Transcript for:
2020 State of Customer Success Webinar

welcome everyone glad you could join us we've got a special webinar today we got a we're going to run through the 2020 state of customer success report i'm joined by our founder and ceo dave blake dave hey how are you can you hear us okay hey mark hi everyone like really excited to be here uh hope everybody's doing well wherever you are curious where you're where you're all calling in from yeah if you're popping out in the chat pane see where everybody is got chicago l.a we got some folks in toronto new york florida atlanta tucson utah we got some canadians santa clara all over the place michael calling in from moscow very good very good glad everyone could be here so we're really excited to to do today's session this has been kind of two to three months in the making and really excited to bring you the results we've never done one of these state of customer success surveys before and so we got some really good insights really good um stuff that we'll go through and we'll also make it a bit of a q a kind of the game plan for today is what i'll do is right at the very top i'll give you kind of a quick high level run through of some of the some of the results some of the trends that we saw in the survey and then from there me and dave will do kind of a walk through a deep dive of let's say maybe five or six areas that are of interest and then we'll open it up for q a so we'll have the q a open if you have questions pop them into the chat pane just like usual either the the chat pane or the q a feel free i'll be monitoring that the entire time so we'll do that for probably 20 25 minutes depending on how long you guys have questions then what we'll do is we have a really cool announcement toward the end and then we'll wrap up at the very end by doing the prize winners so everybody that took the survey the 400 plus folks that actually took the survey they're going to get entered to win one of five really cool apple prizes so we'll do that at the very end so is that good to go you you good to go dave do it yep let's do it all right so let's jump in so so the the first thing that i that i want to highlight here a lot of you might not be familiar with client success who we are what we do why in the world would we consider doing a state of customer success report and the reason is is because we live and breathe customer success this is our world and so if you're new to client success what we are we're a customer success growth platform and so what we do is we help with all things related to the customer journey we're going to help you drive better onboarding better adoption better renewals better growth anything that your customer success team needs to drive a great customer experience that's our world that's what we do we'll take all that give really good insights into your leadership team allow you to collaborate on behalf of customers take your customer success information put that into slack put that into microsoft teams so you can collaborate and have really good discussions on it you'll see here we're a leader on g2 customer success category also the 2020 cody award winner for the best customer success solution so this is just our life this is what we do this is what we live for and so getting a pulse on what's going on in the industry is really what we're what we're all about and so if you want to learn a little bit more chat more about your customer success strategy let us know we're at clientsuccess.com you can email me directly i'm mark with a k at client success and just really looking forward to chatting with everyone about it but let's um let's jump into the survey itself so i'll give you kind of a a high level idea of kind of what we did and then what were some of the some of the results so you can see here on the slide here we surveyed north of 400 customer success professionals all over the world and what we found is that we we ended up doing about 70 north america then there was the the rest of the majority was in emea we did get a few folks from la dam and aipac signing up but really what it ended up being was about 350 companies of broad different ranges so we had a bunch of companies probably about two-thirds of which were either early stage startup series a series b funded startups and definitely some scale up some series c series d that's probably about two-thirds of the bucket the other third was much more your enterprise your large public companies and so we got a broad range of different types of companies and insights from them and at a high level the the big trends that we noticed the first one that really got us excited was the fact that customer success is growing you know even during a pandemic even during a recession companies as a whole are still growing their customer success teams we did find that there was a small portion about 12 of companies that had um cut some of their cs heads but as a whole even right now over the last six months we saw people growing so we'll dig more into that really excited about that result um the next thing that we spent a bunch of time in is trying to figure out where are csms spending a lot of their time what's the day-to-day life of a csm look like and what we found there was that they spend the overwhelming majority probably 80 percent of their time on what i'd call customer enablement tasks you know they're doing onboarding they're doing adoption they're doing um implementations those types of things and much less maybe 18 20 of their time on revenue specific tasks like renewals growth we're gonna have a big discussion around that and get dave some of dave's thoughts there the next thing that we saw was that organizations are putting a big emphasis on their customer experience and so i i keep thinking back to a quote that i read last year from brian halligan ceo of hubspot where he talked about 10 years ago in software your product had to be 10x better than your competition but today it's more about your experience your experience needs to be 10x better a lot of companies are thinking about that so really interesting there we'll dig into that two more areas that we'll dig into is just the fact