Maranda Dziekonski: The Power of Personal Connections on Leadership and Customer Success

I’m excited to welcome Miranda diony customer success and operations leader from id.me welcome Miranda yeah thank

you so much for having me excited to be here Scott great I love your background and it feels really festive is this like

a big part of your is this like a your place is this a conference room it is not a conference room this is my house

okay those that know me know that I’m the crazy Holiday Lady um so well mostly just Halloween and Christmas my house

gets so Decked Out that you could see it probably from miles away it’s just

glowing um but yeah so I have to have a Christmas tree and everything in my my home office because I spend a lot of

time here so I think I need to do the exact same thing uh next year it’s I love it that’s that’s terrific um well

so one one of the things that I read when I was kind of learning about you was that you prepare and have this

practice of using a relationship cheat sheet um I’d love to know more about

that and maybe some of the examples of the things that you write down on there yeah um so this started this practice

started well over probably 20 years ago now um prior to there being any kind of

customer success management tools um I would have a binder with my customer

profiles in you know in this binder and when I learn something about one of my

customers whether they make mention that they like golfing or uh they talk about

their kid or their pet or if I knew and I shared this in LinkedIn if I knew some

you know someone did not like small talk so it was just get right to business I had all of that written out in their

profile along with other key business elements um and that just helped you know as when I was a customer success

manager be more sharp um and to be able to stay on top of things now as a VP um

I view my customers as my te team so in my handy dandy notebook I have names of

kids dogs um you know it gets hard when you get the teams get bigger and bigger and

bigger but you know where somebody is from what the name of their spouses are

they have kids how old are they what their names are so on and so forth and soon after I get more and more exposure

to folks um I don’t need the book as much because I’ll start to remember it but in the beginning when you’re trying

to remember tidbits on 2530 people it’s impossible so I write it all out and

then I go back to it before I get into my call with them have you have you found that this practice has gone from

paper to digital at all or is it still just you prefer written uh well for customers definitely it’s digital

because you want to be able to share that information internally so if one of your csms you know wants to take a

vacation I hope they do want to take a vacation but are able to to take a vacation or maybe they’re you know out

sick you know that experience can be seamless amongst the csms if somebody

has to pick up an account so digital for customers definitely but you know for my

teams I usually just write it in my handy dandy notebook awesome I love it um you mentioned kind of transitioning

from maybe CSM or or relationship management to Leading a team you know leading all of the customers it’s

obviously a big responsibility um and you’ve built scaled quite a few of these teams both in early and and later stage

startups um I’d love to know a little bit you know some of the lessons that you’ve learned as you built those teams whether it’s just hiring principles or

practices or how to best work with your customers yeah um so I’ve been doing this now I’ve switched from the a

practitioner role to a more of a leader role probably close to 15 years ago um

and you know a couple little tidbits on the hiring side definitely um hiring is

something I pride myself in and actually have written and published articles about how to interview how to prepare

for interviewing and even as Leaders when you’re interviewing questions that you should ask to really assess the

overall health of the organization but if I were to give a CS leader advice um

I would say make sure you have a very well-balanced team because if you

overhire for certain skill sets you’re going to have gaps in in other areas an example of how this plays out um if you

are somebody who supports a certain domain uh like we work in identity at ID

me my previous organization hrtech or you know Transit Tech um you know we

would hire a lot of folks that had that domain expertise and could speak directly to the customers but we needed

to balance that out with Enterprise CSM skill sets and then folks could learn

and and help each other be stronger um so those are tips you know make sure

you’re always assessing for where your skill gaps are and then building out a plan on how you’re going to plug those

gaps either via hiring or via training um that’s I think thing one thing

two I would just tell folks to act your age in regards to your org

size um not to be so blunt about it but I

have seen so many times people try to build out processes that are better

suited for a company 10 times the size of them and then it hurts them slows

them down creates unnecessary angst in the organizations um so that’s that’s

another thing I’m not saying don’t have process I’m saying build out what you need for this quarter and the next

