CS My Way #11: Gillian Core, Former SVP of Customer Success
I’m super excited to bring you my interview with Gillian Core, Former SVP of Customer Success at Placer.ai, a leading location intelligence platform that helps professionals in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, and more understand and maximize their offline activities based on customers' foot traffic analytics.
Thank you, Gillian, for sharing your story and insights on all things Customer Success with us at The CS Café!
The stage is yours!
P.S. Want to share your own story? Fill out this quick form and I’ll get back to you over email.
Key Highlights from My Interview with Gillian Core:
Career Journey: Insights into Gillian’s career path and milestones.
Customer Success Organization: Understanding the hierarchy and structure of customer success teams.
Integration of Education and Leadership: How her educational background influenced leadership in CS.
Adapting CS Strategies for Enterprises: Tailoring approaches for large-scale businesses.
Board Level Integration: How she ensures CS has a seat at the table.
Metrics for Impact Measurement: Specific KPIs for tracking CS impact.
Major Challenges in CS: Navigating obstacles in customer success management.
Her Impressive Tech Stack: Overview of Gillian’s technology toolkit.
Customer Segmentation Strategies: Customizing CS for diverse market segments.
Feedback Gathering Channels: Methods for collecting customer insights and influencing product development.
Talent Attraction and Retention: Building a culture of employee engagement.
Interdepartmental Collaboration: Aligning CS with sales, marketing, and product teams.
Emerging Trends in CS: Gillian's perspective on the latest industry developments and the future of CS.
Investment in Training and Development: Nurturing skill growth within CS teams.
Her Take on CS Layoffs: Lessons, recommendations, and insights to overcome challenges.
Key Lessons for CS Prioritization: Fundamental principles for CS success.
Learning Resources: Gillian's go-to recommendations.
Career Advice: Insights for leaders and aspiring CS professionals.
And more!
Introduction and Company Overview
Can you provide a brief overview of the problem Placer.ai solves for its customers in practice?
Placer.ai provides data on any physical location to make informed decisions in real estate, retail, and any industry that has a physical location or investments in those locations.
Data is based on foot traffic that is extrapolated from mobile applications tracking where visitors actually come from.
And Placer provides its data to customers.
At my previous company, Reputation.com, the main difference for a CSM would be that Reputation manages its customers’ data with natural language logic extrapolating ratings, reviews, and surveys into a Reputation Score that allows national chains and individual locations to manage their reputation with customers.
Although they are both B2B SaaS there is a critical difference in the day-to-day management when you are selling data or managing customer data between two databases.
The latter is more prone to emergency management and more urgent in nature.
About You and Your Experience
Could you share your professional journey so far?
I began my career in NYC in advertising as an account manager which is equivalent to a CSM today.
After I earned my MBA from Columbia University, I started my own agency focused on triple-bottom-line businesses—those that care about profit, people, and sustainability.
One of my clients was an advertising revenue model that served ad space in email messages with a non-profit cause which led me to the ESP (email service provider) and CRM (customer relationship management) businesses and eventually to B2B SaaS.
The activities that always served me no matter where I went, were to volunteer for everything, know the numbers better than anyone else, speak up in meetings with an opinion, and always introduce yourself - even if you are the most junior person in the room.
Organizational Structure and Reporting
Can you elaborate on your customer success organization and its reporting hierarchy within the company?
Whether at Placer or my previous company Reputation, CSMs were responsible for product adoption and retention.
There are four main components when you think of the CS organizational structure:
Charter - What is the core objective? At both, it was product adoption and retention
Structure and Resources - Beyond Adoption what should CS own? At Placer it was only retention. At Reputation, it was retention and upsell.
Engagement Model - How should sales and CS engage each other? At Placer, sales only focused on new sales. At Reputation, they supported the customer throughout the life cycle. Clear delineation is critical here. Paying two teams on retention is not effective.
Talent and Compensation - What are the right hiring profiles? I hire for human characteristics; willingness to be a part of a team, emotional intelligence, relational intelligence (knowing one’s place in a SaaS organization), and analytical inquisitiveness (the desire to ask why and to leave something better than you found it). All other skills can be taught with a great enablement curriculum, but those are characteristics that great CSMs have, and cannot be taught.
Additionally, I have used Radford and found it incredibly beneficial.
Radford explains job levels through four components; knowledge, problem-solving, interaction, and impact. Really considering the impact a role makes and not just the knowledge required is critical.
To hire, I highly recommend using the CCAT, the Criteria Emotional Intelligence evaluation, and a presentation to fully evaluate a candidate.
Those tools also create a foundation for future coaching.
It is also important to think about organizational hierarchy.
A good rule of thumb is no more than six direct reports to any manager including yourself.
Education and Leadership Skills in Customer Success
How do you integrate your educational background and leadership skills into managing and developing the customer success team?
