Masha
For context, what's your role now? What are you up to at PandaDoc? And your background as well, how did you get into this space?
Amanda
So my role at PandaDoc is SVP of Customer Success, which is basically everything post sale.
So once a customer has signed a contract, at that point, everything in the customer journey then points to our team and for the CX that surrounds that journey. So to get a little more tactical, some of the teams are on-boarding. We offer on-boarding for customers should they wish to pay for it. There's a certain level of on-boarding that's automated in-app, but if they want to go a lot deeper and a lot faster, and have a lot more help, it's very easy to set up. But, you know, sometimes people want to be guided. And so we have an on-boarding team that handles that part.
Then along with our services delivery team there's what we call, obviously training, customer training. Also on that team are our internal enablers to help all the CSMs and whatnot.
But we also have a team called Solutions Architects. And that team basically is chartered with, they're kind of like an SE, but on the post-sales side. So they help architect complex integrations and workflows to help our customers get the most value out of PandaDoc.
Once an account is handed off to a CSM, then that starts the next part of the journey, adoption-wise, and their North Star is retention and adoption, basically.
And we do have a separate AM team that takes over the larger opportunities for expansion. But we work very closely with them.
What else can I tell you? Also on the team, we have a community. So there's a group that manages that, and Help Desk knowledge base kind of stuff.
There's a Support team that is pretty traditional Level One, Level Two CMs that manage a Premier Support offering that we launched last year.
Pretty traditional CS team!
One of the biggest tasks we've had this year is migrating from our, what we call a v1–first version of our platform–to our Editor 2 which is our new generation. And the team has really done a great job. We have a drop dead date of February in 2022, that no customers can be on the old platform.
And so we've got roughly 30,000 customers now.
Masha
Woo! [Laughs]
Amanda
So trying to make sure that we get them to a good spot is a lot of work. And we've got a great team that's done an amazing job. We had, I think in q3 or q4 and q1 of last year, this was managed by our Product and Engineering team. And I think they did a few 100 each quarter. And they came to us and said “Okay, clearly we need your help.” And in q2 we did I think it was either 5000 or 6000 accounts.
Masha
Oh wow.
Amanda
And we're actually almost done. We're well under 1000. I think we're closer to like 200 or 300.
Masha
Awesome!
Amanda
So that was good. A little bit about my background.
Early in my career, I was in telecom and did that up until around September 11. And basically just kind of grew up in that customer-facing organization. It was customer training but technical training. And I would fly all over the world and show technicians how to install and maintain this what we called Voicemail and PBX equipment.
Around September 11, I was working for a large financial services company helping them bring software into their footprint. Telecom at the time was not a healthy industry, a lot of businesses were struggling. September 11 happened and I ended up saying, you know what, for the time being, I'm going to get out of telecom, because my company had been acquired, and get into something else that's a little bit safe right now, all things considered.
So I ended up going to work for this financial services firm bringing software into their footprint. And because people didn't want to travel at the time, WebEx was one of the technologies that I brought in. And by the way, many of the people that are at Zoom today, are ex-WebExers.
Masha
I was gonna say, is this like Groundhog Day for you? [Laughs]
Amanda
Totally. So just as a part of—that was the first company that I hadn't worked in that wasn't a startup. And I just built such a relationship with the Sales team. They said, you kind of get back into high tech. So they convinced me to leave an executive level VP job, and start all over.
So I became a CSM. Midway through my career—I call it, I pulled a Cher. I decided, you know what, I've already made it to the top, I can do it again. And I'm just gonna do it again. Because it's fun, and I need to get my hands back on everything to understand it. So I changed careers a bit in that I had moved away from telecom.
Now I'm in SaaS. WebEx was one of the first SaaS companies and I was their first employee in the field, but I worked remote most of my life, so it was no big deal. And I helped WebEx build their domestic CSM team and build offices in New York and Chicago. Did that for a few years. Our Retention and Expansion numbers were the best in the company. So they said, “Hey, we want you to move to Sacramento and lead the Enterprise team, the entire world global team.” I said okay, did that. And then the next year was given emerging markets because we were growing so quickly. Then we got acquired by Cisco and everything kind of started to slow down.
And so I followed a VP to another company, Core Metrics. They were later acquired by IBM.
And so in total, my career is my sweet spot is going into a company over a two to three year period and taking kind of like either a small skeleton crew, CS or very lean team and helping the company, align it to the stage that they're at, and then grow it and scale it over time.
So I've worked for some very big brands. I've worked for Marketo. I joined Marketo in September of one year, and we went public in March. And CS had dissolved, there was basically nothing. I had two people and 1000s of customers and no processes because they had stopped using Gainsight. And it was like go-time. So anyway, worked with Eloqua, worked with them with Marketo.