quarter not for five years down the line if you’re putting in process that is so big and requ requires you know 50,000

steps when you’re a smaller organization it’s just going to slow you down and hurt your ability to be agile and to

move quickly um but also balance it out and don’t just leave the process

behind I love those um one of my team members he’s a product manager he spends a lot of time documenting um and over

the years he’s realized that most of the time he’s documenting for himself and for his small team and initially he was

very frustrated that maybe some of the materials would get reviewed or read as regularly as he’d hoped I think he’s changed more recently to pretty similar

philosophy of like recognize who your customer is of the the content and then how often and how deep you actually have

to do it he seems much happier after he had that realization there is nothing more frustrating than you build out this

masterpiece this artwork of a process and you think this is just going to revolutionize everyone’s lives and then

no one reads it or no one does it um and I’ve seen that happen again and again

and again and usually if you really get down to it the process either isn’t

solving the right problem it’s too cumbersome or you know people aren’t

bought into the idea of the problem or maybe you didn’t dig deep enough and

figure out what the true problem was and you’re only solving a portion of it so people then discount the value of the

process right right so yeah yeah absolutely um so you are now vpcs you’ve

had a few roles in the past past um I’m curious what it’s been like to kind of transition between those roles both

leadership as well as as you called it the practitioner to what’s the what’s the new version of practitioner to

leader what’s the right word there I I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it or not but individual contributor

to people manager right it’s just managing a different uh set of customers

right so my customer base changed well I am responsible for the full customer base um because of you know that’s

that’s my role I’m also now responsible for a new set of customers which are my team members um and making sure I’m

setting them up for success and they’re getting you know what they need in order to be able to drive value within their

portfolio um this is an in this particular role is an interesting role

for me uh it’s a bit of a change from where I was before I have been in smaller organizations over the last

10ish years I started out years and years and years ago and I say it years

and years and years because we’re talking 20 plus years um in an organization had 35,000 employees 4 to

50 billion dollar a year in Revenue then shifted to series a series B series C

startups so you can imagine my shock of going from you know being this massive

organization to where we had a process to drive to even write a process or process to even get a period changed in

your standard operating procedure to no nobody even knowing what anop was like I

was This brilliant genius when I said we should create anop and they’re like what is that um and I spent the last 10 plus

years or so building out the early operations now I’ve joined a much larger

organization where you know we’re I think a a little over a thousand employees and you know the past few

years have been spent at organizations so 300 you know under 300 employees um

so it’s been different and the scope of my role is much larger than it has been

in regards to customer success previous organizations I’ve had a wide scope in

regards to the functions I own so HR customer success implementation on

boarding tech support API engineering support I’ve even had sales marketing

bizops Finance all of that so I’ve had very wide Scopes in that regard my scope

here is a little more narrow where it’s just customer success uh onboarding and

customer support but it is much larger scale with multiple verticals um so I

have multiple directors over these orgs it’s just very different motion compared

to the other orgs but incredibly exciting and challenging I don’t it’s

like oh sorry remember what your question was I just started talking it’s it’s totally fine your answer is great

um I was sort of curious how you basically figure out I don’t know whether it’s how to navigate that you

know through these roles or identify the most important things you know you mentioned you had three different responsibilities which could presumably

pull you in lots of different directions all day whether you’re reactive or you have a plan and and you’re strategic um

how do you navigate all that yeah um so first it it it is hard sometimes to shut

off noise uh because it can get you know it can be so easy for me to get sucked into the because I’m genuinely

interested in what we do um so I have to be super mindful of where we need to be

in the next three six nine months and keep myself laser focused on that so that leads me up one level is figuring

out where do we need to be in the next three six nine months and today I just

officially hit my two-month Mark I presented to the entire CS org our overall plan of where I would like us to

be you know some key themes some goals that we have for the entire org and then

what what our okrs for q1 will look like so objectives key results to get us all

aligned and all on the same page now over the past couple of months though in order to arrive at that point I’ve been

