GSD Podcast with Scott Roth, SVP Global Customer Success @ Medallia
I am very happy to announce the return of the podcast! In the latest podcast, I am joined by Scott Roth, SVP of Global Customer Success at Medallia (MDLA). Scott and I worked together at Endeca/Oracle in the Professional
Topics we covered:
100% reference-able, but now the numbers matter. How to transition to an organization where metrics are being tracked
How to get large the Top 5 Consulting companies to sell and implement your software
Running a Portfolio as a Practice Manager
Benefits of Vertical vs Regional services organizations
Having your biggest companies own your Product Roadmap
Having Professional Services Project Managers and Architects as an active part of pre-sales (and speeding up your sales cycle)
Hiring great Customer Success teams
You can listen here for Apple Podcasts, or Spotify here.
(as a note, the first 6 minutes are some off-topic banter. Feel free to jump ahead, but I thought that, in these times, its nice to hear some normal conversation).
Transcript:
Jeff 00:11
The GSD podcast, couple quick notes. podcast was off for I think about seven months or so I had jumped in in a startup, helping set up the professional services and onboarding team. And then when all the COVID stuff started, I decided to start my own thing. So I'm out there, instead of helping one company, I'm helping out multiple companies, which is awesome. I really love working with a bunch of different people and different problems. So that's been great. As part of that. I definitely wanted to bring the podcast back, I've been getting some emails, not just from services people, but from software people too. So I think we'll just call it the GSD podcast. And sometimes the S can be services and sometimes it's gonna be software today, it's services. And one of the people who had been contacting me and definitely wanted to jump on and talk was a good buddy of mine, Scott Roth, he's the SVP of global customer success at Medallia, which is an amazing company as well you guys should definitely check them out. In Scott and I worked back at deca, which is now Oracle. Think like 2005 2000, eights, as I've mentioned before, and some of the other podcasts, we had this new way of just real go getters come in as we started really going through a growth phase. And Scott had that big consulting background but understood what it took to work with customers at a at a product company. And the even great finding about Scott is we always bump into each other in the most random of places. Like I think the last time I saw him was a mall, which I never go to and before that, it was that I think an off off off Broadway performance of I think like a Peppa Pig show. Some type of kid show. So anyways, this was a blast. Scott's very, very smart about customer engagement, working with product teams, getting stuff launched, and whether that's SAS product or a custom product. So just a great guy to listen to in a very, very calm, cool perspective on things as well, too. So enjoy. And I will see you hopefully next week. Recording Hey, I'm gonna stop recording and start recording. I had it set to default and I heard you know what, I'm just gonna let it fly. I'm just gonna let it fly. Let's see if I can get out of
Scott Roth 03:47
control today. Mr. Kushmerek.
Jeff 03:49
How are you?
Scott Roth 03:51
Okay, man, I'm probably smaller than when you last saw me physically?
Jeff 03:56
Yeah. Did you? Is that is that on purpose? Or did you go on survivor or what happened? Nope. You froze there for a second.
Scott Roth 04:06
It's all about the peloton, my friend. Yeah. Are
Jeff 04:09
you are you? Are you doing that you get the peloton.
Scott Roth 04:11
We had it for two years. So we were we're not a COVID band jumping family. We
Jeff 04:17
we've already made that distinction, by the way. Like
Scott Roth 04:21
I make sure everyone knows like out there and radio land. That is something we did prior to COVID
Jeff 04:29
Do you get into the communities and trash document all that stuff?
Scott Roth 04:32
I don't do the communities like that. I think there's the gamification on the actual rides is very helpful, motivating for me personally, and then just having friends, you can follow us and keep encouraging, like people that are in your network. It's fun to see how they're doing and like, you know, congratulate them. It's just it's a good motivation. Oh, yeah. You know, I don't want to ride today, but you know, so and so it's gonna ride and then they're gonna give me crap for not riding so I'm gonna do it. I'll just go do it. They just do it. So I've been a 75 Week St. Where I've worked out at least once a week for 75 straight weeks, I've never done that my entire life. Oh my god. Wow. And I'm on a man, I'm almost almost three month stint where I've written every other day without missing a day. Which is like that's out of control for me that I've done that. Usually I'll go a couple days and take a couple days off and I'll go a couple days. But yeah, I've been very diligent about every other day.
Jeff 05:23
I've got the Airdyne right. The thing with the big fan that yeah, oh, yeah.
Scott Roth 05:27
Yeah. Those are nice. Yeah. Cool. And your workouts are good. It's a double benefit.
Jeff 05:32
It sucks. Don't get me wrong. I've been watching that. The Michael Jordan documentary while I'm on it. Absolutely amazing. I like to think of myself Scott as the Michael Jordan of professional services sometimes, right? You'd be like, Jeff, I don't know if I don't know why you can't do this. Like what's going on?
Scott Roth 05:52
I think it was episode two or three. They show they show. footage of him at the Carrier Dome.
