CS Hit Every Metric and Growth Still Flopped

Your CS team can hit every metric on the dashboard and still miss the growth number.

Maranda Dziekonski is Chief Customer Officer at Fexa, with 27 years in customer success and operations and a decade in HR. She joins Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski to diagnose a CS team that did everything right on paper.

From there, the three of them argue about what it takes to make CS a revenue function, and who pays when it isn’t.

We discuss:

• Why a CS team can hit every internal metric and still miss a 20% NRR target
• Running a white space reading before you commit to an expansion number
• How NRR can hide a gross retention problem
• Supporting the long tail without losing future champions
• The 50/50 comp split that ties CSMs to gross and net retention

(00:00) Why CS gets cut first
(00:33) The 20% NRR scenario
(02:31) Starting with a white space reading
(05:30) Expansion, churn, and the leaky bucket
(07:27) What to screen for in CS hires
(10:16) Who owns the value statement
(12:32) Bringing the CSM in before close
(17:09) Total cost of ownership and the long tail
(20:04) The Zendesk story and the champion effect
(27:21) Monday Morning Move and the handoff gap
(31:26) Layoffs and AI in customer success
(37:50) CSM commission and the comp split that works

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Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Jay

Co-founder & Managing Partner of Revenue Reimagined

Host

Dale Zwizinski

Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Revenue Reimagined

What is GTM Uncensored™?

Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.

Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.

The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.

GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.

Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.

What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.

Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.

GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.

Maranda Dziekonski (00:00):
So I've personally helped lead multiple rounds of layoffs. I have about a decade of HR experience under my belt as well. Acted as a fractional COO at a company where I went and I reviewed the budgets and figured out where are we going to cut first. The first place that I cut is if you're not coding and you're not bringing in revenue, you got to go. So it's quite frankly that simple. You're not writing shipping code

Adam Jay (00:25):
Tied

Maranda Dziekonski (00:25):
To revenue outcomes.

Adam Jay (00:33):
All right, Maranda, it's scenario time. So tell me what you would do. Floppy Logistics. They are a $34 million ARR supply chain SaaS company. The board signed off on a 20% net revenue retention target for this year, growth. The same number they've had for three years running and by cross-selling one add-on module at renewal time. This year the number comes in at 11%. The CS team hit every internal metric they were measured on, response time, C - STAT, renewal call completion, and every account manager got their bonus. When the CRO finally sat in on the renewal calls himself, the pattern was the same at every single time. Reps had a fantastic relationship, but no idea what the customer's own revenue numbers actually looked like this year. Dale's nodding because we talk about this every day with clients.

Dale Zwizinski (01:25):
The team read the scenarios.

Adam Jay (01:26):
Let me finish. The team did everything they were measured on, but the growth number still flops. What does that tell you about what is actually being measured?

Maranda Dziekonski (01:36):
Okay, so they came in 9% below target, is that correct?

Adam Jay (01:39):
Yes, ma'am.

Maranda Dziekonski (01:40):
Okay. And the CSMs own this target, they own the cross-sell expansion, upsell number, whatever you want to call it.

Adam Jay (01:50):
They do.

Maranda Dziekonski (01:51):
Okay. So they aren't aware though of what... I'm asking a lot of clarifying questions.

Adam Jay (01:57):
No, you're good.

Maranda Dziekonski (01:58):
They aren't aware though of what their customers are measured on. Did I hear that right?

Adam Jay (02:04):
Correct. No one is asking the customers, what are you actually measured on?

Maranda Dziekonski (02:08):
Okay. So probably activities. So we're measuring activities and not outcomes. So I think, do you want me to diagnose? This is fun.

Adam Jay (02:19):
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Let's go. What are we fixing? This is Dale's wheelhouse lately. I feel like Dale eats, sleeps, and breathes this exact scenario.

Dale Zwizinski (02:29):
Yeah, he's true.

Maranda Dziekonski (02:31):
First and foremost, I want to take a look at the portfolio and get a true white space reading. I want to understand, do we have enough white space to actually drive the number of 20%? Is that a realistic target? That's thing one, check. Yes. Let's say yes, we have

Adam Jay (02:50):
Realistically

Maranda Dziekonski (02:51):
Enough white space based on the qualifying factors that we've determined to be white space. The next thing then is how are the CSM or account managers having these conversations with their customer? How are they positioning value?

