In this episode, Eran Ashkenazi, Chief Customer Officer at SentinelOne, discusses the importance of maintaining gratitude for the customer, the challenges of prioritizing customer success within an organization, and the pitfalls of being too scrappy with tools.
This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Eran Ashkenazi, Chief Customer Officer at SentinelOne. SentinelOne is a pioneer in delivering autonomous security for the endpoint, data center, and cloud environments to help organizations secure their assets with speed and simplicity.
Eran is an experienced business-oriented technology leader with a mind for business development and customer focus. He’s a world traveler and resident speaker in company events and conferences. His technological experience related to pre-sale/post-sale activities includes consulting, design, implementation, and training.
In this episode, Eran discusses the importance of maintaining gratitude for the customer, the challenges of prioritizing customer success within an organization, and the pitfalls of being too scrappy with tools.
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“Innovation, tenacity, relentlessness, there's a lot of different values that got us to that particular point in time. But you know, I think everything starts with customers. Customers are the essence of existence for a vendor. And I think that vendors should never forget that, you know, as they focus on top end and bottom line, on savings or growth.
Customers are the fuel that drives all of that, right? If you keep them in the center of your attention, then there's better chances of you succeeding, right? It's still a slim chance, by the way. Not many companies can go through this road and end up where we ended up. So we're very, very grateful for that, and we're grateful for our customers.” - Eran Ashkenazi
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**(03:51) - Customers are top of mind at SentinelOne
**(07:24) - Endpoint security
**(16:39) - CS challenges
**(25:43) - Mistakes along the way
**(31:35) - Building out the digital journey
**(37:38) - Quick Hits
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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Eran: Innovation, tenacity, relentlessness. There's a lot of different values that got us to that particular point in time, but you know, I think everything starts with customers. You know, customers are, you know, the essence of existence for a vendor.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to CS No BS. Your Practical Playbook for delivering net Revenue retention, The Holy Grail of Customer Growth, hosted by Jamie Bertasi, COO and President of Totango.
Today's episode features an interview with Eran Ashkenazi, Chief Customer Officer at SentinelOne. SentinelOne is a pioneer in delivering autonomous security for the endpoint data center and cloud environments to help organizations secure their assets with speed and simplicity. Eran is an experienced business-oriented technology leader with a mind for business development and customer focus.
He's a world traveler and resident speaker in company events and conferences. His technological experience related to pre-sale post-sale activities include consulting, design, implementation, and training. In this episode, Eran discusses the importance of maintaining gratitude for the customer, the challenges of prioritizing customer success within an organization, and the benefits of using a customer success platform instead of trying to be scrappy.
But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor. Don't get stuck waiting on a rigid. Time intensive build for your customer success software. Start right away and see immediate value with Totango. The industry's only composable customer success platform. Enjoy a modular platform that enables easy iteration and optimization to drive predictable scale up growth.
Start for free at Totango.com. And now please enjoy this interview with Eran Ashkenazi, Chief Customer Officer at SentinelOne.
Jamie: Hello, Eran. Thank you so much for being here.
Eran: Hey Jamie. Thanks for, Thanks for having me.
Jamie: No problem. Um, so I've been so looking forward to the conversation because you are one of my, I think, like top performers as the way I think about it in customer success.
So I'm super looking forward to, uh, asking you a bunch of these questions.
Eran: So I'm humbled. I wanna make sure you talking about the same person.
Jamie: No, come on. All right, Ron, so let's kick this off with a big question. You were promoted earlier this year. Congratulations. By the way, how would you say your customer first mindset has played a role in your personal?
Yeah, I
Eran: think, you know, this is something that kind of, uh, uh, I have since my early career I've been working even like, you know, after school sometimes, like servicing customers to some extent, you know, building PCs, doing networking stuff. So, you know, a lot of that kind of. Followed me through my career in Checkpoint and in Sentinel One.
And you know, that definitely helped kinda maintain this customer centric philosophy in, in the company and to some extent also to, to my promotion throughout the years. So do you feel like
Jamie: it's something that you kind of like learned at a really early age and just kind of kept going? Or was it, did you have a great mentor, you know, who kind of taught you as you started your career?
