Episode 74 Transcript

Banoo Behboodi: Hi everyone. It's great to have you back. This is the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry.

I'm Banoo, your host today. As always, I'm very excited to have you all with us, but I'm also very excited to have Sabina Pons. Sabina is the Managing Director at Growth Molecules and coauthor of the book Pressing ON as a Tech Mom. She is an expert in crafting scalable growth and metrics-driven customer programs.

I'm excited to dive into the topics of the customer journey, how you make that seamless, and make it value-focused so that, basically, the customer has an amazing experience but also stays engaged and interested all along the journey. Thank you for joining us, Sabina. We are so excited to have you.

Before we dive in, I want you to talk through where you've been and what you've done. You were obviously at some point with Mavenlink. As I joined Mavenlink, you had left, but you were a legend; your name came up all the time in terms of everything you had done that was amazing at Mavenlink. Really happy to be connecting this way and excited to have the conversation.

Can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, your career, where you've been, what you've done at Mavenlink, and since then?

Sabina Pons: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the kind words and warm wishes. I'm happy to be here and finally get to engage with you live. I've also heard great things.

I had the honor of joining Mavenlink in 2016 when it was we were just around, I think, 100 employees at the time, and being a part of that growth, the team I inherited was four people, and by the time I left, my team was 104 people, and I left in 2021. It was a really rapid growth and a wonderful, amazing journey to be a part of seeing the growth and becoming Kantata as well, not long after I left the organization.

I oversaw the post-sale relationship with customers, namely by way of customer success and the support team. I launched our first user community and our first customer advisory board and did a lot of work with marketing on our customer advocacy programs, client gifts, and loyalty initiatives as well. We did own not only the adoption motion but also the expansion and renewal from a commercial perspective, which ties nicely into our conversation today because I had to be really well connected with my peer group and departments across the organization to deliver a customer experience, one that at the time we all said needed to be a remarkable customer experience. That was what we prided ourselves on at the time.

After that, I joined my mentor to help find, build, and launch Growth Molecules. We are a customer success advisory firm working with B2B SaaS companies, predicting and driving their revenue, retention, and growth. It's been an honor and exciting. I actually met Emilia, my partner, while I was at Mavenlink. She came in and did a session with my own team. She was also a mom in tech and helped mentor me to figure out how I not only had earned but maintained and grew that seat of the leadership table and how I did that at a global level. It was a natural jump for me to want to do this entrepreneurial spirit where I got to work with our amazing customers.

Then Mavenlink Kantata sphere professional services automation. Now, I'll do that for about 80 companies a year with the different B2B SaaS needs across multiple verticals. I loved that opportunity to build and grow our business and work across the three practice areas of pure play advisory, customer journey mapping workshops, fractional leadership, diagnostic assessments, and recommendations on what to do. We also have a full academy where we train students at the corporate level on the best skills. My favorite one is how to tell a customer no, we call it the Art of No Jutsu. How do you do that in a friendly way that preserves the relationship and your company's bottom line?

We've got the academy, and then we also have tech services. I also oversee the professional services aspect of technical implementations and optimizations for major customer success platforms like Gainsight, ChurnZero, Totango, Planhat, and some more. That's where I was. Now, what I get to do in my day-to-day with people I love, some of which I worked with at Kantata and Mavenlink and clients who are also mutual customers of Kantata today.

Banoo Behboodi: Amongst all of that, you also coauthored your book with Emilia, which we'll get to a little bit further in our discussion here, very excited to have some conversation around the book as well.

Let's get started with the topic at hand, which is looking at the journey that the customers go through right from prospecting all the way through their core customer journey; hopefully, customer for life, starting with the sales team and then moving on as professional services for implementations and then CSM and so on, the various groups that they interact with within a company. What are some of the challenges that are faced in making that journey seem less smooth, in your opinion?

Sabina Pons: It's really challenging. It's a difficult feat to have that cohesive experience, especially if it's enterprise-level software, because it requires more involvement to get it activated, to get data migrations, to make sure that the information that was captured in that pre-sales discovery process that permeates through the rest of the internal knowledge for teams who are driving and delivering that customer journey outward.