shadowing listening in on customer calls visiting customers talking to the

various leaders over the different um verticals that we have to figure out what their challenges are and how

customer success can play into that um and then bringing that all back and meeting with my directors we had a we

had our onsite a couple of weeks ago here in the San Francisco Bay area where we spent two full days in a very small

room in a Wei workor um brainstorming out ever all of the things all of the

data points to figure out our plan so wow uh that’s awesome um I I talked with

the CEO of gain site a few months ago and he mentioned that one of the first things he does it sounds very similar to what you described it’s sort of like a

almost like a listening tour talk to customers talk to the board talk to the the team and um so

when yeah that’s right yeah uhu um and so I I can

understand where visiting with customers and listening to them and then sort of presenting your your plan after you’ve

worked with it through your team after you kind of established that plan how do you go about building alignment and and

helping you know your team achieve and meet those goals I’ve talked to a bunch of different types of leaders who you

know they talk about this third third third principle of you know um some should be failure some should be good

some should be great and then you have like Google who talks about okrs where their target is you know 70% achievement

um how do you make sure your team Works towards these goals and are successful but also maybe setting challenging

aggressive goals it can be hard because customer success manager

in a lot of companies have become I don’t want to call them The Dumping Ground but in some cases and

organizations kind of have become a bit of a Dumping Ground so one of the things

that we’re doing is taking a look at what is on the customer success manager

plates and trying to figure out how do we free up enough bandwidth for them to

be able to execute on the oars that we’re putting out so that means you know

peeling off the reactive work uh before I I came we launched our B2B customer

support side so that is just now being spun up and hopefully that will free up work also um putting in this Services

layer you know making sure we have enough bandwidth within the implementation and onboarding team to

again free up some of that uh reactive work and then once you know that you

know you’re moving the needle in the right direction ction it’s just as simple as having Buy in from

everyone um making sure everybody understands the importance and knows the why behind what’s being asked of them

and that they have the skill and the will to be able to execute uh the skill

and the will I’ve never heard that phrase that sounds pretty cool um and then maybe just uh going back a little

bit maybe is more of like a reflection um you’ve worked at these startups who you mentioned that they often um you

know overd doent particularly or or create processes that are overly burdensome and complex are there other

you know critical mistakes that you’ve seen um as you’ve gotten started at them

and it could be any stage I’m curious maybe outside of the the process what else have you seen that that ruins

things or makes it hard I would say ruins things but putting in tools that are too big for where you are um there

are tools out there that require full time people to maintain them if you

don’t have full-time people or the budget to have full-time people don’t put those tools in um because it’s

garbage in garbage out so that’s one um thing

two hiring individuals that can’t

Flex or aren’t able to be don’t have grit I guess is is the right phrase and

grit is a hard thing to inter inter for but what I’ve seen happen in some

organizations and look I lived this I went from an organization where everything my day my almost my every day

was almost so predictable it was crazy um I could come in in the morning

almost know exactly what was going to happen looked at the same report had certain customer calls set up things

were just like very methodical very operationalized that’s the way it has to be when you’re at a company with 35,000

employees that’s driving 40 billion a year in Revenue it’s usually very predictable um if you are hiring folks

that come from that type of an environment to an environment that is less predictable that is you know

somewhat chaotic which a lot of startups are assess for that assess for their

ability to flex because if you don’t and if they can’t they will burn out fast

they will burn out fast um so make sure you’re setting them up for Success because it’s not fair to them or their

team members if you have folks that are are burning out from that chaos that is

almost natural it in some startups yeah I I have to definitely Echo the the startup chaos I’ve worked

for three and they’ve all been chaotic in their various ways I’m on my 10th oh my gosh that’s crazy yeah uh I feel like

do do you ever wonder if there’s something like wrong with you or you know deep what’s going on inside of you

you keeps keeps going here I’m a glutton for punishment no I I love um I love

startups I do I love tech companies I love the early mid stages I love

the being able to make a big impact because I am very process oriented um

but also I love being able to see around corners and and predict what’s going to

happen before it happens and be able to kind of squash it before it becomes an issue and that’s what comes when you’ve

been at 10 of these now but yeah I am a glutton for punishment it’s funny when I

announced that I was coming here I got probably a dozen text messages from

folks they’re like really are you’re not done yet you’re not just gonna like retire or going

