Building a Customer Success Organization in a Startup

Stephanie Berner is a Customer Success Executive at LinkedIn. Since 2018, Stephanie has spearheaded all post-sales functions at LinkedIn Sales Solutions through its period of rapid growth. With a background in building and scaling customer success teams at Box, Medallia, and Opower, Stephanie has extensive experience in delivering exceptional customer experiences across various company stages.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• Common customer success mistakes
• Creating a world-class customer success org
• Tactics for hiring exceptional talent
• How to structure compensation packages
• Where customer success fits into the wider org
• Key early-stage customer success metrics and rituals
• Successful strategies from Box, Medallia, and LinkedIn

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Referenced:

• Aaron Levie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boxaaron/
• Box: https://www.box.com/
• David Love: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-s-love/
• Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/
• Jon Herstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonherstein/
• Jonathan Lister: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanlister/
• Ken Fine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmfine/
• Medallia: https://www.medallia.com/
• Nick Mehta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/
• Opower: https://www.oracle.com/utilities/opower-energy-efficiency/

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Where to find Stephanie Berner:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanieberner/

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Where to find Brett Berson:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

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Where to find First Round Capital:

• Website: https://firstround.com/
• First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
• This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:21) Formalizing customer success at a startup

(05:01) Hiring ICs before CSMs

(06:22) Tactics for hiring standout talent

(11:39) 3 questions to ask candidates

(15:38) Fail-case patterns among customer success hires

(17:49) Considering candidates with non-traditional backgrounds

(21:21) Indexing toward a bias for action

(24:17) What v1 of customer success looks like

(26:03) Key early-stage customer success metrics

(28:21) Whether customer success or sales should own renewals

(30:40) Where customer success fits into the org

(32:14) Why customer success doesn’t report to an executive

(33:48) Distinguishing a product problem from a customer success one

(35:18) Simple way to deal with customer churn

(39:21) Tactics to get customers to give honest feedback

(40:58) What happens when customer success and product teams collaborate

(44:14) Rituals for zero-to-one customer success

(48:23) How to structure an early customer success team

(52:01) Structuring compensation packages

(54:35) Aligning customer success with the business model

(60:14) The role of customer success in B2B software

(62:17) Common customer success mistakes

(67:44) People who had an outsized impact on Stephanie