The Customer Success Pro Podcast
This is The Customer Success Pro Podcast, hosted by Anika Zubair. Customer Success is not a destination, but a a journey. Join me on this crazy CS journey as I chat to leaders, strategists and experts in customer success about their experiences and definitions of customer success and share with your their best practices on how to build and scale world class CS organization. Each interview will unlock tips, tricks and best practices to help scale your customer success career and company. I will dive into important and relevant topics to help spread knowledge about customer success in order to help companies put the customer at the center of their business. Because at the end of the day when customer are successful, so is the company.
Learn more at: thecustomersuccesspro.com
The Customer Success Pro Podcast
How to Use Segmentation to Drive Value, Retention and Efficiency with Kelley Turner
Signup for the FREE Masterclass: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/masterclass
In this episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast, host Anika Zuber and guest Kelley Turner, SVP of Global Customer Success at Vitally, discuss the critical role of customer segmentation in driving effective customer success strategies. They explore the importance of understanding customer needs, the balance between automation and personalization, and how AI can enhance segmentation efforts. Kelley shares her unique background in finance and how it informs her approach to customer success, emphasizing the need for curiosity and engagement in building strong customer relationships. The conversation also touches on measuring success in customer success initiatives and the evolving landscape of customer engagement.
#customersuccessmanager #podcast #revenuegrowth
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:54 The Importance of Customer Segmentation
05:57 Kelley Turner's Background and Role at Vitally
08:48 Understanding Customer Success at Vitally
14:51 The Role of Curiosity in Customer Success
18:01 Operational vs. Service Segmentation
20:51 Creative Segmentation Strategies
23:54 Impact of Segmentation on Customer Outcomes
27:06 Balancing Automation and Personalization
29:59 Measuring Success in Segmentation
32:59 Future of Segmentation and AI in Customer Success
36:06 Quick Fire Round with Kelley Turner
Connect with Anika Zubair:
Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/
CSM RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revup
Connect with Kelley Turner:
Email: kelley@vitally.io
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelleyturner/
Kelley Turner is a seasoned leader in Customer Success, currently serving as SVP of Global Customer Success at Vitally. With a career spanning across multiple industries, Kelley is known for building high-performing teams that deliver measurable value and lasting customer partnerships. At Vitally, she leads the full post-sale experience—spanning onboarding, support, education, and CSM teams —to drive retention, expansion, and strategic impact across the customer base.
Prior to Vitally, Kelley held executive roles at Iterable, Guild Education, and Kapost, where she managed portfolios exceeding $200M ARR, built customer success functions from the ground up, and championed initiatives around DEI and employee development. Whether scaling customer teams, driving retention, or mentoring future leaders, Kelley is driven by the belief that customer success is everyone’s business.
Want to be our next guest? Apply here: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest
Podcast Editor: https://podcastmagician.com/
Speaker 1 (00:00.578)
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Speaker 1 (01:27.158)
and you start owning your impact. Go to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash rev up. I look forward to seeing you inside the Academy. Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice and actual insights in the world of customer success.
I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach, and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams. So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey.
and I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years. And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. And let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.
Speaker 1 (02:59.704)
Welcome back. Today we're diving into a topic that's foundational for driving both scale and personalization in your CS strategy, and that's customer segmentation. Now, if you've ever looked at your book of business and thought, where do I even start? Or how do I engage with these customers that actually land? Well, then this episode is for you. We're talking all about the art and the science of segmentation and the different ways to cohort your customers.
and more importantly, how to get creative in how you engage with them. So whether you're managing a high touch enterprise segment or running a digital led program or maybe something in between, this conversation will give you fresh ideas and tactical takeaways. And I couldn't think of a better guest to bring on for this conversation than Kelly Turner. Kelly is the SVP of global customer success at Vitaly.
where she leads the full post sales experience covering onboarding, support, education, and CSM teams. Her leadership has driven measurable value, retention, and strategic impact across a global customer base. And before Vitaly, Kelly held executive CS roles at Iterable, Guild Education, and Kapost, managing portfolios worth over $200 million in ARR and building CS teams from the ground up.
