In Customer Success, it’s easy to take on an “everything to everyone” level of responsibility, but that is not your job, it shouldn’t be anyone’s. 

Masha Krol

LeeRon, thank you so much for joining me. Tell me a little bit about you. Tell me about your path to Customer Success, because I found that everyone's experiences are so varied. There doesn't seem to be a particularly set "this is how you get into Customer Success." How did you end up in it? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

By accident. Like most people. I like to refer to myself as a recovering educator. I was in education for many, many years and kind of rose in the ranks from a classroom teacher to a school administrator, to a district administrator, and then woke up one day and had a midlife crisis for the first time and realized I don't want to do that when I grow up. I've turned into something that I don't want to be. And I sat on the couch for three days and realized I have zero hobbies. but which is okay, it's okay to have no hobbies except work. And a good friend of mine reached out and said, “Hey, I'm part of this really cool new startup, and we're building something for educators and we could use someone with your brain and your experience to come over.” And if you're familiar with startup world, there is no job description. There is no, here's what we need you to do. It's more like, what can you pick up and do.

So I got to do everything from marketing, inside sales, outside sales,  support. And then one day I realized people don't just call us and give us a cheque again or say, how can I pay to renew this? We should probably reach out to them. So, it took a notebook and a pen and sat in front of an actual phone and started dialling and asking people if they wanted to renew. And I did that for a week and got replies and then realized we should probably do that more often. but I tie my education background because I truly believe that Customer Success is truly education. What you're doing in order to get customers to be successful is educating them how to best use the platform or system or product that they just purchased and showcasing them the best ways to use it. And the way that I kind of look at Customer Success for my customers is always through that journey lens; the same way I looked at my students, what are you ready for? At what time? What kind of lessons do you need? What type of format should I present this to you? Is this an email? Is this a webinar? Is this a video? Is there say a one page? What do you need in order to serve you in the right moment for you to have that ‘aha’ moment of like, “oh, I know that”, or a value realization, the two kind of meet for me in the same, same concept. 

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Masha Krol

I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I really appreciate that you describe it as education for their customer as well. While we're on the topic, is there any other way that, like, what does, what does Customer Success really mean to you? If you were to summarize it in one sentence, 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

I don't want it to sound fartsy. So I'm not going to say “enabling customers to be their best”cause that's, that's teasing. I think Customer Success is creating long lasting partnerships and educating and learning from one another. 

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Masha Krol

yes. I love that. Okay. If we think about that, how do we measure it? How do we know it's working? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

Yeah. Great. You put milestone markers throughout your journey with the customers. You start by asking them what their goals are; what do they want to achieve? What are your super lofty goals? one, based on how realistic or unrealistic they are, and then resetting them to more realistic expectations.Asking questions like “what kind of resources or time do you have to invest into this? And then “let's talk about what does 30 days look like and 45 and 90 and six months and nine months”. And “here's what we've seen with other customers like you in a similar situation”, or as close as we can get. “Does that sound like a good plan?” And then tracking that to make sure that you're meeting or exceeding those markers accelerating when needed, slowing down when needed, providing a lot of feedback on what is happening in a really fantastic way and where you're seeing opportunities, where we can partner to do better, really being that coach and guide throughout the journey. So Customer Success, if you change their title, they’re almost like Sherpas. They guide you in a way to your destination of where you want to go. And people often say, “I want to go this fast”, or “I want to go this slow” and you might not know what your abilities are or might not realize what you can and cannot do. And your CSM is the one that would guide you through it in a very safe and fun way, hopefully 

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Masha Krol

I love that coaching analogy. That's really great. My coach always says that his job is to facilitate my leadership and I'm like, "huh? This might apply. This is like, what a CSM does it facilitate the customer's leadership? Right?”

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LeeRon Yahalomi

I used to tell my teachers that they are unlocking potential. A CSM does the same. they unlock potential. 

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Masha Krol 

I can get the ‘teacher’ analogy out of my head. Now that you've set it up.

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LeeRon Yahalomi

It's really embedded into me. But I do strongly believe when you think of all, everything a Customer Success manager does from onboarding customers, to training, to constantly making sure that they're aware of new things, that's everything a teacher does. And to all those teachers who are trying to leave, be a Customer Success Manager, you'd be amazing. 

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Masha Krol

Totally transferable skills. Am I right? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

Huge. They’re huge planners. They can sell, they can engage, they can plan and create. 