And then I left there went to Adobe, was recruited in from my director that I've worked with at WebEx and helped Adobe. They had acquired E-sign, EchoSign, several years before, and all the former executives had left. And now Adobe basically had this large team that needed a leader to come in and say, “Okay, let's make sure we've got this aligned correctly.” So I was there for about three years and then ended up going back into a smaller startup.
I really enjoy the building and getting it to where it's humming. And then at that point, I kind of say, okay, it's time to create a succession plan and let somebody else move up and me move on, and do it at the next place.
So that's a little bit about my background.
And every place that I've gone, I think I've walked in the door and retention has been probably in the 60 percentile and without question in every company, we've moved it up to around 98 percentile and typically for all business segments. Small business, medium business and enterprise.
Masha
Wow.
Amanda
But it's with the help of a great digital journey. It's the help of a great talented team. I have a lot of my team that we've worked together two, three and four times at various companies over the years.
Masha
That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. That's an amazing journey. I know we're going to learn so much from you. How are you folks organized at PandaDoc? Who do you report to? Who does your team report up to?
Amanda
Yeah, I report currently to the CRO. Who is great, probably one of the best leaders I've worked with. And he leads all of the go-to-market teams. So Sales, Marketing and CS reports into him.
Masha
Gotcha.
Amanda
And then he reports into the CEO.
Masha
Right. And how big is your team? Because you named quite a few functions.
Amanda
So when I joined PandaDoc, a little over two years ago, in July, we were about a $16 million company. We're roughly, I think, just under $52 million right now. So we've had tremendous growth. We'll be $100 million by the end of next year.
We've also grown from about 275 employees when I joined to about 700.
Masha
Oof!
Amanda
And from about 16,000 customers to over 30K. Now [...] the size of the CS team. Yeah, we are about 115, 120 people today.
So I think we're one of the lucky CS teams that receive a great amount, the right amount, of investment to make sure that we have a delightful customer experience.
Masha
That's fabulous. So maybe just on that note, while we're there, what does Customer Success actually mean to you? And how do you know it's, you know, “working”?
Amanda
Well, you know it's working when your customers at the highest level advocate for you, which typically means they're seeing value. If they haven't renewed, they're probably likely to, and they're also expanding, but at the highest level, they're referring other customers in because they're so delighted with their experience and how you've transformed their business.
Masha
Yeah, that's a pretty high bar to shoot for. And you mentioned that you folks report up to the Chief Revenue Officer. I know that sometimes the CS function is set up to report directly to the CEO, sometimes through Operations, it seems to be like there's a gamut. What in your mind is the best way to set up a Customer Success team organizationally? And what is the worst?
Amanda
I don't know that there's a right or wrong way to set it up in a given company. I think personally, for me, what it boils down to more is culture.
So when I left Adobe—Adobe was great. We just had built a super high performing team. But I then started to yearn for a small startup again, and Adobe was a really large company. And of course, like everybody, I want to find those unicorns. I've had several—I think, I forget, let's see—six or eight exits at the companies that I've worked out over my career. And so I'm like, I want to—
Masha
Amazing! Have you considered being a VC Amanda? [Laughs] You got that hit rate!
Amanda
Well, let's see, there was one company in telecom that went public. I think the next one that went public was Eloqua, then Marketo and then I've had—
Masha
Well WebEx got acquired.
Amanda
Core Metrics. Yeah, WebEx got acquired. Eloqua got acquired later, but Marketo got acquired as well. And Core Metrics got acquired by IBM, so there was an exit there. So quite a few—a lot of exits.
Masha
That's what I'm saying!
Amanda
So to me, I've had the reporting structure work both ways where either I've reported to a C-level, or I've reported to the CEO and in other companies as well.
To me, what it boils down to is the culture of the company, and the level of transparency and communication. And at the end of the day, to me, it doesn't matter if I'm reporting to the CRO or the CEO, it's about the relationship and how that information flows and how CS is seen within the organization and whether it's a respected organization or not, you know? A lot of companies say they're customer facing, but they're not. PandaDoc is great. We're a very transparent organization and growing by 75% year over year right now, so.
Masha
It shows!
Amanda
It's going quite well.
Masha
Yeah. Maybe more specifically, I guess, one of the maybe controversial opinions that people hold in this space is like, how close or how far you want to be with the Sales organization in terms of do you own revenue expansion, for example. How do you see that?
Amanda
I think, again, it depends on the relationship and how well the teams work together. So the way that it works at PandaDoc today, I owned all of Expansion. When I first started at PandaDoc, the team really didn't pay that much attention to Retention, they counted on the ostrich rule. And they said, “I'm going to wait and just see what happens after the end of the quarter. I'm going after Expansion.” And it scared the heck out of me to tell you the truth, because I'm like, this is going to come back to bite us at some point. It hasn't. But I helped the sales team build an AM organization. In fact, we gave them our top two CSMs to start it. And then we kept giving them resources over about a year period as they were building that engine. At about a year, then we said okay, it's time for you to own the expansion targets so that now the CSM team can focus—we're still a part of Expansion, but we focus more on Retention, and just worked very closely with them. So it's about the working relationship.