Jeff 05:58
Yep. I'm trying to remember which one was that? I didn't see them two or
Scott Roth 06:01
three. Like when I was in college. It was no, no, he was he was there like they did an expedition fishing game. The Bulls played I heard the bulls played. But I was at that game. Okay. I was on the floor of the court because my high school photography teacher, Mr. Parker, your money remember these names? Was the photographer for Syracuse University Sports, and he taught high school photography. Okay, and I begged Mr. Parker to be his lackey to carry all his equipment to that game. I'm like, Mr. Barker. You don't have to pay me. I will carry every camera, anything you want. You know, gotta do Just tell me where to be when I whenever I just want to be on the because he always had corppass Like he was saying the basketball and big tele lens. And I'm like, just let me come to the game. He's like, Yeah, no problem, Scott. And I was just, I was just lucky that day, and I got to, like, get sweated on like, sweat drips of sweat, Michael Jordan, hit me. And I thought I was like, the greatest thing ever.
Jeff 06:56
Which by the way, it would be a total like you and your current state like, that would freak you out beyond no belief, right? Yeah,
Scott Roth 07:04
but back then I think the greatest thing that ever happened later, never gonna wash that spot of your body for next 40 years.
Jeff 07:10
Oh, that's amazing. Well, you look great. And you know, I was gonna ask if there was a, a skin product or a hydration sort of protocol that you're following these days or things like that, but it sounds like it's the peloton. So as you can imagine, I'm well caffeinated. I'm going to try and keep keep the rails on today. So listen, and I'm going to dive we're going to dive in, we're going to talk some some professional services and success. Scott, but before that, I do have to tell you, the last guy that was a buffalo native, the podcast never made it to the air. I'm just gonna say that right? So keep the bills tucked down.
Scott Roth 07:54
So grew up in Syracuse, New York, went to school in Buffalo, and I'm a New York Giants fan.
Jeff 08:00
Okay, I'll take that I can respect the Giants fan.
Scott Roth 08:04
And honestly, like, I'm the kind of fan where like, I just read for the team, but I don't know the players. Yeah, I didn't do that much at the time.
Jeff 08:11
So Mark Bavaro doesn't mean anything to like literally guys, this so so. So Scott, you know, he's talking about I'm gonna listen to the build. Oh, yes. My phone's ringing. Of course, only I don't think it's rang today. Hold on one second. I'm gonna my wife so I'm now in trouble. So hold on one second. Scott, I'm gonna put you on pause for one quick sec. I'm just gonna pause the recording. You can hear the whole thing go. This reminds me of a very funny story when I was at Bright Cove, and you have the emergency protocol, right? I'm sure like, you know, with your wife, like, hey, it's an important day, but like, called call and hang up twice. And I'll know it's important. Right? Right. So we're doing like board prep, you know, for the roadshow stuff or something like that. And you know, and I wasn't part of the roadshow. So I'm like, getting everybody up to speed with our numbers and things like that. But you might have just gone through. And and then suddenly, the emergency protocol goes off. And I'm like, Oh, my God. Everybody hold on one second. In in, in, I'm on the phone in my notes. Now the fabric softeners next to the dryer actually. So what I was saying before my phone rang was that you were that part of that next crop of, of professional professional services people that came to in deca, you and Bill Bonneville, I believe and Matt, like you had some of us who were, you know, OJT and doing the best that we can and things like that. And then you came in, you know, everybody with their Accenture and bearing point backgrounds and things like that. So why don't you sort of talk about no I did with respect believe me like you guys came in MU Okay, we've got it, we've got enterprise level customers, now we can't be doing this, this Mickey Mouse stuff anymore. So that's a compliment. And so I'd love for you to just touch on sort of that background a little bit. And then and then what I'm looking for is, we're trying to find that intersection of one customer when when services teams start getting big, and in how they need to change in and how, you know, we kind of changed through the batch of yours when you started until you know, we got bought and things like that.
Scott Roth 10:30
Sure, yeah. So I think, you know, when you look at startup organizations, obviously, things are bootstrapped. Everything is run on a very tight ship. And people are asked to play many roles. Sometimes those roles are roles they've never played before in their career. So they're, they're asked to do the unknown. And because the the type of people that start companies and are the first kind of wave of employees, they have a, I can do anything kind of attitude. And I will do anything kind of attitude. And I think that's what makes startup so successful, because people just roll up their sleeves, and they figure out how to get it done at all costs, right. And that's what you need, right? Because when you're brand new, as an organization, you need to obtain customers, you need to make them wildly successful, very quick. 100%, referenceable, I
Jeff 11:17
believe was the time,
Scott Roth 11:19
I needed customers to recognize that and, and speak publicly about that for you. And that's super important. So you do whatever you have to, then you hit this point in your company's growth, where the numbers matter all of a sudden, right? Like the fact that first set of funding money has kind of run out, and you're about to go for your next series of funding. And all sudden, the next the next set of investors who are putting, you know, probably some, some large dollar value behind that, they start thinking about the numbers, what is your software number? What is your professional services number? If you know, if you're selling education, what your education number, yeah, and that's something companies that are in the growth phase don't really pay attention to because they're just like, we're gonna grow at all costs, no matter what, right. And at some point, you have to become a business. And the business has certain pillars, certain legs of stool, and the you know, the, the analysts have models, and they have to be able to plug numbers in models, when you can't give them number to plug, you can't value your company, and you can't get funding. So that's kind of like where that level of like the next set of people kind of come in who have worked for larger organizations where they're already in the model. And now they're kind of running a business running a steady state business. And there, they have to operate at that. So remembering back to the days, when I joined in deca, it was really about helping the company think about like profitability at a customer level, thinking about what does it truly take to do this work so that when we're out, bidding it, selling it, it's repeatable, you know, we're consistent, we're creating an ecosystem. So our partners can also have a competitive nature, because that's another thing. As a growing enterprise software company, you need a partner ecosystem to be successful, no company is going to become a $1 billion organization without a partner ecosystem. I don't care who you are, and then I software.
