Pitango Growth Academy- Customer Success Special Edition: Scaling CS in Exponential Growth

Eran Aloni: Scaling Customer Success in Exponential Growth?

“A lot of what we’re doing is actually educating our customers into going deeper and understanding what are the big transformational challenges we can help them serve.” - Eran Aloni, Chief Customer Officer at Gong.

In a Q&A with Idit Muallem, Partner at Pitango Growth, Eran dives into Gong’s Customer Success organization, including milestones, KPIs, and specializations.?

Before we get started and dive into the different topics, can you please give us a quick overview of Gong.io?

“My team has all functions related to handling our customers post the initial sale. Meaning customer success, professional service, support, training & education, and community. We are serving thousands of customers and growing rapidly year over year. We segment our business into four tiers, from smaller customers to very large enterprises. These include commercial, mid-market, enterprise, and strategic accounts. Each one of those tiers has a slightly different customer lifecycle, stakeholders, and milestones throughout the customer journey.”?

Out of curiosity, why don’t you have a self-serve tier??

“It’s something we continue looking at as a company who started a new category. A lot of what we’re doing is educating our customers into going deeper and understanding what are the big transformational challenges we can help them serve. As the category matures, this is definitely something we will be looking at. We’re investing a lot in making big parts of the customer journey self-service, but we feel that we would better serve our customers today with more of a human touch by validating that we are a good fit for them and showing how we can make them successful.”

So you’ve mentioned the different tiers. You started from a lower tier and went up market to four tiers today, with customer success maturing accordingly. Can you share some of the milestones you hit along the way??

Our journey is likely similar to other companies that are growing quickly. We had CS and focused on the entire customer lifecycle from the beginning. As our customer base grew, we saw the differentiation between what smaller customers need vs larger customers. We then started segmenting the team into different tiers, and over time became more specialized as our team grew, which involved specialization training to add a layer of technical integration for our customers. The KPIs evolved as well, as we had more access to data as our number of customers grew. We focused largely on meaningful growth while remaining proactive.?

What strategies do you use to be proactive??

"One thing we did very early on is invest in building data infrastructure, meaning that we know for every customer how many users they have, how often they use the product, which features they are using.. Etc. We measure KPIs consistently, conduct QBRs, and our CSMs get triggered if an account is not in a good place so they can respond immediately."

I’m curious how you manage the hiring and onboarding process??

"One aspect is being really clear on what is the profile of people that you’d like to hire. This can change significantly over time, where in the beginning we look for people who can do everything and thrive on being a jack of all trades. Whereas in the end, we dial the profile to be more specific. For instance, a strategic CSM will have a different profile than a commercial CSM. Something that is crucial to our success and ability to hire a large number of people is that we invest very early on in a strong enablement process. This allows us to create a solid foundation for everyone who joins the company to have a common set of skills and knowledge that is shared across the board. From there, they are put on a path of learning where they can grow with us long term."

How do you align the CS organization with the sales and marketing teams??

"When you have multiple people working with one account, clear definitions of roles and responsibilities and who owns different paths throughout the customer lifecycle is key. We tweak and update this every six to twelve months to make sure that we address what we are seeing in the market, and have the best process to drive the best results for our customers."?

What is your advice to an early stage company building out their Customer Success organization??

"My advice to an early stage company is to make sure you lay the foundation very early on, make the right decisions at the product and market level, in terms of price, how you handle churn, and all the other discussions that will lead to major milestones along the way. Reinforce that it’s much easier to scale when you commit to giving your customers the best journey when using your product. By the time customers get to customer success, they already formed an opinion about your company, and if their interaction or experience so far has not been good, it will be difficult to change that later on. So make sure you are committed to having a consistently positive experience for your customers from the start and throughout their entire journey."