Hear some tips from the pros! Managers from Gainsight's Customer Success & Ops teams will share methods for hiring the best talent. What backgrounds and experience do you look for? What are some interview questions and how do you manage candidate pipeline?

1. Hiring for Customer Success
March 2, 2016
Sonam Dabholkar & Barr Moses

2. Presenter Introductions
Sonam Dabholkar
Customer Success
Barr Moses
Business Operations

3. Principles for Customer Success Hiring
• Hire process-oriented people
• Diversity
• Testing candidates
• Hire ahead of schedule

4. Hire Process-Oriented People

5. Why is process-orientation important?
• Customer Success is the most operationally complex
department in a SaaS company
• Cross-functional elements required to make a customer and CSM team
successful
• We have more data to work with than other departments
• With every major product release, we adjust our strategies and
processes for making customers successful
• Process-oriented CSMs identify the root cause of problems and
build sustainable processes to address this

6. Evaluate candidates based on…
Communication skills:
• Able to run a meeting with
multiple stakeholders
• Clear, articulate speaker
• Poised, confident presence
• Courageous, assertive
Problem-solving ability:
• Curious about client’s
business needs
• Able to dissect those needs
• Able to identify a product-
based solution to those needs
• Resourceful
Attitude:
• Shows persistently positive
attitude in the face of challenge
• Passionate about tech,
Gainsight, and making the
customer successful
• Has an empathetic, consultative
approach

7. Diversity

8. Hire the most talented people
• Diversity ensures a top-notch team
• Differing opinions cultivate creative tension that allows for continuous
improvement
• Fosters an environment that encourages tolerance and admiration of
differences
• Don’t limit your search to people with “Customer Success” in
their title
• Talent pool in CSM is still relatively small

9. Potential CSM backgrounds
• Operations managers
• Project managers
• Management consultants
• MBAs
• Teachers
• Recent college grads (including those right out of college)

10. Balanced skill set: analytical & strong
communicators
• Knowledge of customer success and
renewal business processes
• Enjoys building effective and efficient
processes
• Loves learning technology and new
applications
• Knowledge of Salesforce.com is a plus
• Comfortable in configuring and testing logic
rules to drive actions and workflows
• Excellent communication skills
Prior experience in ops, analytics or
customer facing role a plus
• Previous Gainsight experience
• Previous sales operations or a business
operations role
• Customer Success or Account Manager
with an affinity for technology, data and
process
• Experience in building reports using
business applications or BI tools
• Familiar with reviewing and understanding
data used to build dashboards and reports
Skills and Background for CS Ops Managers

11. Additional Attributes to Screen Candidates
• Passion for designing processes that scale
• Ability to break down ambiguous problems into concrete, manageable components and think
through optimal solutions
• Enjoys “getting their hands dirty” by digging into complex operations
• Takes high degree of ownership over their work
• Clear communicator with professional presence
• Strong listening skills; open to input from other team members and departments
• Ability to lead through influence

12. Testing Candidates

13. Interview: Simulate a Real Life Client Situation
• Provide candidate with the name of a real company
• Provide old copy of an “introduction to Gainsight” deck and demo org
• Present a 45-minute, in-person, hypothetical client meeting
• Make it real! Assign roles to those who are on the interview panel
• Hold a consultative, discovery conversation about how Gainsight would
address the client’s business challenges, and conduct a demo to illustrate

14. Candidate’s performance is indicative of…
Process orientation:
Did s/he provide
structure to the
conversation, walking
the client through a
thoughtful process of
discovery and solution
identification?
Communication:
Did the candidate
show confidence and
poise when presenting
to a group that
includes executives?
Problem-solving:
Did s/he demonstrate
curiosity by asking
questions about the
client’s business? Was
s/he able to problem-
solve on the fly, by
matching Gainsight’s
capabilities with the
client’s challenges?
Attitude:
Did the candidate do
enough research about
our value proposition
and our solution to
signal his/her passion
for the role?

15. Incorporate Take-Home Assignments in
Interview Process
At Gainsight, we have a “scorecard" to measure our own customers’ health — i.e. their
probability of renewing their subscription with Gainsight. Please describe how you would
design a customer health scorecard for this purpose.
Make sure to capture the following:
(a) What specific metrics would you track
(b) How would you measure these
(c) What insights would you be able to draw from this scorecard
Feel free to present this in your preferred format
Example: CS Ops
Design a Customer Health Scorecard for Gainsight

16. Use Skills Matrix to Define Team Expectations
and Assess Strengths
Example: CS Ops

17. Hire Ahead of Schedule

18. Why is hiring ahead important?
• Not having a CSM to assign new accounts to can create a poor
experience for new customers
• Assigning additional accounts to an over-loaded CSM can lead
to low morale
• It’s important to have spare bandwidth in Customer Success
• Hold your team managers accountable for hiring ahead; they
should anticipate their hiring needs a few months in advance

19. • Highlight your assumptions
• Never insert a raw number into a formula (e.g. = B5 +10)
• Put time periods in the columns; put metrics in the rows
• Keep model organized; divide it into sections, bold the most
important metrics
• Create a section for every Customer Tier
Forecasting hiring:
Basic principles for building a financial model

20. Step 1: Determine the output of the model
We want to spend 15 cents on Customer Success for every $1 of ARR
Net fully loaded cost of CSM divided by ARR
=
15% or less

21. Output: Total ARR by Customer Tier
Step 2: Project your ARR
Key assumptions to make:
• Monthly churn rate
• Average ARR of churned customers
• Monthly upsell rate
• Customers transitioned in/out between tiers
• New customers
• ARR/customer

22. Step 2: Project your ARR (cont.)
Data is illustrative

23. Step 3: Project your costs
Outputs: Fully loaded cost of CSM (within Customer Tiers)
Fully loaded cost of CSM / ARR ratio
Key assumptions to make:
• CSMs hired each month
• Hire when net fully loaded cost / ARR ratio falls below 15%
• Tolerate higher ratio if trying to accomplish a company goal, e.g. improve NPS,
increase advocacy
• Average OTE / CSM
• OTE means on-target earnings, including both base and bonus, commissions
• Overhead (benefits, office space, IT, etc.)

24. Step 3: Project your costs (cont.)
Data is illustrative

25. Step 4: Project your ARR from Premier CSM
Outputs: Net fully loaded cost of CSM / ARR ratio
The numerator (cost) is offset by the ARR from the Premier CSM
offering
Key assumptions to make:
• Price of Premier CSM
• Number of existing customers who newly purchase Premier
• Percent of new customers who purchase Premier

26. Step 5: Add Management & Operations costs
• Include costs from non-CSM team members, including team
managers, CS Ops
• Only have 1 section for this in the model; do not replicate for
each Customer Tier
Final output:
Net fully loaded cost of CSM / ARR (including all
customer tiers and cost of management)

27. Step 5: Add Management & Operations costs (cont.)
Data is illustrative

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