The Distributed Truth

Data-Driven Customer Success, Beyond All the PLG Hype with Michael Boyd

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Distributed Truth, Evan welcomes Michael Boyd, who is the Head of Customer Success at Vanta. Previously, Michael ran Customer Success at SecurityScorecard, Tanium, and Pythian. Michael has spent over 20 years in enterprise B2B post-sales delivery roles. This week Michael Boyd brings a concise, useful perspective into how Customer Success teams can truly become central to their organizations’ performance. “Time-to-first-value” as a metric can deliver a unifying momentum, and reflect real adoption among a customer base so the entire company can celebrate meaningful success. Evan and Michael discuss rising interest in CS operations, particularly around data, thanks to product-led growth and the focus on efficient revenue creation, particularly via interest from VCs in net dollar retention. TRUTHS OF THE DAY MICHAEL: CS IS THE CENTRAL GEAR “I always feel customer success is the central gear in the bigger engine we want and for our companies to go fast, and it has got to go fast. If the engine is going to go fast, that means CS has to be there driving it. I know my product friends don't like that they think product’s the biggest gear, education, they think they're an important gear but CS touches everybody.” MICHAEL: IMPORTANCE OF DATA IN CUSTOMER SUCCESS “You can't measure what you can't see for our tools that help you see all those cybersecurity risks that could pose a threat to you. And it's almost the same analogy in customer success. We can't grow what we can't see.” MICHAEL: START WITH WHAT YOU HAVE “Start with what you have and iterate. I always tell my team that, yes, we will never have perfect data from the product, from the financial side, from any of it. Let's start with what we have, and then we can incrementally build on that, as we both try and manage our groups better, grow our teams better, and ultimately tell our story, both internally and eventually externally a lot better.” Connect with Michael and learn more about his work: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjboydcitp/ Vanta website: https://www.vanta.com/ Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast: Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!

Episode Notes

In this episode of The Distributed Truth, Evan welcomes Michael Boyd, who is the Head of Customer Success at Vanta. Previously, Michael ran Customer Success at SecurityScorecard, Tanium, and Pythian. Michael has spent over 20 years in enterprise B2B post-sales delivery roles.

This week Michael Boyd brings a concise, useful perspective into how Customer Success teams can truly become central to their organizations’ performance. “Time-to-first-value” as a metric can deliver a unifying momentum, and reflect real adoption among a customer base so the entire company can celebrate meaningful success. 

Evan and Michael discuss rising interest in CS operations, particularly around data, thanks to product-led growth and the focus on efficient revenue creation, particularly via interest from VCs in net dollar retention.

 

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

MICHAEL: CS IS THE CENTRAL GEAR

“I always feel customer success is the central gear in the bigger engine we want and for our companies to go fast, and it has got to go fast. If the engine is going to go fast, that means CS has to be there driving it. I know my product friends don't like that they think product’s the biggest gear, education, they think they're an important gear but CS touches everybody.”

MICHAEL: IMPORTANCE OF DATA IN CUSTOMER SUCCESS

“You can't measure what you can't see for our tools that help you see all those cybersecurity risks that could pose a threat to you. And it's almost the same analogy in customer success. We can't grow what we can't see.”

MICHAEL: START WITH WHAT YOU HAVE

“Start with what you have and iterate. I always tell my team that, yes, we will never have perfect data from the product, from the financial side, from any of it. Let's start with what we have, and then we can incrementally build on that, as we both try and manage our groups better, grow our teams better, and ultimately tell our story, both internally and eventually externally a lot better.”

 

Connect with Michael and learn more about his work:

 

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

 

Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!