Consulting yet I’m like NOP not yet I’m like maybe I have one more and me and I say that every time I’m like maybe one

more yeah I love it well I mean at the very least you’ve got Grit and you’ve figured out you know probably how to

interview for it as well so you uh one thing that I was curious about you know from your perspective is having I think

you said you know 10 startups roughly 20 years plus or minus um you’ve probably seen a lot of cycles of various products

and and tools and ideas the latest one obviously is is you know Ai and um it’s

become increasingly integrated into all the tools that we’re we’re using um what what are you seeing so far where AI is

integrated into your tools or helping shape your team and then what do you think it’s going to do maybe out into

the future o i I wish I could predict what AI is going to do in the future I would be sitting at a beach sipping a

drink somewhere if I could I could predict that um I my mind has been absolutely Blown

Away by Ai and how far along it’s come just in the last couple of years if you

can I I remember I was part of zenes early

chatbot beta program years ago years and I’m talking probably going on 10 years

ago I was part of their early beta program and I’m like there’s no way that

this is going to take over you know for a customer support rep because it was

not good at that time and now it’s fantastic um so just kind of watching

that Evolution um I think where I’m seeing it more and more is

some of the things that don’t require critical thinking don’t require that human intervention but I’m actually

starting to see it now more a little bit with the human intervention side as well so the back and forth interactions via

chat um how I had my previous team use it was taking our customers earning

statements and uploading the public publicly facing earning statements and saying I work at this company

these are my goals tell me what I should be focused on out of this earning statements and nine times out of 10 AI

would serve up a really great plan and you could take that and then create an account plan and just wow your customers

they would think you were absolutely brilliant that you knew so much about what’s going on in their inner workings um you know other things you

know it can help you write emails it can serve up Analytics

that you were pumping the earnings announcements I think that’s so smart I mean it seems Seems obvious but like

only until you said it I was like oh yeah of course yeah it’s public facing why not any public

facing collateral that’s available that’s dense that your csms would have

zero time to get through but there could be some great insights in there if you get smart about what you ask chat GPT it

will serve it right up to you and I’ve actually made it a conversation where I’ll upload it I’ll say you know I work

here what are the top things I should know about this and then I’ll say Okay

dig in a little bit more on point two and you know tell me what course of

action as a customer success manager at you know insert company name I should

take and AI is smart enough to know what customer success does because it has all

that information and then it can give you insights even deeper than just the topical level it it does kind of uh seem

like these tools particularly I mean maybe all tools are like this but um some of the folks on my team are just

you know deep and trying to understand every aspect but I think others are more surface level have you found that like

it’s challenging to get your team to become equivalently awesome as you and

you have to train them how do you show them how to become a chaty PT or perplexity or AI Master like it sounds

like you are I haven’t tackled it here yet just to be clear but I have seen

internally here we do have folks creating their own gpts um and also creating their own you

know templates that they’re sharing with their team members and saving them as a group so I mean you can create you don’t

have to train your teams to be super awesome at using chat GPT you can go in

and create the template in chat GPT that you want your team to use and then share it out widely so everything is done all

they need to do is say give me this command for this customer and bada bing

bada boom It’s Magic love love the botom Bing I wish chat PT would have like a cool sound sometimes rather than just

scrolling the text I mean you could probably ask it and see if it could incorporate that somehow oh that’s a

great idea yeah I should do that I mean it’s notating pictures of people I’ve seen people do the based on what you