Jeff 13:08
And to add to that, because I was I was part of that initiative. It's not just for delivery, right? I mean, I remember specifically, the exec team saying, finally, because they thought they're gonna be able to do it for a while. And then they heard loud enough that like, you're not selling it to coke. Right? Like, maybe Accenture, maybe it's AP, and maybe it's IBM, but those are the people that are selling into Coke. And then in then, as part of that, they need to be able to learn how to sell your stuff, they need to be able to deliver your stuff. And they need to know why it's important for them. Right? And so for them, it's basically like, Okay, I've got 60 software companies calling me up saying, Please sell our stuff. Like why why do you guys matter? Right,
Scott Roth 13:53
right. So, so as those big, those big firms that you mentioned, you know, what do they look at? They look at the total addressable market. They look at can I build a practice of 500 practitioners that can deploy this technology? Because like, that's their money is made on their people, right? Like they don't they don't make software, so they don't get any of the software revenue is all about people revenue. So, you know, what is the addressable market? What kind of practice can I build around this? And How sustainable is it in the market and your point about, you know, these big enterprise service providers, they have 1520 30 relationships with these companies, they are ingrained at the C suite, and they're talking to them all the time. And as a startup software company, you can have the best sales directors in the world, but then getting a meeting with someone at that level is it's very difficult. So you need you need a an Accenture, Deloitte or an IBM to see the value your technology. So when they're working on a roadmap with the CEO or the CIO or the CMO, they can say, hey, I have a piece of technology itself. These three key problems you've been trying to solve for five years. I want to bring in and show you how it works. And here's the expected return on that investment, right, that's what gets you your meeting so that your people can come in, do what they do best, which is explain your product, explain how it works code sell with your partner. And then the idea is that the partner takes on all the professional services revenue. And like, honestly, as a software company, that's exactly what you want. You want to enable partners to drive professional services revenue with your technology and software sales stream. And then you can focus with your engineering team to build your product and make it even better.
Jeff 15:28
I mean, it's like listening to a mirror right now, Scott, thank you so much. But it's so true, right? It's, it's your or your services company, or a software company, right? Like, you know, go do that thing that you're successful at, build the product, and then let people go make money off of that have a small team, but maybe, you know, you're we're in small, I mean, I think we're like 70 people, 100 people or something like that. But we're working on, you know, the bleeding edge stuff. So they're able to work with the, you know, dev team in the back if things need to be tweaked and stuff like that. But I think like, if I think about the history of projects that I was on, and then you know, by the time you guys came in and stuff you guys were on, it went like from $30,000, quickstarts, right to like, Oh, my God, the sales team is killing me. But we're looking to like a 75k thing here. And then suddenly, we're looking at, you know, half a million dollars and services projects and things like that. You became a practice manager? What were you talking about some of the activities that you were doing, then was it going out and scoping those things and managing the teams and stuff?
Scott Roth 16:34
Sure. So as a practice manager, you now are basically running a portfolio, right you are a company within a company is probably the best way to think about it. And your job as a portfolio manager is to not only you have to go out and acquire customers, right? So you have to help the sales team sell, you have to sell your professional services. So the customer understands the value you're going to bring to the table, you have to recruit talent, you have to train talent, you have to develop talent, because you have to have a system that can be self fulfilling. And then when you create that machine, you have to you really your job is to feed the machine. And so, you know, first it was building out the infrastructure to make all that work. And then it was about helping acquire business in the field and making sure that my team was well fed in terms of the amount of pipeline coming in, versus the number of people we had, so that people were being utilized to the appropriate levels.