Adam Jay (03:11):
How

Maranda Dziekonski (03:12):
Are they thinking through problem statements with the customers? How are they getting deep into the customer's business to understand what they're being measured on, therefore

Adam Jay (03:22):
How

Maranda Dziekonski (03:23):
This particular product could solve that problem and then position it accordingly? Some of the things I've done with my teams is build out simple little things like a maturity matrix that shows the customer what good, better, best looks like, especially in vertical SaaS in their industry, and then walk them through how to go from good to better to best. Sometimes getting to best requires additional investment, sometimes it doesn't. You

Adam Jay (03:51):
Want

Maranda Dziekonski (03:51):
To balance that with the customer to where they don't always feel like you're coming back to sell them more, coming back to sell them more, that you are a partner with them and you are helping them mature within the problem sets that they're solving for. I specialize in B2B enterprise SaaS, mostly vertical SaaS. That is the motion that you put in place if you have a target like 20% and you have proven that you have enough white space to support that target.

Dale Zwizinski (04:25):
I love that. And I think what we have seen a lot lately is it's not all on CS either. So what we've been having conversations with, because so many people have focused on ARR for some long period of time and not GRR or NRR, is it marketing? Are we marketing to the wrong ICP? Do we have the wrong ICP? What does that ICP look like? When was the last refresh on the ICP? We finally, oh, we looked at the ICP two years ago and we haven't looked at it again. It could be sales. So sales could be just trying to sell things that we necessarily don't have yet or cannot necessarily deliver. It could be the product. The product may just be not doing what it's supposed to do or what we've marketed it to do and sold it to do. And then last time we could have some CS challenges.

(05:16):
It could be some health score or challenge that the CS team is having the CS individuals having. So you have to dig into the performance evaluation just like you would anybody else.

Maranda Dziekonski (05:30):
Yeah, I agree with most of what you said. However, I think with this particular -

Adam Jay (05:34):
Oh, please disagree with him.

Maranda Dziekonski (05:36):
With this particular scenario, we're talking about back to base revenue, not new logo revenue, right?

Dale Zwizinski (05:43):
Sure.

Maranda Dziekonski (05:43):
So with it being back to base revenue, I feel like sales has less to do with it. Sales is -

Dale Zwizinski (05:49):
Depends on when they churned, right? It could be if they churned in the first 12 months.

Maranda Dziekonski (05:54):
We're not talking about churn though. We're talking about expansion. Are we talking about churn? Did I miss that?

Dale Zwizinski (06:01):
Or expansion. So it's a valid point. I think those are valid points. These are just conversations that we're having with people, but I do think expansion, sales sometimes will give additional pieces of functionality that doesn't really exist. And we do, we tell them to sell in front of it, but I think you make a really valid point on that.

Maranda Dziekonski (06:24):
Yeah. If we were talking about churn, those are definitely different levers. If you gave me the scenario that my gross retention is 70%, how do you diagnose that? Absolutely. I look at the ICP, I look at what are the churn reasons. I interview churned customers if they will have me to figure out what happened, where did we go wrong, what could we have done better? I take a look at the sales cycle and how we are presenting the product and the problem sets that we're solving for and so on and so forth. But churn is a different problem than expansion. However, there's no way you can hit that 20% growth target or I will say the NRR target if your gross retention number is garbage because you could have a leaky bucket.

Dale Zwizinski (07:14):
NRR and a couple of clients we have talked to are coverups for bad GR. Awesome. I really appreciate the pushback on that. And I think the second part of that -

Adam Jay (07:25):
The first guest who asked clarifying questions, by the way.

Dale Zwizinski (07:27):
I love it. And true first. And I love that the part you're talking about on the retention side I think is super important as well. The next part I want to talk about is something that you've talked about on Sales is King podcast. You talked about how there needs to be a commercial mindset in CS and not just a relationship management. I've been trying to preach this for a while, especially in our clients. And in a separate conversation, you also said there's new openings like CS ops, CS enablement. So when you're hiring CS leaders today, if you were hiring a CS leader today or people that are hiring CS leaders today, what do you want to screen for that you wouldn't have looked at five years ago?

Maranda Dziekonski (08:10):
Yeah, that's a fantastic question, Dale, because it has changed a lot. Recently when I've hired, I've hired for folks that have owned a number. They understand what it means to own a number. I don't care if it's in an AE capacity, an A&M capacity, a CSM capacity. I want them to have owned a number and not just a renewal number. Either they've owned an expansion number directly and have been responsible for closing it or they owned it in partnership heavily with a sales counterpart depending on the complexity of the sale. But having owned that number and understanding what it looks like to set your portfolio up to be able to drive the right revenue outcomes is mission critical these days, especially with money being so expensive, especially with jobs being at a premium. We're not in the world where I just get an unlimited bucket of money where I can hire both CSMs and AMs.

(09:14):
I need to have mostly one or the other unless the unit economic support having both, which most unit economics aren't supporting that these days.

Dale Zwizinski (09:26):
I love that.

Adam Jay (09:27):
Well, that was going to be my question was, would you hire someone who can talk ROI? But we answered that and they have to be able to sell. So let's shift gears a little bit.

Maranda Dziekonski (09:35):
Not even sell. I don't want to use the word sell.