Eran: I mean, that's, that's a great question. I think I had multiple mentors in all sorts of stages. Some of the latest that definitely worth mentioning is, uh, you know, our, my, uh, previous vp, uh, you know, at checkpoint like 10 years ago. Uh, and then eventually, you know, with Nick and with Tomer, both of them being very customer centric, that definitely helped the mission.
Jamie: So then, okay. How about at SentinelOne then, in terms of the company success, obviously very successful organization and you know, how is customer centricity there a major point of emphasis? What is it you guys do to kind of bring that to life?
Eran: I mean, we actually talk about customers almost in every ELT meeting and every executive leadership team when we get together.
Customers is either the number one or the number two topic that's being discussed. So there's a lot of kinda acknowledgement around the table, not just by what you would normally see as go to market leaders, but also, you know, with people from, uh, MNA and, and our key people officer and product officer and technology officer, et cetera, like, Everyone is engaged when it comes to customers, and that brings it really to the top of mindset.
It's not just the lip tax, it's
Jamie: it's real. So it sounds like it's part of the culture. A hundred percent. It's so interesting. So how do you think you guys did that? How did you really bring it into the culture? You
Eran: know, I have to say that maybe a part of it is actually that we didn't start as a leader. We were the underdog.
And being an underdog means that you have to work harder and smarter, and you have to pay attention to every single deal from the early presale stages to the sales cycle, and of course the entire customer journey that comes after and when you'll like. Talk to other customers that have been eventually, um, you know, procured our, you'll see that a lot of times they would talk about the attention that even the sales teams are giving them.
So customer centric for us is not just in post-sales, it's also in pre-sale. It's also in the sales motion as well.
Jamie: Yeah, that's super interesting and definitely let's get into that a little bit more, but before we do, I think might be better or maybe helpful to get a little more background. So maybe just tell everyone about the scope of your role at SentinelOne and maybe a little more background on the.
Eran: Sure. You know, I'll, I'll start the, I'll start with the company. I mean, you know, SentinelOne these days everybody or most people know us, definitely in our area. Cybersecurity is a publicly traded company on the ticker s in, you know, we're, uh, almost thousand employees. We're, uh, servicing almost 10,000 customers.
And we started about, you know, our journey about almost 10 years ago, actually as a small startup with two Israeli founders, childhood friends that wanted to make a difference, wanted. You know, re revolutionized the endpoint market. Uh, they definitely did that. And then, you know, since then, of course, we also went into some other areas including, you know, um, data and mobile and some other, uh, capabilities that the platform now has.
Now if you know, if I talk about myself, my journey with the company actually started also way back, you know, over eight and a half years ago, I joined a, a, you know, very small, scrappy 10 people-ish startup as their VP of customers. That was the original title to some extent. And guess what? There were no customers.
So that was basically, if you're talking about customer centricity, then Tomer back then was like already seeing to the future. He said, I want someone to be here to be with everything from pre to sales. And this is kind the premise of my. Of course since then, I, you know, I started in Israel for the first like year or two and I moved to the us.
I've been here ever since. And, um, you know, that allowed me to be closer to our customers, closer to the business and help scale and grow the company and my teams as well.
Jamie: Awesome. So, so maybe just one more sec on endpoint security, since that might be a new topic for people they might not have heard of.
You know, what is endpoint security? So maybe you could just briefly explain that and, you know, what's a typical CU a typical customer for you guys? Obviously 10,000 customers in, you know, eight and a half years is super impressive.
Eran: Yeah, thanks for that. Um, I, you know, endpoint security or, you know, these days we're actually referred to more as a cybersecurity platform, but definitely with emphasis on the endpoint.
Endpoint is everything. Endpoint is, you know, your desktop, your laptop, a server. But endpoint can also be a cloud workload. It could be a container, it could be a mobile device. So, you know, as we continue to grow, we cater more and more of these surfaces, which allows us to provide that level of protect.
And then we add other capabilities on top, including, you know, iot discovery, uh, or, you know, mobile protection or identity protection, et cetera. And I also owe you, by the way, a little bit of note about my role at, So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back it now, just please definitely. You know, chief customer officer means a lot of things for a lot of people and different companies.
You know, for us it's really, first of all, it's really the customer. So of course when it comes to events like customer advisory board and, you know, customer events and, and just generally, whenever we interact, customers then know I'm there and I'm part of team, but it also in operational. Leader that basically runs everything from support to customer success, professional services, and our threat services organization, which includes managed detection and response, digital forensic incident response, and threat hunting.
