[00:00:00] Taylor: Welcome to Success/ful, where we break down the essential elements of leading customer success strategies. This podcast is all about uncovering blind spots, pushing past typical best practices and tackling those out of bound topics for CS leaders that are key to our success. I'm your host, Taylor Johnston, VP of Customer Success at Vitally.

Today we're joined by Tom Lawler, Senior Director of RevOps at Elastic. Tom brings a unique perspective from his background in customer success. We'll explore how he uses data driven storytelling to enhance the role of customer success within the organization. Before we jump in, I have a favor to ask. We hope you're enjoying our first season as much as we loved creating it.

We're always looking to improve and bring you the best content possible, but we need your help to do it. We created a short survey about season one. It should take you only a few minutes to fill out and your feedback will help us make sure season two delivers the content you want. The survey link is in the show notes. We can't wait to hear from [00:01:00] you. Let's dive in.

So Tom, welcome. You have such a cool role and I'd like to start there. Tell us a bit about your current role and how you got into it.

Tom: So thank you for having me first and foremost. I'm currently the Director in our Revenue Operations Function, which is the operations, strategy operations function that is broadly overseeing our field function within Elasticsearch as a business. I actually started, funny enough, I started as a CSM and I've worked through a few various roles within the business, but what led me down this path was At Elastic, I was primarily tasked with thinking through our scale issue. What's our scale problem? How do we address scale problems? And through that, I kind of ended up more involved in business technology, how we use business technology to solve problems.

And over the course of what's more than half a decade now, I essentially started a number of teams, started a number of departments. Three years ago, we started the strategy and operations function for the customer success group. And I was in charge of, at that point, the support and [00:02:00] customer engineering function of that, of that group. And then over time, I've taken on more responsibility. So now, now I have I have various departments reporting to me, so customer engineering support, services and education, so that's consulting and education. Um, I also have, uh, solution architecture, some pre sales, I have renewals, communications, and business transformation.

So I have a number of different teams now that report into my function, and that's part of the larger RevOps. So, I've gone very much from customer success group. And the post sale and focus on the post sale to now all of our field technical teams and the post sale. So because of the nature of Elastic as a product, we have a very technical sale cycle. And so all of the engineers that are in our field teams are now, I have operational oversight for and strategic oversight over those groups. So sort of an evolution of responsibilities as we've grown through Elastic and in terms of standing up teams and process people, data process tools, that's sort of been my, my bread and butter over the last five years.

Taylor: That's fantastic. Well, I always love hearing about career pathing through customer success because [00:03:00] truly you are an example of run towards the problems and new and interesting roles will will open up and will follow. So it sounds like a fairly complex environment. What kind of processes or work habits do you rely on to manage it all?

Tom: I think it starts with great leadership, right? When I say this, I mean the leadership group that I'm a part of as part of that broader function. You have to manage that complexity by having the right people in the right place. And I think that goes without saying, right? And I think most organizations are subject to having great people. It's just about how their, how their tasks and how they work within those organizations. The next part, and I think this, this has a common theme through all of the things we do. It's, it's about how you set the strategy for the business. We're in a remote environment with an elastic first and foremost, which drives additional complexity in the environment and how we work together.

And so being able to anchor in a strategy and then operate off that strategy is the most important way of managing complexity. We have lots of really smart, brilliant people who are capable of delivering great outcomes, but making [00:04:00] sure that they're aligned to the strategies most and first and foremost, the kind of the primary way of managing that complexity. And so what we do at Elastic, and I'll probably talk to this more as we go through some of the questions, is We create a very clear set of objectives for ourselves at the company level and then in the department level and then even layers below, right? And what we say is if you are operating a people, process, tool, data change, we have to make sure that it is aligned fundamentally with one of those pillars of our strategy.

And if it's not, you should ask yourself whether you are operating within the right business or you're doing the right thing and talk to your manager, talk to your leader. about whether that task that you've been asked to execute on is, is aligned with what we're trying to achieve as a business. But you've got to make sure that that strategy is in place, and that there's buy in and consensus across the business, that that's the right strategy, and then, then you're managing down from there. You've also then got to balance work and communication. You've got to make sure you set your standards of execution, that they're well understood. And then the other major part is that relationship with major stakeholders. If the complexity is [00:05:00] just existing in a vacuum, and it is growing and perpetuating, then you get out of sync with your major stakeholders and other departments really quickly.

