How to Succeed at Enterprise and Product-Led GTM with Miro CRO Sangeeta Chakraborty

By Leeor Mushin and Ann Miura-Ko

Recently, Floodgate had the privilege of hosting Sangeeta Chakraborty, the new CRO of Miro, to chat about Go-to-Market (GTM). Sangeeta is someone Floodgate and Ann have known for close to a decade when she was working for a portfolio company in the ML space, Ayasdi.

Before we get to some of her core GTM lessons, it’s worth mentioning the extensive experience Sangeeta has on this topic. Prior to joining Miro, the leading collaboration workspace for innovation, Sangeeta was the VP of Customer Success at Okta (another Floodgate portco), where she assisted global organizations to accelerate their cloud adoption and achieve success in their zero trust initiatives. Prior to that, she was the SVP of Customer Success and Growth at Checkr, helping customers such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash and others become successful in the new world of work by bringing safety, speed, fairness and transparency to their hiring. In her career, Sangeeta has held executive-level customer success positions at Symphony AyasdiAI (acquired by Symphony), Accela (acquired by Berkshire), VMware, Digital Fuel Technologies (acquired by VMware), and InQuira (acquired by Oracle).

We are publishing her responses to our questions with a bonus section especially for early stage founders.

• Part One: CS’s Role in a Unified GTM
• Part Two: Building out GTM in the Early Stages
• Part Three: Choosing and Integrating GTM Motions for Success
• Bonus section: Tips in GTM for Early Stage Founders

Part One: CS’s Role in a Unified GTM

To start, how do you distinguish between Customer Success and Sales?

While most leaders and founders agree there is a need for both functions in enterprise SaaS, there’s a misperception in some circles that there needs to be a separation of church and state between Customer Success (CS) and Sales. Some people have the belief that Customer Success is not/should not be ‘commercial’ and should be all about service, responding to the needs of the customer. In other words, CS is expected to make and keep the customer ‘happy’. While I understand the underlying concern, I believe this ‘service only’ oriented view of customer happiness is a false pursuit on the road to nowhere.

In my experience, the ultimate job of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to partner with the executive sponsor and champion, and ensure the customer is successful in achieving their goals, and ultimately in achieving the business case that motivated them to make the purchase in the first place. It’s being a trusted adviser that enables the customer to get more value and, in the process, drive more revenue on behalf of your company. In this view of Customer Success, the objectives of CS and Sales are very much aligned, and not separate entities. The most successful organizations that I’ve seen have created a framework designed to maximize this alignment and build true partnership.

On the other hand, I have also seen organizations (usually early/mid stage) where CS faces a significant identity crisis. I once surveyed a GTM organization as part of my advisory work. Had an opportunity to ask a few CSMs a simple question, “What does Customer Success do?” I got ~15 answers, all were variations of “we are the single point of contact,” “we are the trainer,” or “we help troubleshoot”. This was not a recipe for success. Since then, aligning CS with the viewpoint of partnering with the executive sponsor and champion has led this organization to a much better place where they now have clear pathways for creating value for their customers.

In trying to drive more value, how do you think about improving inefficient GTM Organizations and how does customer success fit into that equation?

In my experience, the best way to start implementing improvements is by remembering, at the end of the day, GTM organizations are about creating and sustaining value for customers. And to do that effectively, you have to be able to partner effectively by listening carefully — both to expressed, as well as unexpressed customer needs.

We all come in with a sense of what we could do, or maybe even should do. But, I believe it is best to set aside those preconceived notions, and listen hard to both the customer and internal stakeholders to understand circumstances that are new and unique to the organization. Gather your insights. Next, look at the data, which is just another form of listening. Question existing assumptions, and leverage your perspective and experience as a business-centric leader to determine how you can ensure the desired structure is sustainable for the business.