Masha
Super interesting. You've seen a ton of different configurations, obviously, and it's also across many different companies. How have you seen the Customer Success role actually evolve in the last couple of years? What have you seen change?
Amanda
A lot. The role has been around for a long time. I mean, I worked at WebEx back in early 2000—you know, 2001 I think when I joined. So it's evolved in that people understand, I think a lot more clearly today, the value that the organization can bring in the customer experience, versus just leaving customers to their own devices and hoping for a good outcome. You know, I think what you're doing changes based upon what the company is focused on. So one of the things that PandaDoc is—my organization is extremely tightly aligned to both Product, Marketing, and Sales, all of the go-to-market teams work really, really well together. But all the heads—except for Sales right now, because he's about five months into the company and he's still working on some parts of his organization—but Product, Marketing and CS, we actually just had an offsite last week, just on CX initiatives and locked ourselves in a room for two days, and just talked through a lot of what we knew we needed to focus on. So it's just having good cross functional partners, and tight alignment. But we're also a product-led growth company. So the reason I mentioned that is it does change what a CSM’s duties might be. So in a very small startup that doesn't have a lot of resources, the CSM typically tends to have to carry a lot more things on their shoulders to kind of keep—they're the glue that keeps everything together. And as you scale and you get a large, much more mature organization like we have today at PandaDoc, we have the ability to do other things. Like we may say, okay, we have product-led growth. So instead of doing X Y and Z as a CSM, we're going to talk to them about putting that into the product, so that we have a much lighter lift, and we're able to focus on the areas that we need to focus on, like driving feature adoption, if it's a new feature and Product hasn't quite caught up with the education part of it or something like that. Typically, we do a good job more on new features as we release them now. We had a big project about a year ago where our customers in-app would see a button that they could contract or cancel, and a big portion of our business, 70% of small business today. And so it's very transactional. That said, we still want to engage and have a conversation without making the process painful for the customer. So we worked very closely with Product, because the customer, when they hit the button, they thought, “Oh, I've been able to cancel, I can just go away.” But what they didn't realize is they actually had already rolled into their new contract, they're in a new agreement. So it was all about changing the messaging to make sure that all of our worlds were not colliding and complementing each other. Because we all have our own objectives on what we need to get done.
Masha
Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. If you had a crystal ball, how do you see it sort of evolving in the next five? Or like, what are some of the trends or directions that you see in Customer Success?
Amanda
Some of the newer things that we're working on now, which is really fun, is AI. I brought one new tool into our company, it's called Ox, it's an enablement system. An enablement software AI, that helps help CSMs navigate conversations that they're not as competent. It could be their brand new CSM, it could be a renewal conversation. If it's a tough negotiation, you know, it might be tough negotiations. And we're growing so fast at PandaDoc, we can't keep up with hiring. We're hiring as fast as we can. And because we also target for the most part more junior talent, and then train them, it's a big drain on leadership. So the ability to have Ox that helps us coach on some of these conversations has been tremendous. We also just launched Ada on the support side to help us from a chat efficiency perspective and to take some of that workload off. And we're looking at some other tools as well. One of the other big initiatives for next year for PandaDoc is going global and localization. So we've kind of determined the first six languages that we're going to go after and then add another six after that.
Masha
Wow, that sounds amazing. So just to dig on that a little bit, you see it changing with the advent of new technologies coming in?
Amanda
Yeah, some of the ones that we evaluated and are thinking about—one that we're looking at bringing back in, I think it was in for a while, and I don't know what happened, is Gong. There's also another tool out there that we looked at called Complete CSM and one of the really interesting things that it did, they're still very small, but one of the really interesting things is they do a Customer Sentiment Score. So you could have a new CSM sitting there listening, and someone's nodding their head but that the words that they're saying are not in line with their body language, or vice versa, you know? Maybe their language is harsh, but they're just acting or whatnot. So the Sentiment Score is huge, because it can force a CSM to really go back and think about the conversation. And did they hit all of the points that they needed to? And do you think that customer is going to renew? So I personally was super excited to see that level of technology starting to come about.
Masha
Yeah, that sounds super interesting. What's the most, I guess, controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success that you wish other folks would just hurry up and catch up to already?
Amanda
Probably the most controversial issue, everyone has their own perspective. So, if you don't have a product, you don't have anything that you can't sell, right? Sales looks at it like well, if you don't sell anything, nothing happens either. The way that I look at it is if you don't have a customer, you don't have a business and if you don't make the customer successful, then you're not successful. To me, that's what it boils down to. You can have a product, you can have a sales team, but you’ve got to get that customer in the door. And once you get them, you need to treat them with the proper experience so that they have a joyful time.
