[00:00:19] Maxime Manseau: Kinsey, as I was saying I'm so happy to have you here. How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's exciting

[00:00:24] Kincy Clark: to be back again. I invited myself to your house, to your podcast house. So I appreciate you

[00:00:29] Maxime Manseau: welcoming me here. Yeah for you guys to understand Kinsey wrote me like a few weeks ago and he was like Hey, Max basically I was thinking about like this topic, which is basically let's call it friction between support and success.

[00:00:43] Maxime Manseau: I don't know if you want to reframe it, but basically tell me, Hey I went through it like several times through my carriers. And I was like, Hey Kinsey, I'm talking to a bunch of like super leaders, like every week, and this is like a recurring topic. This is sometimes not something like people talk about, but many types in my ears Hey, this happened to Sexy. So I don't know how to navigate like this and this. So this is why we're here like today. And we're going to see where is this leaders. So I don't know, Kinsey, if you want just to reframe Like the topic of this talk.

[00:01:19] Kincy Clark: Yeah, no, I think you did a good job. I think, as support leaders, we can get frustrated with our success colleagues. I'll just throw that out there. They can drive us bananas at times, but there's reasons why, I've spent the last two months actually interviewing a lot of success.

[00:01:35] Kincy Clark: People to truly get at the root of some of these issues. And I've learned a lot of really interesting things. So a lot of things that I felt like I came into it knowing, but a lot of surprises. But yeah, I think it's just about how to navigate that. Cause we should be on the same team, right? We're very aligned in that we're supporting customers directly.

[00:01:51] Kincy Clark: So why is that friction?

[00:01:53] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And it might be something that you haven't experienced yet, or maybe you experienced some of it, not the rest. Maybe you're going to experience it later. on your journey. So the idea here is just to uncover basically all this and give you some some, yeah, some tips and advice basically to navigate that

[00:02:14] Kincy Clark: just before.

[00:02:15] Kincy Clark: It's also to make sure, you're not alone. I would say, I think sometimes I've talked to a lot of, like the hobby, like there's some commonalities, like there's absolutely commonalities across all organizations. You're

[00:02:26] Maxime Manseau: not alone if you're, if there's friction. So maybe Quincy, just to start.

[00:02:31] Maxime Manseau: I would love you to define what is for you success and what is for you support. I know it's something that might differ from a bit to a lot, especially I'm talking to a bunch of people and now you have people who are doing support, who are called like success. So basically just tell me, what is the scope about what you call support and the scope about what you call success, because sometimes, like the names can get confusing.

[00:02:57] Kincy Clark: And that's actually one of the challenges is the names, not just internally, but for other people as well, but I am going to use the LARE model, which stands for land, adopt, expand, and retain. And so landing is generally a sales function, but adoption, customer adoption, customer expansion, customer retention, those are considered in this framework, customer success responsibility.

[00:03:19] Kincy Clark: So they're here to onboard. Now, again, you may have specialized onboarding teams. You may have a specialized retention team. You may have, they bring sales reps in to help expand, but ultimately it's taking care of that account. To set the stage for adoption, expansion, and retention. So that's the success function.

[00:03:35] Kincy Clark: On the support side, I would say that it's more reactive. You're helping the customer directly with an issue or a question that they have in the immediate. So the other way to think about this, I've heard is reactive versus proactive. That's a pretty common framing. And then I think lastly.

[00:03:52] Kincy Clark: I would characterize success people as having a book of business, meaning they have accounts that they're responsible for and they may or may not be comped on that. We can talk about that support in general, unless it's like a premium support or something like that, where it's highly differentiated support generally as a function has responsibility to everybody versus the success theme, which has individual people focused on accounts.

[00:04:19] Kincy Clark: So I think those are really important differences and that's how I would frame And like you said, it's different. But those are the prime variations,

[00:04:26] Maxime Manseau: I

[00:04:26] Kincy Clark: would say.

[00:04:28] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Got it. So I'm just going to ask you guys cause this conversation might go in many different directions. So if you have any specific questions, if you have any specific.

[00:04:41] Maxime Manseau: Topic you want us to cover today, just write them in the comments. So Kinsey and I will take into consideration during our chat. Kinsey, I know you've been chatting with a bunch of success leaders those past weeks, maybe to start, would you mind sharing with us what you discover basically?

[00:05:00] Maxime Manseau: And maybe we can start from there.

[00:05:02] Kincy Clark: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So I've talked to about 30, maybe a few more success people. I like to call them success people. So there's been some leaders, there's been a lot of like customer success managers. So individual contributors that are practicing success. And then I think was a relevant thing.