And I use this word “sustainable” intentionally. Many early stage companies find themselves riding high on the thrill of the first early adopters. They then make the mistake of building a framework around a few high-intensity, early signals, which don’t always take into account the full picture required for future, sustained success.

When you focus on building strong partnerships across the business and with your customers, based on listening to a number of signals inside and outside of the organization, you create an entire organization, not just GTM, that is truly customer-centric (for all customers), durable, and incorporates all aspects of your business. After all, customer success is the remit of the entire organization, not just a team called CS.

How do you create the right incentives for Customer Success in this partnership?

In my mind, it’s first about building the right culture and mindset within the organization to think customer and value first. You need to develop a vision, values and ways of working that encourage customer-centricity from top to bottom in every department with clear roles of execution. Every other decision — including incentive planning, prioritization, org design — flows from those values.

In terms of incentives, sales incentives are generally straightforward within a few familiar frameworks and parameters, and most people tend to be clear about those. However, when it comes to Customer Success, people tend to think of lagging indicators such as customer retention. But, since CS driven outcomes are more complex, and lagging indicators cannot be solely attributable to the work that CS does — CS incentives tend to be more complex. I lean towards a mix of important leading indicators, as well as some key lagging indicators such as retention but try to find a fair balance between the two.

With leading indicators, you need to think through what success would look like for you and for your ideal customer persona. For example, did they adopt your product the right way — understanding what the customer journey looks like, ensuring it can be measured by the data and then designing CS incentives to influence that journey for the customer. For example, for certain personas, a particular integration or workflow executed on your product may be the best path to value — find a way to measure that, set good targets, and hold CS accountable to driving that for each customer. Other elements may be the level of customer engagement — are they regularly conducting high quality quarterly success reviews, and offer them spiffs for highly desirable outcomes, such as customer case studies. When the organization is mature, it is helpful to find the right balance of incentivizing customer growth as well (again, a lagging indicator).

Part Two: Building out GTM in the Early Stages

How do you think about building GTM functions in earlier stage startups?

As I mentioned before, an easy trap to fall into especially for experienced GTM leaders and founders, is the trap of preconceived notions. Since every business is different — you have to let go of those, and seek to understand the specific nuances of the business, challenge your own closely held beliefs, and ensure you’re doing the right thing for the business you’re founding or walking into.

Some critical questions to think about are:

• What is the customer value journey?
• What are the stages?
• What is unique to our business model and value proposition?
• What do we need to measure?
• What could be failure points?

Meet with the data analysts, and work to deeply understand what the data tells you about your most successful early customers. This allows you to build a comprehensive journey and associated maturity/health score. Once you have listened and gathered your insights, the next step is to bring your ideas to the table so that the team can come together, challenge and test them. This gives you the opportunity to bring the entire organization along on the journey with you, giving them a sense of shared ownership of the success of the business.

The next stage is to determine the sales motion, the specific sales plays, the role of the different entities that are necessary to bring the customer along on that ideal journey that you have designed for them — including a very strong operations team that is a strategic internal partner for you.

How does this all shape up into creating the first Sales Playbooks?

The best approaches that I’ve seen are in startups who experiment and iterate before they scale. They have hypotheses and test often. And they have built a model that allows them to measure what matters.

Variables are critical — what works in the smaller segments may not work in the bigger segment, different geos, different channels and so forth. Here is a methodology that I have seen lead to success in landing on the right GTM playbooks for an early stage startup:

• For the first few sales, you want the Founder/CEO to be very close to the process. It’s about learning everything that you can and building an experimentation mindset. Once you start to see a pattern emerge, that’s a good sign. It might help you get to the first $1M in revenue.
• But then for the next $1M-$10M inevitably the variables change. It may not make sense for the founder to be in the driver’s seat. At that point you’re letting the team drive the playbook that you think will work for the next stage. You want to ensure you are ready to scale when the signs show you are ready. But, you still want to be in active learning mode by always staying close to your sellers.
• At some point, you see consistent patterns and start to think about scaling up. When you think about scale, I would scale very narrowly at first (again in the mindset of fast learning), i.e. maybe only scale in the western Americas and one vertical. If that lands, then you scale beyond that. If you’re a partner-led model, you may scale through one or two different partners to see what works, and then you scale from there.