And so having that, making sure they understand what the roadmap looks like from a deliverables and capabilities perspective, and then working with them to understand theirs as well, and making sure that those are well reconciled. And if you have a good company strategy, then that is actually a little bit easier as you get into the departments. And as you scale and grow, that's obviously really important because, Departments do move further apart from each other as you scale and grow. And making sure that you have that really robust strategy to come full circle when you have, having a robust strategy helps you manage that complexity. That's primarily, I would say, the direction to go.

Taylor: Yep. I love that. Having a really specific lens through which to assess, am I doing the right things that are really going to drive the end state? There you go, folks. If you're curious how I do it at a billion dollar company, not so different than the rest of us.

Tom: Absolutely not. And it's the best way to scale. Like, there's, if you have that, and that's a behavior and a habit of your organization from day one, it's infinitely scalable.

Taylor: You know, in your role, you own so many [00:06:00] different responsibilities, functions, both pre sales and post sales. In your words, now that you've gotten more insight into the pre sales side of it, why does that matter for, for post sales?

Tom: It's interesting because obviously the difference between a pre and a post sales is essentially the conversion, but you've started engaging with the customer. If you think about it, if you've ever purchased something before, or you've been a purchaser in a business, it's a B2B, B2C. The purchase is a transaction, but it becomes a moment in time, right, because you've researched that item, you've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Uh, you've then executed this moment in time sort of purchase of that thing and then you're, then you're gathering, you're receiving some value from that item because you've determined you're going to get value from it. We tend to put this, this sort of mental barrier in that this purchase is a, is a really fundamental part, which of course it's a fundamental part.

It doesn't then just mean that you're then two sides of the house that don't talk to each other and don't exist in each other's world, right? And when you look at pre sales, If you think about the pre sales [00:07:00] motion, you think about the customer journey, those individuals are going to be affecting or effective in three things. That's pipeline creation, conversion, and then future revenue growth, right? And the things that you do at that point in time, absolutely going to have an influence on all three of those things. And if you get into the post sale and you're looking at revenue growth and you're looking at how an organization then performs over time, after that conversion point, there's effective activities that happened before then.

The other thing is that point of conversion. I think this has been true and apparent within sort of the realms of customer success and customer success philosophy over a point of time. The conversion isn't a point for the post sales team to start to get engaged, right? The post sales team should be integrated and engaged through the entire lifecycle because Delivering value and time to value is super important. And for many customers, like reducing that time to value has a benefit for the customer. They get to make the most of their commit and the product that they've purchased and committed to. And it benefits the business. You're probably likely to see better [00:08:00] outcomes on the business side if you're able to deliver value quicker.

And so having an understanding of those activities and the way that they have an impact, making sure that there's an integration between the two teams, and the flow of information is consistent through the business. Um, I feel like these are obvious things to say, but the challenge of actually operationalizing is that is where the rubber hits the road, right? You can say those things, but where the rubber hits the road is actually making and designing and building systems that allow that to occur and happen. That's the challenge, but certainly having insight across both helps you and having oversight across both helps you understand how you address some of those challenges.

Taylor: I love what you said about the point in time conversion. We do talk so much about before and after, and yet it's just such a fleeting moment of time for the buyer that it really, it's sort of become a bigger thing than it really is. So a part of that, I'm sure you mentioned talking about systems and processes, and we'll certainly get into that, but I imagine that sales enablement plays a role in, in what you do and how you operate. So how do you make sure that your sales enablement efforts are actually having an impact [00:09:00] to streamline that before and after flow?

Tom: Yeah, this is where I'm going to come back to the strategy again, right? If you have a go to market strategy in a business, and you try and make that message as clear as possible around the tenants, the pillars of that strategy, right? Internally, you may have two, three, four pillars of that strategy. Your. Enablement has to align to making those pillars of that strategy relevant and impactful. When it comes to sales enablement and making sure that they have an impact, first of all, making sure that the sales enablement is reflective of the strategy.