So there's really a lot of various, both value add. And very kind, simple run of the mill, you know, must have type of services at the same portfolio. I
Jamie: love the names, I love the terms. They're just, they're so like, uh, captivating, right? In terms of like response, threat, all this kind of cool stuff.
Eran: Scary . I know.
Get
Jamie: your attention. Right. So that's awesome. All right, so you're the customer advocate. And it sounds like, you know, you guys have just from day one, been very oriented around the customer, delivering for the customer, as you've talked about, you know, number one or number two, topic, agenda, topic for uh, ELT meetings, which is all super interesting.
So how do you work to really, I would. You know, pre and post sales, bring the teams together without there being any kind of seam, let's call it, for the customer. Right. You know, you might have one team that has a certain agenda, another team that's got a different, a different goal. How do you make sure it all
Eran: works?
I mean, at the end of, at the end of the day, it's all people, and it starts with the leaders. I think having good relationship on the leadership makes a huge, huge difference. And so, you know, as for myself and say our SVP of sales engineering, Jared, or our Chief Revenue Officer, Mark and other leaders, we get along really well.
And I think that once leadership gets along is transparent, can also sometimes disagree, right? And argue that's perfectly fine. But even. All of us want exactly the same end result. We wanna make our customers successful. We wanna make the company successful. We wanna make value for our shareholders. Then eventually, the the rest of it follows.
Do we have some themes that are still there? Of course. But we're working on it constantly and, you know, making it better. And how do
Jamie: you feel like that transfers to the rest of the company, right, In terms of the culture, like you talked about? Yeah,
Eran: I, I think that eventually, you know, one, one of our values that we talk about is One Sentinel, which is just a.
Like game on SentinelOne. And it basically means that we're, yeah, we're all, we're all one team. We all have the same goals and we try not to work in silos. So, you know, and whenever we, we see that, we try to go back and remedy the situation, get back on the table, have a conversation, and I think like 99% of cases that really solves everything.
Uh, and people follow, you know, once they've seen that something is successful and that's that a better way to work instead of. Everything goes through some sort of an escalation and comes from different channels, then they continue to follow that and that creates culture, Action creates culture. Yeah,
Jamie: it's really, really awesome to see.
So you guys recently had the largest cybersecurity IPO in history at 10 billion plus. So obviously again, you know, huge kudos to you and the team for making that happen and just to hear your story going. Being like, say the 10th employee to where we are today is just, um, kind of mind boggling really for the rapid growth you've seen in the eight and a half years.
But, you know, how does the company's philosophy and customer success play a role in that accomplishment? Yeah,
Eran: I mean, you know, our IPO was indeed like a monumental event, uh, you know, for the company and also definitely for me personally, Almost unreal to be there standing on the, the porch icy and ring. I think that there's a lot of aspect that came into it.
Customer centricity in all levels definitely has been one of them. You know, innovation, tenacity, relentlessness. There's a lot of different values that us to that particular point in time. But you know, I think everything starts with customers. You know, customers are, you know, the essence of existence for a vendor.
And I think the vendors should never forget that, You know, as they focus on, you know, top end and bottom line as they focus on maybe savings or growth. Customers is the fuel that drives all of that, right? So if you keep them in the center of your attention, then there's, there's, uh, better chances of you succeeding, right?
It's still a slim chance by the way. Not many companies can go through this road and end up where, where we ended up. So we're very, very grateful for that. And we're grateful for our customers,
Jamie: of course. Right? But I'm sure it's due to the hard work of everybody on the team. You know exactly the values that you point.
Innovation, tenacity, you know, relentlessness in terms of thinking about the customer, trying to make everybody work together for it. So, you know, I guess the question is, when you look across, say pre-sales as you even mentioned, you know, and then all the way through the whole life cycle of the customer, where do you run into the biggest difficulties in terms of delivering for the customer?
Or maybe, you know, getting the teams working together seamlessly? What's, what's the biggest c.
Eran: I think generally like, you know, handovers between organizations that are in kinda separate to some extent have different kinda path in terms of what defines their. Is always challenging, but I think that to that end, we have, you know, devised handover methodologies that kinda work more seamlessly in terms of like warm handovers and proper onboarding.