It’s about experimenting, being ready to have your beliefs challenged, and then getting ready for scale. What you expect and what turns out to be reality might surprise you, and often scaling too early on a flawed hypothesis can be expensive and difficult to reverse.

What is the ideal customer stack for GTM to help folks achieve some of these shared objectives?

Well, there are a lot of people trying to make it better, but we’re still underserved. And, that’s because these tools typically still honor the separation of church and state that we talked about earlier.

At the moment, we use Zendesk and Gainsight on the CX side. On the sales side, some of what we use are Salesforce, Clari, Gong, Chili Piper and are experimenting with Pocus. I am still hoping for the ‘one place that solves all needs’ but that seems a long time coming.

Recently, I met with a bunch of my peers in the industry, and the common use case we are all solving for is: The CEO says “I want to know what’s happening at Customer X”. And immediately, everybody scrambles to try and get the usage answers, the confidence scores, the sentiment of the account, everything. It’s a big, disruptive fire drill. But with these LLMs now abounding — how do we bring in all of the system data thoughtfully so not everyone is scrambling to pull data together?

I’m looking for something that understands the sentiment and state of the customer by looking at all of these different systems, as well as public information, and will put together a narrative based on the current state. That’s the kind of tool that can help make the promise of a shared GTM vision a reality.

Part Three: Choosing and Integrating GTM motions for success

How do startups figure out their GTM motion given some of these foundational principles you are describing?

It depends on what value you’re building. If it’s something you believe can be understood through the product experience, self-service is absolutely the most beautiful motion that you can deploy.

But, not all products are the same. There are many products where a higher degree of engagement and education is required, making self-serve less than ideal. Again, you need to understand the problem you are solving and how your product does it. The way I think about it is digital-first — most people don’t want to have a conversation if they can self-service. As much as possible, start with product and digital first and then start to understand where you need to insert human touch. There is absolutely a need for human touch in PLG motion, but it’s about the right timing and the right customer segments and what problems you are solving for them. It needs intentional design to get this right.

Another crucial aspect, that a lot of early stage companies overlook, is the power of an engaged user community.

Miro did this way before I joined so I take no credit for it, but I love that the community is so vibrant. Many of our 50 million users participate actively in Miroverse, and that plays an important role in product adoption, helping spread the word about our product. We have committed users who actively build out templates and share their IP on Miroverse for the benefit of all.

Don’t overlook community power and, if it makes sense for your business, begin building as soon as you can — a lot of the enthusiasm comes from the early adopters. You want to harness that intention and love.

Would love it if you could dive more deeply into the motions at Miro as an example of what this could look like.

Miro is very strongly rooted in the product-led growth motion — it’s the foundation upon which we are built. We believe that at the end of the day the product is our number one salesperson and customer success person. In theory, if everything is straightforward, we wouldn’t need to talk to anybody at all. That is how we drive the majority of our business — our goal is that you should be able to do as much as you want and get significant value from Miro without any human interaction.

At some point along our journey, we found ourselves doing business with organizations with more complex enterprise needs. These could be topics like user management, security and compliance requirements, etc. If there’s a way for us to service those needs without human touch, that’s ideal and we will continue to do it. At the moment, for complex enterprise customers navigating those needs may need some human touch help. Depending on how complex the need, customers receive a program for their success. That program could be entirely digital or it could be provided through one of our Customer Success Managers. Customers can also access our Support Center, our expansive Help Center, our deep Learning Academy, and of course our resources on the Miroverse.

Understood for bottoms-up organizations. What do you think are the secrets of tops-down enterprise sales businesses with your experience at Okta in mind?

