We spoke last week with former-Rattle-user-now-Rattle-user-AND-employee Aakanksha about how she uses her favorite-est SaaS product (hint: it’s Rattle) to lead her team of SDRs here.
It’s only fitting, this week, to bring in another former-Rattler-lover-and-now-Rattle-convert to our series.
Meet Jesse, our Head of Customer Success.
Wait, you’re saying, Customer Success uses Rattle ,too?
Believe it or not: We explicitly point comms at Revenue teams — not just Sales teams — for the very reason that CS is a major, major beneficiary of Rattle use!
But don't take it from me!
Every day, Jesse brings her refreshingly positive demeanor and crisp communication style to Rattle, so in a way, she was the perfect person to talk (at-length, even!) about how Rattle helps her do more with less (no doubt, an all-too-common story in the world of CS, these days).
Enjoy!
Let’s start with something easy: where you’re coming to us from.
I was at a rapidly scaling organization. I joined to start their customer success team and I was tasked with building an entire team of about 30 folks in six months. The reason I was introduced to Rattle was that, during that rapidly scaling period, my team was never onboarded to Salesforce. We didn't use Salesforce for anything. We communicated with our customers through email and internally via Slack. But somewhere in that period, the need for a process emerged for us to start using Salesforce Cases.
No big deal, just onboard these THIRTY PEOPLE to THIS OPAQUE SOFTWARE.
Right. I was terrified of the enablement burden to get 30 folks who had varying degrees of familiarity with Salesforce onboarded into Salesforce and onboarded into this new process. We said immediately: is there any way we can keep these folks out of Salesforce? And Rattle was the answer.
So clearly it went well? Well enough that you thought of us?
I was enamored with Rattle right away. It just solved such an acute pain for me, of having to onboard these folks quickly. It got this process up and running very quickly and had a positive impact internally for our team members, for the teams we were supporting, and also for customers. So when I saw that Rattle was hiring, I was like, sign me up. That's a product that I believe in.
Important in your line of work, no doubt?
I think when you're in Customer Success, feeling at your core that the solution you're helping customers use will deliver value... That's the dream job. It makes your job easy and fun.
So what was your first order of business AT Rattle, with this whole new world at your feet, new product that you loved?
The first thing we did that was really impactful was leveraging Deal Rooms. Our sales team was already using deal rooms during the sales process, to track the progression of deals and collaborate as needed as deals evolved. But adding customer success into that deal room before a deal closed was really crucial to help me have a smooth handoff with our sales team.
What kinds of information were you becoming privy to?
Before an opportunity even closed, I could see the whole history of that sales process, who was involved, what their pains were, what they got excited about, what they said wasn't necessary, who the decision makers were.
Were there any changes to better help you with your own CS style?
We just rolled out a new Rattle where there are just some basic pieces of information that are really helpful for Rattle CSMs to know when we're onboarding the customer. For example, who's our primary point of contact? We have a field for that in Salesforce, but it gets intermittently completed. So we've created a Rattle when a deal moves to closed won. We surface these core pieces of information then, via Rattle we're like, “Hey, does this look right? If not, please update, AE.” So that all goes to the deal room just to make sure the foundational information is complete.
But I imagine it goes the other way too, right? Asking questions late in the game means they’ll ask them early in the game too.
Oh absolutely. CSMs spend more time with customers than our AEs - our sales team gets a finite period of time with customers, so when the CSM asks the AE on a deal questions, they start to wonder, “why does that matter in the customer journey?”. So our presence in Deal Rooms has also helped the sales team ask some better questions to set that customer up for success during the trial or during their relationship with us.
What’s also interesting about that, is when an SDR or AE asks really good questions that can be helpful to selling, right?
I think there’s a really nice feedback loop between customer success and sales that we create in Deal Rooms. When a customer gets to us [in CS] and they’re already live with core use cases because the SDRs and AEs are armed with what questions to ask to identify that pain knowledge then, that’s when it gets really interesting and exciting. It's like, okay, you've got the basics. Let's get into the really complex problems or let's start looking outside of your immediate purview and see, where are the handoffs happening? How can we surface more information, to the right people, at the right time and give them the ability to act on that information? Once we’ve solved the customer’s immediate pains, going one degree of separation from that can uncover some really interesting use cases.
And more use cases mean less churn typically.
Ideally, yeah.
So let’s pivot and talk about not just how it works for customers, but how it works for you.
The Rattle that we use most often is the Meeting DM.
Not one I would have expected!
In Customer Success, we're on multiple customer calls every day. Our customer meeting cadences go anywhere from weekly for some of our newer customers to monthly or quarterly for some of our more mature customers. It's really crucial for us to be able to capture what we talked about in the call, what were our next steps, what were the actions items, what were the topics that came up that we didn’t get to cover. We don’t just use the Meeting DMs though, we also use the auto-create contact feature. As new stakeholders in our customer’s organization join calls to talk about their pains, their use cases, we automatically capture those folks in Salesforce, which is really beneficial for us and especially because we're often back-to-back calls.
I’d imagine it gets wild.
Remembering to go add that person to Salesforce? It would never get done. The fact that it is automated is awesome. Oh and the Log a Call feature is fantastic.
How does your CS team use that?
From the Meeting DM, we can log our call notes. It’s really useful. We actually push those to the Deal Room. We log our call notes, it posts in the Deal Room, so everyone related to that account can see what just happened on our call. Queue more collaboration and learning! We also have a channel that is customer call notes where all of our customer call notes post as well.
I notice you said “It posts there” and not “I have to post it there.”
Important distinction! Another case where the onus is not on us to remember to do a task. We log the call once and it posts in all the places we as a team have determined are relevant. This is helpful because if we have a monthly cadence with a customer when we're prepping for that next call, being able to go back and review, OK, what did we talk about last time? Or even just following up, creating tasks off of that call, having those notes at the end of the day to be able to not have to try to jog your memory about what you talked about on your 9 a.m. call is really, really helpful. So I would say that's the feature we leverage most — Meeting DM with Log a Call and Auto-Create Contact.
Fantastic… So last line of questioning. You currently run a team of three. Tell me to me a little bit about how Rattle helps you do that.
We have a very people-focused approach to Customer Success here. We want to make the people we work with successful and that requires deep knowledge of their business, their motivations, their personal goals, and about them personally, too. e try to deeply understand and build partnerships with our customers. Rattle unburdens us from some of the routine things that you have to keep track of that take up a lot of mental space or time.
Examples?
Like reminding us that a renewal's coming, giving us the full history of the sales cylce, or by giving us a way to quickly log call notes or go find those call notes when the next call is upcoming. Rattle allows us to spend more time thinking creatively about, oh, the last time we talked they told us about this pain point and since we last met, I talked to another customer who had a similar problem and solved it in a really cool way. So let me make sure that I share that with this customer.
So as an expert you get to be… an expert.
I think that’s really the story. If you can automate some of the routine work and have information surfaced to you when it is relevant, it frees up your time to be thinking longer term, more strategic, more proactive for your customers. So it allows you to actually do customer success work.
What a dream!
Yes. I think for all of us — SDRs, AEs, customer success, solutions engineers, whatever the team is — we're all managing more things than you can do in a day, in a week. If you can automate away the mundane tasks, it really helps us all be better at our jobs.