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Masha Krol

Okay. Can I pick on that for a second? Tell me about the selling portion of that. Cause like what in your mind, is the correct relationship of Customer Success Managers, the Customer Success organization, to Revenue. I know people have kind of polarized opinions on this. What's your take?

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LeeRon Yahalomi

I'll climb on my little soapbox and tell you that I'm a radical person, but that's okay. I believe that ‘sell’ is not a dirty four letter word. Everyone sells. Are you someone's partner, parent, child, friend, or colleague? If the answer is “yes” then you’re selling. You’re selling all day long. A Customer Success Manager, their role is to sell. You're constantly selling. It's a much softer sell. It's continuous. It's never ending. It's you making sure that they're realizing the features or parts of the product that they're not using to their best of their ability. You're constantly reminding them of why they bought, what were their goals? How are they achieving them? How are they tracking? That’s selling. It is a softer, more consultative form, but it is selling. Now, I’m of the school of thought that Customer Success Managers are accountable and responsible for commercial activities and renewals within their account. How much do they get paid on it? Depending on the size of company, depending on the organization, depending on the maturity of the company, all the work that Customer Success Managers does to enable usage and deeper adoption yields the result of renewal and expansion. Therefore, there's an accountability piece that we have to name it. You are accountable for it because if you're not doing a great job at managing usage and adoption, there will be no renewal upsell.

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Masha Krol

Right? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

So I cringe often when people say Customer Success managers, they're in charge of making sure customers are happy. This isn't the circus. No one is here to make other people happy. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

The not the definition of Customer Success? 

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Masha Krol

Do you know Gal from Testim? I'm like, “you must be friends”. She's like, “I'm not here to make customer happy. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

I’m not here to make anyone happy. I actually, there was a period in my life where a colleague and I would design funny Customer Success t-shirts for ourselves. And one said, “I'm a Customer Success Managers. I do things you don't know that I do”. Another said “I'm a Customer Success Managers, I manage disappointments”. That is what a CSM does. They don't create happiness. They manage unrealistic expectation. They manage disappointment, happiness. No one's in charge of your own happiness. Let alone your Customer Success Managers.

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Masha Krol

You're in charge of your own happiness. All right. I love it. I love it. Tell me about the top three qualities of the most incredible Customer Success folks that you've ever worked with. Like what are the things that they share 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

In the last three years? Resilience/Grit. I kind of put them in the same because this is really, it's hard. It's tough. I believe that Customer Success is one of the hardest jobs out there. You don't have the right tools. You don't get enough recognition. You're doing too much. You're basically everything to everyone, "but don't do that, but do that, but don't, don't do that. Be everything to me, but don't be everything to me”. So grit and resilience, I think are great skill. The second one is probably Empathy because you cannot connect with other people, especially right now in this new world where technology is taken first seat and we're not onsite or creating these relationships in person. Empathy, understanding not just where the customer is or what the person that you're speaking with is. What else is on their plate? What else are they dealing with? How can you make life easier and better for them not harder? So a lot of empathy I think is needed. And the third is probably Project Management skills, organizational skills; you are doing more than you should within the hours of the day. I like to describe this to people, I think in analogy. So this might make sense. It might not but I heard this once on a podcast. As human beings, we're constantly are juggling balls in the air. What we need to come to realize is some of those balls are bouncy balls; so if they fall, they bounced right back. Some of them are cotton balls; if they fall, it's not that big of a deal. But some of them are glass. And if you can realize which ones are glass and keep those up in the air and don't lose too many cotton balls, then you're doing an amazing job at what you do. It’s realizing that within the world of  Customer Success you're managing a lot of balls and you're not supposed to keep them all in the air. Some you can pass to others, some you can bounce, some can drop, but some really need to be gently cared for. So I think being able to be super organized, being able to manage everything as a project and being able to understand the prioritization is key. 

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Masha Krol 

I'm going to keep that. No, I love it. I'm going to keep those, that ‘ball’ analogy in my head. As I tried to juggle things.

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LeeRon Yahalomi  

I often would ask my manager when my plate was full. Which one of these do you believe are glass balls? Which of these are bouncy balls. Like which ones can I bounce to next week? But out of everything that is on my plate, which ones do you believe? And then let's see what I believe in are we aligned or not, or where we're mismatched, but you can't do everything. 