We know in enterprise software, and even on the mid-market level, there are typically solutions, engineering workshops and, system architecture, design workshops even before a contract has officially been signed with a customer.

For a professional services team to potentially risk not getting that critical information and maybe even having to ask those same questions again, maybe having to re-architect and do a new whiteboard session, there's a time and a place for that. Typically, it is frustrating for a customer. They're now being asked the same questions, and they feel that they're wasting their time.

We have to remember that on average, a SaaS company has up to 200 SaaS providers that are their vendors. A CTO has all those contracts, all those systems, and all the security regulatory compliance to that through. To be a cause of bloat for them in their mind, where the teams are being dragged through repeated processes to gather more information just to get live is frustrating.

To summarize, the concept of capturing the data, I mean using data loosely, but the information that matters to a customer, what are the business outcomes that matter? What are the business decisions that need to be made critically for the configuration and the ultimate engagement with a product or service? How is that being disseminated across the organization? Is it being held in a repository that can be accessed by the individuals who are delivering that experience for a customer?

Is it dynamic, meaning the customer's business is changing, their needs are changing, and the world is changing, so how do we change our knowledge about the customer's needs as we're servicing them, and then how to support know what they're walking into if there's a feature request or a SEV 1 issue. How does a customer success manager know when there's been a management change, your primary contact has now been promoted as no longer going to be your champion, or maybe they have left?

The average tenure right now for VP and above in most roles in marketing and sales and customer success, which typically leans into PS in that world as well, it's just a little over two years. If you have a three-year contract or a four-year contract, it may take you in enterprise software a year to implement, maybe less. Let's just say on average, it's a year before you're actually getting value from your investment. Then there's the change management aspect that's going to continue. You're maybe launching it more to your global distributed team and workforce. Now your champion who bought the product is no longer there.

A new leader comes in, and they have another tool that they like better. They're going to try to phase out that contract and sign with a competitor. This constant evolution of needs of humans changing and roles and then the pressures of tech consolidation, and the economic uncertainty that's facing teams, it is very challenging for them to have a cohesive customer journey, when there's that change.

Therefore, if companies don't do their best job at codifying what they capture, and then what I call democratizing the data, making sure that the information is readily available and a tool or a system for all those downstream teams, professional services, customer success, maybe an account management team, support team, and even finance and accounting.

If they're invoicing customers and they're engaging, that's still part of a journey. Is that cohesive? I think companies have a really hard time with that because it's hard. It is challenging to do.

Banoo Behboodi: I understand we have those discussions with customers all the time. We have some of those challenges ourselves as well.

How do you arrive at that, whether that's technology and processes that go hand in hand? Is it possible? Ultimately, what you're saying is you need to make sure that everyone throughout the organization that interacts with that customer is current at any point in time, ideally, with what that customer's outcomes are, which are continuously changing, right?

The outcomes they desired last year whenever they purchased may not be the same today. How do you keep that up to date and make sure the different individuals who get engaged have the right information because not all of them need the same information?

They all probably need to understand what the outcome is, right? They need other pieces of information to then be able to service that customer. That's complicated, right? It seems obvious but very complicated.

Sabina Pons: It is complicated. The solution ranges from more manual grassroots, which is a lot of what my team and I tried to do in 2016, and 2017. There are also things that are on the brink of general availability by way of application, like tools and AI sets that can bring in and aggregate data from many sources. The key becomes how to enable your people to interpret that data. How do they act upon it? What do they do with that information?

Some of the things are tips that people after this podcast can use immediately, then I can talk a little bit more about some of the other things that are coming to market right now in the space, but I think that if teams have a central source of truth where they can make sure and hold accountable the teams that are capturing that information in the first place.

At a bare minimum, the call should be recorded in the pre-sales process. Most organizations are using Gong or the AI tools within Zoom to do that. That transcription is becoming better and better and better. It's uncanny. There's also the ability to sense that sentiment from those calls and not just the words that were used but how they were said.

Of course, using professional services terms, if a customer has established a mutual action plan such that on a PS kickoff call, we identify a customer's billable utilization, they want to increase it by 6%. They've said that; we acknowledge that, we copy it down, and we share on a screen an actual mutual action plan. Meaning, as a customer, I'm committing to doing this, as a service provider, I'm going to commit to doing this, and we're going to revisit this in three months.