[00:05:19] Kincy Clark: And I had a structured set of questions that I would ask them. And I really tried to focus on, Hey, where did they live in the organization? What incentives or compensation that they have. And then what were some of the challenges that they had with support? So that was the framing of the conversation.

[00:05:33] Kincy Clark: I would say like one of the big things that jumped out is something you alluded to at the beginning where there's confusion within the organization about what the teams do. Hey, and I experienced this personally in my last company at Bolt where the engineers literally had no idea in many cases what the difference between success and support were.

[00:05:51] Kincy Clark: So when the success people would come trying to push priorities, they'd call me cause I was running support and it just, it got a little frustrating and complicated because we all had our own incentives and we all had our own priorities. And that was a little confusing. So just as you said just even from what do these people do in the organization?

[00:06:09] Kincy Clark: That definitely came out. One of the other interesting things, maybe a little controversial is both. Teams accuse each other of being passive aggressive. They're definitely close. A sense of like success people, they're nice until they're not, they can be, it can be a little pushy and that makes sense, given that they often have disabilities.

[00:06:27] Kincy Clark: I, that's exactly it. But I will say the success, a common theme from the success team was that support people. We're also, they wouldn't push to do things, support people are really nice and they don't push. And that was a a theme that, that recurred. So that was, I'd say a little more humorous.

[00:06:47] Kincy Clark: I think that's personalities, but there were some similar personalities. Like I like to help people, like everyone said that, like that was just part of so that's defining for these roles is that we like to help people. We want to make people successful and that creates some challenges.

[00:07:02] Kincy Clark: And then I think the last, and probably the biggest thing is the misalignment of goals because of either comp or org structure. So you can have a case where a success person is very laser focused on a set of accounts and maybe the support team isn't tracking that or they see that as not their priority for very valid reasons.

[00:07:25] Kincy Clark: Again, it could be compensation structure. It could be just the metrics. That are being measured. So there's definitely I,

[00:07:32] Maxime Manseau: I I sure will misalign it. I've seen what you're doing. On this third point, like regarding, I would say like a compensation, sorry, package, let's call it bonus bonuses.

[00:07:42] Maxime Manseau: Like really like sometimes misalignment. Because like in, maybe I would say like half of the support teams, or let's say like even more like this, still don't offer bonus, for example, or yeah let's say this way, but in almost all the success team now, they have like a compensation plan for them.

[00:08:01] Maxime Manseau: And this, like in many cases 10, to friction, but we can talk about it So

[00:08:06] Kincy Clark: it's interesting, a third, I'd say 40 percent say that number don't, they didn't, they weren't compensated. I was a little surprised because I've only worked in places where CSMs are compensated.

[00:08:18] Kincy Clark: So my kind of assessment was this is natural. Like all CSMs are like point off, driven by their comp plans. But 40 percent of the people I talked to, Did not have any variable or associated compensation, which in some ways made it more challenging for them. But in some ways, like maybe comp wasn't the only thing driving them.

[00:08:41] Kincy Clark: And I thought that was really interesting, but I agree writ large, are I think the we all think that they're driven that way, right? And I think that's a pretty common understanding and clearly most 60 of them are so

[00:08:52] Maxime Manseau: at least I thought it was much more from like my but anyway, I was surprised.

[00:08:59] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. Okay, great just three points.

[00:09:02] Kincy Clark: There's one other one I would add which is go ahead and this starts to touch in some other groups, which is If you think about who owns the business, pre and post sale, so sales, we all understand owns the business, right? Before the sale is made up to the point of contract planning, who owns the business afterward?

[00:09:22] Kincy Clark: And I think this is a little more common in smaller companies where there's confusion around who, who owns the business. So who is ultimately responsible for the account? There were some big differences there because some companies had success people. That were had ownership of the business, but didn't have full ownership.

[00:09:41] Kincy Clark: And there was some frustration around that, whereas other companies, the success team was clearly on the blame line for making sure that the account stayed with the company. So that was a really interesting difference as well. And I think that starts to play into incentives and structure, and that also creates

[00:09:59] Maxime Manseau: friction.

[00:10:00] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. I'm seeing some of you, the comments here and someone asking like that they have to support like all customers, whereas CSMs are focused on a specific boot of clients. This is what you mentioned at the point. And it is like often what we see around. So I'm curious, like on this specific point, did you experience it yourself and how did you navigate it?

[00:10:20] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And I'll be

[00:10:21] Kincy Clark: the first to admit like, Until the very probably last like year of my time at Bolt, I was totally guilty of being the support leader who was like, all my customers are my people. Like I have to take care of everyone the same. And I was pretty resistant to having the success team prioritize for me.