that the customer success seems also to be working not only are people growing their teams but it's working because the average net revenue retention rate of the 350 companies we talked to was about 99 which is awesome there's a ton of really healthy sas companies out there driving a ton of great value even with everything that's going on really good to see and then what we'll wrap up with is the diversity section you know diversity is extremely important not just in our industry but in every industry globally and what you'll notice there is that we looked at it from two angles we looked at a gender diversity and we looked it out from racial diversity and at a high level it turns out that at um on the front line you'll see we have pretty good about 50 50 gender diversity in the industry not quite but but almost a little bit less as you move up the ranks and where we have a lot of room to grow is in the racial diversity side so a bunch more we'll go into there but i just want to kind of give you guys some some high level you know broad strokes but let's start with the the growth portion and this is where i want to bring you in dave so at a high level what we found in the results was that 58 of teams grew over the last six months about 30 just held steady and only about 12 saw a reduction so were you as surprised by that as perhaps i was i was shocked when i saw that i was expecting you know i remember seeing march and april when every time you loaded up linkedin it was just this depressing you know run through of different companies laying off customer success folks but at the end of the day it turns out it was only about 12 of companies what are what are your thoughts there yeah you know i think that uh what we saw was very the visual uh the very visual aspects of this trend this covid crisis where um there were definitely a lot of companies who laid off employees not just customer success professionals but employees in general and unfortunately we saw many of our friends throughout the industry who were impacted and our hearts went out to them we did our best to to help them find jobs and there may be some still out there and and we're always happy to help if you're one of those individuals um what i think though is that from what we didn't see as much kind of posted on linkedin and such are were the teams that doubled down on customer success who realized during the the covent crisis that sales sales pipelines were drying up uh a lot of budgets were on freeze um and so people weren't buying software early on uh but but uh and so that resulted in teams saying hey the most savvy teams decided to double down on their current customers and started to to shift head count maybe from sales in the short term to post sales customer success in order to take care of their existing customer base so a little bit um you know i think vote of you know the visually out there we saw a lot of companies impacted but i was glad to see the results of the survey where we saw teams who were very savvy and very smart and decided that this was the time to double down on customer success and the cool thing is is it feels like they're roaring back at now i mean i see a ton of customer success job openings now and so hopefully we can get all those folks who who are impacted back back to work as quickly as possible you know there's there's another side of this that i thought was interesting is the fact that you know as you've kind of seen customer success evolve over the last 10 years there's kind of been you know different schools of thought on where does customer success live who do they report into do they report up through the sales team do they report up to the product team did they report up through their own function and as of right now it looks like about 41 of companies have their cs leaders the actual cs or reports directly to the ceo so that tells you you know even more companies are are getting it i bet if we had done this five years ago that number would be sub 20 i agree and that's that's a really positive sign to see more and more uh the value that that cos and boards are placing on customer success uh having them report into the ceo and that's how it should be uh frankly i mean i think there's there's different situations that require a different org structure but really in this day and age and to really take care of your customers right you want that you want the customer success team reporting directly into the ceo and and be empowered uh through through that uh type of alignment yep yep exactly a few questions in the chat pane about what we're gonna do with the reporter we're gonna we're gonna share the report yeah so what we're doing today is we're going through the high level results and then as soon as we're done here we're going to send out not only an infographic but a much detailed much more detail probably about 20 page full report of all the results so we're going to be sending that out you'll hopefully get that this afternoon um if um if you don't get this afternoon you'll get a first thing in the morning so let's jump on to pay structure models it looks like there's really kind of three schools of thought out there in the industry and about half of the companies out there are doing a base plus bonus model and then a quarter are doing just a base straight up you know base only and a baseball's commission now i wasn't terribly surprised by this this kind of feels like it makes the most sense i was a little bit surprised that a full quarter of companies have just base only no no incentive no bonus no commission structure etc i'm curious to get your thoughts on that dave i was actually surprised by that the 25 percent of base only as well um and i frankly i was i was a little bit surprised by the lower uh percentage on commission as well and when when we talk about commission it doesn't mean that that we're turning our customer success teams into sales reps but i think that there's this i see more and more in the industry people going to a commission model that they get more of the upside on on the retention and growth uh that that typically comes through a commission type model my guess is that there's um the