If you're going to chase a certain market segment, you're going to chase a certain sales methodology, making sure that you're educating on the strategy, right? How am I effective in, in my role in delivering the strategy, I think is first and foremost. And then, then it's just accountability. It's an accountability to that enablement from that point one. So I think that I've been, you know, privileged enough to be part of some, some great organizations. Many organizations create great enablement. [00:10:00] There is great enablement out there, but without accountability and a line of sight to the strategy, I think sometimes it can feel like it exists in a vacuum for sellers and also for post sales practitioners as well.

Right. I think that, it can feel like it's not really tied to something. So again, I'm going to come back to strategy, but strategy is super important as an anchor for operations. I think you have to make sure that your enablement is tied directly to your strategy and that it is enabling on delivery of that strategy.

Taylor: Mm hmm. Yep. And I love the way you talk about kind of tying a thread from the impact, the strategy, and then how that plays into the enablement roadmap. And your role in particular, you are someone who interacts with the C suite a lot, so you get to spend time thinking about strategy, and in particular, I think where you are very strong is being able to match the data with the story of what's happening in the business to drive impact. So when you walk into conversations with your C suite leadership [00:11:00] team, how are you positioning the post sales message, showing impact on revenue, and really telling the story of what happens post sales?

Tom: The most mature businesses on this specific issue of how do you communicate to the C suite, the efficacy of your teams in a post sale environment, is the gap between the two. Here's a set of leading indicators. Here's a set of lagging indicators. We hypothesize that these things cause these things to move, but actually connecting the dots between those two things is, is the hardest part. So many, many organizations, ourselves included, have these two concepts. Uh, and then it's The bit in the middle is the hardest bit.

We have solved that challenge in some places, we still have that challenge in many other parts of the business. Uh, and I think that's how you gain trust in the C suite is being able to show that connection. And so, for example, we're in a normal SaaS environment, we're measuring top line KPIs like a SaaS business would, and then we, we know that there's some leading indicators in terms of activities that we're delivering on those accounts. We then need to create structures and we [00:12:00] need to have data analysts. And this is where having a great data science team really helps, by the way, that I, I'm lucky. I stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to some of the, the ability to actually make those connections, but actually coming up with a data model that shows how.

A top line metric performed at an account, or at an aggregate level, you could do it at an aggregate level, you could do it at a regional level, you could do it in a geography, however you wanted to do it. At the point at which that activity was delivered, or that thing was delivered, how did the account progress over time in the top line metrics on those accounts? And as I say, you could do it at an aggregate level, you could do it at an account level. But actually being able to normalize on month zero is really important. And so I think sometimes we look at the world in a year over year, month over month, day over day perspective, but actually month zero, normalizing on month zero could be a really effective way of showing impact over time.

That's one way to gain trust is to be able to make that connection between the two. I don't think there's any holy grail for what that looks like. I think that takes If [00:13:00] only. If only, exactly. If only. I think it takes a lot of really smart people to think about how they reconcile the data. But I would say if you're going into that conversation, making sure that you have some confidence and you gain confidence in the data is really important.

Taylor: And you talked about gaining trust and being able to have an effective conversation No doubt there's going to be pushback. Pushback on, maybe it's, you're making an ask for additional headcount or additional resources. How do you get ahead of that potential, that potential no or pushback from other stakeholders in those kinds of meetings?

Tom: You begin to understand, I think the more time you get to spend with people, right, with the major stakeholders, you begin to understand. how they ask questions, how they think, right? And so scenario planning is one of those really things when you're introspecting on the data, when you're reviewing the data prior to going into any conversation, making sure you understand the kinds of questions that are going to come back. What's really interesting, I'm sure everybody's experienced this, right? You've spent ages [00:14:00] preparing a data set and you're sat with your team and you feel really good about it, but there's all this bias that starts to creep in. where you, as a team, you kind of giving each other a pat on the back and a thumbs up and you just haven't thought like, how is this individual going to respond and react to this data?