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Masha Krol 

What a great one-on-one question too. Thanks LeeRon. I’m just learning things today. Thank you. Okay, in this current situation, we talked about resilience and definitely grit. And over the last few years, for sure, all of us have had to flex that particular muscle, whether we want it to or not. What would you say is the biggest challenge facing Customer Success as a whole, maybe I guess both the role, but also maybe the department kind of like the part of the organization that's kind of responsible for Customer Success. How do you think about that? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

I think the biggest challenges, even though Customer Success has been around for, it's going to be 20 years. So when you actually think about it, so it's not that new, but we keep calling it this new thing. 

There is not a defined, what is the charter and responsibility of Customer Success. So when you think of an organization like Marketing, what does Marketing do? People will give you three bullets. What does Sales do? Here are the three bullets. What does Engineering do? What does Product do? All of it is super defined. For Customer Success, the Charter changes in every company, in every vertical segment you look at, in every industry and every stage. The biggest challenge is often, I like to refer to them as the 'Bloody Mary of the cocktail hour’. Everything goes into this Customer Success. They're in charge of renewals and upsells and onboarding and implementation and support tickets and creating marketing materials and enabled materials for our customers, they’re responsible for churn, they’re responsible for upselling, they're responsible for everything, except that paying the bills for the company… “but wait, you keep the lights on, so you are responsible for paying the bills.” It's almost like everything that no one knows where it goes in the company, it’s like, that should be a Customer Success responsibility. And that is really challenging because the role of a Customer Success Manager is extremely different in every company. And so I've, I've coached and talked to folks who are like “I don't know that I want to be a Customer Success and having to help them see that what they did is very different than what they would be in another company. And maybe that company, that role, that structure wasn't successful for them. And let's find the right one for you. But because there's so many versions of what Customer Success is, there is no way for you to know, are you going to be good at it or not? And you need to try it in different places to find your right place and what you're really good at and know that you're not supposed to be good at all the things in Customer Success. Think of yourself in a ‘T formation’. Your job is to be a Customer Success Manager and can you do all these little things too, not as much in depth, but have some knowledge in it because unfortunately that is still the world of Customer Success. I'm hoping that along with others, we can change that. 

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Masha Krol 

Yeah. That was going to be my next question for you is how do you see it sort of changing and evolving over the next five years? 

LeeRon Yahalomi 

I'll tell you first how I would like to see it changing and evolving. I would love for us to have as, a function, maybe three or four different, versions of what Customer Success should look like at its optimal state. Depending on the stage that you're are as a company, if you are pre-seed or early seed, this is more or less what a CSM role is. And be honest about it "in this stage, you're doing everything. You have no tools. We have no budget. Can you just do everything”. “As you're maturing into a CDE rounds, or you're looking at going public or IPO, this is what a Customer Success Manager role is”. And then “here's, once you were part of a company with a 1000 or 2000 employees, and you're either privately owned or you've gone public, but this is what it looks like”. So individuals can find the right place for them in their career and also make it easier to enter and grow with it. We're still very much saying "in order to be a Customer Success manager, you need to have experience in Customer Success”. Well, how do you get if you're not letting anyone in? Build those moments where people can learn as they're doing the work and allow them to grow. I would love to see the same way that you look at every other department. There's kind of like, "here's what it typically looks like for that cognitive accompany on this stage and yes, there's various versions and variations and snowflakes, right? But there's almost like three or four boxes that you should fit within”. 

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How do I think it's going to happen? Unfortunately, not like that. I think what's going to happen is that large entities and companies within the realm of Customer Success will tell us what Customer Success should look like. And a lot of little companies would still not find themselves fitting into that and continue to make mistakes, which would unfortunately lead to us losing some phenomenal talent that should be part of the world of Customer Success. 

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Masha Krol 

Right. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

Continue marching towards helping companies see that. 

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Masha Krol

Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because I'm sure there are a lot of companies right now, I'm seeing all of them pop up. I'm sure this has been popping up over many years with kind of like maturity models, and this is what a CS level three is or something looks like. Right? And it's like, cool, you know, maybe that helps, right? Maybe we kind of establishing it.

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

I think if we can establish those guidelines. Here's an analogy someone gave me the other day, “we can establish what guard rails are, but no one said how wide or narrow they are.”

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Masha Krol 

[Laughs] Right.