know about me um create a picture of my life how you think it is and oh that’s

pretty cool I should try that after this call there was another one uh that was kind of creepy too and I know you’re

trying to ask me another question no it’s fine I I I was going to tell you what while you’re looking it up but I saw one that was like basically like

assume like you’re the CIA and sort of try to understand like how you would you know take advantage of me based on the

information you have and and I I plugged that in it was pretty creepy and spot yeah yeah no you know what I remember

what it was my husband sent me a screenshot of roast my

hometown and nice you’re like chat GPT roast my hometown and I put my hometown

in there and sure enough it was like spoton um it’s like gossip travels way

faster than self-service which probably is spotty at best um what was your hometown by the way I think Crystal

Michigan I grew up in the middle of nowhere Michigan um fine dining means

choosing between gas station pizza or hot dog very nice

anyway um well pulling back to CS a little bit um I love I love Ai and it

sounds like we have a lot of fun potential things to do with AI um you know uh I’ve I’ve been to I’m trying to

remember what it’s called the the gainsight success uh you know um conference for maybe the last five six

years and and pulse thank you and I think we’ve seen a lot of Chang over the

last five to 10 years people actually understanding more so what it means hiring specifically for it um whereas in

the past I think it was a more of a niche kind of thing what what have you seen what are some of the biggest changes you’ve

seen and hiring for CS maybe more broad like broadly um some of the the biggest

changes in customer success over the last two decades Revenue ownership that

is by far the biggest and quite frankly I even tie it back into hiring

um because I asked hiring first a lot of folks out there are struggling to get

their next role leaders and csms alike and I’ll probably get some hate

mail for this but I’m going to bet it may be how they’re talking about the

ownership they played in revenue or how they have owned Revenue maybe they haven’t owned Revenue because

because organizations right now are heavily scrutinizing their bottom line they have been over the last couple

years more so than ever and that’s heavily because the rising interest rates made money more expensive and then

the funding that we got you know a constant flow of from Mostly VCS and

sometimes PE firms dried up and then occasionally customers occasionally customers um it dried up and what that

means is and and I personally did this as somebody who owned Finance at ay

you go line by line by line and figure out who’s driving revenue and if you’re driving Revenue you’re safe if you’re

not you’re looked at oh I didn’t get to my Steve button quick enough so that’ll

be on the podcast that’s okay um I I sneezed um and if you aren’t able to be

tied closely back to the revenue then a lot of the times you would be put on the

chopping block and that is a big change in customer success if you listen to me or any of the other

CS leaders 10 years ago we were evangelizing not owning a

number um keeping customer success as this safe moat so we could be viewed as

this safe valued partner for the customers and they didn’t have to worry about us selling to them um I’m not

saying that that should change customers should view us as valued partners

and you know hopefully we’ve created a safe place for them to have those

conversations and dialogue with us but CS has to be tied to revenue somehow

whether it is driving up cells driving renewals both in partnership with a

salesperson on their own whatever it may be um and that is a massive massive

change over the last decade yeah I think that that one definitely really stands out to me I know uh the two models that

I’ve seen and and obviously my tenure in this this industry is quite a bit shorter than yours at least understanding it I I always saw sort of

the Salesforce model of like you own the number of Revenue expansion renewal and then there was sort of like what I saw

of many other companies which was friendly neighborhood Spider-Man CS you know just do whatever you need backfill

whatever yeah um NPS you’re going to be measured on NPS NPS that’s right yep

nope not no more that doesn’t that is if that is still happening anywhere where a

CSM is being solely measured on NPS I’d be surprised yeah and you know NPS can be

gamed and tweaked and adjusted a lot more easily than than Revenue can be so I I it’s a great point I think that’s

that’s a that’s probably the the best answer that that you could probably share oh good I won then great he did it

congratulations uh you get the points um let’s see so maybe just like two

other questions for you um um you know I I I think I actually um

have you know to your point about hiring for for these roles I have been hiring an additional CSM or we put out a job

description for it recently and we probably had six to 800 people apply it’s just a lot right and and so I’ve