debate you know if you look at the base plus bonus and commission it's what 75 percent and so i i'm happy to see that i think that i think that the csm's deserve some upside whether it's bonus based or whether it's commission based sure yeah i couldn't couldn't agree more and one thing we'll talk about a little bit more as we get down the road and one thing we talk about on a lot of our webinars is is the discussion around you know does does customer success actually own revenue in one degree or another i suspect that the 25 that space only are going to be majority people who are either in kind of customer success related roles that just don't own revenue maybe like an onboarding or an adoption role or in just companies where the customer success team just doesn't own some portion of revenue but let's um let's switch from here to the day-to-day life of a csm this one actually really surprised me and so if i go through these results i'm going to bucket this and kind of take the adoption implementation onboarding bucket and put that into one bucket and call that kind of customer enablement these are the things that a csm is doing every day to make sure that customers are successful make sure that they're using the platform make sure that everybody's well you know trained and then on the other side you have the expansion and renewals only 18 and i'm going to call that much more you know revenue producing and so the other one maybe is more like revenue influencing and this is more revenue producing i was surprised to see that the revenue producing bucket was so low what are your thoughts i actually think that this should be fairly uh in line with what i would hope in and let me explain my logic there i believe that if csm and you know their uh their team can um really drive results in the enablement phases from onboarding uh to adoption then hopefully the expansion renewal the amount of time you're spending on expansion renewal will be less because they're getting value there's a natural forward motion to to renew and there's a natural for motion to expand because they're getting the value so i i actually am okay with this result uh and feel like that's where you know they've got 44 of their time in adoption phase i like that i like csm's focusing on that driving adoption aligning to objectives and delivering to those objectives and hopefully if they do that right that time and effort will result in a very easy renewal and expansion discussion whether they own it or whether their colleagues in the sales team uh own that expansion yep i guess my guess is you would buy into the to the old bill walsh the old 49er coach idea of if you take care of everything you need to the score takes care of itself this kind of feels like a score takes care of itself thing where if i if i focus on the things that actually influence revenue get everybody adopted get everybody on board to get everybody implementing the the expansion renewals that just kind of is a byproduct of us doing our job yeah i agree and um you know there's there's some questions here maybe i'll take uh mark i'm going to jump in here samantha talked about what's the difference between onboarding and implementation you know sometimes those terms are used synonymously um and it just depends on the company there's some products that require a very uh more technical implementation process that maybe another team would do it's the the configuration the implementation whereas sometimes onboarding may just be uh more of that enablement process it's the kickoff call the the goal alignment the training and enablement to get them up and running so that's how you might differentiate the two and then if we probably had a venn diagram there probably would be a decent amount of overlap between those two exactly and then i think russell asked a good question and mark maybe your uh 39 combined for implementation and onboarding seems really high um there is a point a part that i would say in here and maybe there's some questions about how do we how do these metrics differ by company size and stage whether they're early stage companies or enterprises maybe we could surface some of that data later if i can pull it up but russell i think from here's my philosophy with implementation and onboarding it may not be everybody's philosophy if you look at that 39 percent i look at that that part as a means to the ends that we need to do whatever whatever is the optimal experience deliver the optimal experience for our customers to be able to easily adopt our product and sometimes an onboarding implementation phase may take 10 days sometimes it may take um 10 weeks uh at the end of the day the way i look at it is that you um you deliver the required experience during that time in order to drive high adoption it is it is pretty um interesting that it's high but hopefully what that's doing is making even helping to make the adoption phase that much more successful once once they're once they're they're live with the product sure hopefully that makes a lot of sense that's one perspective cool and susan you just asked kind of a tactical question of what did we actually use to to capture this i think we used type form was our survey tool that we used to capture all of those and um it was cool we were able to have the the type form itself and send out the link to that but we're also in a able to embed it into a landing page within our website so that's what we ended up using for this pretty popular survey tool um okay let's i think we've gone through that bucket of questions let's go on to so so the first we actually had two sides of this where do csm spend their time question we had this one which was like what almost kind of parts of the customer life cycle do you spend your time on the next is more i would consider tactical of like what tools are you using day to day what types of meetings are you in day to day like if i just pulled up your calendar and looked at it every day what would it look like and this is you know there's no one area that just dominates a csm's time they have a lot going on they're spending time in customer email they're type spending time in internal communications