Again, I think it starts with being brutally honest about how big and relevant the problem you’re solving is. Even as a startup, you have to eventually provide a valuable solution to a problem that is relevant to the most significant stakeholders in the organization — CEO, CIO, CTO etc. When you’ve built a product that meets that criteria, that’s where the tops-down skills really come into play.

It’s not a factor of time; it’s a factor of how much value you’re driving. Okta took off because there was so much demand for the problem they were solving, and it spread like wildfire from CIO to CISO, etc. And then Okta built on that foundation, by consistently delivering with a customer-first mindset — something established from the start by the CEO. They built that ethos we spoke about earlier. That is the way to do it.

Bonus section: Tips in GTM for early stage founders

How do product-oriented founders build out a sales motion and team?

The best product-oriented founders are the ones who are able to study and learn about go to market quickly. Whether you are driving a product-led growth motion or a more traditional approach, you have to think about go-to-market very strategically in terms of how you want to build it up, and you need to do it early. Your GTM motion will set the stage for how you prioritize decisions within the business, how you sustainably grow your business, it’s a critical function that when done wrong comes at a significant cost.

Getting it right requires curiosity, honesty, and humility. When it works well, it’s because the Founder/CEO is willing to dig in and ask tough questions, when they don’t have rose-colored glasses about the product and what it takes to make the customer successful.

What I mean by that is they don’t confuse technology with product. I’ve been at places where the bare technology was considered the product. It’s important to understand the difference. Does your technology have a layer that a user can use to actually solve their problems? Or, do they have to jump through hoops to do something, anything with it, thus rendering it less than ideal for solving real problems. I have worked with companies that were so fixated on the underlying technology that they completely forgot about the user experience.

If you recall, I said that Customer Success is not just a GTM responsibility…it belongs to the whole company. Be real about what problem your product is solving, and how capable it is at solving it.

So, how do you get to the level of understanding and perspective?

Learn from the customer: How big is the problem? Because you could be solving something really well. But if it’s not big or critical, how valuable is it?

• You have to get real about this — you have to talk to users and customers forever as the market will keep changing. The learning never stops.

Learn about and from the competition: You have to think about the competition, and position yourself in their shoes.

• Competitors may not immediately show up on the radar of an early start-up but, as you become successful, you’ll start noticing them and they will start noticing you. Watch how they react to changes in the market.

Learn from your team: If you have a salesforce in place, you have the opportunity to hear directly from the people on the street selling your software. Talk to the sellers.

• As the founder or CEO, you get special status. You’re likely talking to people to whom you’ve been introduced by warm introductions — be wary of the Ivory Tower.
• Talk to the sellers, again, all the time. Your sellers will constantly come back to you with first hand information, and if you have created a safe space, share with you the challenges they’re experiencing everyday. This is immensely valuable information to learn from. “Tell me more” is a great way to seek to understand.

Learn to separate signal from noise: How are you separating out the strategic input form the feature functionality requests?

• If your team is only ringing up problems from the squeaky wheels, that can be an issue. You have to understand what is not in your roadmap that may be critical for the future. You need to find the balance between future-proofing your product and responding to customers’ requests. You can’t be a custom shop, and you’re never going to be able to satisfy every customer.

Learn from all customer personas

A common folly I have seen in companies is completely underestimating the administrator’s problems, and the impact that can have on expansion and future sales. Or, they forget to build visibility with key stakeholders and champions within the business. There is an ecosystem around your product for which you need to provide care and all user personas matter!

You can’t afford to forget any of it.

The job Founder/CEOs have embarked on is a big one. And again, it requires positivity, curiosity, honesty and humility. The startups that will break apart blame sales teams for lack of success, engineers for not building good enough products, or they think that the customer is just going to a cheaper alternative. The best and strongest leaders are constantly learning, looking at the signals from the street AND the signals from product feedback and working that virtuous cycle to keep driving forward.