1. Scaling CS From Onboarding to Expansion
- Yamini Bhat Co-founder & CEO, Vymo
Vymo is a sales productivity tool. We are a vertical SaaS company focused on financial institutions, and we help their sellers do more.
Over our journey, we kept going upmarket because we realized that the problem we're trying to solve, sales productivity, not sales automation, is much more critical at scale in large organizations.
When we found our product market fit, our average ticket size was about 60,000 USD, our first insurance and banking contracts. Since then, we’ve stuck with that vertical. Today, our average ticket size is half a million dollars.
Customer Success has played many different roles in this journey. Our strategy now is to land and expand.
We are amongst the top five cheques that these institutions have to cut. This is why our contracts go all the way to the management committee, Boards, etc. Hence, it’s easier for us to land at 100 – 150k in one department with the budget and expand from there.
Land and expand can only really work if you go live fast. We have to ensure we can go live in three to four weeks. But there's usually much friction for this in enterprises, because of integrations and the number of teams that need to come together to close the requirements. Managing this is one of the leading roles in Customer Success at Vymo.
There’s a whole customer success method for ensuring the launch happens fast enough so there’s ROI and you recognize the revenue fast enough.
Then there’s adoption. This is fundamental usage — what your users buy you for. In Vymo’s case, the product gets rolled out to, say, a 7,000-person sales force in different parts of the country, who all must magically start using Vymo from the day of going live.
Adoption includes many things. Is everything we’re showing on the screen relevant? Does the product follow the company’s specific journey and context? Is it configured according to their internal language? Do the managers get to see the reports they saw until yesterday without Vymo?
The Customer Success team also answers all these questions. In accounts of this size, retention can be taken for granted for a short while, so the job of Customer Success is to make sure it's sticky by driving adoption.
And then, there’s a whole amount of account management required there. The team has to have a T‑12 plan, where T is the rate of renewal, and 12 is the number of months they start talking about it.
This is where the team goes to the customer and talks to them about the return on investment that they have already gotten.
They introduce version two of the product, which is a higher edition, and tell them that if problem A is solved, they can now move on to problem B.
You can build complete Customer Success playbooks and other engines around this. The team is upselling for nearly six months before the renewal.
At the enterprise scale, your ideal list of customers is finite—it fits into a list of thousand lines. You need account managers who can individually go to each customer and paint a story to upsell.
We sign large enterprise contracts that last three to five years, so we need more consistent relationship management. This is why our customer success team is not purely that; it is also an account management team and holds revenue targets.
There’s a whole system set up to help them succeed in driving these launch, adoption, and expansion KPIs. The solutions team works closely with them to show ROI and make new features available, so the revenue targets set up the right motivations.
In the end, though, the only reason a customer uses and retains on a product is that the product delivers.
You must be careful not to oversell your product. Overselling can lead to challenges in delivering the promised value, hindering your expansion prospects when you have a renewal or upsell conversation.
But make sure that reasonable retention is guaranteed for you just on the basis of your product — up to 90 – 95% — and that your product leads the expansion with additional features to sell or features for other teams to cross-sell.
If you can’t see that, there is a problem with product market fit, which would cause massive issues during scaling.