And we have the, the teams and the capabilities and you know, we actually use your platform for some of these things as we're going through the process of onboarding new customers that kinda help a customer understand. I'm now a customer. This is what it means. Here's my new team, here's my ways to communicate.
By the way, Jamie, it doesn't mean that customers will not continue to call their SE or rep when sometimes when they have an issue or they, because they're just used to that, but it's a process and eventually within time as they go through their journey, they understand kind of the different roles of different people inside that, you know, hybrid team that is manag.
Yeah.
Jamie: Awesome. So your COO, Nicholas Ward, said, SentinelOne puts customers at the center of its universe and which is, you know, obviously very much what you're talking about here in, uh, in all the conversation we've been having. But can you give us an example of a story or how that happened? Some, some example of really putting the customer at the center of the.
Eran: Yeah. Well, I think that, uh, this is something that's very, you know, very true, not just with Nick, but also with Tomer and some other executives where we would never basically kind of try to move on when we see some customer that is in pairing, right? So, for example, uh, You know, it could be, and it doesn't matter if it's or Tomer, but like say that some arbitrary customer, a very small one from some other geography, sends a note via LinkedIn and tells Tor, Hey, I'm your customer for the last year and a half and I have these problems.
You know, Tomer will probably respond faster to that customer and loop me in. Then he would respond to a lot of other things. And so, you know, none of our executives actually kinda look the other way or there's some sort of. Of a request, a concern, an issue. And so that kind of replicates with all our executive teams, especially with, with our top
Jamie: leadership.
Yeah. And I guess you guys must have faced during this eight and a half years that you've been there, like questions of scale, right? Because going from zero customers to 10,000 customers is a pretty brisk pace, right? During those years, and I get, I. Wondering about the kinda challenges you faced as you look to scale out your customer facing functions, let's call it.
Right. Because one of the things that we talk a lot about at Totango is the customer success operating model, where we believe that, you know, customer success is something that is delivered by a. All of the teams working together as opposed to just the CSM team as an example, right? Because it seems insurmountable for just one team, you know, to do everything that kind of needs to be done, as an example.
So tell us one of the biggest CS challenges that you've had to solve as you've scaled this, uh, incredible business.
Eran: Yeah. Well, when I think about challenges, actually I think about like the first challenge, which is actually to get the budget to properly fund customer success as an organization and bring a leader to that organization.
And I actually very vividly remember conversations I had with, uh, well, that was our previous CFO somewhere in. Essence of thousand and 18 talking about the need and why we need to have it. And it's a little bit, it was a hard for our CFO at the to say, Wait a second, I, Ron, you're just asking for a cost center.
This is just gonna be, you know, money spend, not money, uh, coming in. And it took me a while to show also via data. I'm a very data driven person. Like there is direct correlation between the health of the estate to renewal rates and a function of that also to upsell, which is what we call net recurring revenue, right?
So n and you know, once we kind those things in, it also allowed us to build KPIs on top of it, around satisfaction, around retention, et cetera. And that allowed me to get that, uh, hump across the. Once we started going, it was much, much easier to justify the growth. But that initial, you know, just getting off the ground, you know, this is really the hardest part was for me at least.
Jamie: I think it's, I, I hear this from many, uh, customer success leaders because oftentimes the other leaders, um, in the organization are not as familiar with some of the kind of, uh, Current thinking, new ways of working, this type of, you know, an approach. And so in many ways I'll hear things like, Oh, well the sales organization can just do that.
Right. I see you smiling. Yeah,
Eran: yeah, yeah. No, I'm smiling because it's very true. And I think that we had some of those same conversations ourselves. I think that it, it will be foolish for a company that once they're growing real fast to do it, I. I mean, to some extent it's doable, but it will be a very kinda, uh, objecting forces in terms of the rep that needs to both hunt and farm and take care of like a full journey at the same time.
So yeah, I think that every company goes through that phase and eventually the ones that are successful see that it's, it's not really gonna stick. Like you really need to have focus education leadership.
Jamie: What were the initial KPIs that you signed up to, to get the cfo, you know, to give you the green light?