Adam Jay (09:38):
Okay.

Maranda Dziekonski (09:39):
I want them to be able to take a look at where our products are driving value and where it can drive more value and partner with the customer to figure out what that looks like within their walls and how that's going to help them meet their goals. What I don't want is a CSM who is just dialing for dollars. I want somebody who can strategically think through their portfolio and figure out what's the right thing for the customer at the right time. And that requires a certain muscle.

Dale Zwizinski (10:16):
So I have a question. Yeah, I have a question for you that I just want to double click on. So you said that is driving value for their client and their position. Who should be defining that initial value statement?

Maranda Dziekonski (10:29):
Ooh, good question. I think it's a partnership with the customer and the CSM. We shouldn't do it for them. If we say, "Hey, we've drove value for you. Look, A, B, C, X, Y, Z." And they're like, "We don't give a crap about A, B, C, X, Y, Z. You failed, period."

Dale Zwizinski (10:48):
Yeah, I just want to add one piece. I agree with that. I'm thinking about pre-sale and the post-sale. And one of the things that we've seen a lot of challenges on is the salespeople actually getting the impact, the goals, because whatever they're defining as impact in the sales process is why they initially bought us. CSMs are kind of just coming in that motion afterwards. So I actually feel like it starts with the sales team, whether it's a joint impact plan, mutual action plan that then gets transitioned into the CS team as the handshake. And then inside of the year, things will end up changing because we all know whoever bought the product isn't necessarily using the product or service.

Maranda Dziekonski (11:34):
Exactly.

Dale Zwizinski (11:34):
And the people that are using the product or service may have different challenges that they're trying to figure out. And so you have an executive buying something, a user using something, a salesperson selling something, and the salesperson or operations person trying to implement something. So you have the weird dynamics that are happening that not everyone's always going to be aligned and a lot of times they're not. And that's where we end up with a lot of churn and/or dissatisfaction because the user is like, "That's not what my real problem is." And so there needs to be that conversation between everybody.

Maranda Dziekonski (12:05):
I completely agree with you, Dale, and that is why mutual action plans are so important. And I would take it even a step further. When you get that handoff, when that handoff comes from -

Adam Jay (12:16):
Oh, my next question.

Maranda Dziekonski (12:18):
When the handoff comes from sales -

Dale Zwizinski (12:21):
Adam, you can leave.

Maranda Dziekonski (12:22):
To the CS org, the CSM, first of all, the CSM should get involved prior to the close of the deal, period.

Adam Jay (12:32):
So let me interrupt you because that's exactly where we're going to go. So everyone talks handoff. We prefer the term handshake and it's the handshake that no one owns. And you have previously said, I actually think in my research, it was on churn FM, if I'm not mistaken, the fix for sales to CS handoff is putting the CSM on the kickoff call with the implementation team so the customer never has to wonder who to call next. Is that enough on its own or is that just the visible part and do we need a larger, more structural fix?

Maranda Dziekonski (13:05):
It's not enough on its own. It is the visual part. It is definitely this, it is a little bit of showmanship at the beginning of the relationship of showing up and saying, "This is your account team. This is what I do. This is what they do. This is who you reach." It's a bit of a security blanket, but it's not enough. It's definitely not enough. Especially again, I want to emphasize that when I'm talking, I'm talking B2B enterprise, six, seven, sometimes eight figure deals. So the unit economics makes sense to do this. I think bringing the CSM in the final stages of the sale, making sure that there is a conversation about the goals, the mutual action plan, then when you get that mutual action plan in your hand and the deal is closed, implementation manager and CSM show up, you will likely have a different crew in this call and you say, "Hey, this is what we discussed during sales cycle.

(14:02):
Do you agree with this? Is there anything that you would like to add?" If we're looking back in six months and we're wildly successful, what does that look like? How do we measure that? Right now, I have a team that is meeting with a customer. We're actually meeting with them in a couple of hours to define KPIs on a pilot. So we're responsible for this pilot. We closed it. Now we're going to define mutual KPIs that we agree upon to show us that this pilot is going well and going well enough to where we will convert it to a full commercial contract. But that is an agreement between your contacts at the customer and the team that this is what success looks like, and it's the same thing.

Dale Zwizinski (14:49):
I love this. And actually what I'm starting to feel is that the CS team, if possible, should be at the proposal stage. So not even near the end, but even more in front. So they can hear any questions that get brought up during the proposal stage and they can hear the challenges they have with the proposal. It becomes a little tricky with, do you have enough time to do that? You're supposed to be doing other things. And playing devil's advocate a little bit, what I hear sometimes is we don't want to commit a particular CSN to this particular account necessarily because it could change. They'll say proposal to close is still another three months, for example, because you got to go through iteration, these big deals. And so you can't necessarily commit that CSM, but all of a sudden that's the expectation you've set with the customer.

