A Customer Success Q&A With Marketo's CCO

A conversation with Matthew Zilli, CCO, Marketo

Marketo is a household name for anyone in the software or marketing automation worlds. Founded in 2006, the SaaS company went public in 2013 before going private thanks to a $1.79 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners. Software Executive magazine and SoftwareBusinessGrowth.com sat down with Marketo’s CCO Matthew Zilli, who was formerly the company’s interim CMO, to get his take on customer success and how he is ensuring this function continues to help the company grow.

SoftEx/SBG: There’s really no one-size-fits-all definition of customer success. What is your personal definition for customer success?

Zilli: I think customer success really, for any company, is about helping and accelerating our customers in achieving their goals. In our case, those goals could be growth or efficiency or anything in between. But for us, it really is making our customer successful, and that can only be done through the lens of what our customers are trying to do. It’s helping them hit their goals, and then of course a piece of it is making sure they understand how we’re helping them do that along the way. It is about accelerating the way our customers are achieving their goals.

SoftEx/SBG: Align that with Marketo’s current stance on customer success. What would you say Marketo’s definition of customer success is and how would you say it’s evolved over the years?

Zilli: The two definitions are pretty well aligned. I think honestly, a few years ago, customer success for us was getting our customers to renew. That really is an indicator, but it’s still more centered on our success than it was really on our customers’ success. The biggest evolution and change we’ve gone through in recent years has been investing in the resources and the offerings to truly help our customers achieve their goals.

Really, every year, the definition I just gave you and the way Marketo is evolving, they come closer and closer together because, three years ago, they weren’t really aligned. It was more about account management more so than true customer success. That’s changed pretty radically in the last couple of years.

SoftEx/SBG: What does your client base consider customer success to look like? Does customer success look different from one Marketo client to the next?

Zilli: This is what has fueled so much of the discussion and debate we’ve had for years. The reason is that our customer base is incredibly diverse. They’re diverse in terms of size of company. We work with many small companies and also the largest of large organizations. They’re diverse, geographically. It might be a tech startup in the Bay area versus a conglomerate in Germany. They’re diverse in terms of what they’re trying to do. They might be going through some large, crazy digital transformation initiative that is company-wide, or, on the other hand, they could be a company that’s had a marketing automation platform in place for years, and they’re just looking to get to the next level of their evolution, because they’re already on the bleeding edge.

All of this diversity leads inevitably to the conclusion that customer success does vary pretty widely, based on what our customers are trying to do. We’ve tried to get a lot better about not assuming we know what they’re trying to do. Instead we try to really capture what their goals are, even during the sales process before they’re a customer of ours. Then, we use those goals as the guiding light through their entire customer experience.

On the one hand, we have customers who are just looking for a platform, they know what they’re doing. They’ll look to us to check in with them occasionally, but they’re not looking for a lot of guidance, because they just know what their goals are. They’ve quantified them, they’re really just trying to execute on them. We can help them there as well, but it’s not nearly the degree of help needed by a customer that might be a really large, complex organization, investing millions of dollars in that digital transformation, for example. They need a lot more guidance from us than maybe the other end of the spectrum.

We try and align our resources to that as best we can, based on the intersection of their goals and how complex their goals are. When we do that successfully, it allows us to make the right level of investment for every customer, so that every customer feels like we’re helping them get to success. That’s really the goal, is not to over-invest in some areas, and under-invest in others, but really to align top to bottom, so that every customer feels like we’re helping them be successful.

SoftEx/SBG: What does it really mean to “understand” your customer in the eyes of your customer success team?

Zilli: Most companies these days would probably be able to point to an absurd amount of data that they have about their customers. Data is a start, but it is a little bit different from actually understanding the customer. I’d say for us, as a software company that can understand a lot of what our customers are doing with our products – what’s working, what’s not – we can put together some of the pieces and see what they’re trying to accomplish.

When we can then intersect that with what we hear from a direct one-to-one conversation between a salesperson and a customer or a CSM and a customer, we can create this really clear picture of what every customer is trying to do. What we’ve spent a lot of time doing is investing in new systems or leveraging our existing systems to bring together all the data in a way that can be operationalized. Worldwide, we’ve got a team of almost 80 customer success managers, so that’s 80 people we need to make sure deeply understand each of their customers.

SoftEx/SBG: What are your expectations of your Customer Success Managers?

Zilli: The number one expectation is that our customer success managers put themselves in the customer’s shoes. It seems like such an easy thing sometimes, but it can also be really hard when we all get busy or there’s some fire we’re trying to put out. When they do that, every conversation after that is easy.

I’ll give you examples of where this can get really hard. You might have a customer who maybe hasn’t paid their bill or they’ve used all of the capacity they’ve purchased from us, and we have to have a hard conversation with them around why they’re outside the limits of the contract. When a customer success manager goes in an exploratory way, with empathy and understanding of what that customer is going through, that conversation is ten times easier than it is if we were to send an email that said, ‘You’re over the limits that you’ve contracted for. We’re shutting you off.’

Frankly, there was a time when that was more the approach that we would have taken, because we thought, as a software company, it was up to our customers to manage that on their side. If they blew through it, it wasn’t really our fault and so on. But that’s just not the reality these days. The number one thing that our customer success managers have to start with is that willingness to go and have a positive exploratory conversation to understand the situations our customers are in, because it makes everything else easier.

SoftEx/SBG: What advice do you have for growing a team of Customer Success Managers?

Zilli: We’ve grown our team over time. We like to hire a lot of people for our team who are right out of college, and we try and train them and grow them into these roles. But as you can imagine, a brand new college hire is going to take some time before they’re ready to interact with customers. Then of course it takes more time before they’re ready to interact with more and more sophisticated customers. We make sure they’re learning the function of marketing and what our marketers go through on a daily basis, in addition to our processes and so on.

But really, the best CSMs are the ones that can go and hold their own with a CMO at one of our customers, have a debate about marketing strategy, and then have that all align with how Marketo is supporting them. It takes years to do that and to build up to that level, and so that’s certainly the expectation, and our goal is to grow people there over time.