Eran: Yeah. Now I need, I need to go back in my, uh, in my notes, uh, and, and, and, you know, and emails. But I, you know, it was mostly around, uh, satisfaction nps overall engagement. I would say escalation, avoidance from like a top level escalation and definitely churn. Right. And you know, as we started we kinda saw where we're, and we were like, ok, you know, we, you know, we started with, with an MP3 success era.
We started with nps. That was probably just highs, you know, I dunno, maybe five or six years ago. And eventually we, you know, we reached some points where it was. Even, even suppressing 70. So I think like there's, there is a lot of benefit to that. And so, you know, as time goes by, we of course subtracted and added different KPIs that will be really more focusing on what we can actually show as our value as opposed to things that are.
You know, more, more generic. And still with some of those KPIs, I keep saying a disclaimer, Hey, this is not just us. This is not just me or my team, or Jack's team. This is actually a lot of other organizations and we're all part of that NPS product quality and you know of and help and self-help and support.
All of it comes together into some of these. I
Jamie: totally agree, and this is also what we see, uh, with other customer success leaders at Totango as well. It's the smart ones who really pull the whole organization together to deliver with this kind of, you know, in this mindset and with this customer success operating model who actually are able to galvanize everybody without sea or as seamless as possible as for example.
So, okay, so when you think about it now, it sounds like probably. Maybe nr, is that like kind of your key metric that you're really going for net revenue retention at this time? Is there one key metric or how do you think
Eran: about it? I mean, it's, it would be one, one of the, and we even have some, uh, more success organization of the up and momentum that we're doing a lot more than before for, for sure.
And of course, Grr, which is, uh, you know, gross retention rate, which is to some extent churn or renewal. Because that tells you a story about the customer satisfaction as a whole. You know, we do a lot of analysis on anything that doesn't get into our renewal rates, what exactly is happening there. We have, you know, weekly, more than weekly meetings and, and executive updates on major deployments on, you know, major hot escalations that actually go to a wide form, including elt, you know, Going back to the point of like, there is awareness and acknowledgement across the entire leadership team and beyond on what exactly is happening with our customers, especially with top customers or top
Jamie: installations.
Okay. So if we go back over to early days, you know, when you, so you got the CFO convinced, got the investments, started hiring, building out, you know, the function in the organization, the way of thinking about it. What were some of the, the biggest challenges you faced once you actually got the investment?
Eran: You know, you always think like, where to start? Where do I start? Right? I can't boil the ocean. I mean, even back then maybe we had, you know, I dunno, couple of thousands of customers and where do we start? So, you know, in my, my book at least, it's like we need to, you know, we're here to protect revenue and we're here to enable.
So yes, we start with the talk and Ed roughly, you know, You know, at the same time we start to think about ways where we. Work on some of the, the digital touch, but we're aware that like it's gonna be harder to get the data aligned, you know, and synchronize and to the point where we can trust it and we can create automation around it.
So yes, we started from the larger accounts. Designated csn, s what we call enterprise Cs. And then we slowly move down the funnel. And actually now we're at the point that we have in our, you know, full functioning community with the, you know, digital, uh, onboarding, not just touch. That's kind of allows us to cater.
And also the scaling is a very important point. I, I, nobody really wants to have, you know, an army of customer. You know, just in order to kind of keep customers happy, you need to do it in a, in a smart and and thoughtful way.
Jamie: Yeah, totally. We, I completely agree with you. And that's one of the things that, um, I'm also working on, which is this question of scale up.
So when you think about that, maybe give folks a bit of an idea of for 10,000 customers, what's the, what's the organization look like? You know, how do you have it organized? And, um, how many resources in each segment that type.
Eran: Yeah, so I mean, going back to your question, it's not, uh, it's more than just customer success.
So like if you look at my entire organization right now, you know, just, just over three people or so that are divided between support, uh, which is about half of it. There another, let's say, you know, roughly two quarters and, and then some between customer success and, and you know, some of our other managed services offering.
Um, customer success is definitely a growing organization, but it grows. Kind of in a direct relation when it comes to the very top accounts and it grows in some smaller kinda ratio when you're talking about kinda the majority of the business. There's of course also our customer success engineering professional services and some terms that fall under our customer success leader.