And what kind of questions are they going to ask? You go into the meeting and you go, yeah, that's a great question. Why did I not think of that? And the more time you spend scenario planning, the more time you understand your major stakeholders and the way they like to ask questions, that's going to help you essentially overcome that problem is thinking through what kinds of questions are going to be asked and having a response where you don't have a response saying, I don't know.

We'll go and figure it out though, right? Being able to anticipate those questions, I think, is really important. And being able to have a second set of eyes on the data is really important. And just being able to iterate and go back is part of the process. But yeah, that's essentially, I think, when you have requests, is being ready to have to go back and look at the data set and answer it, ask a new question of it.

But at the same time, I think that if you've managed to, we sort of go back to the previous question, if [00:15:00] you've managed to make the connection between your leading and lagging indicators and showing impact and productivity and efficacy of certain activities or roles, then hopefully you've done 90 percent of the work.

Taylor: So we talked, we've talked a bit about the metrics we might look at for the customer themselves, but how do you measure success and effectiveness of the post sales group, the team that's taking action?

Tom: We would look and measure the impact of the post sales team on usually net expansion rate of the accounts assigned that have been touched, right? So if we take a customer and we've had some level of activity on them, whether that's been a consulting engagement, whether we've had a customer engineer in that, in that customer, whether they've partaken in education in some format, their level of interaction with our support team. We would then look at that moment in time, and it's back to month zero.

How did that moment in time impact the customer behavior? Both on the top line, so from a net expansion, from a dollar perspective, but also from a leading indicator perspective. So, we've set up a number of [00:16:00] models that allow us to track that impact over time, and that's how we are able to understand impact and efficacy. And really, we're just looking for what are the highest value activities, right? We have a really incredible set of folks in our post sale environment. And really, we just want to know what are the most effective activities that lead to a mutually beneficial customer and company outcomes. And you've got to be really careful.

That making sure that the activity that you engage in and are measuring on has a mutually agreeable outcome with the customer as well. And so we're able to measure on those things. And that's things like net expansion rate, ultimately renewal rate. What you don't want to do is, is sacrifice one at the altar of the other. Right. And that's, that's things like, I could really rapidly grow this customer, but if they're not getting value, then my renewal rate is going to take a hit because they're not getting any value. They're not going to see the point of the purchase and actually balancing those two things. I know that some of the bigger, some of the bigger organizations, some of the [00:17:00] hyperscalers have, have teams that's full.

Sole responsibility is optimization. So making sure that the customer environment is optimized for value. It doesn't, the short term, the short term gains to the business aren't necessarily the best in that, but the long term benefits are huge. And so making sure that you, those two things are When you come to, and then we get into compensation plan design, when you get into compensation plan design, that those things are well, well balanced within the comp plan so that the incentive for the post sales environment is first of all aligned with your customer outcomes, but then how we measure internally as well, right? Like we are looking at those key metrics to make sure that they're aligned.

Taylor: Are there any activities that you found, wow, this really is not driving the outcome we thought, and you stopped doing? Anything that felt like a big move to have the team stop doing or start doing?

Tom: I'm going to give an example of what it's not. We didn't necessarily stop doing this, but I remember this one from early on, and it's one where there was some noise to try and encourage this activity. And I think we managed to [00:18:00] sort of disprove that it was a valuable activity. If the technology that you work in, and the technology that we work in is this technology, but if the technology that you work in is part of a broader technology stack, and so it's mainly communicating with other parts of that stack using APIs, Then you're very unlikely to see something like user logins and user numbers be a reasonable thing to encourage.

And so if your activity is, let's go and identify more users on the customer side, but your technology, the products that you are representing doesn't necessarily, isn't necessarily aligned with the end user in that way, then it's just something that you shouldn't, shouldn't encourage. Whereas other SaaS products, right, the product is the UI. And so getting more folks into that, into that function, getting more folks to use it, That is something worth measuring and it's an activity worth delivering on. If you look at how does the end user use my technology? How does the, how is the end user [00:19:00] operating within my product? You've then got to identify what are the set of activities that drive the right behavior.