When you can show them that their billable utilization improved by three percentage points, four percentage points, or maybe even surpass their target completely and that up to ten, there's data right there that transcends the persona. Meaning, if the economic buyer that set that goal of 6% is no longer there, you at least have the data to showcase where they were and where they are now. That's a pretty compelling place to start.

The key thing that teams can do right now, though, is making sure that information is captured in a centralized system using call recordings, and manual entry that you avoid slide decks living on someone's computer drive that they need to be in your CRM, ideally a Salesforce or HubSpot, such that it's on a holistic location at the contact level and at the account level.

Starting with that, that's great, such that then your PS team or your onboarding team can see that information. That's an investment. That's a cost. There's beauty in the Kantata-Salesforce connector, making sure that you have that visibility of the pertinent data because the PS team doesn't need everything. They just need to know the basics like what were their targets and goals. Why? Who are the key champions? Is there a critical date upcoming? Do they have a upcoming board meeting or fiscal year end that they have to make sure their books are going to be ticking and tying out? Maybe they're going through a merger acquisition.

There are key things that that team needs to know. Can they be ingested to meet the needs of the PS team where the PS team is? Further downstream, right? When I was at Kantata Mavenlink, we also had a connector built into Gainsight such that I could pull now Mavenlink data into Gainsight so I could see what the PS team was doing. I could log in to Mavenlink properly, but I didn't need to because I pulled in the data that I needed to look at the account holistically from that side. Centralize repository that now has data legs, if you will, that can be consumed downstream.

In terms of the dynamic aspect of business changing, the grassroots element is something as simple as leveraging features like Gainsight, they have sponsor tracking. What that means is you're enabling a LinkedIn connection to a contact level record and if their job title changes or their company changes, you get an alert.

It is a little bit of a lagging indicator, but it's a tool that's helpful because a CS person can't monitor all contacts across all customers at all times. You could see early that there may be risk there. My contact is just left. There are other things that are grassroots, like Google Alerts and subscribing to those different feeds, and at the onset of establishing a new customer relationship, establishing those Google Alerts such that you can see what's going on in their industry, in their sector.

A story I tell a lot that is important because it was painful, and a key learning for me in my career was how BuzzFeed was a customer of ours years back. Based off of our system health scores at the time, they were 92% healthy. That meant there's a 92% success rate of them signing their contract renewal later that fall. I did my executive onsite lunch with the West Coast general manager of that studio and had a great lunch. At lunch they basically broke up with us. They said, "We love you, but we are having financial hardship, and we're closing our LA office." That was 50% of our license count that they had to subscribe to.

I hadn't personally taken the time to do any industry research and realized that AdTech and MarTech and that whole space was taking a beating, and that that could have been some risk. Had I had a little bit more wherewithal and done a little more research and tapped into that a little bit more, I might have had some more insight that I lacked previously.

Democratization of data and doing your best to make sure that you have different data sources to keep it updated are pretty key to enabling your team on what to do with that information and making sure that they're empowered to take action accordingly. If they're something that's risen. It's one thing for a client-facing team member to possess that knowledge, but is there a channel with which they can escalate it and get the support that they need to potentially save an account if there's a significant feature request that's being driven by a new regulatory or compliance announcement that's come out of everyone?

GDPR was first announced. There was a whole level of work that we had to do across not only our core product but all of our 50-plus connectors. All of those were different vendors with whom we had to work, and it was a big project that was all hands-on deck. Even though I wasn't literally in engineering, it didn't matter because now I also had to go through change management with my team, our customers, and so on and so forth.

There's no quite easy silver bullet on this particular topic yet. However, the way to bridge those gaps is at least to start by getting it in a centralized location, making sure that teams can access the information that they need, where they need to, do they know how to use that information, and are they empowered to do so.

Banoo Behboodi: I would imagine that we live in a world of excess information and technology. There are a lot of technology options. The key becomes to make sure that companies are very clear on the purpose of the technology is serving, which system is serving as a system of source for what, and that everyone understands the governance around the kind of data and data access because otherwise, it can be very confusing as well, because you can very easily get overwhelmed by too much data, not know what to do with it. How would you say how to mitigate that? How do you reach that balance?