And you know, that is really around deploy. That is really around engagement, you know, to get customers off the ground. And we have a couple of offerings and we have some things that we're doing, uh, to certain cohorts, regardless of offerings that are being sold or not. So this is also another area that we've invested the lot in, like just making sure that deployment is very smooth.
It's like, If your initial experience is smooth and easy, you know, after that everything becomes easier. If you start on the wrong foot, it's, it's a lot more effort. It's, it's a lot more friction down
Jamie: the road. Yes, Totally. Completely agree. So, okay, when you look back, now, we're gonna go into digital and all that in a bit more in a second, but when we look back at.
Kind of the journey that you've gone through as a leader, building out this organization of 300 people and aligning everybody, though it sounds like it was kind of a cultural element of the company from the start, from the top as the, The two founders were very customer oriented from the beginning, so I think that's wonderful.
What mistakes did you make along the way, looking back? What would you do differently?
Eran: I made a lot of mistakes, but, uh, I dunno if I'm ready to admit all of them. You know, I'll say that at least one mistake that I did early on is that I was trying to be a bit scrappy, so I was trying to save. Right. Money, right?
In terms of budget, et cetera. And, you know, there's a couple of areas that I, I try to save and it didn't really work. For example, one of them was on the tooling. So I tried to do my own thing with just with Salesforce, which is our crm, and I'm like, Yeah, what's the big deal? I'm gonna, you know, I can couple of, and, you know, red, orange, green and this and that and some tasks and use some of the existing infrastructure.
and actually spent a couple of tens of thousands of dollars on it, and I absolutely got nothing. Like it didn't really work. It didn't provide what I was expecting. That's definitely mistake number one. Mistake number two, again, related to being scrappy, is to not hire the right leaders and not investing in top talent when you're building.
Anything to do. I mean, with, with the customer facing organization, you know, sometimes you know, you know, maybe you've got a chance and you're a VP in a small startup and you wanna bring like somebody to head your cs. And so you take someone that has been a customer success manager somewhere, but that person can really, a CS organization, you know, they could be a great CS CSM to start with, but if you wanna bring a.
Bring a leader, get someone that had a leadership position prior, et cetera. So, you know, we've definitely done a couple of these mistakes, you know, way early on talking about, you know, but you know, as we grew, we changed that philosophy completely 80 and you know, in the couple of years it's just really top talent across the board.
And I'm actually very lucky and privileged to have the team I have. It's one. Big reasons why I continue to like wake up in the morning with a smile on my face. It's the team that I work
Jamie: with. That's so great. So coming back to the team then, what are your tips on hiring? You know, do you guys use recruiters?
Is it just word of mouth and referrals? Or do you have any particular process that you would recommend to other people to follow? How do you, how do you really identify the top.
Eran: Um, that's a good point. I think, uh, recruiters actually never for completely blunt, early our recruiting team to, I used to like guide them, still guide them very closely when comes to like looking for a particular talenting through candidates saying, Yay na, starting to kinda hone in on the right.
Persona, but you know, do you know how they say, uh, an announce of luck? You need that too. So you need, it's, it's a little, little bit of timing and, you know, having the right brand or being in the right business to attract of that talent. So having a good brand or a growing brand together with being in the right, looking at the right time, helped us find some of the, some of the folks that we have today, and it takes a while.
So I'd say don't give. Sometimes, maybe it's a process that will take a couple of months and don't, don't settle for a second best, just, uh, you know, go all the way . Great.
Jamie: Okay, So then coming back to the saving money on tooling, right, and we see this too, what would your advice be to somebody else starting out there?
You know, you said, you said you tried to use the CRM to start with, get some kind of basic stuff going, but that wasn't really helping. So if you could do it differently, what would you do?
Eran: Yeah, I mean, my advice would be, you know, focus on your own line of business. If you're our case, we're a, a software company in the cybersecurity arena, we do endpoint protection and then some, then we should focus on endpoint protection.
You should not focus on building a customer success platform, right? So if you're, then you're in a cloud business, maybe you're in some other business, it could be, you know, uh, some FinTech, it could be some. Focus on what you do. Don't try to build and reinvent the wheel. There are vendors out there, whoever you like, it doesn't matter.