Jeff 17:27
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's, it's all of that. Right. And I can't remember there was a certain point, I think it was regional for a while, and then it went vertical. Did you find any specific success in aligning teams, either vertical or or regional? Go ahead
Scott Roth 17:47
is a great, it's a great question. You know, I think a lot of companies start off in a regional model. Because obviously, when you go to a vertical model, that takes critical mass, it takes more staff to be in a verticalized solution, and when you're an original solution. And so you have to have a certain size and scale as a company to decide to go vertical. There, there's a very big benefit to being vertical. Because once you're in that vertical nature, you are speaking the exact same language that your customer speaks, right. So when you're talking to a telco tell telecom and telecommunications company, they use certain terminology that you will never do here, nowhere else. When you talk to a financial services company, they have their own lingo. So being able to, like just speak their language, allows your team to have so much more credibility in the first and second meetings, that you get brought right into the problem. And you're the customer versus the customer saying, Hi, I have to train another consultant about what we do. Like that's what they always say, when you don't know their business. Yeah. So the vertical model that should get you in very helpful helps you out that way. The second thing the vertical model does is allows you to feed back to product, what your industry needs. And I think that's something that a lot of companies kind of fall that fall on deaf ears. So when you're a startup, in a smaller company, the customer that pays you the most gets all the product enhancements, that's how it works. You can say it does, nobody
Jeff 19:11
should feel bad about that. It's just the gig, right? Like
Scott Roth 19:17
it's the way it works. Like you're a small company, you need their revenue to survive, and you're gonna fix things and build things that they want because they're, they're willing to pay for it. Yeah. But as you start moving into verticalization, you start realizing that certain verticals require certain things that others don't. And if you've done your market analysis, and you think that your total addressable market is a certain dollar size of that vertical, you're gonna prioritize one vertical feature request over another because it's new business you can get for new customer acquisition. And honestly, when you're growing you want to have it's not only retain your customers is it's not new, low acquisition, you want to have a wide base of customers. So it helps it helps your product engineers and your product team product managers prioritize what they're going to do because they're getting 1000 requests every day from every customer. What They want the how do they decide what's the most important? So it's another way to help kind of know Yeah, that yeah, matrix out what you're gonna do
Jeff 20:06
you know what to a couple points on that. If you don't mind me just buttressing enough that your your point a little bit, I found that you're the salespersons best friend and a vertical model, because you're able to first of all, you're you're a non commissioned person in the room that is just there to answer questions. And you're using their language. And suddenly, they realize the sales guy is just there to like, block and tackle and your team is in there to basically a talk about how they can use your software to what they need to do. And then B can also talk about what other people in the industry are doing. It's a copycat industry. And if you're like, oh, yeah, well, you know, somebody, just like your competitor is also doing X, Y, and Z or something like that, you know, no names and things like that. But like, just saying that at an industrial sort of level, it's just that it's, it's out of the sales realm, and it's just in total applicability. And I just found that just really, really resonates with customers in the pre sales process. So so that
Scott Roth 21:14
level, that level credibility is super important. And then the other thing I think he does in the pre sale process is let you actually help the customer kind of leapfrog competition. No, absolutely right. Because you're gonna, you're gonna find that that person is at the table. That's the aggressive go getter that wants to be better than all the rest, not just to the status quo. Yep. And even if you understand that, that's a motivated individual in a sales cycle, you can say, you know, like, the status quo, or table stakes is that everyone in the industry does X, Y, and Z. However, based upon your goals and objectives, I think you could do A, B, C, which would put you years ahead. Yeah. And, and for certain people that resonates, and they want to, they want to be that and do that. Oh, yeah, no, I got there. That's awesome. That's exciting.
Jeff 21:54
I can tell you without mentioning names, but if I'm not sure if you were there at the time, but there was one team that was working on one specific large home improvement store, and I was working on the other home improvement store. My goal was to have oh, yeah, they did that over there. But we're coming in six months after you. And there's been all these features released. And this is how they're gonna make you better than that.
Scott Roth 22:19
Right. But I mean, hey, somebody
Jeff 22:21
wants exclusivity, they have to pay more for it. So that's all that's right. That's right. Yep. That's awesome. And you bring in the architects, even a project manager, they're just so helpful, because they're just in the weeds, they know, they can just ask those super defined questions, and help you pull out the scope and things like that. I don't know about you. But some people don't like bringing in their sort of, you know, the people are actually on projects into the pre sales phase, I find it super helpful, you have to coach the people a little bit and making sure that they're very well defined. But is that something that you continued as well, too, I'm like, I'm gonna bring in a pm and an architect on this, because they know the questions to ask. Right, so.