I had the privilege of taking a High Performance Leadership class while at Columbia University from Michael Feiner the author of “The Feiner Points of Leadership.”
The thing that really stuck with me is a story he told about the day he retired and the day after etc.
No one called.
These careers take all of our hearts, attention, and time, but no one will remember how “great” or not that we performed.
It is all about the memories we create with individuals including clients and how we make them feel.
Tailoring Customer Success Strategies for Enterprises
Drawing from your work with large enterprises, how do you adapt customer success strategies for customers in similar industries?
Enterprise customer success has longer sales cycles, more influencers on both the customer side and internally, and requires C-Suite presentation skills.
In my history, I have found it is always better to hire a more tenured professional with a background in the clients’ industry and role and train them on being a CSM.
The best Enterprise CSMs want to be thought leaders and consultants.
CSMs with consulting backgrounds also do very well with enterprise clients.
Commitment to Customer Success
How do you ensure customer success has a seat at the board level?
Easy, know why customers stay, leave, and grow by segment and very tactfully explain how you can address any gaps with specific executive “asks”.
When examining why customers cancel, it is critical to document churn reasons.
Churn reasons are defined by who internally could solve that reason. If they leave due to a failure to answer their support ticket, those should be summarized by segment, product, ARR, and have suggestions with the support team regularly.
EVERY customer who leaves should be interviewed by someone other than their CSM, a director, or a VP.
Another helpful tool is to classify churn into two buckets; avoidable and unavoidable
Use unavoidable as a baseline at the beginning of the year.
This is incredibly helpful with the board and C-Suite when you are thinking about setting reasonable churn targets.
An example of unavoidable would be the shrinking of small businesses. Maybe 5% of your SMB customers go out of business each year.
That should be accounted for and known as unavoidable churn.
Here’s my cheat sheet on reasons.
Customer Success Metrics
What specific KPIs or metrics do you track to measure the impact of your customer success efforts?
I run a system that PREPs CSMs for success.
These metrics are tracked and form a foundation for performance reviews. The hardest part is documenting the business value and staying on top of that relationship, always checking in to see if they are satisfied with the results.
Customers don't always tell you when you are failing. You have to get creative in how you ask during each interaction.
Customer Success Challenges
What major challenges have you come across in your role at Placer.ai and how have you addressed them?
No matter which SaaS company, building meaningful relationships where the CSM is a surprise or delight in the customers’ day and they are providing the business value is a full-time job!
Companies shift priorities.
Key contacts change jobs. Products fail.
But a CSM must stay ahead of whether the customer is making money or saving money with your product and quantifying it so that they have an internal rationale and talk track to keep renewing year after year.
Customer Success Tools and Technologies
What's your tech stack, and how do you leverage AI to boost team productivity and customer experiences?
I know there are CSPs out there, however I do think Salesforce is adequate to stay proactive and share data and tasks from sales to CS and executives.
Service Cloud has been my favorite support software.
Rocketlane is great for onboarding.
Gong for recording with the automated transcription of calls tracked in your SFDC fields.
Zoom surveys at the end of calls to ensure customers are satisfied.
Hubspot to send automation to SMBs and manage your NPS (which should also be sent in-platform for the best response)
Pendo and Lessonly for customer onboarding with ease and certification.
Insided for customer community and gifting.
Customer Segmentation and Targeting
How do you segment your customer base, and adapt your CS strategies for different segments or target markets?
It is important to group customers by how they buy, what they can spend, and their service expectations.
Typically you will end up with an enterprise, mid-market, and commercial team.
Commercial teams are highly focused on automation.
The interesting thing I have found is that typically the mid-market teams expand at a higher rate due to short sales cycles and also suffer the greatest churn.
Customer Feedback Mechanisms
What methods and channels do you use to gather customer feedback, and how is this feedback used to drive product and service improvements?
For feedback at many of the SaaS companies I have led, we use NPS and frequent surveys based on milestones and support.
All feedback is gathered by category, i.e. product or issue, and reviewed each month in-depth to write up trends.
If there is ever negative customer feedback a CSM and the director are required to call within 24 hours.
Most recently, we have added a survey at the end of each Zoom call for a customer ranking 1-5 stars that is used in performance reviews and coaching.
Employee Engagement and Retention
What strategies do you use to attract and retain top talent within your team, and how do you foster a culture of employee engagement and growth?
Attracting talent is a full-time job on LinkedIn.
I don’t mean job postings but actually responding to all of the talents that reach out daily.
Additionally, just being responsive.
Candidates spend their valuable time with you and it is critical to respond to their thank you notes and outreach. It is also equally critical for the talent team to provide productive feedback. It will only help them.
How many of us knew better until someone told us?
For recruitment, I think we need to do more than post when we need someone.
