Customer Success and Quarterly Business Reviews - with Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO Totango

**Ray Reich** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by Guy Nirpaz, founder and CEO of Totango, and author of Farm Don't Hunt, the definitive guide to customer success. Today, we'll be covering four main areas with Guy. First, customer success best practices. Second, going to pivot to quality business reviews, the who, what, when, and how to drive customer outcomes through QBRs. How to measure the business value of QBRs. And then the key metrics that customer success should be using to validate the business impact of their solution. Guy, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Guy Nirpaz** (1:19)
Absolutely. Hi, Ray. Thanks for having me. As you said, I'm Guy Nirpaz. I'm the CEO and founder of Totango. I've started Totango in 2010 around the mission of customer success. We've been seeing the huge transition into SaaS and recurring revenue and Cloud, and we set ourselves to come up with a technical solution and solve that for all those companies that are dealing with the challenge of centralizing their companies around their customers.

**Ray Reich** (1:48)
When we were first speaking, I mentioned what a pioneer you've been and the evolution of customer success. And wow, what a 12-year ride, huh? So let's start with, you wrote a blog, you shared a lot of best practices. I love your blog. So let's start with, from a high level, what are the fundamental best practices that a customer service organization should make sure they use and deploy to optimize both customer retention and customer expansion?

**Guy Nirpaz** (2:16)
Absolutely. So first, I'd say that the way I look at the world today is that customer success is a company strategy. It's not just about the customer success team, although the customer success team has a very important part in running this strategy. The very high level metaphor of customer success is if you want your customer eventually to grow their relationship with you by buying or renewing their contract or buying more, you need to make sure that everything ahead of that is being done in a way that delivers value to customers because initially there's like a promise and then over time this promise needs to be delivered. And in many cases, one of the challenges morphs over time. So we'll talk more about that in the QBR topic. So, you know, the concept of Farm Don't Hunt the book is that you will only bear the fruits of your prior investment and you can impact that at the point of harvest, right? You got to do a lot of work ahead of time to do that. So, from a customer success strategy is, first and foremost, to be super clear about what are the objectives of the customers and what are they trying to accomplish and then create systematic, scalable way to manage the customer journey to those positive outcomes.

**Ray Reich** (3:30)
Well, let's step a click on that because one of the big challenges I see for customer success organizations are, who is their customer? Of course, you got your day-to-day liaison, maybe they're a program manager, maybe they're a super administrator power user, but you often aren't dealing every day with the executive or economic buyer. What are some of the best practices to make sure that you can involve everyone within your customer versus just your day-to-day contact?

**Guy Nirpaz** (3:58)
Yeah. I mean, basically what you're saying is a business or a company is a collection of people and each of them has different roles and different objectives.
So this is why B2B is more complicated than B2C in that sense, where you have many masters that you need to please, or you got to take care of multiple people. So I think the very first step that you need to do is track all the users on the account of their roles. You got to have a system to know who they are, what's their role in the relationship, and then make sure that you engage appropriately, whether it's executive engagement or user engagement through training usage or whatever, just to make sure that all the stakeholders are being mapped and tracked, and you have an engagement, designed engagement to right cadence, right level of information to drive success towards the customer objectives.