Sabina Pons: You said the word that was on my mind, which is governance. I think of it like you have to go slow to go fast, right? Allocating the time to do the spring cleaning, ensuring that you're at least annually evaluating data objects across internal tools. For example, a unique customer identifier. An ID that persists across the whole journey. Thinking about it like oceanographers and marine biologists, they'll tag mammals and track their migration patterns around the Earth. We need to be able to do that with our customers.

The idea of having a data object that represents Sabina Pons at onboarding and my engagement with a podcast, my engagement at customer event, maybe I referred someone and etc. I need to be able to see that and, obviously, my system behavior. How many projects have I created, and how many budgets have I assigned to those projects? Have I brought in a ton of subcontractors or a workforce? I need to know all those things if I'm a service provider.

The best approach to be mindful, I think, of that is, as I mentioned, going slow, taking the time to pause in the midst of craziness, and look at those data objects, and making sure that there's control, that different departments aren't creating new ones, and knowing the 80-20 rule is going to have to suffice not every single thing to start. If you're starting from scratch at some sort of an initiative. Not every single data object is going to be captured.

Let's agree and start with the main ten. What are the ten key attributes across the company that are non-negotiables? These fields have to be signed off on by a special select committee. This is the data dictionary, here's what they mean, and we're not changing anything unless we all come back together as a committee and change that and starting something simple like that.

Then, you can iterate over time, but it gets overwhelming. Aim small to miss small is what I had a former colleague tell me. I thought it was really negative, but I believe that it does actually get you to think about taking the time, carving it out, focusing, doing a spring cleaning, starting small, and then iterating from there. That's going to be better than where most companies are today.

Banoo Behboodi: For those customers and for those that are listening and want to do an assessment of their approach and whether their approach is prone to customer-centric experience along the entire journey, where would you say that they need to start looking and assessing the current state and what are some of the steps they need to take along that path to get to target?

Sabina Pons: I believe that something as simple as a quick pulse check to inspect what you expect, meaning as a leader in the organization, theoretically, let's say, you're a chief customer officer, should theoretically be able to ask a PS resource, a team member managing, not even an implementation, but maybe it's an optimization or an add on body of work.

They should be able to ask about key dimensions of that particular customer. I'd say spot-check then with the corresponding account manager and CSM that are on that same account and see if they come up with the same answers. Just a quick: it takes five seconds to send a quick Slack message, do a quick mini unofficial, not tech-savvy investigation, and see what the answers come back with.

Conversely, as a leader, can you quickly see the information that you need to? If you're going in on a client call, you're the executive sponsor, and you're participating in an executive business review, or more ad hoc check-in, so to speak. Do you have the information that you need right now to be able to have that call? You don't want to walk into a fire. You don't want to find out they've had a feature request that's been non-dispositioned for six months or a P1 SEV 1 support blocker that they can't close their books for the end of the month. You need to know what's going on. Those are the more reactive. Proactively, again, what's going on in their industry? If you can't quickly get that information, that's a first big warning sign that some work needs to be done.

Banoo Behboodi: Awesome. I want to direct our conversation to your book because I have to tell you, I think I've already shared with the listeners that I have three daughters, Gen Z daughters that are out there also looking to start their careers.

I was in the car with one of my daughters driving to a location for a few hours, and we listened to your book, and I loved it. It really resonated. It was fantastic that you had gone and interviewed. It was just basically living through other people's experiences and a lot of "Aha, yes." I've been out there for a while and have had to build my career. It resonated so strongly.

To have my daughter and have that conversation with her, who is a completely new generation, faces some of the challenges that were discussed in the book and then others that are not. Thank you. It was a great book. It was a great experience. Tell us a little bit more about why you took on to write, pressing on as a tech mom and that experience. I know you partner with your partner, Emilia.

Sabina Pons: It was in conversation with her realizing that we had gone through a lot of the same things, and a lot of my other peers in the industry as moms in tech, we all were at this unique time where it was getting a lot better and hadn't quite yet got to where we needed it to be. It still isn't there yet, but it's definitely getting better.