(15:41):
So the expectation is the customer believes that's going to be their CSM.

Adam Jay (15:45):
But how scalable is that, Maranda? How scalable is it to add a CSM to every pre-proposal call? I'm going to push back on Dale a little bit.

Maranda Dziekonski (15:53):
I don't know if I completely agree with Dale about putting them in the -

Adam Jay (15:56):
Hallelujah.

Maranda Dziekonski (15:57):
Proposal level. I know sales folks would love that. They would love to have that because CS can be a big factor in helping close deals. I mean, the attention that they're going to get. I wish we had the luxury to be able to do that, but the reality is as somebody who's managing my own budget, I have to be very cautious and conscious about where and when I answer a CSM. And it's not for the reasons you said, Dale, you can overcome that. You can overcome that by saying, "Hey, this isn't necessarily your CSM, but this is a CSM on our team and they can talk to you about what that partnership will look like. We wanted them to be here to understand where we're going." Or you could put the leader of the CS team. It depends on how many deals you close a quarter, right?

(16:47):
If you're a high volume organization, it's tough. If you're low volume, if you're talking a few deals a quarter, might be a little bit more doable.

Dale Zwizinski (16:58):
And just to push back on Adam, because I love to do that, I didn't say every deal. I said you definitely have to segment them. You definitely need to have your high value ones.

Adam Jay (17:06):
You told me every customer's a tier one customer.

Dale Zwizinski (17:09):
No, we definitely know that with some of our clients. These long tail clients that customers have, because we go in a lot, it's somewhere between a five and a hundred million dollar stage, and some of these clients have done fonduled sales for a long period of time, they've just tried to get a lot of customers in the door and then all of a sudden you're going to cut off that long tail because those customers, they're not really good for you anymore. And they're not good for your CS team because the reality is you're spending a lot of time and you're burning resources. We talk about total cost of sale, but we should actually talk about total cost of ownership within the CS side. We don't do enough of that calculation on the backside of this. How much is it costing us to maintain and manage a customer?

(17:53):
And if you looked at that as some of your lower customers, you may fire the bottom 20% of your client base. I don't know if that's something that you feel strongly about, but I feel strongly like not all customers are good customers.

Maranda Dziekonski (18:06):
Oh, I don't disagree with you completely, but I've never been in a company where I've had the luxury to do something like that. And also, I have been a customer at the bottom end of that tier. And I know how it feels when I go from being super important in your strategy to a couple of years later, I can't get anyone to pick up the phone. People were tripping over themselves to support me and send me swag five years ago, and now it's like pish posh, we don't have time for you. So I don't want to make customers feel like that. There are definitely unit economics at play, so I have to always be creative about how I will continue to support the long tail.

Dale Zwizinski (19:01):
I think you actually have to be just honest with your customers on some piece as well. And it may, whether it hurts their feelings or not, it's not personal, it's business. And yes, every customer can be important to us, but things are shifted and we have -

Adam Jay (19:18):
How do you have that conversation? Hold on. I'm not going to disagree with you. I do think there's different levels of CS, but how do you say, "Hey, Maranda, you're not important enough to me to get access to a live human. Everything has to go in an email."

Dale Zwizinski (19:37):
Let me answer the question. So you wouldn't put it just like you would on any other... You would ask them if your customer was costing you more money than you're bringing in, would you keep that customer on board?

Adam Jay (19:50):
So you're telling me I'm costing more money than I'm bringing in now?

Dale Zwizinski (19:53):
Yes. Yes.

Adam Jay (19:55):
Maranda, come on, jump in here.

Maranda Dziekonski (19:58):
Can I name a company name on this or no?

Dale Zwizinski (20:01):
Yes.

Adam Jay (20:01):
I mean, listen, we are uncensored. We drop names all the time.

Maranda Dziekonski (20:04):
Okay. Well, I will tell you, 14 years ago, I still am, I'm a customer of Zendesk. And I have brought Zendesk into well over a dozen companies, either as a consultant or as an employee of an organization. I used to get whined and dined like crazy. My office was right by Zendesk's office in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I'd get free lunch. I got a private dinner at Trevor Trainor's house with them, which is the stepson of Daniel Steele and Billionaire's Row of San Francisco. I used to get whined and dined like crazy by Zendesk. Then they're like, "Yeah, we don't need startups anymore." And I no longer even had

Adam Jay (20:58):
A phone

Maranda Dziekonski (20:59):
Number to call.

Adam Jay (21:00):
Right, right. [e-mail].

Maranda Dziekonski (21:03):
Right, exactly. And look, I get it. Logically, logically, I get it. Emotionally, I was ticked, right?

Adam Jay (21:11):
Yeah.