She's a builder, a mentor, and a firm believer that customer success is everyone's business. And today, she's here to share how segmentation can transform your CS strategy and unlock more value from your customers and ultimately help you drive outcomes without always needing more headcount. So let's dive into the conversation. So welcome, Kelly, to the...
podcast. I am very honored, excited, and just ready to have this conversation with you. But before we get into the juicy and very important topic of segmentation today, I would love to hear in your own words a little bit about who you are, how you started at Vitaly, kind of what your role is. Give us a little bit of background into who you are. Absolutely. Well, thank you for bringing me
Speaker 2 (05:05.358)
Thank you for having me the podcast. I, was excited to get on the conversation. So my name is Kelly Turner. I serve as the SVP of global customers, Successed! Vitally! Vitally! for anyone who may not know is a customer success plan platform or CSP. And so we work with CS teams all around the world in terms of how to have a clear and understandable view of your customers, how to engage in specifically scale. I would say that's a place where we spend a lot of time.
is how do you use and deploy your folks and your teams in the places that are most impactful with customers? And then how do you use really excellent automation, things like playbooks and calculations to be able to say, where can I know most about my customer to engage best? And a lot more AI coming in that space too. So things that were assumed to be manual or even just assumed to be one size fits all automated, there's gonna be a lot of changes in that. I think we're seeing it across the board and
I'm really excited to see CS find its own way in the AI space. What makes AI most effective for CS? There's such good models already, I think, in terms of where we're seeing it in sales and leads in marketing. But I think CS is still figuring out the best and sweetest spot for us with AI. A little context on me. So I've led customer success at a variety of organizations across ed tech, a long time in marketing and marketing operations as well.
And I came into CS from a probably less traditional source. I was a finance person. I was a financial analyst and went all the way to becoming the controller of a multinational corporation. I had the opportunity to, we had subsidiaries in India as well as the US. I had to fly to India to physically stamp the books with the local magistrate, which was great.
Awesome. I've never I've had so many guests, but that's such a unique life experience
Speaker 2 (07:00.832)
It truly was the concept of closing the books. It's so workable when you think about how we do it today, but there was literally a gentleman, he stamped the book, he stamped the page in the book. I signed off on it that this quarter is accurate and correct. And I put my name behind it. And I had continued to grow into finance space. I've always known very early that I exist at the intersection of sort of three points. Number one is analytics. I love data.
And I think most people who continue to love CS and gravitate towards CS, and those who I think really tend to rise well, are those who love some data. Like, what can I truly know about my customer? How can I meet both the intersection of relationship with knowledge? So I knew that was always going to be my foundation. Second was people. I've been a manager from very early in my career. And to me, the opportunity to invest, peers, colleagues, customers.
That's always been sort of, I've known at the end of my career, that's what I'll look back on and will mean the most to me. And then the third part of that triangle is really operation. So how do I make things better for those who are operating? How do I make things more clear, more understandable? I always think about Brene Brown's quote, clear is kind. When people know what is true, they can then be their best creative selves.
and not have to spend as much time trying to understand where they exist in the organism or the ecosystem. And so for me, I had been able to do that in finance, but I knew I was kind of coming to the limits of where I would go more and more just deeper and deeper and deeper into spreadsheets. And so I actually made a wild pivot and I said, hey, this is not where I want to continue while being a CFO is something that is next up for me.
I would rather do something different and I went from being a controller to a frontline CSM.
Speaker 1 (08:53.622)
my gosh, I love that story, Kelly. I think customer success is so cool. I get the honor of meeting so many guests and chatting with so many people from so many wakes of life, so many different backgrounds, but I have never spoken to someone that was basically a finance controller. And how cool that you physically stamped a book and closed it out in the digital world or AI world that we live in now. That's so cool. I love that career. And I think that's so cool about customer success that we have such different backgrounds.
that makes the industry and the community so robust and so interesting. yeah, having a finance background into, yes, that's definitely, I can imagine that being so helpful in so many ways. And I know Vitally really well. I'm actually an ex-customer of Vitally, but I know that your team and your company has really expanded. There's a lot of different remits that your team looks after right now. And people listening to this podcast also have different remits, team sizes.
customers that they work with. Can you tell us a little bit more about kind of what your team is responsible for? What is CS held accountable to? What are you guys doing at Vitaly?
