Introduction
Dive into the world of cross-functional collaboration with Shareth Ben, Chief Customer Officer at Apptega. Shareth shares invaluable insights on deploying cross-functional brokers, redefining customer success strategies, and leveraging acronyms for operational excellence.
Shareth's Insights
- Cross-functional collaboration to deliver business outcomes is one of the toughest challenges a CxO needs to solve. I suggest deploying a strategy that has worked well in my past experience. CxO leadership needs to invest in cross-functional brokers. These brokers are individuals who are met with the least amount of resistance to act as catalysts between two functions or departments, and they are either identified or developed. There are two types of cross-functional brokers: bridges and adhesives. Bridges are great at being the conduit of communication between two functions i.e sales and CS. On the contrary, adhesives are individuals who can bring multiple teams together based on their ability to relate the most with others based on technical compatibility. i.e technical CSM who can work with engineering. Investing in these cross-functional brokers can help break down silos better and faster.
- When Customer success is treated as support plus, it is simply not sustainable.Any SaaS company that has CSM’s serving customers in a support plus function capacity, will struggle to improve the GRR and the NRR metric especially. This is often the symptom of product-market fit issues, lack of proper customer segmentation for differentiated support, lack of self-service, absence of problem management and feature fragility to name a few. If these critical issues are not addressed promptly, post-sales teams will continue to face scalability challenges with high staff burnout.
- This may seem trivial however smart companies use acronyms to their advantage to improve on operational excellence. Process changes are often essential and unavoidable to improve internal departments’ collaboration. To implement these changes at-scale try labeling them using acronyms for one simple reason: acronyms are brief and easy to remember, which makes them more likely to be adopted. Tactics such as using acronyms, along with other change management best practices can promote process changes faster to yield better results.
About Shareth
Energetic and results-driven, Customer Success Leader, focused on transforming customer success to operate at-scale for supporting rapid growth at Enterprise Software startups. Experienced in growing SaaS revenues from $10m – $102m in ARR. Responsible for strategizing and executing on the post-sales customer journey, from onboarding to adoption and value management. Improved Gross revenue retention and Net revenue retention by aligning interlocks between CS to work cross-functionally with Product Management, Product Engineering, AM and Professional Services to actualize the capabilities of a Next-Gen SIEM, across strategic, high-growth, and mid-market customer segments. Shareth has over fifteen years of cybersecurity domain knowledge, specifically in the SIEM/UEBA products and prior in Identity and access management solutions. Shareth is passionate about building high-performance teams focused on delivering results. Proven track record of successfully managing customer relations with innovative strategies to increase product adoption. Shareth’s thought leadership on insider risk has been published in several articles featured in the WSJ, Forbes, Dark Reading ,and other notable media platforms. Shareth is on the board of Ithaca College’s Customer Experience program where he works with faculty to shape the future of customer experience for SAAS companies.