[00:10:42] Kincy Clark: And some of that was some metrics assessment, because again, if you have a CSEC goal, then you have some incentives to want to make sure that you're, again, this is very, I think, Machiavellian, but it is back to Vine, where if you have 100 customers and 10 of them are key accounts your CSAT is going to be driven by a hundred, not those 10.

[00:11:04] Kincy Clark: And most people don't weight their CSAT in that way. So there's some kind of, there's some kind of like subtextual incentives there that are going to drive support people to want to help everybody. And I think again, by our nature, like I don't necessarily want to discriminate against the customers because they all have problems.

[00:11:22] Kincy Clark: They all need to get fixed. And I don't think any of us want to live in a world where, you know, Our interactions with a company are strictly by how much money we're giving that company. We'd like to think that all customers are created equal. And I think we all accept that all they are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

[00:11:42] Kincy Clark: But I think this is a source of tension. It's a very common source of tension. It's something I've experienced, like everywhere I've gone, where we've had lots of customers, but then there's a small group of customers that are priorities. But those priorities weren't made clear to support. In a way that we could really

[00:11:59] Maxime Manseau: negotiate it.

[00:12:01] Maxime Manseau: That made me think, I'm gonna show it right here. Like one of you guys in the comment he's saying CSMs tend to have, like something like Yeah, like a CELs approach, like in a sense, like obviously like the need to load more revenue and make sure there is no churn.

[00:12:14] Maxime Manseau: And make sure like they need to continue like the subscription. Whereas in the , like maybe there is a more generally. genuine approach in the sense, really like when you have an issue, we are here to solve it and this, and also like it's not related to basically money, any take on that?

[00:12:36] Kincy Clark: Yeah, no I completely agree. And I think that's a source of friction because oftentimes we have cues and support that we've established based on technical priority or, our methodologies and then a success manager comes in and Hey, I need to push it to the top because this customer has entered a renewal period or they're there, they may not be adopts, they may not be adopting.

[00:13:01] Kincy Clark: There's an expansion opportunity. So there's commercial opportunities that get weaved in there. And I would say that most places don't have clear systems on how to broker that. And I think that's something that we really tried once I recognized this dynamic and saw that we have to be good at both. Then we start thinking about solutions, but again, I'm guilty in my career for kind of fighting success more than trying to work with them until very recently.

[00:13:28] Kincy Clark: And that's what really started this kind of path for me of discovery is like, Hey, I think we can do

[00:13:34] Maxime Manseau: this better. And so let's grab this example, see how we could solve this. So let's say. You have a backlog, so you have a queue, of like tickets coming and the supporter decided of a, like a certain way maybe like they score them for, whatever.

[00:13:51] Maxime Manseau: Like way. And as you said, like someone from the system just ping, say Hey Kinsey, look, I have this customer who really need a hand from the support team right now. And this one tend to be in your lowest priority. Like, how do you deal with that? What's your advice like. Is that something that need to be like manually, you were talking about a system, is it maybe just a slack work like How do we build this, to make sure there is like a fluidity between both teams.

[00:14:21] Kincy Clark: Yeah. So the solution that I use is accessing clearly and then you have to put some sort of limitation on it. Like you can't just say, Hey, success. You guys can have as many. Priority tickets as you want. Like you have to have some sort of gating factor Hey, you can have 10 prioritizations or 15 or some way of managing that to force the success team to prioritize.

[00:14:42] Kincy Clark: Because if there's one thing success, people do not like doing is prioritizing. If you want to see them sweat, just give, say, Hey, I can only handle one of these two accounts, which one? And it's sweat porn and nine times out of 10, it'll be, you got to do both of them. But you can only do one.

[00:14:57] Kincy Clark: I know, but I need both. Like I've had that conversation a lot, but I think if you have a system where you can clearly transmit business ownership and so there's accountability there, right? So if I, all of a sudden I'm like, okay, Mr. Success person or Mr. Success person. You want me to prioritize account X?

[00:15:14] Kincy Clark: Sure. We'll do that. But I want your name on there. I want to make sure that as a business, we have visibility that this is a priority. So I think just trying to be transparent about the business priorities really helps. And again, the system we use with Slack, so we had a channel called prioritization where a CSM could go in there and say, Hey, I need this ticket.

[00:15:35] Kincy Clark: And I need it looked at ASAP, but we forced them to provide clear outcomes that they were looking for, because oftentimes they would just do a drive by and say, Hey. This customer's blown up, go fix it. What do you want? Do you want it done by today? Do you want it done by the end of next week?

[00:15:51] Kincy Clark: Like we really forced them to take ownership of the issue. And I think that really helped. So I think if you can really get your success team to take ownership and then assign priorities, that's very helpful, but you do need a system to track it because, and I would argue that it needs to be transparent because that's the other thing we did.