maybe that's internal email internal chat systems like slack or teams they're working on tasks they're working in you know 20 of their time is in combining with their crm or their cs tool they spend some time in spreadsheets i mean just a hodgepodge of stuff i was really surprised to see that only 13 of their time is in customer meetings that's the one that jumped out to me yeah i think that we want to i would love to see that improve i agree um you've got customer related email so they are engaging with our customers and that seems to be a standard um you know channel to be able to do that um i think internal meetings my hope is that that internal meetings would reduce a little bit hopefully it's it's they're for uh specifically um focused on customers uh the majority of those meetings but yeah i think that if you were to ask most css fortunately i bet the the answer is not i know it's it's yeah it's persuasion on behalf of your customers and and things like that but i would like to see um next year i'd love to see customer meetings increase i'd love to see frankly i'd love to see that to be uh 20 to uh you know 20 to 40 percent and and try to see how we can we can optimize the rest of this as an industry and as even as a partner um to to spend more time with the customer yeah i mean there's just a hodgepodge of different kind of things that are going on out there so i think there's you know potentially interesting innovation to be done there to bring the the tools related stuff down and increase the the amount of customer meetings there's one thing actually on the last slide that i wanted to to highlight here is i want to jump back just for a second so what we found is that okay this is where you know people are spending their time in fact 70 of the respondents also said not only is this kind of how i spend my time but i'm also as a csm like i'm responsible for every single one of these stages i'm an onboarding specialist i'm an adoption specialist i run expansion deals i i run the renewals so i mean at the end of the day those folks that 70 of csm's they're spread super thin right now yeah what advice would you have like is that kind of it is what it is that's what we just that's the that's the game we've signed up for would you advise teams and companies to think a little bit more about specialization what are some of your thoughts there i think it depends and i think there's a couple things one is i think cs organizations should be willing to embrace owning the life cycle from what we call new to renew i think they should be willing to embrace it and i think that the customer success leaders need to us become very good coach coaches about how to um how to equip their csms to be able to handle all parts of the lifecycle but i think as companies start to scale up that you start to see the specialization and so you might have an implementation and or an onboarding team you might have um have renewal specialists etc so i i don't i think that's a part of our evolution is that we're we're and i think it's a good thing that we're able to own more of the customer journey um and i think it really just depends on the product of the company and the stage that determines when you should start specializing across that journey and i bet even if we pulled peel back the onion kind of on that maturity idea if we go back to super early stage companies which we didn't have a ton of in the surveys but like there's a lot of really early stage companies that there's another bucket of here of customer support and you know kind of you start where you're doing support and success trying to be proactive and reactive and then really the majority of people in in this survey had gotten a little bit beyond that so they were at least splitting off support and success and the success folks are spending this time and then like you said as they expand over time they um they'll they'll get there interestingly enough in a couple weeks we're doing a webinar with um peter o'malley who runs a big part of customer success at oracle so he's doing you know customer success at a huge scale and to be i'll be make sure to ask him these questions around how do you how do you specialize do you guys think you know yeah specialize through the journey or not so i actually can i dig in real quick there mark before we go on i i really think that's the case um it my guess that if we would have added support related tasks in the survey i'll be us that might be the 44 of their activities unfortunately like ty put in there that sometimes cs can be a stop gap um i agree with you ty when i ran customer success for a portion of the adobe business uh back in the day we did an analysis to dive in there and found that a big portion of the csm team is doing support related activity so my suggestion for cs leaders out there is dig in and really understand that if they are work with your support counterpart to optimize that get it off their plate so they can be focused on these value-added activities sure so coming back over here samantha asked a question when we were earlier digging in on the 13 customer meetings um what what should the ideal be do you have an ideal for me my answer is probably just more i don't know if i have a specific ideal do you have an ideal that you would shoot for of the amount of time a csm is spending in customer meetings versus some of this other stuff i mean i would love to see 50 at least 50 of their time i don't know i'd be curious to see what the the folks in the chat um but i wouldn't it wouldn't be great if csms could spend 50 percent of their time with customers on the phone uh helping them driving adoption driving enablement and the other time uh the the other time that the minority part of the time would be um around um meetings for their customers um or or driving activities and improvements for that that customers uh that's what i'd like to see yeah i mean we're definitely seeing a a correlation between the amount of you know time that a customer just the amount of customer success results that you have and the net retention of the business i mean if we would have ran this result we'll talk about in a minute how the average net