I’ve since talked with a bunch of these candidates and they’ve asked for some advice and I’m curious what what you think like for the folks who are early

in their career they’re they’re either trying to become a CSM or they’re or sort of navigating that individual

contributor role what are some of the most or the most important things that you would sort of share or say so if

you’re early on trying to get into customer success right now I’m not again I don’t want to dissuade anybody but it

is hard right now for folks to break into CS because I’m gonna just throw a

number out there this isn’t fact checked I should ask chat GPT but I’m gonna guess for every um role out there you

probably have an applicant pool of of thousand unless you keep it you know a

thousand within a week let’s just say and in most cases it’s like a thousand within a day depending on the exposure

your company gets and out of that I would say probably 30 40% are very very

tenured customer success professionals so the competition right now is very high I don’t want to dissuade folks but

what I am suggesting for folks to do you want to get into customer success is one

figure out a way to own revenue for a little bit at an organization whether it’s in the function of a SDR or a

junior account executive the barrier to entry into sales in some organizations

is a little bit lower than it is to get into customer success because there’s usually great training programs to bring

junior sales folks along um two if you are trying to make

that pivot from you know let’s just say you’re not super junior fresh at a college or whatever it may be and you’re

trying to make that pivot try focusing on a a software or a domain where you

are an expert so for example if somebody is coming from public

transit and you want to get into customer success find technology tools that support public transit or if you

are a salesperson let’s just say Salesforce and you want to get into to customer success somewhere else try to

find a tool that supports sales right um because that is another way to get your

foot in the door is to double down on your domain expertise yeah I just just to Echo you

know I my friend who I talked to a couple couple days ago his LinkedIn profile was so Broad and almost like

untargeted that I said hey what do you what what job do you actually want like what are you looking for and my my

advice pretty similar just sort of narrow it down be specific and I I think that advice is great even once you become the AE it’s like narrow down your

ICP focus on your customer become really great at talking to them all those kinds of things so uh I I think those two

pieces of advice are great um May maybe sorry any other additional thoughts there I just don’t want to you know for

the folks that are listening to this I don’t want them to think Maran just said that it’s hard to get in right now it is

hard to get in it is not impossible um so I don’t want to you know discourage folks it’s just the

reality of where the industry is right now yeah I think my take away from what you’re advising is be specific and

targeted and take the time and energy to to go in in a you know more more Target

area so that that seems totally reasonable um the spray and prey approach for sales has gone away as well

as getting jobs correct um maybe just one last quick question this is more just like our fun wrap-up but um if you

could assemble a dream team of customer success leaders alive historical

fictional who would you choose and why

um so or just great leaders that you’d love to work with uh well first one is

Jay Nathan um he’s always top of list for me

he get he he’s not I don’t want to put him in the bucket of a customer success leader while that’s where he spent time

he’s also just a business leader and somebody that understands like the the

full you know the full breadth of how a business is ran um person one um and

then uh I would love to work with Christy fter ruso uh just because I’m

really good friends with her and I just think we would have a blast working together and get some great things

done then maybe I would throw Batman in there

yes um you know I I can’t think of any like anyone else other than you know Batman

because you put up the bat signal and Batman puts on this really cool costume and drives a really cool car and comes

and just solves whatever problem is going on or rescues I think Batman would

be more of like my atrisk customer play um so if I could create an atrisk

customer team I’d put Batman on it um and let him go the thing about Batman is

that um I I you know I don’t know how deep your your desire or love for Batman goes but mine I love him I think he’s

terrific main thing I like about him is he always has a plan he’s always thought about what he’s going to do yes exactly

and he has like the best tools available to him no what he’s got something coming out of somewhere and everything turns

into some gadgets for everything beautiful well uh Miranda I think it’s been so great talking to you and I love

uh this kind of quick wrap up but thank you again for your time and for being with us and sharing your thoughts thank you