[00:16:08] Kincy Clark: We made this open to everybody in the company. So there was no secret backdoor deals. Which there were many and this was a support team problem I'm going to say support people are notorious for doing little backroom deals with their friends and throughout the organization and prioritizing tickets And then things go sideways so having this transfer and I spent a lot of time like trying to coach my team like Quit getting pressured by CSMs directly, forced them to use this transparent system and there was some discomfort there, but I think eventually we got to a good place with that.

[00:16:42] Kincy Clark: No, no direct message through Slack saying Hey, please help me. Yes. No DMs. Yeah. They could DM me, but I was the boss. So I was like, no problem. Sure, like we'll have a conversation and then I'll out it. And I encourage that because sometimes, they want a little more context Hey, why aren't you guys looking at this account?

[00:16:59] Kincy Clark: I can tell you why, but don't DM the people that are on the lines doing the work, like that was, I tried to prevent it from happening.

[00:17:07] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So I'm going to, here's the reason, Akash saying something like, I think quite interesting, like he's saying that the tension often arise when technical support short term issue resolution goals.

[00:17:22] Maxime Manseau: Clash with customer success long term or I can also see it like the other way around, we're like exactly, like success just need I don't know, like a short term thing, like renewal. Maybe this bug or issue is already known, not as important and plan for another quarter, it happens.

[00:17:40] Maxime Manseau: Any insight

[00:17:41] Kincy Clark: on that? Yeah I agree with you a hundred percent. There's two sides to this coin. There's definitely short term, Oh my God, this account's gonna, this account's gonna churn unless we fix this today. It's a very short term fix because maybe we're sacrificing product priorities or 17 other customers to, to make sure this wasn't, doesn't churn.

[00:18:00] Kincy Clark: So definitely, I think that short term, long term, Outlook can change over time. And again, a lot of this again, and this is why I would encourage people to really find out how their success team functions. Are you looking at like monthly, are you on monthly renewals? Are you on a yearly renewal basis?

[00:18:18] Kincy Clark: Because that makes a big difference because typically in yearly renewals, everyone waits and then it's that last month where it's we got to fix all, so we sacrificed some long term stuff for this panic. At the end of the account. And I, again, I think in general support people, this is a gross generalization.

[00:18:37] Kincy Clark: I'll be the first to admit, but I think in general support, people have a better, better, maybe the wrong word, a more holistic view of the product. Like I think they care a little bit more about the product. And again, this is a feature, not a bug, success. People are a little bit more short term focused on their account.

[00:18:54] Kincy Clark: That's again, that's a feature, not a bug if you're driving them. On retention, those sort of things. I saw a thing there about the weekly meetings with success. That is absolutely another recommendation I would make. And that's something that we implemented is a weekly meeting. And again, I would let success drive that, not support.

[00:19:13] Kincy Clark: And I would let, I would make the success team come with their priorities and then support figures out how to support them rather than support coming with all the things and then asking success. To prioritize it for them, make the success team do their, do the work of prioritization

[00:19:29] Maxime Manseau: before they show up.

[00:19:31] Maxime Manseau: And he or she mentioned product too, which I think also like sometimes is a, because like product, like you get like success, you get like support, like product like is, it's all here because at the end, like customer facing team are success. And support and they should fuel, like everything for the support.

[00:19:52] Kincy Clark: Yeah. Came out in these interviews and pats was like, there was a little complaining about support, but everyone like products, like the Death Star that everyone wants to blow up. That was pretty common across like all the conversations. Yeah, I have some problems with support team, but product team just drives me crazy.

[00:20:11] Kincy Clark: So definitely like a common theme. And I think that's a little out of scope of this conversation, but product definitely plays a role there and how you send those priorities to product, because if you send them separately as a success team and a support team, you can lose them. And I think depending on where your company is.

[00:20:30] Kincy Clark: If your company is really trying to scale, that's where you really want business stuff being the lead versus if you're more early stages, you may want product thing, like more product issues to lead. So again, you have, there's a temperature check you have to do at your own company to know what's going to move the needle in product because some product people are moved by business cases.

[00:20:50] Kincy Clark: Some product people are not because that's just where they are in their journey.

[00:20:54] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. Like the other conversation coming here, but like we're going to jump on I'm going to try to answer to all of you guys, but there is something I wanted to ask regarding the metrics and, sometimes like the clash between metrics, both teams, support and success are using metrics to measure success.

[00:21:15] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Have there been times when these metrics, like kind of clash or contradicted each other? Oh yeah, a hundred

[00:21:25] Kincy Clark: percent. I think this happens quite frequently. I think CSAT. Is one that, support people tend to focus on. Cause that's one of our commonly measured one and success people care about it mildly, but at the end of the day, they're much more concerned about their retention and churn.