Scott Roth 23:06
So 100%, I think there's a couple of things that unpack there, honestly. One is, you don't need to be the smartest person in the room. And I think that's what everybody there's a complex out there. Everyone wants to be that's not not a problem for me, by the way. So I'm right in that camp. My my, my philosophy on this is, is that my job is to bring the right people to the table, because they all have a skill set that I don't have. And my job is to identify the gaps and fill the gaps with the right people. The quarterback. Yeah, yeah, or the coach, one of the two. Probably, I'm not that athletic. So I won't go quarterback, oh, Coach callers on the sidelines. But But point being is, you know, when, when you're in a sales cycle, large enterprise companies have very defined processes. They have it processes that when they evaluate software, that you have to check certain boxes, there's obviously a slew of security requirements that are super important these days that probably weren't as important in the past. And so what your architect can do for you, is can help educate your customer and navigate through their process to get those boxes checked and confirmed so that your customer can say with confidence, this is a technology we can bring into our enterprise or we can integrate with, and it will not create any problems. And we feel really good about it. Because what that does is that speeds up your sales cycle doesn't slow it down. It speeds it up. Yeah, it's actually ROI that right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then your project manager, what they're going to help do in your sales cycle, is they're going to help your customer understand that there's a defined methodology that you as a company follow. And there is a path from start to finish, and it's expedited. So the customer will see value quickly. Because there's a way to do it. It's not like you're making it up for the first time. We do this all the time. Like my job is to do this day in and day out. And this is how I do it. What it also does is it exposes gaps. So this is like where the risk comes in the sales cycle so to speak. But you said it very well coaching the person. There's an artist, there's an artist selling, let's be honest about it. Yeah. But you know, you will want identify like resources from the customer side, you're going to need because at the end of day, once you start dancing, like the dance is on, and you need a partner, so you got to know who you need from the customer, what kind of skill set you need, and what kind of availability you need. Giving the customer that visibility helps them plan. Yeah, but it also can create some some risks, because they might not have been able to fill those boxes. And that's where they can get cold feet. So that is the that is the art and the science right there. How deep do you go without going too deep that you scare them?
Jeff 25:35
Yeah, exactly. If I do you want to be able to say like, yeah, you're gonna need like, I don't know, two hours a week from your IT person, for example, right, which is, if you just wave it through and press the easy button, people will if you're selling to the enterprise, they're gonna be like, I don't, it's never that easy. I know, this sounds like an issue versus just saying like, yeah, so we're gonna do some requirements, gathering upfront, probably going to be like a one day session, we can stage it out and say, like, okay, there's gonna be an IT time from two to three. And then we might need one or two hours a week. And then right before we go, you know, stuff like that. That's what they want to hear, as in my impression. So one thing here because I want to go into store what you're doing now is that we were still in this is non SAS, basically, we were we were customizing a product that we would go install on some servers. Now we're in the SAS world. So before we dive into that, you do a lot more than just services now. And Ian wants to talk about where you are right now in in the thing in your oversight, and what you what you're watching over right now.
Scott Roth 26:42
Yeah. So for the last almost eight years now, I've been at a company called Medallia. We are a customer experience management company. And I am currently the senior vice president of Global Customer Success for the company.
Jeff 26:58
That's amazing. That's great.
Scott Roth 26:59
Thank you. Yeah, no, that's,
Jeff 27:00
that's well deserved, too. So are you wanting to target you know, so I'm always interested when talking to leaders like yourself? Are you watching over success? Is the account management team? Are they? Are they just helping the customers out? Are they actually getting the renewals done? Everybody? Does it different? There's no right and wrong way to do it. Sure, quote, unquote. And then we can get sort of into implementation and onboarding and SaaS, b2b? Because that's kind of where I've been focusing a lot these days. So sure,
Scott Roth 27:31
yeah. So our customer success team was officially set up in July 2019. prior prior to that, you know, everybody at Medallia was responsible, I will say is responsible for customer success. Like everyone's got that in their DNA. Yep. But what happened was that it wasn't any one person's like sole focus job, right? It was always like part of their day job or part of their evening job. And you know, what that ended up doing was put it put a lot of strain on folks, you know, we have a professional services team, they have revenue targets, we're asking them to hit in that revenue targets equate to the amount of billable time they're able to log on a weekly basis. If they have to make a trade off between something that's a billable activity versus an investment to tivity. From a customer success perspective. You know, they were torn, which one do I do? Right? And it wasn't fair to them?
Jeff 28:19
No, no, it's it every customer, it hits a breaking point. And then that's exactly what happens. Yep, exactly.
Scott Roth 28:26
So when we got we got to the point of scale, where we decided we can, we, as a company could afford to fund this organization, we started taking the responsibilities off of those people's shoulders so they can stay focused on their delivery activities, and we can have someone else focus on success. So success means a lot of things. As you said, Jeff, you know, at the end of the day, it's really about us understanding your customers goals and objectives. So that we can help them achieve them and achieve them. There's multiple things it could be with additional products or services we offer. It could be through additional public recognition through our marketing channels to get them recognized for things they've done in their industry. It could be helping them influence our product roadmap to create new capabilities that they see or something that they need to have a special differentiator for their industry. Obviously, you know, we are a SaaS based software company. We, we do need to have our customers for life like that as my mantra customer for life. So we you know, renewals as part of the business, we need to make sure that a customer is renewing, but honestly, like the renewal is, is, is the output of all of our hard work, right? If we're doing everything right, working with our customers, helping them manage through their their business challenges, helping them, you know, achieve their goals, then the renewal is something that should technically be table stakes, and it shouldn't, it should just happen because the customer see value in your software. So I don't think of my CSM as being a team that chases the renewal because if they're chasing the renewal, then they missed the mark altogether. They have to get much more upfront in the process with their customers. And ingrained with them to make sure that they're real successful.