revenue retention for a sales company today is about 99 i bet if we ran that five years ago it's nowhere near that and the big difference is that yeah products have gotten better um but also companies have just staffed up their customer success teams they're getting it more and more so yep agreed let's go to the next one there's a ton of stuff in this slide so we could easily probably spend an hour digging in here i just want to pull out a few things that that i noticed here and then dave you can obviously you know put in some of your other thoughts so we have you know these first three bars that let's call it about two-thirds of respondents said you know our companies are more customer-centric or we consider our companies customer-centric my ceo he or she gets understands values customer success and you know we're properly represented at board meetings so that bucket that feels like progress but it still to me is not where it needs to be like this is 2020 how do 28 of ceos sas ceos still not get customer success that progress but i'm still call it frustrated by that what are your thoughts um i i think that we have made progress i think call progress uh what it is and acknowledge that but i do think we've got a ways to go i think you know ceos that don't get it it makes me scratch my head a little bit um and and i think that there's sometimes when a ceo will be a very sales-driven ceo um and he or she will really focus on sales and sometimes they say hey revenue cures all ails and sales sales sales growth growth growth i'll get to customer success later and that's my that might be the case in these these organizations i think what happens though is those that eventually um it catches up to them and and they regret not not getting it earlier not investing earlier and then they're scrambling to ramp up customer success and and and that's a little bit too late what i hope to see is more ceos see customer success not just as a retention strategy but a significant growth strategy within their current base uh customer base and that will give them extra incentive to invest on that side board meetings certainly we need to see more in board meetings i can't imagine today that there should be any board meeting that there isn't a focus on the customer side of the business so i i would like to see that further got it awesome um jesse makes a comment here on the next part where i was going to get to you know only about half of companies are celebrating renewals i've never been in a company that doesn't celebrate sales deals everywhere i've ever been you celebrate sales deals even the smaller sales deal but only half of them are still celebrating renewals i don't know yeah and this one is kind of a wtf to me uh this one i'm gonna say is a call to action uh for everybody on the call if you're one of the companies that's not celebrating renewals uh i i would say hey make it a plan of action to convert and convince your your uh leadership team to do that or just start doing it uh the the at the time and effort that uh we as customer success teams spend in taking customers for a year to drive that renewal is significant uh most times more a lot of times more than the time spent trying to close the initial deal so let's all rally together and let's let's um let's have a call to action to make sure that in our individual companies that we're celebrating renewals we're selling we're celebrating expansion we're celebrating success yeah for sure um the the next ones here visibility into cs metrics um you know still only 60 of you know customer success folks and i'm guessing this is much more kind of frontline csms still don't have visibility into the overall cs metrics of the business and that's another just another thing that i'd be pushing on like if you don't know the net re you probably know your individual numbers whatever numbers you're held accountable to but if you don't know what your overall company logo gross net revenue retention numbers are and how you as a team can influence those that's something i'd just be pushing on pushing on really hard if i was if i was in those shoes any other thoughts there dave now just that i think it goes along with everything here is that as companies become more and more customer centric as ceos spend more time there as boards spend more time there it tends those metrics rise to the top across the organization where you start to see them communicated in town hall meetings and quarterly internal qbrs and etc so i think those will come up as as the others continue to come up sure sure jay asked a question back on the celebrating renewals like what do you kind of mean by that you know do a party with the client do company-wide mentions and create congrats like i know what it means at client success for us it's when a renewal comes through you know we've got a we've got a shout out going out in the in the general slack channel we'll usually do an all hands meeting on friday where we call them out and kind of the same way that we do for for new sales deals it's it's thought about the same way party with the client 2019 i was all for that but maybe that doesn't happen this year but i like that idea i'm with you yeah i think i think you you covered it well it's just making sure that you're celebrating whether it's in a slack channel town hall weekly meeting recognize them i think some of the the cool things that we've done and we've seen others do is not only talk about the customer that renewed and and some of the things that you're doing well but maybe even talk about the individuals you work with and show not only a logo but also the faces a picture of the individuals that you engage with throughout the year and make make that your logos per people turn those into people you're celebrating an extension and a continuation of a great relationship and just make sure that everybody's involved in that exactly um so we got a lot of companies that are talking about customer success i want to jump into this customer advisory board this feels like a something that's happened for it's been out there for a long time but obviously only 40 of companies are doing it we did a really cool webinar back in