[00:21:42] Kincy Clark: And I would argue that those are not, I think they brief. And being aligned, but in reality, they're often because there's ways to like promote your CSAT and get a high CSAT score, but maybe not take care of key account because again, if you have 10 key accounts and 90 not key accounts, and you need to get a 90 percent CSAT, there's a pretty long solution that another one is a mean time to resolution versus just like overall getting an account healthy.

[00:22:12] Kincy Clark: That definitely, that came up like success. People brought that one to me in these interviews. And they felt like a lot of times the mean time to resolution created friction because they just felt like the support team was just trying to answer questions and get stuff off their back. And they weren't really thinking about the account health writ large.

[00:22:31] Kincy Clark: And I think that, I think another metric there, like the back. No one specifically mentioned the backlog, but that's a big one for support people. Like we, we want to beat down that backlog as much as possible. And sometimes we, we got to cherry pick some things to like. Make that thing go down.

[00:22:46] Kincy Clark: And especially if you're getting hammered on that and you don't have enough, you don't have enough people, which is pretty common. That was another observation that's around again, not a metric question, but I think an early mid stage startups, like success teams are typically pretty under, under they don't have enough people, like the book business are pretty crazy.

[00:23:05] Kincy Clark: I, anywhere from 40, 60 accounts to a hundred accounts. If you have to reach out to a hundred people every month, it's not going to happen. So there, there's a ton of pressure and there's a shell

[00:23:15] Maxime Manseau: game that they're playing. Usually what I see at this stage as you mentioned, it's like people are here to really like prevent churn.

[00:23:22] Maxime Manseau: So basically just like when they see fire on an account, they just rush to this one. But obviously yeah, it's not a healthy organization of more mature stage in terms of success where we like, you have a book of a few dozens of customer, obviously, Ben of your product, your setting of your type of customer, right?

[00:23:41] Maxime Manseau: But you're right. By the way, guys, if you have any story,

[00:23:46] Kincy Clark: There's one in here. I wanted to hit on Max and that was it was, let's see down here. It was about revenue, linking to revenue. I'm trying to, what do I think? I guess

[00:23:55] Maxime Manseau: I wanted to jump on this one from Gary. Here it is.

[00:23:58] Maxime Manseau: What do you think about ruining this prioritization? Go ahead, because

[00:24:02] Kincy Clark: I'm a fan, but I think it has to be led by the success team. I just, I think it's unfair to ask support people to make those prioritizations. And I think again, like if you did a strictly revenue based approach, I don't think that would be a great customer experience.

[00:24:18] Kincy Clark: That's been, I think my anecdotal evidence would support that. And I don't think anyone's really looking for a pure revenue, but I think you have to find that sweet spot of how do we prioritize high revenue accounts in a healthy way. And again, I would offer that the success team needs to own that, like that's their job to prioritize the business.

[00:24:40] Kincy Clark: They own the business, not the support team.

[00:24:44] Maxime Manseau: Go ahead. It's not like I disagree with you, but what I've seen around in support, which to me is not enough done is really include like how much money does this customer bring to the table as a repartition key in the queue, yeah. For example, let's say you have a queue, you're early stage, and this queue have never been prioritized and you don't know where to start. The first key I would, the first filter to me that support should add is revenue. But this is, I don't know, I might be wrong, but this is my I

[00:25:16] Kincy Clark: don't disagree, but I think that should be led.

[00:25:19] Kincy Clark: I think that decision should be at least made with. Yeah definitely, no, I will be, I just, I think like saddling the support team with those decisions. Now, as a support leader, I definitely have a responsibility to the business and I, and as a support leader, I think I can take more of an active role and do what you're saying.

[00:25:40] Kincy Clark: But I think where it gets frustrating for support people like ICs is when they're having to make those decisions. In the moment with tickets no, I know. I agree. I just, I don't think that's a fair burden to put off.

[00:25:53] Maxime Manseau: No, that's why basically this should be took and thought before, so you have, it's all about system, what you're saying.

[00:26:00] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, exactly. My point's just like revenue need to be included in the support system. And this can come through a discussion, we have sea level and success, But my point is I don't know, 1, 000 customer. If you have two bugs, one from a customer that bring 1, 000 to the table and the other one bringing 100, 000 to the table and you don't know where to start, probably you should

[00:26:23] Kincy Clark: Yeah, no, for sure.

[00:26:24] Kincy Clark: I, yeah, I don't disagree with the airbags at all. I think it has to be a factor. Another one that it can be a good proxy for this is account help. And at Bull, I think we used this successfully where There were some more or less objective, account health is always going to be somewhat subjective and I'm okay with that because we live in a world of humans, but like having kind of a red, green, yellow approach where, you know, red, danger, a churn yellow may turn into red during a certain type and green, hey, we're all good, like bringing the support team into that understanding as well can be very helpful because that can be a way to provide context.