LeeRon Yahalomi 

So establish the guardrails of what it is to be this level of maturity, this level of maturity. You could, depending again, on the company and the product they're selling, they could mature quicker than others or stay in a certain stage longer, which is completely okay. I think the biggest difference I am seeing, and that is optimistic, is more and more companies are realizing; develop the product, find market fit, go get a CS team. That is the first thing you should have on operations. You have to build a Customer Success team. In the past, it’s been, “we've got sales and marketing and product, we're probably having a problem, no one is engaging with the customer.” Now we're realizing the customer journey actually starts before they become customers and we need to build that into the product, we need to build that into our processes. Not afterwards fit it into what we already have, but build it as you’re building your company. I'm seeing more companies do that, which is inspiring. 

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Masha Krol 

Cool. Yeah. I'll take that food for thought right there. Okay, last couple of questions I have for you. One is, I love asking this question, what is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success that you wish other folks would just like hurry up and catch up to already like, “just get there”. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

I have a lot of those 

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Masha Krol

Give me your top one, but maybe two. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

I'll give you my top. Okay. I don't know if it's my top, but here is one of my not so new-ish, but when I'm standing very firm on; there is no difference or should not be any difference between a Chief Revenue and a Chief Customer Officer. You cannot be a Chief Customer Officer, if you're not a Chief Revenue. And you cannot be a Chief Revenue. If you're not a Chief Customer, it is the same role. It needs to be the same person. If you're leading a revenue organization, which I strongly believe ‘customer’ should be part of a revenue organization, you have to have both. So when folks ask me “where does the head of CS report to? It is the Head of Revenue, the Head of CS is the Head of Revenue. I don't see a difference between Chief Revenue and Chief Customer, to me, they're the same individual and thus, think about it as revenue as a holistic approach, not new sales versus post-sale. That's a radical one that will take a while to change. 

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And another thing. Another radical one that I think is worthy: Customer Success Managers are not the Quarterback. I don't like when people call them the Quarterback “their Quarterback in the account.” They're not the Quarterback. Sometimes they're the Quarterback but, sometimes they're the Linebacker, sometimes they're the Kicker. They change roles depending on the segment, that period of life cycle and where the customer is at. They're not always the Quarterback, the ball moves. And to me, Customer Success is a team sport, not an individual sport. The more you play with the rest of the team and move to different positions in order to make sure the team and the customer is moving forward, the more successful you will be.     

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Masha Krol 

Yeah. That makes a ton of sense and goes to our point of resilience and flexibility and doing all the things. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

Yeah. 

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Masha Krol 

Yeah. Cool. Do you want to share another one or?

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LeeRon Yahalomi

Mine was too long.

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Masha Krol

Okay, let me ask you a fun one. We know Customer Success folks love making their customers feel like superheroes. So obvious question for you, if you had a Customer Success related superpower, what would yours be? 

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LeeRon Yahalomi

I've heard that before and my team previously always would laugh that I would like send a message Monday morning saying “Avengers assemble” because it always felt like you needed everyone. Again, team sport, you need everyone. Everyone has a different superpower on the team. And so bring that together to win. 

It's really hard to choose one superpower but I'll tell you what my team calls my superpower and there is not one like that yet. And maybe Marvel will listen or read this. My team was using an analogy to describe a day in the life of a Customer Success Manager, to the rest of the company in an all-hands meeting. And they described it as “we are farmers room. We use the Farmville app. Sometimes you have farms that grow carrots, and sometimes it's corn, and you plant things at different times, and sometimes the land is fruitful, and sometimes you have bugs, and sometimes the crows come, and that's the power of a CSM”. And then they said, “and then you've got to LeeRon. So when you need to plow a large piece of land or you need to dig and find something, that's the machinery you bring, A LeeRon. And the machinery actually goes to work because her ability to dig through things, plow through things, move things in a way that you can't on your own, but she will let you get on top and do that.” That's the super power. And I thought it was the funniest thing. My face was on like a little tractor as it was like plowing through the field and then digging holes and moving large pieces of items in our farm. And I thought “that is my superpower.” That's what I like to do as a Manager, to be able to move those large pieces for you, that you could on your own, but it's just going to take you so much longer. I have the ability to just move that for you. So I like that. 

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Masha Krol 

I love that. That is incredible.

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LeeRon Yahalomi

And I also have an obsession with large machines like diggers and crates and the men trucks. I don't know why, but I have a serious obsession with them. 

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Masha Krol 

But there's a connection. 

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LeeRon Yahalomi 

There's a connection. 

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Masha Krol 

Just, I love that. that's all my questions. This was really fun. And I learned a ton and I learned a ton about, I learned a ton about managing my team too. So that was an unexpected outcome, but lovely. thank you so much for taking the time.

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