Use some of it. Use all of it. But definitely go to, uh, and, and eventually at the end of the day when you do the math, it actually makes more sense because once you get to a, to a scale where you need to like, Cater 10,000 customers. If I had my own system, whatever it would be, you know, using all sorts of tools and tableau and other things, I would find myself like with an ops team of like 20 people.
So that would cost me more than what I pay for a platform, probably.
Jamie: Yeah. And how big is your current ops team? It's,
Eran: it's pretty small. It's like, it's a handful of people, right? So the idea here, and, and again, this is things that I like to do, is when I choose certain tools, I like to make sure that they're easy to use, that I can manage them in my own team's capacity without necessarily, Offloading that to it in order to be quick, in order to react quickly and to make sure that the changes and kinda, you know, stay within, within my own organization as much as I can.
It might not work when we become a, you know, a thousand people company, but for now it still works and it works well.
Jamie: Right, right. Okay. I think that all sounds great and I guess that ongoing iteration is really what's key. Being able to kind of be nimble. Realize something, make a change, uh, and, and, uh, just continually improve.
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. Okay, So let's go back to digital, because this is definitely a hot topic these days, and sometimes people of course will call this tech touch. But the concept of using, you know, one to many types of programs and, um, experiences so that it's not always a one-to-one human engagement with the.
With the idea being that this is more cost effective and a way to make the business model work for the customers who are very small. And of course the whole world has moved, you know, really to digital models, as we all know. So how do you approach building out the digital journey? How complete is it? , You know, what more do you guys have to do it?
Just talk about some of that.
Eran: Yeah, so I mean, it's, it's a work in progress for sure. I mean, we did a couple of things. First, we, you know, we set up a, a team, we brought in a leader, kind of, you know, what call cs. You know, so, you know, here's another name for you. And, um, you know, and, and then we, you know, we brought in some additional assistance to build out our customer community and connect that to additional resources that we have already in terms of like curated search on top, how to documents K'S connecting s system, you know, to an LMS system in order to provide content.
And then created some additional content in terms of like webinars, et cetera. A big, big word that now repeated in the last couple of sentence is content. So in order to build a good digital touch program, you need to have a lot of content because you're replacing the fact, the human interaction with.
Webinars with emails, with all sorts of like activities that can be done, maybe through some collaborative platform, like some sort of a community forums, et cetera, And order do that. We need content. So I think getting into, you know, doing scale CS or digital touch, you need to make sure that you are. on a route to building content and you know, so we're still in that process of building content.
We're still in the process of making our customer community more easy and accessible. We've also invested a lot in value reporting. So a part when you think about like customer success managers calling their customers saying, Hey, Obviously not asking how things are, but rather saying, Hey, I watched that you are doing this and that, or I see that you, you know, most of your endpoints are outta date.
You know, if you guys thought about like an upgrade plan, instead of saying that, then you could potentially do it automatically via data. Let's say this case that ised into in part A of a campaign or we had created like separately value report. That goes automatically, they're customized and personalized and goes into their customer community.
So when the customer logs in as part of some email campaign, that kinda alludes them to, it's the call. So they go in and they see that they have a report. In the report, they see all the data in very vi visual format that says you're out support in this areas and, and you know, here are some couple of best practices that you need to do, et.
These type of things is what can replace more of human interaction. And then human interaction becomes still an area for cases where, you know, there's more attention that needs to happen there. You know, some escalation cases, et cetera. But it becomes really the one to many, even one to many, many.
Jamie: Right.
Yeah, I love it. So what do you, where do you guys draw the line in which you say, Okay, this is one where we put, you know, a human being managing the portfolio versus one where they're gonna be in our scale CS program?
Eran: That's another tip, and I would say that it actually changes all the time. So it grows as the company grows.
Don't stick to a singular number, cause that number might not be relevant and it'll actually cause a situation that. Your team will blow up and you know that, that might cause problems, uh, you know, down the road. So we started from like, you know, when we had, and I remember when we had a couple dozen customers, Guess what, They all get a call, you know, they all talk to, and as we continue to grow, that number start to change, but maybe it's 50,000 or, or 200 or 500.
So, you know, these numbers continue to change and we're reevaluating it and recreating different segments to adhere to those cohorts. You know, now we. Strategic customer success and enterprise customer. And scale Cs. So these are all like different tiers that cater to different type of cohorts of customers.