Maranda Dziekonski (21:12):
Logically, I get it. However, I do think companies have to be very careful and very smart about how they handle this because while the revenue associated with the company I'm currently at may be small, the revenue you associate with me as a champion could be massive.

Dale Zwizinski (21:30):
Two different things,

Adam Jay (21:31):
By the way. You never know who, my friends.

Dale Zwizinski (21:33):
Yeah, we're kind of talking about... So I'm curious, in this scenario, Maranda, did Zendesk have a conversation with you and be like, "Maranda, you see, this is the problem."

Maranda Dziekonski (21:43):
No, I just moved companies. I moved companies.

Adam Jay (21:49):
Let her talk.

Dale Zwizinski (21:51):
Zendesk, companies are not treating individuals as partners or -

Adam Jay (21:57):
Correct.

Dale Zwizinski (21:58):
If you brought in a bunch of revenue with a bunch of clients, that should be tracked somewhere. Their stand CRM, they should be able to track it in their own CRM, and they could have a conversation with you like, "Maranda, I know we caught whatever the conversation with their talk track is, that should be a conversation. And because we don't do that, most clients are not good customer client success teams because they're not thinking revenue.

Maranda Dziekonski (22:29):
I never want to be the customer that takes advantage of a vendor in a way that's unfair to their bottom line. That's just not something I want to do because I as well own a budget and I get it. I know the decisions you have to make and I know what that looks like. However, I do think there needs to be thought about how we treat the long tail in every organization, period. We can't just shut them off, shut off their support and taking Zendesk completely out of the equation. I'm just saying in general, now not every account will get a CSM. I remember when, I don't know, a few years ago, and I've been doing this for 27 years now. I remember a few years ago, this new thing came out and everybody's talking about digital CSMs, tech touch. I'm like, "You mean marketing funnels?

(23:22):
Is that what you're talking about?" We've been doing this for a long time in that one-to-many motion that's not new. The drip campaigns, the in-app walkthroughs, the training videos, the office hours, all of this stuff is not new. We need to make sure that we're not just shutting this long tail off and not supporting them because they actually make up a big chunk of your revenue when you put them in a bucket.

Dale Zwizinski (23:50):
Totally agree. I think there has to be a plan. There has to be transparency. Companies grow and evolve. I mean, I saw the same thing at Oracle. We had a lot of customers, and they ha small customers, large customers, and they just bucketed them into different places. And if you're on the long tail, you almost ended up into a call center type of scenario where someone would just randomly pick up and you never had the same person twice. The reality is the business economics of how we execute on the CSM level is different. And so when we get into negative margin places with clients, we have to be honest with them and say, "We love having you as a client. We just have to say we're getting into negative margin territory and we have to figure it out together or it's not going to work out."

Maranda Dziekonski (24:37):
Clients don't care. They don't care about your negative margins. They care about the business problems that they're solving for and how your solution supports them or doesn't support them. They don't give a damn about your margins, period. And that's good. They shouldn't, logically.

Adam Jay (24:55):
I mean, it's funny. I agree with what Dale's saying from a business sense. I do too

Maranda Dziekonski (25:00):
Completely.

Adam Jay (25:00):
The why and the what, but I can tell you as a customer, and as the one who purchases the majority of our software and software for our clients, if I ever got on the phone with someone and they started telling me about their margins, Maranda, I would say exactly that. Not my problem. Not my problem. I don't care. Figure that shit out.

Dale Zwizinski (25:19):
So would it be your problem when I increase your price by 50%? You just leave. That would be the conversation.

Maranda Dziekonski (25:26):
Maybe that's okay, right? If you can't support them and you can't afford to support them, then maybe that's okay.

Adam Jay (25:34):
Maybe there's a premium support tier. We did this with a clientele. Totally. If you remember, we had that recruiting client out in LA, and one of the first things I did on that project, Maranda, because I was leading, is we had customers that range from spending $38 a month to $6,000 a month, and they all got treated the same.

Maranda Dziekonski (25:52):
Yeah.

Adam Jay (25:52):
You know what? And that's not clear. At $38 a month, you get support at whatever. If you would like to pay for premium support, we absolutely have that as an option for you.

Maranda Dziekonski (26:00):
Yeah.

Adam Jay (26:00):
And that's what I'm saying. You don't have to go up in tier. Totally. I'm not going to make you go to 6,000, but you can pay for a human being to talk to.

Maranda Dziekonski (26:08):
It's a

Adam Jay (26:09):
Balance.

Maranda Dziekonski (26:09):
And that is fine too. That's a fine solution as well. I did something, I won't name company names, but years ago, I work for a company that had a free offering, and we had hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. We had everything from free to people paying us tens of thousands of dollars a month. The free users were cannibalizing my support team, and we had a phone number. We had a phone number on Google. I went and I took the phone number down of like, phone number, gone. It was funny how quickly things shifted internally. It was the most customer-friendly thing to do, but it was a survival mechanism.