[00:27:00] Kincy Clark: Thanks. When you're looking at a ticket, because one of the other things that I heard from success people was support can be clueless about what's going on with the accounts. And to your point not only revenue, but like, where is the accounts? Like, how is the account dealing from a health perspective?

[00:27:19] Kincy Clark: And again, that's not necessarily our responsibility and support to gauge, but it's definitely something that we should be aware of to help make better decisions. Thanks.

[00:27:27] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. Is this one, which it's not really related to success, more to support, it's a very famous one, but do you agree on this or not really?

[00:27:38] Maxime Manseau: No I

[00:27:39] Kincy Clark: agree for sure. And I think sometimes you've got to go fast and you have to cut quality, but I think those are business decisions. And I I'll say that I know I have personally frustrated my boss because I always indexed on quality and can see that's great, but we got to get some things done today too.

[00:27:59] Kincy Clark: We got to get like all these things knocked out. And I think I've come over to yeah we have to balance this to some degree because you can't just. Focus on like super high quality because you may not get anything done, but you just have to be aware of that balance. And again, I like forcing people with the trade off.

[00:28:14] Kincy Clark: Like I really Hey, we can do this fast or we can do this. It's your account. What do you think? Typically they're going to want to do it well, but then you got to come back and say then we're not going to get it done today. Like I, I think there's some negotiating that you can have.

[00:28:28] Kincy Clark: around that and really force what the priority is because ultimately there's no right answer here, right? These are all business decisions. And typically when we, when support has a perception of the business, that's very different than success is decision. And there's no one managing that. That's where the friction's ultimately created.

[00:28:47] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So I've seen like a lot of people are basically like reacting to Greg. Which basically provide, I don't know if I can say like a better answers that we did, but obviously I guess is the right way to approach it, which is basically build, a way to formalize yeah, of different things and build it with like sales and success team and have this included in your like support system.

[00:29:13] Maxime Manseau: So at least those are the rules. I need to play with, and you just follow them and everyone happy. Everyone needs a line and no friction.

[00:29:21] Kincy Clark: Now I love this. This is a really comprehensive set of data. I'm, I'm guessing Greg that you're probably in a more mature organization. Not everyone can integrate this information.

[00:29:32] Kincy Clark: I know we struggled with this, even trying to get like Vendats and Salesforce to talk to another pretty mature system. There were some bandwidth issues, but this absolutely is the right answer. I would argue because. Now we're incorporating everything into kind of our

[00:29:47] Maxime Manseau: overall prioritization. Maybe, I don't know if you have anything in mind regarding how maybe to cry, to create, like feedback loop between support and success when I'm saying feedback loop, I'm not talking about like product feedback, I'm talking about Hey, this is how we're going to start to work together.

[00:30:05] Maxime Manseau: I don't know. How should it work? Should it be like the VP of sales of sorry, success, like sitting together, like once a quarter, like how this should look like?

[00:30:16] Kincy Clark: I'm a stay in a more frequent meetings at Bolt. We had a weekly where me and my two support leads. Would show up and we had a dashboard that we knew we were going to have to answer questions, but it was really an account health meeting that we attended.

[00:30:32] Kincy Clark: So it was the success leadership reviewing all of our at risk accounts. And then we would just go through those. And that really focused the conversation. Like I think the temptation is to have this big holistic meeting where we talk about all the issues and everything. It's I would argue like start out small with just Reddit.

[00:30:52] Kincy Clark: If you don't have anything going on right now, just start out small with red accounts and then work through those and again, force the success team to lead that meeting. That's their role in the organization, show up prepared and have an adult conversation about, how we're going to, how we're going to get these accounts out of red.

[00:31:08] Kincy Clark: Cause a lot of times it may not have anything to do with support and then just have all the data there. Like I made sure that me and my leads were really well prepared with we could talk to the tickets individually. So there was some context transfer that had to take place, but I'm not a huge fan of bringing, again, this depends on the size of your company.

[00:31:26] Kincy Clark: I didn't want to have 20 people in a meeting. This was a pretty focused meeting with about seven or eight of us, as opposed to all the individual contributors from all the teams. So there was some management overhead with that, because I had to get smart on issues, my two leads had to get smart on issues, so they had to, invest a little time to prepare for that meeting.

[00:31:46] Kincy Clark: But I will say, our red accounts went to zero, and then we started focusing on yellow accounts. And then, We got

[00:31:52] Maxime Manseau: out of the woods. Okay, cool. So yeah I'm sorry. I'm reading like some, like this check. Yep.