Absolutely. So for me, when I think about customer success, it is the entire customer journey. From the moment someone says, yes, we want to partner with you. Yes, we want to take advantage of your platform to make changes in our own business. That is where CS kicks in. So we have iStart. We have our solutions architecture team, which is very much organized in terms of the foundational structure of Vitaly and our place in the tech stack. I think that's a really important point these days that whenever you think about setting someone up in your platform,
No or very few platforms exist independent of everyone else. And so being able to build up expertise in your team, not just technically on your platform, but technically in where and what are the other tools around you that really help customers set up well and feel like adding you is not a loss or source of friction, but rather just continues to build on what they have in their organization. So that is our Solutions Architecture team.
Speaker 2 (10:57.566)
They also do the most of the delivery for our implementation. I have really built out in the last year a very, I'm very excited about it, enablement program. We have always done a lot with really great on-demand content, whether it is on-demand webinars, whether it is blog posts, et cetera. But I was finding that customers, sometimes it's a hard bridge to
to go over the first time to go, do I integrate with this content? So having more live programmatic offerings at a cohort level has been very successful. Also our CSM group, obviously in terms of our day to day, we have our support and our support engineering team. So really continuing to remove blockers from folks in terms of how they engage with the platform and how it operates in their own tech stack. And then our account management team, which handles more of the post sale commercials.
in terms of how do we continue to drive renewal, engagement, and expansion based on value.
love that. That's a very robust team. And I think it's changed a lot. I've known the Vitality team for a number of years, but also that's really great that everyone is so interweaved to the entire journey, like you said, and just not one pivotal moment or the renewal or just onboarding. is end to end. And I think that's what we're seeing a lot in customer success right now is really thinking about the full experience. And actually I'm seeing a lot more even from
top of funnel integration, from prospects of customers to then the whole customer journey as well. So I love how robust your team is and then what you guys are accountable to. I'm really curious and I like to ask my guests this question because we come from so many different ways of life. Why customer success? You came from finance. Why? What inspired you like of all the things to think about as your next career step? Why customer success?
Speaker 2 (12:51.224)
I already sort of knew where my best intersections were in terms of people, data, and operations. But it was interesting as I got higher and higher in finance, I spent all of my time on what I call the donut, which was the first half of the donut is predicting what I thought would happen in the business. So how could I take really build and take really extensive modeling to say this is where I think our revenue will be, this is how I think we're gonna need to grow our investments. So I would predict and then,
The other half of the doughnut, I would reconcile. So whether it was truly reconciling very specific general ledger accounts or reporting back to other leaders in the board, this is how we perform versus expectations. These are the things that surprised us or didn't turn out as we had previously expected. There was a lot of that. But you know what was it in the doughnut? Actually changing the way the business operated and the outcome. And so for me, I felt very grounded in both
understanding the business enough to predict and then reconciling it, but I wanted to be in the middle. I wanted to actually be engaging with customers. I wanted to actually be delivering the things, whether it was platform or services or partnership that actually made people want to spend their time, money and effort with us. And that's why I made the jump because to me, CS is the center of that donut. It is absolutely the core of
How do we ensure customers are seeing measurable, growing, and recognizable value? And I wanted to be in the middle.
love that. That's also so interesting because a lot of people who work outside of customer facing roles like to just be in the data or in the weeds of everything that runs a business rather than, oh, okay, we'll let someone else deal with speaking to people. But it's interesting that you saw the gap or the middle of the donut as your analogy puts it. But it's interesting that you saw that and you're like, well, I want to know what's going on there. And I think something that as I speak to more and more CS professional leaders, you name it, the
Speaker 1 (14:56.238)
skill or trait of curiosity. And I think that's underlying across all of us because we're so curious or hungry for more or wanting to fill in the hole or the gap and trying to figure all that out. And it sounds like that's where your true calling came from. It's like, I was curious for a little bit more and that's what led to customer success.
One of my last leadership roles, I was having a conversation with some of the folks that reported to me and they actually said to me, which was very wild, they said, do you know what your best skill is? Like, no, hopefully being a good manager. They said, you ask really good questions.
That's a powerful skill. It's a
powerful skill in pre-sales you call it discovery How do we get deeper and deeper to understand core root causes what meet with what the meaning is what what matters? Sometimes I feel like in CS. We are so oriented toward protect preventing churn Sometimes we're scared to ask a question if we don't
We are.
