Customer Success Needs to Grow (Up)
Peter Armaly
Emily Murphy
With:
Moderated by:
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About Peter Armaly
Peter Armaly is a Senior Director and Advisor for Oracle SaaS Customer Success. He is responsible for program
design and execution of skills enablement for the customer success organization and in that capacity he works
closely with senior executives both internally and externally. Peter is a highly accomplished marketing and
customer success practitioner/leader who leverages his background by speaking and blogging about the
challenges and opportunities around developing sophisticated customer-centric approaches. In addition to Oracle,
Peter has been instrumental and influential in architectural and leadership roles at TSIA (Technology and Services
Industry Association), BMC Software, CA Technologies, and Eloqua. Peter lives in Toronto but spends an
extraordinary amount of time in the air.
About Emily Murphy
Emily earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, for her major in Film and Digital Media
and minor in Literature. With experience in writing, publication, and teaching, she continued her work after college as a
research writer and an online blog contributor. She has now joined the Aggregage team and is the Editor for several
sites in our network, including Supply Chain Brief, Logistics Brief, and Customer Experience Update.
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Agenda
Customer success facts
Headlines In the news
Sales and Services relationships
Customer success needs to own revenue
Customer Success - its own worst enemy
How to fix

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This presentation is not about Oracle products or
services and does not represent the company’s views
or its practices. This presentation is about Customer
Success as a service practice from an industry point of
view and how it generally relates to and interacts with
other organizations within the business enterprise.
What you will hear today are the thoughts and ideas of
Peter Armaly based on his 30-odd years of experience
in high tech (18 of them in various customer success-
related roles) working for a variety of vendors and with
a multitude of customers of all organizational rank.
Disclaimer

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• 70% of companies have a formal
customer success practice (TSIA)
• 6th most promising job for 2019
(LinkedIn)
• 28% of a customer’s decision to renew
is based on trust; 45% for customers
of longer than 5 years (Accenture)
• Customer Success Platforms Market
Worth $2.664 Billion by 2024
The growing prevalence of Customer Success

Why customer success should matter now more than ever

But what’s with these headlines?
if product is king, marketing is the queen
Sales says Services slows down their deals
Most organizations feel the pain of sales and delivery not being in alignment

Does this look familiar?
 Attract
 Convert
 Close
 Delight

The horizon needs to be longer
Purchases
Adoption
Advocacy
Renewal/Expansion
Onboarding
01 02 050403

The customer needs to be seen this way
Awareness
Evaluate
Need
Research
Delivery
Use/Adopt
Maintain
Advocate
Recommend
Buy

But why has the Sales org always been king?

But, that conventional dynamic no longer makes as much sense

The problem is compounded

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• Not enough customer intel
• Funding
• Increasing customer expectations
• Increasing C-level expectations
• DNA
Customer Success struggles

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Ask the hard questions of customer success
• How is its performance measured?
• How does it impact revenue?
• What’s its value to the company? To the
customers?
• Why should it be treated differently from
other customer-facing units?
• Who or what funds customer success?
• What’s the ROI?
What needs to happen

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What more needs to happen
• Raise expectations for CSMs to match those of customers
• Up-level skills
• Domain knowledge
• Business expertise
• Swagger
• Ability to think on feet about how a solution might be
suitable to address a customer challenge

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Objections often heard
The two roles are built differently
• Sales requires a more extroverted character, one that is
driven by an innate competitive instinct to win
• Customer Success requires a more introspective
character, one that is driven by an innate desire to help

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Process and data - where the two roles should meet
Process  Weave disparate cross-organizational processes together
Data  Lots of it
• But only if it adds to the overall story about the customer
• And only if it participates in some downstream action that benefits
the customer
• In other words, if the collected data does not improve a
process or improve a deliverable that the customer receives
or feels, then that data is most likely of little value for the
company

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A customer relationship
without data and insights is
just a relationship without
commitment

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Besides data, you know what’s needed?
CSMs who have share similar DNA with salespeople but with at
least one important molecule of distinction.
Being able to comfortably ask this question, without thinking too
hard about it… “How can we first measure, prove, and
communicate to customers the value they’ve received before we
talk with them about why they should renew? Let alone what
they might need next?”

Then collaborate on what future value could look like
There’s a process for that
Measure
the value
Talk
about the
value
Get the
customer to
validate the
value

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As a quick aside, Customer Success isn’t the
only one singled out – look at Marketing’s
struggles over the last 50 years

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In today’s economies, companies need all teams to prove
economic impact, including customer success

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Better data = better analysis = better outcomes
Prevailing metrics almost everyone is tracking (85% according to latest
research from Deloitte)
• Renewal rate
• Up-sell and cross-sell
• ARR
Are those good things to track?
• Of course, but they’re not going to tell you very much about the
customer beyond their financial investment. And in this cloud age,
how does that differ from the way things were tracked 10, 20, 30 years
ago in the on-premise world?
You don’t need a customer success org if these are the metrics you’re
going to hyper-ventilate about. Sales can take care of these.

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So what should you do?
1. You must track those metrics, but to understand why those metrics
are what they are, you need to understand more:
Telemetry data
• Product and product experiential data
• Environment data (systems, integrations, etc)
• Relationship data (engagement, Voice of the Customer)
• Process data (and change readiness)
• Customer data (their business, their markets, their trajectory)
• Support experiential data

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And…
2. Then you need to do something with all that data
• Correlate it to derive insights
• Benchmark it
• Action the findings; use it to infuse your dynamic customer success plans with
empirically-backed recommendations and execution steps
• Leverage it to drive the customer’s ability to adopt more of the product
• Leverage it by sharing anonymized results with other customers
• Evangelize the message – give gifts!
• Share the stories/insights with Product teams
• Share the stories/insights with Sales
• Share the stories/insights with Marketing so they can become more of a
partner
• Document the customer’s experience in the CRM (or whatever tool or
method you use to describe the account)

3. Raise the
hand for
revenue
What else?

4. Now that you’ve
got the data, you’ve
produced the
insights, you’ve
been able to prove
it across a set of
other customers….
Challenge your
customers and
challenge
yourselves to do
more
Anything else?

If you’ve done all that

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Only then can customer success say it deserves a seat at the table
• It will have demonstrated the ability to deliver value for
customers through success plans and adoption guidance
• It will have demonstrated the ability to share customer insights
with internal stakeholders, including more accurate portrayals
of a customer’s propensity to renew and expand investments
• It will have demonstrated the ability to drive significantly
higher levels of renewals and that the accounts in which they
operate are expanding to a much greater degree than those in
which customer success is absent

Q&A
Emily Murphy
With:
Moderated by:
Senior Director and Advisor of Customer Success
at Oracle
Linkedin page: /in/peterarmaly/
Twitter ID: @peterarmaly
Email: peter.armaly@oracle.com
Peter Armaly
Editor, Aggregage
Linkedin page: /in/Emily-millard-murphy/
Twitter ID: @CXupdate
Website: www.aggregage.com
https://www.customerexperienceupdate.com/webinar-series/customer-success-needs-to-grow--up-/