Moments of Truth: Customer Success Focus Areas for Early Stage Startups
Moments of Truth: Customer Success Focus Areas for Early Stage Startups
Our Moments of Truth interview series provides bite-sized Customer Success advice designed to drive out-sized impact.
The Moments of Truth interview series is all about connecting you with Customer Success professionals with direct experience in the trenches so you can learn how others are approaching everything from strategy to the daily grind.
These short format, raw interviews were recorded so you can gain access to some of the best minds in the Customer Success industry. In this series, you’ll get their take on hot topics and key experiences that have shaped how they are thinking about Customer Success and its related disciplines.
In this Moment of Truth, Lauren Hayes Brown from BloomAPI discusses the key operational aspects leaders should focus on when building out a Customer Success organization with an early stage company.
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Moments of Truth Session Transcript
NOTE: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and content where necessary to improve readability.
Andrew Marks: Hi everybody, this is Moments of Truth with Andrew Marks, Founder and CEO of SuccessHACKER, and today, I have with me Lauren Hayes Brown, Head of Customer Success with BloomAPI. Lauren, thanks for joining me today. Tell us a little bit about you and what you guys do.
Lauren Hayes Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Head of Customer Success at BloomAPI. BloomAPI is an all-in-one communication platform for healthcare, so essentially facilitating both internal conversation across coworkers, patient communication, and then also a telehealth solution, and probably the most important thing here is that it’s a HIPAA compliant chat tool.
Andrew Marks: Thank you for joining me.
Lauren Hayes Brown: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew Marks: So Lauren, you’ve got some experience working in early stage startups as the first Customer Success individual that gets hired. So what are some of the things that people should be focused on and concerned about at that stage?
Lauren Hayes Brown: So I’ve been the first Customer Success hire into early stage environments, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way about where to focus my time and energy. I think that a lot of resources that are out there today are very focused on kind of that later stage area of growth, where maybe you have an entire team of CSMs, you’re able to kind of get into more of like the nitty-gritty with things like NPS, or CSAT, or some of those Customer Success Ops pieces. What I had to learn very quickly was that before I could run with stuff like that, I had to learn how to walk.
When I first started at Siftrock, which was my first early stage Customer Success environment, I really focused on our onboarding process. So how do we get customers ramped up quickly? How do we prove that value super efficiently to them, because they’re also taking a gamble on you in an early stage environment. You may not have as many customers, you may not have as many case studies just yet. You’re small, you’re the only one doing it, so how do you utilize your time in a way that is valuable for your customers?
I think that really building those one-on-one relationships is super important. So what I learned was kind of taking the approach of the book, Radical Candor. Actually just being super honest with my customers about my time, also just building those personal relationships was the way that I kind of had that foundational success.
Andrew Marks: So early stage, you don’t have as many customers, so you have that opportunity to build that relationship, and really get close to them and share with them, “I’m here to support you, but we’re early stage, so you can’t expect out of us what you would get out of a much larger company, but expect more, because I’m this much closer to you.”
Lauren Hayes Brown: Exactly, and your first 20 to 50 customers are some of your most important, because then they become your brand advocates, they become the people that are telling their friends about this really cool tool that they’re working with, and so they become the base of your business. So investing in Customer Success early on, and building those relationships, and really focusing on that is super important.
Andrew Marks: I think also in that early stage, when you’re able to be close to your customers, you have an opportunity to really glean a lot of insight from them on product direction, and key pieces of functionality, as you, as an organization, or your product organization in particular, begins to continue to build out your product and the functional set that these customers are using.
Lauren Hayes Brown: Absolutely. The advice that I would give somebody in this situation in an early stage environment as a first Customer Success hire, would be to establish those Product relationships very quickly. So become best friends with your Engineering team, become fast friends with your Product team, and really incite customer feedback-driven product advancement every day, because it is incredibly important at that stage, and you can really take how your customers feel about the product to the next level. Not only are they buyers, but now they’re invested on a deeper level, because they’re helping you to build it out to be what it hopefully will end up being, which is a high-growth product with many customers.
Andrew Marks: Thank you, that’s some great advice. I appreciate your insight, and thanks for spending some time with me today.
Lauren Hayes Brown: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
Originally published at https://successcoaching.co on November 18, 2020.