I think we need to think about recruitment as a sales and marketing function. What if we were looking for an analyst and our CS leader spoke at the local school for data analysts?
It would create a group of followers of potential candidates. A great book on this topic is, “Hiring Success” by Jerome Ternynck, CEO of Smart Recruiters.
Ensuring you have enablement programs that equip CSMs for their careers and not just at your company can be another differentiator.
For engagement and growth, I think it is critical to spend quality time in smaller meetings.
CSMs know their manager but little else.
Off-site meetings at least once a year also help to create camaraderie.
Personalization, Collaboration, and Advocacy
How do you foster collaboration between customer success, sales, marketing, and product teams to ensure a seamless customer experience?
The best way to foster collaboration is to have one set of customer metrics and one budget.
If that leader is holding weekly, face-to-face, and “hard” meetings where each of those leaders has a respected voice, collaboration will follow.
There can be no back-channel conversations without the group present.
Industry Trends and Predictions
What emerging trends do you anticipate shaping the future of Customer Success?
Instituting an SMB AI character emoji that represents your CSM and follows the customer the life of the relationship because people work with people, not products
Customer education rather than product training.
Helping customers understand the use case and successes of like customers to better strategize for themselves. Rather than just creating videos on how to use the product.
No work in an office for self-motivated CSMs.
Training, Development, and Continuous Improvement
How do you invest in the training and development of your customer success team, and what strategies do you use to foster a culture of continuous improvement?
It is critical to highlight the career path for your CSMs.
Without it, the motivation is drained.
The career path should highlight the attributes and accomplishments required at each level. This should be tied to PREP and performance reviews.
However, I do always highlight for individuals professional advancement is one part you and your performance and the other part timing or luck.
If there isn’t a role open, it is hard to get it.
I also invest in enablement.
There should be at least one individual who is drafting the CS educational curriculum at the organization. It is a full-time job.
Here’s a snippet of what I have implemented.
The CS training portion should focus on key pillars.
The Leadership Challenge should be something any CSM can take anywhere and is a core differentiator when attracting talent.
Handling Organizational Changes and Layoffs
1. What is your perspective on recent layoffs in customer success organizations?
Layoffs are done many times to move out bottom performers.
Make sure you are getting a performance review and if you have any questions they are in writing with quantifiable, attainable, and specific goals.
Also, spend an hour a day on yourself.
Reading, writing, and making one new acquaintance a week.
It is so hard.
But, it is too late after you are already unemployed.
Also, take AT LEAST one interview a year. Be confident in the going rate for your role.
2. Did you have any in your teams? If so, how did you ensure continuity in service?
Yes, I have had and have executed layoffs many times throughout my career. My biggest regret is not insisting on performance reviews EVERY quarter so people had a chance to get feedback and improve.
Lessons Learned and Recommendations
Reflecting on your experience, what key lessons should customer success leaders prioritize, and what advice would you offer any CS professional in the field?
Always manage up, down, and sideways at the same time.
They are all UBER critical.
If you are on a 1-on-1 with anyone up or down and they are getting their kids or walking the dog, take the time and go to see them in person.
Make sure they are buying into what you are doing. There is no such thing as too much face time. (As long as it is structured and has an objective.)
Personal Insights
Are there any books or resources that have significantly influenced your career trajectory or approach to customer success?
Customer Success by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, Lincoln Murphy.
I have bought a copy for every CSM at every company I am at.
It is a great foundation for professionals who are just starting.
And, Lincoln Murphy is also a great speaker at kick-offs.
Thought Leaders
Are there industry leaders whose expertise and insights you actively follow and draw inspiration from?
Markus Rentsch
GrowthCurve.IO
Lincoln Murphy
Best Career Advice
If you could offer one piece of career advice to your younger self, what would it be?
In the layoff culture we have today, I would tell myself and everyone out there to fight the pain, don’t look back, and enjoy those rare moments of free time!
Self-worth is never determined by anyone outside of yourself and certainly not in a job.
Preferred Quote
What quote resonates with you most, both professionally and personally?
“Press ahead and do not look back.”
It is a biblical story but it is so true for all of us today. We will miss the blessings ahead if we keep looking back.
We must, no matter how hard, always press ahead.
Hobbies
Outside of work, family, or travel, what hobbies or activities do you enjoy the most?
I am a soccer nut and forever renovator.
I played at Tulane and still play and coach. I have three sons that keep me busy. And, I am remodeling my second house with a 7 v 7 soccer field for fun.
And That’s It
Thank you Gillian for your insights and thought leadership!
It’s been such a great pleasure hosting you on The CS Café!
-Hakan.
Want to share your own story? Or you know a top player you’d love to see on CS My Way?
Fill out this quick form and I’ll get back to you over email.
I’ll speak to you in the next edition.
Cheers,
-Hakan.
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