Then that's where, how you build your activity set. And that is one user logins is not one that for us, which for many other companies, it's a, it's a, it's a huge metric, but for us is not a, is not a meaningful metric.

Taylor: I love that because it just. points to the fact that customer success is not one size fits all. Those, those particular metrics that we have in our minds, number of QBRs, support tickets, user logins, those are not universal. Every company you go to, there's going to be a slightly different problem to solve. So just make sure that you're honing in on what those very specific metrics are that drive adoption and overall value.

Tom: I love that. Yeah. And I think it's, it's funny because I think you can get really bogged down in some kind of dogma towards how you should treat customer success. The more that the problem is, is reconciled, resolved, introspected, you, you have to align what your end user is doing with the activity set that [00:20:00] you're delivering on and then measuring on. I think customer success is how do your customers get value and how do I build a function and a go to market motion that aligns with delivering that value? And that's the, that's the question you have to ask before you then you delve down into anything else.

Taylor: So true. Great advice for anyone listening, thinking about looking at adoption and what that means for your company. So you, especially in this role, highly cross functional. You're working with stakeholders from across the entire business. So what does your partnership with other departments look like, particularly finance and the rest of the operations team?

Tom: I'll talk first about marketing and then I'll talk about, I'll talk about finance. So marketing, depending on how they're positioned in your customer base, right, they are pervasive. They're everywhere. They're top of funnel. They're bottom of funnel. They're running sets of programs. And one of the big things is, is again, is, is I go back to it, is that shared alignment around outcomes, strategy and outcomes. So what, what is our shared strategy? [00:21:00] What are we trying to deliver? Uh, do we have shared goals? Are we delivering content information at the right time to our customers at the right place? Where, and then we're backing it up with emotion. And so we do have those, we obviously have those conversations with marketing and really, It's also about making sure that if you're in those conversations and you know something that maybe you've had visibility on that they haven't had, is then supporting them, right?

Loaning skill sets. And we do that regularly. It's almost like some folks in marketing are part of our team and vice versa, in the sense of we regularly have conversations about their lead scoring process, for example, and we have statistical models around propensity. And how do we marry those two things? How do we make sure that That both of those things are influencing one another, both wherever they are in the customer life cycle. And then there's the content, right? We're with the customers. The post sales are really having that relationship. You think we, we, we spend a lot of time with customers after they're in the product utilization stage.

What do [00:22:00] our product, what do our customers want? What are they, what are they craving? What information do they need? How do we deliver that information at scale? Those are the kinds of conversations that we have. And we, as I say, we, we are almost, it's almost like we loan expertise across the teams to make sure that we facilitate the best delivery of information to the customers over the course of the customer life cycle.

Taylor: Yeah. And I imagine, I love this concept of loaning skill sets out to the rest of the organization. And I imagine at the end of the day, it helps you get your job done too.

Tom: Oh yeah. Big time. And we, we do it on the, we do it on the, with finance as well. And I, I think that, that, that same philosophy goes then into finance. It's really important that finance are signing off and agreeing on our sort of view of the world because without that relationship, you're operating in a vacuum. And so, for example, we've had folks in our data science team do support analysis for the finance teams and vice versa. We've had folks in the finance team support analysis for the customer teams. Being okay with that and, and being ready to [00:23:00] help other teams as they work through that. It builds bridges and it builds consensus and it builds trust. And having those things, particularly in a remote organization like Elastic, and particularly in an organization that's scaling fast, it's really important to maintain those things.

And as I say, you want to build, if you're building from a, you're building from the ground up and you're in a smaller organization where water cooler chat suffices for much of that. As you scale, it doesn't. And so putting those processes into place, putting that level of trust, having that culture is really important for that cross functional engagement.

Taylor: And so many CS professionals out there listening are thinking about how do I increase my influence? How do I, you know, start to make change happen in an organization? What are maybe some other tactics or suggestions, advice you might have for those out there thinking about how to increase their internal influence?