[00:31:57] Kincy Clark: Yeah, no, it's good. There was one in there I wanted to talk about.

[00:32:00] Kincy Clark: Cause this was a, this was not an unusual suggestion about having a success team work in support. I would almost argue the opposite would help too, is maybe don't have your support people ask if the success person. But maybe do a ride along and have them go to a few MR, monthly reviews or other like touch points with customers to really get an idea of the pressure that the success teams are under often, because I will say this, the success team can be graded much more easily.

[00:32:34] Kincy Clark: It's a binary Hey, you have a turn, right? So if you're in sevens based on churn and you're only allowed 10 percent churn, it's like sales. Like it's, you made it or you did it in support. Let's face it. We can fudge a little bit. Like we don't really have a clear performance metric.

[00:32:50] Kincy Clark: No one's going to like fire. Maybe they would, but nowhere where I've ever worked. So they fire like a support leader for like poor CSAT the first Like year, unless there was like terrible other things happening, but like a success person can be moved along within a few quarters if they're not hit it on turn, right?

[00:33:08] Kincy Clark: So don't forget that additional pressure on the success team. That's helpable.

[00:33:14] Maxime Manseau: Your point is like so true. And I just want to emphasize on, on, on Z because this I've seen it a lot, so you get like the sales which is like really like how much dollar did they bring, like Basically, like the success, I'm thinking churn is almost like a much dollar did you lose, so you have a clear metric, based on like revenue, where in support, like it's like. It's much more foggy, right? So absolutely by design too. Like I try to make it fog. The thing is really, those guys in success, they need to hit the numbers, right?

[00:33:53] Maxime Manseau: Whereas, as you say, like in reality, like in support it's much, much less obvious to, to see if you succeed or not,

[00:34:02] Kincy Clark: yes, you're hitting it. It's not buying a lot of our issues are driven by product, right? Hey, the product didn't work. I couldn't get this bug fix. Engineering didn't look at my issue.

[00:34:10] Kincy Clark: Like we have a lot of reasons why we don't always succeed in support. But, and again, there's a lot of reasons why everyone doesn't get things over the finish line, but in support and do a lesser degree, but still to a degree success, people are held accountable, period. Like they're accountable. For that business in many cases.

[00:34:26] Kincy Clark: So I would just find that out. Like what level of accountability, because some support, some success people I talked to didn't feel that pressure. Like they, there was a recognition in their company that there was nothing they could do to save accounts because the product wasn't quite there yet. But in many cases, the test people are held accountable for a number.

[00:34:46] Kincy Clark: And I think that's really important to realize because when your mortgage is on the line. And feeding your kids is on the line, like your behaviors are going to change, you're going to be a little focused on the problem.

[00:34:58] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. I'm seeing the time. I know we like already talked for 45 minutes.

[00:35:05] Maxime Manseau: So I guess we have a few minutes left. So if you guys have any comment, question, this is, like the right moment to write them below. I wanted to ask you. You add, I don't know personal experience, you could like, tell us about in your past support roles where really you got maybe like your biggest clash between, like success and support if you have something in mind.

[00:35:31] Maxime Manseau: If not, that's fine, but if you have a specific

[00:35:33] Kincy Clark: story, I can even name names in this one because it's in my past, but like I was at a startup called the Mastery, and then we got acquired by Intel, and then we got bought by tco. I'd say the first half of that. Was it wasn't contentious, but there's definitely a lot of friction because the support team was fairly isolated from the success team.

[00:35:54] Kincy Clark: That was a relatively new organization. And there was a strong feeling of disconnect between these two teams. Fortunately, I was not leading support or unfortunately, I had a different role. I was basically a solutions engineer supporting the success team directly as an individual contributor. So that was a really interesting role because I did a lot of support work.

[00:36:14] Kincy Clark: Like I would parachute into accounts and just Because again, I could focus all my energy on that account. Unlike the support team they had to, there was about four or five of them maybe, and they're like dealing with a lot of big troublesome accounts, but I could just go in and be like, okay, I'm going to deal with this account this week.

[00:36:30] Kincy Clark: I would go on site and I would do everything I needed to do. So having that, like that right arm for the success person to bring someone in. Really reduced, but because I had a support background, I could back channel a lot of stuff to the support team. So I would really try to. I'd try to bolster their reputation and really help them.

[00:36:50] Kincy Clark: And not that they needed that. Yogi was a good manager of that support team, but he was just under and so anything I could do to support them and make sure the CSMs understood, like this isn't easy, because it's not easy when your product doesn't work all the time.

[00:37:03] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, no, definitely.