june with a guy named mike gossby who i would consider kind of the the guru of customer advisory boards if you want that i can send out the link to that but you know dave for you like what are your thoughts on customer advisory boards are you surprised by this result if you are like what would you what's the call to action there uh you know i think that's probably in line with what i what i would think um just because i think customer advisory boards tend to come into play as you're scaling up and in particular in the enterprise space um usually early on um to be able to have the resources and the capacity to to formulate a customer advisory board um it takes a lot of time if you're going to do it right you have to invest it um in in resources and time and effort to do that so i that doesn't surprise me as much what i think that i would do is if you're an early stage company there's different ways that you can um you can get the same impact like we we've done a thing that we call an idea exchange where we invite customers to participate in the ideation process and the validation process of how we should evolve and so people can go out there they can add their ideas other people can vote and validate and that that's another way to have this voice of the customer um present within your company if you're not ready to go to that next step and invest in a customer advisory board you bring up this point around the voice of the customer and we're starting to see much more of these voice of the customer programs emerge and they're usually part of like a customer experience team but there's there's a whole you know litany of literature and different things out there around voice of the customer and how does customer advisory boards how does customer experience fit into that i mean we could do a whole you know series of webinars on that but you know everybody on the call i'd recommend if you if you feel like you need some work there on voice the customer or customer advisory boards what have you like there's a there's a ton of really good literature out there to just just google and you'll find a ton of stuff on it yeah cool um let's do we got a few more slides here to jump through um the next is i've referenced this slide probably a dozen times now so i've so i've you know i've already given away the the story here but i was really inspired and happy by this result so you can see here this was the average retention rates of the companies that were surveyed um you can see they on average had about an 80 gross or logo retention rate and about a 99 net retention rate so effectively what that means for most of these companies and those of you who you know haven't spent a bunch of time schooling yourselves on the difference between all these different retention rates is that you know when they come into a month or come into a quarter they're typically keeping 99 of the revenue that they came into the quarter with they're not you know they're at least able to upsell and expand out of whatever retention out of whatever churn they have but really what this means is that whatever the new sales team brings in goes immediately to the growth line and that's why you see these companies that are you know growing at breakneck pace i mean we've seen a bunch of news on the snowflake ipo um over the last few days and i was i was reading some of their literature and that those guys have a 156 net revenue retention was the number i think i read but you know that's that's rocket ship territory um what what are your thoughts here were you were you as happy by this result as as i always did yeah and the first thing i'd say is just kudos to everybody on this webinar because there you are driving these numbers this is phenomenal to have it average uh these numbers is great um and so kudos to uh the the customer success um professionals on the front lines and the leaders and the teams who are driving these numbers up across the board i think one thing to just keep and and maybe as a caution is to think about is if you're on the call today and you're saying hey my numbers are are way lower this or somewhere lower than this or higher than this recognize that this is a an average across all all the participants across all different customer segments and so if you're an smb customer your benchmarks may be lower than this uh smb has tends to have lower or higher churn and lower retention mid market is uh comes up a little bit and then enterprise is is typically north of 100 net revenue retention so just keep that in mind that depending on the primary target that you're selling to your benchmarks your your your ranges will be a little bit slightly different than this but this is great across the board again there's so much literature out there and there's different thought leaders like david scott and others who have a ton of you know if you want to learn a little bit more about what dave mentioned there um let's switch gears into some of the diversity discussions that we put in here so as i mentioned the beginning really what we dug into is kind of two different schools of thought or two different buckets we bucketed into um male female kind of you know gender diversity and then over into racial diversity and really what i see here is and this is what i mentioned at the beginning of the call is that as far as male female gender diversity goes i would consider this pretty good at the front line csm level almost 50 50. um now as you go up the ranks that 44 in the front line isn't translating it's it's not you know outrageously different but it's you know it's it's definitely not 44 percent at both um and so this is another one that you know i'll call it progress definitely not you know perfection i'm sure this is better than it was you know a number of years ago but this is one where especially in you know tech companies that you know tend to you know have challenges around this in general this was this was a what i thought was a pretty good result um curious to get your thoughts i would just say that i think that the customer success space can lead out better than any other space out there in this regard i think the women and customer success are