Adam Jay (26:56):
I don't hate it. I mean, listen, you got to be able to survive finance. You've got to be able to take care of your customers. You can't tell a customer, in my opinion, about their margins, but I think, and maybe that's the middle ground, Dale, what we just spoke about. You find a way to phrase it in a way that isn't saying you're screwing my margins, but you got to pay more if you want this kind of service.

Maranda Dziekonski (27:18):
Let me show you my P&L.

Adam Jay (27:21):
Yes. Let me pull up my P&L for you. Maranda, we have something that we call the triple M, which is the Monday morning move. So it is a practical takeaway that listeners can test next week. We're going to put you to work a little bit. So number one, Dale would like you to score me on my Monday morning move on a scale of one to 10. Then you're going to tell - And it can even be

Dale Zwizinski (27:41):
Dot points. You can do 3.2.

Adam Jay (27:45):
I mean, if we have a three point anything, I'm just going to leave the podcast because that's going to be a big problem. And then you're going to tell me what you would add, change or push back on. So here we go.

Dale Zwizinski (27:54):
You cannot influence the scoring of telling our guests that you're going to leave.

Adam Jay (27:59):
I mean, that might be a good thing.

Maranda Dziekonski (28:01):
Don't worry. It doesn't scare me. Okay.

Adam Jay (28:03):
Maranda doesn't get scared easily, I'm sensing. I'm not sensing that Maranda's shy and timid and is going to hold back here. All right, Maranda. So this week, folks should pick the single highest risk handoff moving through their pipeline right now, whether that's sales to CS or CS to renewal. Write down the success criteria that... Write down the success criteria the sending team believes that they handed off. Separately, ask the receiving team to write down what they think they were handed. Put both of those lists side by side, and wherever those don't match, that gap is what's costing you your retention. That's the problem with whether the two teams agree on what the customer actually bought and what the customer's going to be delivered.

Maranda Dziekonski (28:55):
So you want me to score you on this?

Adam Jay (28:58):
Score it and then give me some feedback. What do we change?

Maranda Dziekonski (29:00):
So let me make sure I clarify. So essentially what you are saying is... Okay, I think I got it. So you want everybody in the CS org to write down what they're handing off and everyone on the renewals team to write down. Did I miss that?

Adam Jay (29:18):
Yep. What one person picked your single highest risk handoff, the person on sales, person on CS. Let's just do sales to CS. We'll simplify this.

Maranda Dziekonski (29:25):
Okay. Thank you.

Adam Jay (29:25):
And I want the sales folks to write down what they think they handed off and the CS folks to write down what they think they got handed off. Where's the difference? Because what that difference is is what's gap costing you your retention. Dale, maybe I'm getting my 3.2 here.

Maranda Dziekonski (29:40):
Theoretically, I can see why you would say that. I think you're missing a big part of the picture and that's the customer's perspective. It doesn't really matter what sales and CS think if there's no external alignment as well. So there's this third... Component. So I would give you a five. I think it's a good start.

Adam Jay (30:04):
I'll take it.

Maranda Dziekonski (30:05):
To say, okay, you write down sales, write down what you thought you hand off. CS, write down what you thought you received. Let's find the gap. And then what I would do is I would take that to your champion and hopefully you have fantastic relationship at your customer, which I often have great relationships with my customers. I can just have private candid conversations with them and say, "Hey, what are we missing?" Make sure it's like a customer friendly version, of course. But again, bringing and looping in customer goals, customer's desired outcomes, what value looks like for them, so on and so forth. And then marry that with those other two data points and then you probably have a better picture.

Dale Zwizinski (30:51):
I think that's a great add-on. I think if you had that good relationship, getting what sales thinks, what CS thinks, and then the external piece, that

Maranda Dziekonski (31:00):
Will

Dale Zwizinski (31:00):
Tell you a lot of where your gap is in the process.

Maranda Dziekonski (31:04):
And if you don't have that good relationship, there's still a way to loop them in. You can look at the original handoff docs and kind of see what were they sold on, what problem statements, was there a mutual action plan? All kinds of yada, yada, yada. You can continue to add.

Dale Zwizinski (31:26):
Awesome. I really appreciate it. I think that was really good and something people can take on today to actually execute on. As we start wrapping some of this stuff up, we'd like to go into some uncentered questions with you, a little bit of rapid fire, see how you handle a little bit of the heat in the hot seat. So Jason Lemkin has written that customer success took the biggest brunt of the SaaS layoff. Worse in sales, worse in marketing, and CS got weaponized by sales into chasing renewals. If CS is really the growth engine, why is it always the first head to be chopped off the block?