And then, you know, of course the more you go down, the more digital it becomes, the more you follow up that funnel, the more human interaction, qbr, EBCs, you know, a lot of attention to details and knowing people by their first name and all of that. Right,
Jamie: right. Exactly. I must ask you, are you, uh, have you heard about the video QBR stuff that's coming out?
The, the, uh, functionality. It's coming out from Totango, that it's gonna be super interesting .
Eran: Um, I, I mean, I've seen it, I've seen it in some, probably some notification even from Ravit, but I, I don't think I really look too much into it. So I would say no. .
Jamie: All right. It's gonna be awesome. It's a good way to do that kind of personalized qbr, um, in an automated fashion for the scale CS group, which I think is a challenge for everybody.
You know, as your customer grows, your number of customers grow. There's only so many CSMs you can hire. You can afford to hire or find or retain or train, or you know, all those normal things that everyone is dealing with. And so you've gotta have that, I think, digital and scale program kind of right from the start.
So do you use digital then across the whole, the whole customer base? To some extent, even with strategic and enterprise? Yes.
Eran: Yeah, I mean to, to some extent, but we're personalizing it more on the top end. So like, you know, there's, I mean even from as simple as like who signs the email, So maybe on some of the, you know, top cohorts, it'll be signed by their designated csm and on the lower end it will be like your customer success team.
So, I mean, as simple as that. But of course it goes well beyond that and there's a lot more customization when it comes to the top cohorts. We're very, I'd say thoughtful when it comes to like how we distribute data and who we distribute that data to. So we went from like, uh, you know, doing email alerts and everything to everyone all the time to really stuff.
And we do some things through. You know, uh, campaigns and we do something through calls and we do other things through, uh, you know, Pendo, which for in app, uh, notifications, et cetera. So
Jamie: yeah, I think that that makes tons of sense and it's super smart. The problem with too many campaigns, so the customers is, you know, at a certain point there's just so many emails we're all getting and how do you really email 13?
Yeah, yeah, hundred percent. Uh, you know, stand out in that. Okay. A couple of more personal questions. What's something you read, watched, or listened to recently that you can't.
Eran: I mean, I, you know, I thought about it, uh, before, uh, before our call and, you know, I was in, uh, you know, rather like a serious topic, but I was in, uh, July.
I went to Dublin to, uh, present at a conference called First, It's like an I'S conference. And we had there, and just after my keynote, there were two gentlemen that went on the stage and were talking about, you know, like just general, like child exploitation on the internet. And I was like, I was looking at this and I'm like, You know, I was shocked actually that these things actually happen around us and I then happened to listen to a podcast, which is called War, which is extremely interesting.
It's just kinda like a six captivated about it and just raise my attention for young kids, et cetera, just to, um, you know, we're all, as vendors, we just need, I think we need to do. In, in that area. So like that was, to me, it was a little bit of a shocking experience, I have to say. So that's what comes to
Jamie: mind.
All right. So now we're all gonna go read that or listen to it, I guess. Sounds very interesting and I'm sure like super compelling and obviously a very important topic. What advice would you give to someone starting out in your role today?
Eran: It's a, it's a tough question. I think work hard, don't expect shortcut.
You, you know, things happen in a certain pace for a reason in terms of like maturity and if you're gonna, you know, find yourself too early in a two, um, it's backfire. I this be like advice number and be. As you're working hard and you're trying to achieve your goals, just balance. Balance your life, you know, balance your family, your friends, uh, and because time is like the most valuable resource we all have, we're endless personal and what's.
Jamie: Okay. And if you weren't working at your current company or in CS at all, what would you be doing?
Eran: Probably I think I would be like either, either a standup comedian or something that like stands on a on a stage and entertains people in some way or form. And if not that, I'll probably do something. I'll try to do something with my hands.
Maybe it'll be like a general contractor or something. I dunno.
Jamie: Eran, you are a man of many talents going from being a cco of a very hot, successful company to working with your hands or a standup comedian, and you clearly can do it all.
Eran: I'm not sure. At least I think I can do it all. That's a difference.
All right,
Jamie: thank you. That's it for this
Eran: week's episode of CS No BS with your host, Jamie Bertasi. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave a rating or review and tell a friend. This podcast was created by the team at Totango, Design and run best in class customer journeys with no code. Visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iter.
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