We decided that we wanted to capture that information, share our own stories, and give way to the many other remarkable insights from strong women around the world that we got to interview. We also really wanted to create a book that was positive because there are awesome books out there that do showcase some of the travesties that have occurred.

Emily Chang's Brotopia. When I first heard her speak on stage in 2018 and read her book afterward, I thought that I had experienced some hardship, and I knew nothing compared to what she had reported as a reporter about Silicon Valley and some of the things that were happening in the early 2000s, mid-2000s.

We wanted to take those facts. We did have to talk about the reality and some of the statistics that have come out in recent research reports over the last three to four years. That was our level setting: explain what's going on, where we've been, where we are, and where we think things are going, and then dive into the stories of the women who had or currently are going through unique challenges of things of maybe, infertility, how how do you cope with that while you're leading large global teams, or how do you manage the lifestyle as a traveling working mom of twins, or someone who is a lesbian and gets criticized for her appearance and is treated low like one of the guys, but then becomes a mom and has to start leaving earlier in the day to pick up kids from school and is no longer given the same upward mobility opportunities and is notably treated more differently at large tax audit firm.

It was really interesting. They did share along each of their journeys what was most meaningful for them in terms of support, that community of supporting one another, being there for one another, and how they would do it all over again because they're so passionate about their career, and also being able to also be a mom that you can do both. It's not always pretty, but you can do both.

Banoo Behboodi: You obviously are a mom yourself. I think you have two or three.

Sabina Pons: I have two, and then the dog and the husband.

Banoo Behboodi: You can count them as you wish. Again, it spoke loudly to myself; it was great to share that with my daughter. I'm just curious: you wrote it during Covid, did you?

Sabina Pons: Yes. We started writing at the tail end of 2020 and wrote in 2021. It is very much still a strange transitional back-to-life phase, and it launched in April of 2022 on Amazon.

Banoo Behboodi: I'm just curious about what you think now that we're post-Covid, it seems to me, and I have no science to back this up or data, but it seems like there is more flexibility for moms just generally post-Covid just because of some things that naturally happened as a result of Covid. I'm just curious about your sense of that now that we're post-COVID, and you wrote the book really during the Covid era.

Sabina Pons: It has improved in many pockets across the industry. There are others where it has not and where return to office is still very prevalent. Salesforce today just announced they're requiring three days a week back in the San Francisco office. I think that affects parents, not just mothers, and we can do a better job.

We still see stats that show when women become of age to have children or have a child, that their upward mobility and their desire to continue to grow in their career is there, but logistically it's challenging. Childcare is very expensive. Summer break, no one prepared me for understanding that I'm spending thousands of dollars in the summer so that my children are not playing video games and eating cheese puffs all day. They have to be engaged, stimulated, and cared for while I work and my husband works.

That is not getting any less expensive, and therefore, it's not accessible to many, and families have to choose. Sometimes, that choice means moving to a less expensive locale so one of the two of the parents can forego work to take care of the children. There's got to be quite a few things I think that change overall in society for those fixes, and that's not unique to tech.

Within tech, I'm really proud to see a lot of my customers that I get to work with, doing such an amazing job at taking care of their employees and allowing that flexible work location and flexible schedules, and are really being measured by the output of their work and treating them like adults, get the work done when it needs to be done with the time sensitivity. We support you and enable you in that. If that's not cut out for you, then we'll find someone else who can. I think that's reasonable. That is business at the end of the day.

Banoo Behboodi: That's perfect. Let's go to the last topic, which is if you can share with us a mentor that's been influential in your life and, as a result, you are where you are and what made it so effective.

Sabina Pons: The thing that was really interesting in the book, along with the research that we did, was that most of the women reported not having a mentor or a sponsor. Of course, the difference is that a mentor is someone with whom you share your beliefs, morals, and values; they can typically be a sounding board and someone who can champion your efforts, whereas a sponsor is someone who is actually in the room making decisions about your future in your career. It could be your boss, it could be another leader in the organization helping to get you that promotion, helping to get you that pay increase. Both are incredibly important.