Adam Jay (32:01):
Ooh, I love this one.

Maranda Dziekonski (32:02):
Yeah, I kind of chuckle because you're not the first person to reach out to me to ask me for comments on Jason Lumpkin and some of his posts. That's why if you saw me look down, that's why. So it's quite frankly, it's what I said in the beginning, they're not tied to revenue outcomes good enough or deep enough within the organization. So I've personally helped lead multiple rounds of layoffs. I have about a decade of HR experience under my belt as well. Acted as a fractional COO at a company where I went and I reviewed the budgets and figured out where are we going to cut first. The first place is that cut is if you're not coding and you're not bringing in revenue, you got to go. So it's quite frankly that simple. You're not writing shipping code tied to revenue outcomes. So I hate to be so blunt about it, but...

Adam Jay (32:59):
Yeah, but sometimes the bluntness is what's needed.

Dale Zwizinski (33:04):
If I just double click one second on this because I do think CS does get a really bad rap. So I think if you do jobs to be done on each of these functions and then figure out how people map to those jobs and be done, because it may not be the CS challenge, but you may need to move them into a different place in the organization or out is fine. But I don't think we've done a good enough job on what your job description is as a CS person because they've always been these project manager, operational people versus revenue tip of the sphere.

Maranda Dziekonski (33:37):
Yeah. I don't know if I completely agree with that, Dale. It depends on the organization you're in. I think you're right. If you're down in business to business but lower dollar values, yeah, they're probably more project managers or sometimes even elevated support. But the enterprise motion for years now, customer success managers have had to be tied to revenue outcomes, whether that is directly with them owning renewals, upsells, expansion, yada, yada, yada, or them playing a really big part in owning CSQLs or some other motion.

Adam Jay (34:15):
Love that. Maranda, Gartner's predicting that half the companies that cut customer service or customer success staff for AI this year are quietly going to have to rehire those same jobs by 2027. Do you agree? And if so, how would you advise companies to prevent being one of Gartner's statistics?

Maranda Dziekonski (34:34):
Oh gosh. Boy, I wish I would've had this question in advance. That's why it's the hot seat, right? It's a really interesting statistic. I think that we are still learning all the upper ends of what AI is capable of. Personally, in my organization, we've been building agents and we've been working to get them to function autonomously. We're this close. It's pretty impressive what they can do. I do think human in the loop, especially in customer service and customer success is crucial. Humans want to work with humans mostly. I say mostly because sometimes humans just want their problem solved. They don't care if it's AI or a human, but I don't know if I can take a firm stance here one way or another. However, I do think that we will know more soon. I think we're getting to the point to where Anthropic, OpenAI, other AI tools are going to stop being so liberal with their packaging and because they're going to stop being so liberal and giving with their packaging, we're going to start seeing the cost to actually run autonomous agents start to peak up significantly.

(35:49):
And then what will happen from there is there's going to be conversations of, is it cheaper for me to outsource support, offshore support to some other country or is it cheaper to have an autonomous agent? There will be these conversations as well going on.

Dale Zwizinski (36:06):
Yeah. The only good news is at least there's competition here. It's not one group in the race, but I do agree. I think this is a big phishing lure and I think phishing hook and I think they've thrown it out and been casting it for a while and eventually we get hooked onto it because I know if Anthropic goes down and people are getting on X like, "What is going on? I can't do any of my work."

Adam Jay (36:30):
My whole business is shut down.

Maranda Dziekonski (36:32):
It happened recently, Anthropic. 100%. And I worry about the state of our organizations and our ability to critically think our way through things now because it's so dependent.

Dale Zwizinski (36:47):
We are outsourcing our strategic thinking to AI in many cases. Instead of being thought partners with the AI, we're allowing them to be thought leaders, which we just had this conversation in Utah with a client and what ends up happening, you don't even come to center. So everyone's even coming to center. It actually is getting your reduction to center. You're less than average when you're starting to do this stuff. That could be another whole podcast and we should probably do that at some point, but if we don't move on, we'll never get to the end.

Maranda Dziekonski (37:18):
I just want to make sure I call out, I did not take a stance. I am Switzerland on this because honestly, who knows at this point in time.

Adam Jay (37:29):
Fair. Very fair.

Dale Zwizinski (37:31):
Name a company that rebranded CS as growth or revenue and change nothing else about how they actually operate.

Maranda Dziekonski (37:41):
I don't know.

Dale Zwizinski (37:43):
I think you already named one Zendesk, but that's okay.

Maranda Dziekonski (37:47):
Okay. Zendesk.

Adam Jay (37:50):
So that's going to tie into my next question. We talked about how CS needs to be responsible for renewals and expansions, but Maranda, when you're hiring a CS person and you're building out a comp plan, should there be a hard quota attached to that? Do CSMs have a quota, a revenue number that their compensation is based off of? Where we put that revenue number, we don't have to debate.