Jeff 30:04
Yeah, it's that's, that's fantastic. You know, I've been going through and everybody I talked to that runs a success team. I haven't asked him sort of one question is it's just a fascinating answer is also based fascinating on where you are in your company's lifecycle. And that's basically like, what is your profile for hiring people? Now, I'll just say specifically for a CSM role, right? Like, you know, because I don't have you heard me talking to Renee, we, we all work together. And it was basically like, I'll take a mom, that that has two kids, and she can only work 30 hours a week, and you know, she's gonna pack every 30 hours a week, and I don't care that she's gonna leave at four o'clock and go pick up the kids and stuff like that, you know what I mean? Like, hearing these out of like, all of hardworking people, you know, but like, I just curious, because it's an ever changing world, do some renewals, there's empathy, but, you know, turn it over to you and see, like, Yeah, cuz I know you're hiring people right now. And like, what knocks your socks off when people come in?
Scott Roth 31:08
Yep. So I think there's a two or three things that I look for right off the bat, I look for people that can build a relationship. So in the first 30 seconds of my phone call with a candidate, I look at how they tried to develop a relationship with me. Because if they can do it with me as an interviewer, then I know they're gonna do it with their customers who spend the money with us. Yeah. At the end of the day, people buy from people that isn't at eight was the age old adage is that the the turnout is correct, you know, dumb, right? People, people buy from people, but what you need is you need someone that you can be honest with, like, I need my customer to call my CSF and say, CSM up and say, hey, you know, we're having an issue, I need your help fixing this. What I don't need is a customer not telling us about an issue and letting that smolder and become a fire. Right? You need to have honesty, trust and compassion. So if you can build the relationship quickly, then I know you can deal with our customers and they will come to you and they will, they will let you know when you need to fix something. Right? So that's super important to me is relationship building. Empathy is another really important skill that I don't think you can teach anyone. I think you're either born with it or you're not right. But people need to be empathetic. Like we're all human beings. It's amazing to see how empathy has changed since COVID-19. has hit us. Right. You know, I mean, look at look at all of us now with like signs on our lawn, like thinking first responders. You know, did I have a sign on my lawn two, three months ago? No. Did I think about first responders? I think about them today? No. Do I think about my FedEx delivery person and my UPS delivery person? And my postal person? Like I think about today? No, no, I really, it's a whole different mindset, right? Because things that you take is that were essential, but you just treated them as not essential or so different today. And so empathy is a huge piece of it, you know, you need to know like, Is my customer? Do they? Do they have a birth of their family? Is a child having a birthday? Do they lose a relative? Does someone get married someone graduate, like just knowing those things and the relationship and like acknowledging them, it means a lot. And it says simple like text like, hey, congratulations on your son's seventh birthday, or congratulations on your your anniversary. Like it's not, they're not hard to do?
Jeff 33:23
doesn't just having a two page paragraph.
Scott Roth 33:26
It's just acknowledging it, you know, and I think that's, that's super important. And if people aren't talking about that, when I'm interviewing them, and they're not bringing that up practically. And that's a that's a sign for me, it makes you pause on like, if I'm going to hire them or not. That's great. And then the last thing I think that's like, really important for me, is about how do you, as a person, present things to a customer, but not as a salesperson. So, you know, my CSMs are not salespeople. And that's not their job. But their job is also to is to recommend our products and services to meet a customer's goals and objectives. Right? Like, right, if I have if we have a piece of technology is going to solve their problem, then we should we should tell the customer, we have some it's gonna solve your problem. And let me bring in my sales director and my solution. It's all to actually show you how it works. But we should be teeing those up and we should be fine. Those warm opportunities inside of our accounts. Yeah. And that's not that's not a bad thing to do. No, no, no, no, because you're bringing the right things to the customer, right? You're not forcing them something they don't need. This can become shelf where you're bringing them value. And so I'm looking for people that can bring value to the customer, but not be seen as a salesperson. And that's a very unique skill, which I think it does. I'll say disqualify a lot of people I talked to, because they said they've never had to do that
Jeff 34:43
before. Yeah, yeah, it's as long as you're coming across as honest. Like I really feel that you would love this thing, right? Versus like, hey, just check out the new mod. Like, it's totally like people can see through that and they're hearing it all day long. Everybody has sad as, you know, 15 SAS products, you know, company I was at at 100 people and 85, SAS products right, so like everything SAS product these days. And I remember I was going through and doing some post implementation interviews with some customers. And that was exactly how things got phrase like we've we've just launched five SAS products, you're one of them in here some ways that I think you guys could improve in some areas and everything like fire away, like that's, that's what I want to hear. And it's all about timely communications, you know, those types of things, it's the soft skills of everything, not like, Okay, I logged into Gainsight. And I saw that I had to get back to this person today, right? So talk to me about, you know, customer signs up. Now what what happens? I'm sure, I'm guessing they come into your department, and you guys help them get up and live? Or is that a different department?