amazing we have amazing leaders we have amazing customer success professionals at all levels um and so i would definitely like to see this um this continue to um improve uh and i could see a day and i i very easily and hope that we see a day where actually um the the the numbers are swapped here that that uh that women are definitely the the majority in the space and and i really mean that i just feel like that in my interactions and for the people that i look to for um insights and inspiration i love um i love what we see in um in this regard in in this space maybe differently than other professional um float areas of focus i think that we have a really good opportunity to continue to um to lead out here as a customer success space yeah sure so so the so the next part here i'll say kind of the the next bucket that we did was kind of racial diversity or people of color and customer success and in general um this one i i i didn't call it rosie news this one told me we've got a just across the board we've got a lot of um a lot of work to do here um 12 percent of csms would consider themselves people of color um 70 of or 17 of customer success leaders um this is where you know i'd put this as a as a call to action on us as a community as us as as an industry i'd i'd love if you know there are folks on the call that know of companies that are doing you know cool initiatives um you know doing things that are that that are bucking this trend i i'd love to hear about them i'd love to be able to celebrate them i'd love to be able to you know have them on a webinar and hear about what they're doing um to to raise raise awareness and raise their profile um because there's just a lot more that i think we can be doing there because the results speak for themselves frankly yeah i agree and i think that it is you know there's there's good and bad with every every insights you get and this one i think there's definitely a call a call to action here we've got to do better and i hope that next year that we see this uh increase significantly i think uh that would be a really positive thing for for our space looks like irene's uh saying that they've done some great things at gen zenefits thanks irene and hope you're doing well um and and i think we need to look at companies like this and understand and learn from them and try to infuse some of that learning and some of that thought leadership and and what i call leading out uh how can we look to them who is let out and and follow have a fast follow in that regard as an industry cool so much longer discussion on that um love to you know like i said if there's other folks who have other comments on on other companies that we could highlight and learn from love to hear more about it because i think that's like we said that's something we'd love to to learn more about and keep pushing um i'm going to skip through a few of these other ones this was uh this one didn't come to me as a surprise one of like the top key performance indicators that a lot of companies are are running into net renewal in churn user adoption customer outcomes expansion revenue gross renewal nps or just any type of feedback so these were kind of the the kpis that different customer success teams were either tracking or being held accountable to this one didn't jump out to me as terribly surprising for for you dave a with this line up with your expectations and b are there any other kind of kpis that you're seeing companies measure that might not fit into this bucket that could be of interest you know i think that this is if fairly well defined and a lot of people have different ways that they measure their csms but i think i i'm okay with the results here net renewal as the ultimate one which is a combination of a lot of things um and you know i've i've heard in the past that mps or csat is a key component of of csm performance indicators and also compensation and i think that it should be uh considered but not i like it at six place against i guess what i'd say in these two i don't like using nps as as one of the top uh performance indicators just because i think that there's a place to mps and csat but it but it's a it's one of the listening methods not a primary one that csm should be measured against or or comped against let's put that out that way cool well i mean there's a ton more data here we could go literally for the rest of the the afternoon or the evening digging in here that's i think what we what we wanted to get through in terms of data we've got a couple other things that we want to dig into but if there are any other kind of questions that anybody else wants to wants to talk about feel free to pop those in i'll do a quick scan through um i'm not seeing i think we've gotten through most of these questions um there's there's a few questions around like how this data kind of breaks out in terms of like from small companies to big companies you'll see more of that in the in the detailed report so you'll see a lot more of that and if there's some questions that when you get the report we still haven't answered um shoot me a note i'm easy to find market client success and we'll go back and look at the data because you know we have an enormous amount of data and we weren't able to slice and dice everything into even a 20 20 plus page report so if there's other pieces of the data that you want us to look at please let us know um let's see judy says something on anything on the number of companies that have referral programs um i don't know if we have referral programs in the data um but i'll go back and look on that um cool let me let anything else you want to jump into on this dave or before we switch gears i think that's great okay so at the the reason that we did you know this survey the reason we do all sorts of different customer success content different webinars is as i said at the beginning like we're a company we live and breathe customer success and we really want to always be a thought leader leading out on you know all things related to customer success and one thing that we've noticed over the last year or so is that especially in the customer success let's call it event space there's