Maranda Dziekonski (38:15):
Yeah. Look, if you would've asked me this a decade ago, I was so against this idea of CS having commissions. I mean, you'll even hear, and I will give you both credit, you've researched me very well. I'm impressed.

Adam Jay (38:29):
We try. We try.

Maranda Dziekonski (38:30):
Super impressed. You're dropping podcasts that I've been on and I was very impressed. So if you go back five, maybe even 10 years ago, I had a very strong stance around the word commission being associated with a CSM. Here's where I am now. I am okay with the word commission being associated with a CSM so long as we are actually requiring them to deliver revenue.

Dale Zwizinski (38:57):
If

Maranda Dziekonski (38:58):
We're requiring them to deliver revenue, my God, they should be compensated appropriately, period.

Dale Zwizinski (39:04):
I totally agree.

Maranda Dziekonski (39:04):
And I'm watching way too many organizations require CSMs to deliver the renewal, deliver the upsell, and then they're like, "And we'll give you a bonus at the end of the year." I'm like, "No, you need to give them a piece of the pie."

Dale Zwizinski (39:22):
100%.

Maranda Dziekonski (39:22):
And I also hear the other side of the argument that it drives different behaviors. If you tie commission to a CSM and you essentially make them more transactional, yada, yada, yada. You know what? I hear you. I don't disagree in some cases, but that is why it's the CS leader's job to make sure you are setting up the right environment for them to be true partners to the customer and not be transactional. And last little statement, how that looks is if your CSM comes to you and says it is not the right time for us to talk about this product, it is not the right time. They know best. That is the difference between it being a heavy-handed sales motion and a value partnership.

Dale Zwizinski (40:15):
100%. I want to add one thing to it, and actually I'm going to give a shout out to a technology. So we've been doing some work with Quotapath and they've done a really nice job. If you're putting in comp plan stuff, they don't give you some of the differences, but I was just building comp plans with one of the CS leaders that we have. Obviously we can't go 100% commission on the CS team because you will generate bad working environments. We talked about health scores, we talked about delivery, we talked about other things that they need to do, whether it's a 60 / 40 split, however you feel, because the CS team has been used to OKRs and bonus plans.

Maranda Dziekonski (40:55):
Totally.

Dale Zwizinski (40:55):
And that transition is very tricky as well because one year you used to... And let's be honest, let's be super transparent. When you have a bonus, most of them are just paid out because they're so loosey goosey in the process, they can fight it. And so they're just used to the bonus is just part of their salary and that's a whole nother thing. You got to think about the base and the OTE. There's a whole different transition that has to happen. And most CS leaders that have been traditional CS leaders don't know how to do that either. So there's a whole learning site that needs to happen to this process.

Maranda Dziekonski (41:31):
Yeah. One of the advice I would give to CS leaders that are contemplating doing this is take a look at what drives the right behaviors. And one of the things that I've done at multiple companies now that seems to work when I'm structuring this is 50% of the comp is tied to individual gross retention and then 50% is a team net retention number. So some reason that seems to drive the right behaviors because they're focused on making sure the customer gets enough value to renew and they're achieving their desired goals. And then it's a team environment around the net retention. And then if you have a product that you really want to push, give them an extra 2% or 3% or 4% spiff on anything that's across the finish line and I'll be damned if the magic opens up.

Dale Zwizinski (42:30):
100%. I love all that. We'll give you a layup on the last one. I'll give you an easy one for the last one. Dream vacation destination.

Maranda Dziekonski (42:38):
Oh, I do a lot of solo international travel, leave my husband at home and just go explore by myself. It's very empowering. And one place that I went to that's very obscure that I would love to go again is the North Korean border. I did that trip and that tour and it was just weird and amazing. And I also hiked in Czech Republic and Poland. So I'm a big hiker, outdoors person. I'm not somebody who wants to sit on a beach and sip a drink. If I'm going somewhere, I'm hiking, I'm exploring, I'm in museums, I'm eating all the food. So yeah.

Dale Zwizinski (43:26):
Adam, you beat on travel, man.

Adam Jay (43:28):
You do have me beat slightly. I'm so with you though. I do not want to go sit on a beach or look at a palm tree. I want to go do things. It's funny you say the North Korea border. We're planning Japan for next year and my wife wants to because we're right there at on South Korea and as close to the border as we get. So I'm very jealous.

Maranda Dziekonski (43:49):
If you get to Korea, book a DMZ tour. It is very interesting.

Adam Jay (43:54):
I'm totally in. I love it. That's awesome. Maranda, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Thank you for arguing with Dale and I and pushing back. It's been a great episode.

Maranda Dziekonski (44:07):
This was fun. Thank you for having me.