Tom: If people want to, and CS professionals want to increase their influence within the business, it's problem solving. So it's doing what you do for the customer, but internally. There's, there's nothing that bothers [00:24:00] me more than people just sending me a complaint. I will largely ignore that. If you send me a complaint and then you send me a suggestion, even if the suggestion is wildly off, I know that you're thinking about problem solving. I'd love to engage with folks who are thinking through problem solving and problem solving internally. And so I think that's, that's one way is to, is to communicate within the business. The other is to share information. And it goes back to the, the previous dialogue. If you're, let's say you're in a customer conversation and you're trying to influence the customer to educate themselves on a certain part of the tool or process or, or whatever you're delivering.

Then going to your teams that either provide the education, provide that information, and saying, Hey, I've got this really interesting sort of use case where the customer is maybe stuck or can move to the next level if we can provide this level of detail to them. Then just providing that information back into the business is really important. And I think you start to build bridges internally and you start to become to be seen as a thought leader around those problems. So I think, I mean, just to [00:25:00] summarize, if you've identified an issue or a problem, Have a solution, communicate that to the right people, either that's your manager or someone else internally.

And I think that's the way you start to build influence is to start to engage, not just with your customers, but with internal issues as well and be part of the, the, the solution.

Taylor: Thank you so much. This has been very insightful, learning a lot about how things operate at a large company that's gone through heavy scale, but also understanding how that can, you know, help Play a role in anyone who's at any size of company. So thank you so much for this, Tom. Before we let you go, we are going to have some fun with a few quick hit questions. You ready?

Tom: Okay. Yeah, I'll try my best.

Taylor: What part of your work life do you wish you could automate if you could?

Tom: Oh, I think it would be, I know we've talked about it a lot, it'd be data. If I could just ask, you know, ChatGPT to, to, to give me some insight. If I could say, tell me how [00:26:00] this part of our business is performing. That would be a holy grail. So I'd automate data review and that's what I would definitely automate that. That takes up a lot of my time.

Taylor: Getting to the conclusion faster would be nice. It'd be nice. Yeah,

Tom: I'd love, it's like I said, I would love to know, I'd say, Hey, I'm gonna present this data to this person. What questions are they gonna ask? That would save me a lot of time as well.

Taylor: I love it. Um, and this play, this next one is perfect for the kind of work that you do. If you had a crystal ball into customer behavior, what would be the first thing that you would ask your crystal ball?

Tom: I would ask the crystal ball, what is the set of activities and in what order deliver the most value to my customers? And yeah, it's, it's not binary. So that's kind of the problem. That's not, it's not a binary question. It's not a binary answer. And so, so yeah, it's, that's why I need a crystal. You're absolutely right. I need a crystal ball big time so I can ask. So yeah, I'd love that. But yeah, it's, that was, that was what I would ask.

Taylor: Awesome. And then last one, what makes you feel successful? [00:27:00]

Tom: What makes me feel successful, and I think this is very specific to my role again, is, is where there is consensus on a decision and a desire to move forwards on that decision. I think that that's usually Again, that's a moment in time thing that's very fleeting and quick, but the amount of preparation and thought that takes a huge group of people to get to a single decision is really, is often missed. And certainly I think that gives me a huge amount of satisfaction when, when all of, you know, a lot of time and effort and thought has gone into a problem and then a decision has been made about how we move forward from that problem. Yeah, that gives me a huge amount of satisfaction.

Taylor: Well, thank you so much. This has been great. We really appreciate you, Tom.

Tom: Yes, I appreciate you having me on. And yeah, thank you. And if you've, if anybody has any further questions, they can find me on LinkedIn and ping me as they desire.

Taylor: Awesome.

Tom: Cool. Thanks, Taylor.

Taylor: Big thanks to Tom for sharing his insights with us [00:28:00] today. And a special thanks to all of you who tuned in. If you enjoyed this episode and found value in our conversation, don't forget to spread the word to your CS friends. Thanks. Before we let you go, I want to remind you about our season one survey. The link is in the show notes and it should only take a couple of minutes. Click the link in the show notes to get started. We can't wait to hear from you. Leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform and check us out on YouTube. Your feedback means the world to us. See you next time.

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