Scott Roth 35:58
Yeah, so we actually have a professional service organization, that Hondurans, our customers, there's a couple of different models that our customers can can follow depending upon what they want to do as an organization. You know, as a SaaS based product. Something that's very important is the self service aspect of the technology. Some companies want to control their own destiny 100%, were their internal people, other companies want to start off with the professional services organization, from the vendor, or from a partner, right? To get up and running quickly. And then they want to take the application back over time. And we honestly see as a lot of companies want us to install it. And then us too, we call manager managed service. You know, they're, they're like kind of getting out of the business attack. They're like, Hey, we're not experts in tech. And that's how we want to focus on we want to focus on the outputs of the technology and the business process chain. So we're gonna outsource the entire stack to you from, from engineering, from a SaaS perspective, all the way through the maintenance software. And we're just going to be the operators of it and users of it. So you know, we have different models, depending on what's right for the customer, we believe it's really important to meet the customer where they are in their journey. But the let's just take a scenario where a customer walks us through the installation, right? So you know, a customer would come in, they would, they would obviously, like go through our signup process get signed up to the customer. And then we're used to their professional services team, which has a vertical nature to our way we organize, so that they understand the industry and they understand the pain points, we've developed a lot of Quickstart solutions. So we're able to get customers up and running, you know, in weeks, not months, depending upon their business needs and get them started. And then just keep expanding out the capabilities on a roadmap. It's really important, I think, to show speed to value, especially in SAS capability. And in this market
Jeff 37:48
and watch three months before the renewals
Scott Roth 37:53
are you know, I honestly, we'd love to launch everything within four weeks of the first meetings if we possibly can. And so it's you know, it's, that's where those project managers come in. They manage everybody, our internal staff, they manage our customer staff to meet those goals and deadlines.
Jeff 38:06
It's so important. It was one of the first things I did at the last place, which was just like, taking these people who were at that time, just don't take this project coordinators and saying like, no, it's it's a, it was a very repeatable process. So as agile as I like to be, I'm like it's this, it's it's a Smartsheet with tasks and go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, knock them down. And you drive that train. And as I always say, the pm project manager stands for pain in the ass and just like, but do it in a good way. And people love you, because they know you're only doing this so they can go live faster, right? Yes, just.
Scott Roth 38:45
And it's it's a win for everybody, right? Because everyone feels good. When you start at nothing. And you complete, you complete a project and you're successfully implemented. We had some great feedback from one of our customers today on LinkedIn where they say this was so impressive how much we got done, like during COVID. You know, their their teams were furloughed, and we still were able to get them up and running and beat their expectations on a timeline during COVID When their staff, like I said was furloughed. We put our team was still there, and we're still plugging away for them. So that's a wonderful thing.
Jeff 39:14
Yeah. Oh, how so? You know, back in the old days, you know, if there was an issue, we could go have dev sort of fix something. How are you dealing with that? Now in the SAS world where it's like, it's one thing affects everybody? You know, do you have a direct line into into the product team and the engineering team for when there are issues or customers or needing something fast?
Scott Roth 39:39
Yeah, I mean, I think any smart software company called striker deck, which is a customer success management platform. That is a tool that we use exclusively in internally for all of our CSM capabilities, and it's, it's, I refer to it as my golden file cabinet for customers. And in my job right now, I think is to ensure that my team members have the new that file cabinet, or the ability to capture those the information they need, and get them technologies that exist in other places. So they can utilize that to be more efficient. And I think that's everybody wants to get as much out of one individual as possible. That's, that's kind of the world of business. So as a leader, you have to figure out like, what can you do to make them more efficient, and get rid of laborious tasks. And so trying to understand all the different technologies that are out there, I mean, every day, I get, you know, three to seven different solicitations, oh, you should talk about this product or that product and try to make sense of the wall, the fair, what's gonna be best for my team to utilize if he was really what I'm focused on the most?
Jeff 40:51
Yeah. Is there a specific set of tools and that you're sort of in love with right now that your team loves using? Or is I'm just always curious about tools in the marketplace that people are using?
Scott Roth 41:00
Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, we strike DEC is obviously what I focus on on 100%. You know, I'm trying to to understand different marketing communication technologies, I think it's really important for CSM to personally invite customers, to webinars, and to regional user group meetings and local meetups by vertical. And I want to give them capability to do that at scale, but yet giving it a person so it's very personalized to the recipient, but for the CSM. It's at scale. And there's definitely a lot of technologies that are out there that do that. I'm just trying to figure out, you know, internally at Medallia is the one we have the best one, right? Is it? Is it scalable for my team to use? And if so, how do we enable them to do so?
Jeff 41:48
That's great. That's great. What did I miss? What did I what I not ask that You expected me to ask?