[00:37:05] Maxime Manseau: This question, I want to talk about this because, so it's not in the hands of the head of support or the head of success to decide. But I think that's right. Let's say if you had to reorganize, the different function, like when you have, and I tend to see this more and more, and usually it's even called like VP of success, and the VP of success as basically like the support team, maybe the onboarding team, the, I can't management team, do you think that maybe ultimately like the solution, or at least it, I guess it really use, it really use like maybe half of the friction.

[00:37:46] Maxime Manseau: Cause you have a guy thinking about all that, like just giving you like one direction and sometimes, you get like the success in the sales team and then you get like the support in the, I don't know, operation team. And so here, like no one is talking to each other ever. And this is dangerous.

[00:38:04] Maxime Manseau: So what's your take on that?

[00:38:06] Kincy Clark: No, I agree a hundred percent. I think this is something Bolt did really well. And again, I was a little frustrated when I first got there because I wasn't super excited about working for, I always liked being more on the technical stack, like with engineering as a support leader, but.

[00:38:21] Kincy Clark: I think the future is CX, right? So like having a C level person who's responsible for the post sales experience, and I really think you should push success, support, and professional services, and anyone who's really dealing with customers post sale under one C level executive, because then you get a unified message and approach and that, to your point, it reduces a lot of friction because you have someone there who can really broker that.

[00:38:51] Kincy Clark: And this isn't a design problem. It's an implementation challenge where you have people who don't necessarily know one of the disciplines very well. So you have a CX person who is support and they don't really understand success. What I'm seeing more often is success people and business people are taking that role.

[00:39:09] Kincy Clark: And then they don't have a clear understanding of support. And so you get questions like, I don't understand why it's so hard to fill out all the fields on the ticket. And you're just like, really, come down and fill out all the fields on all the tickets. Like it's actually really hard and it takes a lot of time.

[00:39:22] Kincy Clark: And there's, there's just a ton of things that like, but at least when they're all together, you can have some better conversations and you can force alignment. So I completely agree. And I think five or six years ago, I would have recommended putting support more in a technical like engineering product stack.

[00:39:39] Kincy Clark: I've completely changed my mind on that. And I think. Support and success have to be glued together. You just have to force a working relationship with that other team. Because I've seen support teams in engineering organizations, they become second class citizens. As well, because engineering doesn't always prioritize customers and you think it's cool, like you have access to a bunch of stuff, but are you really being effective and I know it works in places like, again, this is broad, it's not nuanced at all, but I think in general, I like the idea of having a CX person as one person to manage it, totally agree with that.

[00:40:17] Kincy Clark: I don't know if the COO is the right move, but I think I personally think it should be. A CX title where they're clearly focused on customers,

[00:40:26] Maxime Manseau: ECO,

[00:40:26] Kincy Clark: CXO, whatever

[00:40:28] Maxime Manseau: you want to call it. Customer experience, just focus on, like someone would just make all the customer facing team once a purchase is done, basically.

[00:40:36] Maxime Manseau: After the purchase it, everything that's after just like someone that can see, I guess we're going to stop here for today because we've been like 15 minutes. I just wanted to. Add to comments. First, I totally forget to take the time to present each other. So I guess if you guys, after 50 minutes, still don't know what we're doing, just be free to visit our LinkedIn profile.

[00:41:02] Maxime Manseau: I'm going to talk for Kinsey, but I think he's going to be okay with it. If you have any specific questions, just feel free to. DM us on LinkedIn, if you're nice, we might answer, I'm not joking, just joking. Sorry. And I've seen many people like talking about it's great to see like this support community growing.

[00:41:21] Maxime Manseau: Just wanted to let you know, it means a lot to me at least, because it's right that a few years ago, like it was almost like, unknown and topics that were discussed were like, I don't know, very low level, so I'm happy, like we're like starting to get like a very like stronger support community here.

[00:41:43] Kincy Clark: Yeah, totally agree. It's been good. Thanks Max. Cause you've really done a lot to I think, promote the support. Like profession with these talks and with all your blog posts and stuff like that on LinkedIn. So yeah, thank you for that. Cause it's been helpful.

[00:41:56] Maxime Manseau: Thanks Kinsey for y'all. And I

[00:41:57] Kincy Clark: think if I'm not mistaken, Max, like a lot of these questions are going to show up in the LinkedIn.

[00:42:01] Kincy Clark: So everything's if you want, if Yeah, no and I'm really interested, someone mentioned cup customer effort score. I'm going to probably ask you some questions, cause I think that's something that is starting to emerge as better than CSAT, but anyway, yeah. Hey Max, thanks again. Really enjoyed it.

[00:42:20] Kincy Clark: Thanks everyone for attending. Yeah. Bye guys. Have a wonderful week.