I've been honored to have both in one person from time to time. There's two that stand out to me, one earlier in my career and one more recently, who I would still consider a mentor. The first is a woman named Jodie, and she's actually in her book. she saw something in me when I was working at Guthy-Renker in a completely different division. We got to come together on a large companywide project, and it gave me the chance to move into her organization. In that process, I saw what my income was and identified that I was significantly under market. It gave me a $40,000 raise and gave me this great division, this new division.

I got to help build and oversee and she was my sounding board. She taught me how to write a really strong statement of work. She had come from PwC, Mattel, and all these large, awesome companies. She really had been through her own years of training, imparted a lot of that on me, and did it in a way that was positive and collaborative. I never felt small, or she was ever condescending. It was uplifting; I was hungry for more, and it just jive. The way she communicated, the way she led by example. She was fierce but kind and inspirational. I told her many times publicly on podcasts and in her book. I'm really thankful.

The second person that really shaped me and helped me was actually the person who hired me at Mavenlink, Chris Scalia, the former chief customer officer. He has a career of over 30 years in professional services and started back at Arthur Andersen, Accenture. He had that very formal training, but also was a collegiate athlete and played ice hockey. He's also scrappy, strong, and resilient. The kindest person I've ever worked for.

I was in my role for four months, just accepted to help completely take over renewals at Mavenlink, helped build a team, and it was this whole new mission to really grow our recurring revenue numbers, our retention numbers. I unexpectedly found myself pregnant with my second child. I was so nervous to go to his office and tell him. He says, "Well, Sabina, you know how babies are made, right?" I said, "Yes, of course." I was also really embarrassed, but didn't expect that answer. He had medical help with my son, my first when I got pregnant. I didn't think I could do it without that assistance the second time. Yes, it's a surprise. That broke the ice of the conversation, just like I am now. I was blushing a little bit.

He said, "Sabina, I have kids. I've been through this. I understand these things happen, and I'm excited for you, and we're going to work through this together, and your job is not at risk." Of course, I knew legally I had job protection, but that doesn't mean it was going to be welcome. That was the first big bonding moment. I thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm so lucky to have this man as my boss." That was great.

All along the five years, we got to work together and build out our team in Melbourne, London, Cebu, Philippines, and all these offices across the US; we went through the wringer together, and all the hiring things that happened and client wins and successes together. He taught me how the resilience of an athlete can come into play professionally, how to be really resourceful, and how to leverage what you've got. Sometimes, we didn't get the budget; it took me 18 months to get the budget that I needed to invest in a major software tool for my team. I had to prove it to the board. I mean, I literally had to to ask for that. It was new for the company. It was a new level of maturity for the company.

That thick skin and that rigor, but in the meantime, let's use what you have. Let's be resourceful and figure out how can we leverage a little bit of Salesforce, a little bit of Google Sheets, a lot of creativity, some bubble gum, some matchsticks, let's make this happen and some of those numbers, and we did. I was so proud and honored for my team of 100 to have the highest eNPS scores in the company that really came from him. Yes, it was a customer success division, but I had someone who inspired me, so I could inspire my team.

He's a great leader both professionally, personally and continue to support me, nurture my career while I was very pregnant, while I came back from that leave and still gave me a seat at the table, still gave me the chance to speak at industry conferences and really drive our numbers. We increase together our gross dollar renewal rate by over 20% in that five-year time. It was a really great working relationship. We still meet for sushi every few months and stay in touch.

Banoo Behboodi: Well, Sabina, I have to say thank you. Thank you so much for making the time to be with me. It's been a privilege to finally meet you. As I said, you're a legend at Mavenlink, now Kantata. To have the opportunity to interview you and share your knowledge and expertise and even more exciting is the fact that you've offered generously a free 55-minute consulting session for the first listener that reaches out and emails us at podcast@kantata.com. Listeners, please reach out, email us. As always, I want to thank everyone for being with us. We appreciate you taking the time to listen to the podcast and always welcome any feedback you have and any questions or suggestions through podcasts@kantata.com. Sabina, thank you for being with us and hope to stay connected.

Sabina Pons: Thank you.

Brent Trimble: If you enjoyed this podcast, let us know by giving the show a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a comment. If you haven't already subscribed to the show, you could do so anywhere you get podcasts on any podcast app. To learn more about the power of Kantata's purpose-built technology, go to kantata.com. Thanks again for listening.