the meaning of disruptive innovation. The long-tail of customers are the secret sauce, and the market is one that has a huge long-tail. Product is really, really easy to turn on and turn off.

Competitive Advantage: Ability to influence large swaths of the market through freemium model at scale and a network cost model that can sustainably support those customers.

For Strategic Action, we could talk about whole companies, but here I will talk about impact to Customer Success specifically.

Impact to Customer Success: Support (the organization that supports ALL customers was the first to scale by a long shot (I think I remember ~15 support team members when I joined as the second CSM). Support is also the service voice on the executive team. CSMs report to the CRO as part of managing contracted business, which is a fraction of the total business.

Juniper Square as a Customer First Example:

It’s impossible to truly blanket call one company market share first and another as customer first because both truly exist on a spectrum. The reality to consider is that there are tradeoffs. Each company has to prioritize one thing over another, and pending where you are on that spectrum, you will make different choices.

Official Strategy / Mission: Make private capital markets more efficient, transparent, and accessible to everyday investors.

Product-Market Position: Today’s business is a SaaS product focused on end-to-end investor management for commercial real estate firms (there is a broader vision from there). Because the product only makes sense with customer data, the migration and onboarding process is much more involved. In addition, customers who buy the product need to run their mission critical business process through Juniper Square. This requires organizational change management and user training. Target customers in this market are highly networked with the largest investors influencing the majority of the market.

Competitive Advantage: A foundation of organized financial data + making it accessible to relevant financial counterparts.

Impact to Customer Success: Customer Success is a meaningfully scaling team because customers require significant training / onboarding and the highly networked nature of a universe of known customers results in customer happiness as a requirement. As a result, we invest heavily in finding the right talent, engineering/product/customer success feedback loops, and the organization is positioned to work cross-functionally.

Summing it Up:

Both companies are incredibly successful companies with distinctly different approaches.

Recommendation #1 is find a successful company. That’s the only way the role gets more interesting over time. Luckily – as a trailing function, Customer Success typically grows when there is proven product-market fit and a need to manage a fast-scaling base of customers.

The definition of Customer and core functions that drive the right level of customer success differs based on company context.

There’s a lot in common between flying and building high growth companies, but I’ll start with a little bit on my personal perspective. I do my best thinking on planes. Leaving my life in the pilot’s hands while simultaneously looking at the broad expanse below leaves me with nothing but my best thoughts.

My first major insight on a plane came when I was about five years old flying back home from visiting family Turkey. I began my existential flow of thoughts, and decided on the point of my life – a decided, guiding principle I really haven’t veered from since:

My life is finite, and therefore, the greatest aggregate use of my life is to contribute positive energy to things that have an effect well beyond me as an individual and beyond my lifespan.

Business school kind of reiterated that notion. I went to Stanford GSB, where the motto is: “Change lives, change organizations, change the world.”

Phase 1: Changing Lives

After business school, I was fortunate to join Cloudflare, a performance and security company that scaled rapidly in my five years there. I had the privilege of making many, many hires across various parts of our sales organization. At the time, nothing felt more fulfilling than believing in candidates, helping them think through major family moves from around the world to land their dream job, and making sure they felt that we as a company were investing in them.

The job I loved most at Cloudflare was seeding and scaling the Company’s global Customer Success teams. At the time, I started a blog, and wrote only one post (kicked off on a flight to Singapore of course). But I always look back and think – what a wealth of knowledge I could have shared if I shared the critical decision points, successes and failures along the way.

Phase 2: Changing Organizations

I think I’m now distinctly in Phase 2 of this journey (no clue how to get to the “change the world” bar yet). At the end of last year, I joined Juniper Square, a company seeking to transform private markets, starting in the commercial real estate space, as the VP of Customer Success. Here, I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility as a new company steward – responsible for making decisions that hopefully meaningfully contribute to a positive trajectory to maximize the likelihood of achieving our vision.

Of course, lots of specifics need to be kept private in service of company goals and private and public company confidentiality, but to the extent possible, I’d love to be able to share some insights along this next journey 🙂

So now, sit back and enjoy the flight! I’ll be back with announcements as interesting insights come up!

P.S. Cadence TBD, but I promise there will be more to come.