Scott Roth 41:55
I expect you to go in harder around renewals? Yeah, I think because I think I think a lot of companies, you know, think of the CSM, like their core job is renewing customers.
Jeff 42:05
I don't feel that way. which I appreciate. Yeah. And that's probably why I didn't go that hard into it. I sort of got from the vibe when that when you were discussing the team, that that should not be the focus. You know, I it always comes down to one thing for me is who gets the Commission on the renewal. Right. And so that's all usually all my questions, because that tells me who really owns the relationship.
Scott Roth 42:32
So I think we have a very unique approach here at Medallia that I'm really proud of. We made a strategic decision when I was asked to take on this team to double pay. Yep. So we might be one of the few companies out there. And I'd love to know if you've seen other companies do this, but we pay both our sales director and we pay the CSM, when a renewal does occur. Because the theory is, is that all the work the CSM has done for the multiple years prior to the renewal actually happening is one of the main drivers of why the renewal occurred. Yep. So like I said, it's, it's a, all the work you do, the end result is a renewal. If you try to just do the renewal, then your your your transaction based person, there's no relationship and it becomes very impersonal. Transactional. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was confrontational sometimes, right? Because it becomes but I was like, nasty, like procurement negotiations. Yeah, you know, if you're seeing value, and you can have your client business side person understand the value, they can help justify that internally to spend.
Jeff 43:31
Yeah, I will say this. And I have seen that model before. And I have seen a very significant correlation between that model in the quality of new customers being brought in. Right. So when we didn't have that model, the sales team would I mean, to pick on salespeople, but they would just sign up everybody, right? But when they actually had to hold on to that customer in they had a book of business that they were responsible for the renewal aspect for, they wouldn't just they would be more truthful and truthful, you know what I mean? Be more informative, I should say, in the sales phase. versus you know, we've all been places where it's been like, oh my god, we just had these five customers dropped on us and they're crap they don't really know what we do. And we know that they're going to churn within the first year because, you know, you might be like, for example, a massive document collaboration tool that people are just using you for storage, right like something like that. And then people are like Jesus, I'm paying 40 grand a year just to have doc stored I'll just go Yeah, so
Scott Roth 44:40
I'm really proud of our of our sales organizations like we do not sell I call that selling paper. We don't sell paper. You know, our team is very good at making sure that we are solving business problems, concrete business problems that customers have. And you know, if our if our customers asked us to do something like our technology doesn't do We are very transparent about that. Because there's just, there's just no point like, you can fit and you're gonna get found out later. And then you're gonna have to deal with it, or you can be up front. And when you're upfront, you build a lot more credibility. It's like, that's not what we do. Like, if you want to solve that problem, we have to do an integration with XYZ. Right. That's all. That's how we do it. How we handle it.
Jeff 45:17
That's great. That's awesome. Any parting thoughts, Scott?
Scott Roth 45:22
I know, it's a crazy thing. It's Memorial Day weekend, and we're still all under lockdown a little bit. So,
Jeff 45:28
but so I'm just laughing. Not at the global pandemic budget, because I chatted last week. And you I don't want to say germaphobe. But you're you're you're pretty high level. You know, you're still washing your envelopes after three days, basically. So
Scott Roth 45:46
yeah, I know that your wife's in the in the medical profession. And you you know, you see the Belly of the Beast, way more than I do. But yeah, I've lived it a little
Jeff 45:55
bit. By the way, there's no work for me like it, like the temperature check happens like every day in my house and you cannot get out of your activities. If you don't have a temperature like my wife's like that. That's nice. You have the sniffles. Like I saw a guy with a spear through his heart yesterday. So
Scott Roth 46:13
yeah, yeah, I'm gonna keep my social distance this weekend.
Jeff 46:17
The winding things up, Scott, I actually get you know what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm playing tennis with my wife. Yep. Actually, they opened up. Yeah, well, I'll be wiping the rest of the day. But like, they opened up with the tennis courts in my town. So it's, you know, all will be spaced out. And we have to not touch each other's tennis balls, excuse me that he's just afraid of saying that, but and then we have to play other courts apart and everything. But we're getting places, Scott. So don't you know, don't be afraid. And maybe six months from now we can have a beer and I can fist bump you or something?
Scott Roth 46:50
Well, that would be an easy one to find. Look forward to that. Okay.
Jeff 46:54
So just hold on for one quick second and stop the recording. And it was a pleasure. Scott, your company's website is medallia.com Or am I missing stuff?
Scott Roth 47:03
The guy.com Right. And Ed a ll i Right now
Jeff 47:07
I'm gonna connect to Scott on on the episode because he's hiring and he's looking for amazing CSMs I heard her other roles you're looking for is he was in those two years from now. Don't just just hit stop right now. So we'll always be looking for CSMs because the team is just going to keep growing. So
Scott Roth 47:26
that's the plan. That's the plan.
Jeff 47:28
Awesome. I'll hit stop and thank you so much, Scott