a ton of really good events and content geared toward customer success executives and you know even us we have one of the the sad parts about this week is that had coveted 19 not happened we would be wrapping up our our executive summit that we do over here today so that we were originally planned to do our cs100 summit tuesday wednesday thursday this week up at sundance resort in utah um we we we've since kind of pushed that out to february hopefully we'll able to we're able to have it but the thing that we're realizing it is that there's not enough events out there for frontline csms frontline folks who are actually you know delivering customer value every single day and so this is what we're going to launch today we're announcing that we are going to launch the first annual 2021 we're gonna be doing this you know early next year csm summit and so this is gonna be the industry's first event put on for csms by csms we're super pumped about it we've been talking about it for months now we're excited to announce it today dave what what else would you add there oh we're just super stoked about this um we think that again a lot of frontline csm's there's so much thought leadership there's so much energy so much passion um and they love to engage and network and learn from each from each other and so we're really excited about announcing this we hope that you'll be excited and the way that we're going to do this is we're going to engage the community we're going to form a a community-based planning committee and and vision committee and they will be the ones planning on it so you're not going to see a bunch of leaders um speaking up there you're going to see your peers and those in you that are in the industry who uh you'll hear best practices and learnings and be able to share and get acquainted so we're harnessing the the passion of the community and and we're really excited to announce this and and make this an annual summit for frontline csms yeah so we're pumped for it i just put the link into the chat pane so if you want to go sign up for it right now go ahead and do it client clientsuccess.com forward slash csm hyphen summit um it's there in the chat pane love to see you know all of you signing up for it we're going to promote it again a lot more details to come we're still working out final days we're still working out final speakers we're still working out format but this is going to be you know an awesome event specifically again for frontline csm so really pumped about that and let's wrap up with the prizes so those of you who took the took the survey there's a bunch of you on the call um what we said we would do as we were going to give away five apple prizes and so these are the prizes that we have we got uh the new apple air pods we've got the beats headphones and we've got new apple watches and so we're gonna do a random drawing of the people that completed the survey and we're gonna give away five of those right now if you're on the call awesome when we we announce your names um make sure you you give us uh give us some excitement about that so here's how we're gonna do this so let me pull this up here i found an online tool called comment picker and so what i've done here it's kind of cheesy but you know it looks like it's going to get the job done for us so what i've done is i've got all 400 plus people that actually took the survey you can see scrolling through all their names here so they're all here all here all here and what i'm gonna do is remove names from list after the draw so you can't win more than once and so here's what we're gonna do pay no attention to the cheesy honey coupon thing here but let's uh hit start and fire away who's our first winner our first winner is adam josephson so adam congrats adam great pumped for you we'll get that over to you we'll reach out to you our is adam on the call i do not see adam getting excited all right so so that's number one adam josephson's our first one the next name we'll start again and if for some reason the software doesn't work and adam doesn't join roger graham number two all right roger congrats roger attaboy all right so that's number two roger graham number three we'll start here let's see who's number three gonna be nina wilkinson awesome i know you know nina well we know nina runs customer success at lob yep awesome congrats nina you're gonna be we're gonna we're gonna be excited to send it to you and again if you if you're on the call what we're gonna do is you're gonna get to choose from any of those prizes so we'll send you the we'll send you the results and choose from yeah so that's three right roger adam roger and nina all right we got two more so let's see here number four let's do it thomas seal binder congrats thomas congrats thomas all right very good and last but not least the last one here let's do it let's see it let's hope for mark stoddard show up paulina paleo congrats to everyone so we're excited for everyone thanks so much for spending the time we would not have been able to do any of this without the time that all of you took to fill out the survey and get us all this really rich interesting insights so not only have you helped client success but you've helped the entire customer success community because now we're going to take all this data share it in a report that everyone's going to get to read and have much better insights into how customer success runs in 2020 and you know what we're doing beyond so really appreciate everyone and dave any final words before we wrap up thanks for joining everybody uh this is an amazing community of customer success professionals we're excited to help share these insights that will hopefully make be actionable insights that we can all continue to improve our community we appreciate all of those who participated in the survey where we congratulate the winners um uh who who get the prizes and we hope those that are uh csms in the trenches would will join us for the csm summit in march 2021. thanks for joining us today forward slash csm dash summit sign up i'm expecting to see a thousand signups before in the next 90 minutes so maybe hopefully all right thanks thanks everybody