Speaker 2 (15:54.574)
I was having a conversation with another leader the other day and he was saying I really want people to be more bold. And I said you've got to create a bit of space that they're not going to ask the perfect question the first time. But if you value the act of asking the question, you value the act of finding out the information, even if the information isn't originally what you hoped it would be, that builds boldness and competence for them to try new questions, for them to go a click deeper.
Because sometimes it feels like, oh, if I asked this, maybe they wouldn't have thought about it if I didn't bring it up. But I do think there is real value in wanting to know more, not only about the organization, but the people. Because both of those things are not static, they're dynamic. And I think this out when we assume they don't change as much as we change. On a holiday, week, month, and year.
love that. That's so powerful. It's so true though. I think don't do enough discovery and customer success. And even if we start to do it, we think it's exactly what you said. We think it's static when it's a very dynamic world we live in and it's something that we have to adjust and change and ask a little bit deeper and ask more and get into the real nitty gritty of what our customer and what that human is trying to do at the end of the day.
Yeah, it's so powerful when you do ask the right questions and it has to come from a mindset of wanting to know more, like you've just said. We could keep going. Discovery and questions could probably be a whole topic for another podcast, but I want to talk about segmentation with you. And I think with Vitaly and then everything you guys work with across the board with multiple different businesses, I think you guys know firsthand how important customer segmentation can be. And in a world where
AI and more and more more is the number one theme in customer success. I think it's absolutely critical that customer success organizations or programs are really segmenting appropriately. And it's so critical, but a lot of people don't know where to even start. So I guess to kick off our conversation, I'm curious, like why, why do you think segmentation is so critical for scaling CS and where should people even start really?
Speaker 2 (18:06.19)
Absolutely. So I think there's two sides to segmentation, both of which are important, but I think one is much more dynamic and then influences the second. So the first one is what I call operational segmentation. That is truly understanding your cost for customer. That is, and I'm going to put on my finance hat, that is truly understanding your cost to engage in support. And so as you bring in new customers, ensuring that the level of support
that you can provide is balanced out by and has the right amount of revenue matched against it. That is what you talk about operational segmentation, whether it's strategic accounts, core accounts, scale accounts, programs accounts. Everybody has a variety of that. That is really about cost to deliver and cost the dollar. Much as you think about pre-sales, says, hey, how much does it cost to get a new customer? It is important that you know how much it costs you to support that customer and do it well and make sure that you're making the most impactful investments.
And it should change. As you think about, if you see churn rates changing, if you see expansion rates changing, that is a foundational model that continues to evolve so that you can invest what I would expect are pretty precious resources in the right places to have the maximum impact. So that is the operational piece. And I think the key pieces there are understanding your cost structure, understanding your ARR structure, understanding where are the places where you can grow and invest.
being very pinpointed about how you identify those opportunities, identify those risks, and continue to watch that data closely, because that's how you can fine tune. Most people just start with ARR. Hey, okay, this is a big account, this is a small account. It's standard, it's a fine way to start, but I think most people find out over time that those who often need it most are not the largest. They're not, they're not. Exactly.
So I think there's also an intersection when you think about service segmentation on what is it the profile of that organization or that segment, what is it they need? So it's not just a more or less, it's a above X size of company, whether it's employees, sometimes that's how pre-sales looks at it. They are most likely to have this structure. That might be an operations person, that might be an enablement person, that might be...
Speaker 2 (20:28.896)
a structure that helps them actually embrace your platform faster versus smaller accounts. If they are earlier in their maturity, they haven't built out those kinds of structures and scaffolds. How you meet them in terms of the service may need to be more focused on structures and scaffolds to get them to the maturity where they can continue to grow. That's one thing I think that we're talking to other customers and partners I hear a lot is
How do we help customers not box themselves in? How do we help them continue to grow in the understanding of whatever discipline you're operating in so that the value can continue to grow with them? So that's more of an operational. The other one, and I think this is really important, and I think I've been learning a lot from what our friends in marketing have done, what I see people really creatively doing, is the segmentation of how those customers want to engage with you.
And so whether it is, whether you are broad enough to have something like industry. One key piece I see a lot is the difference between what I call regulated industries and non-regulated industries. Regulated industries are things like healthcare, government, finance. That is a very specific model of organization in terms of compliance, in terms of structures, in terms of rules that they have to operate within.
And how you need to meet them is often about helping make sure they can meet those base expectations of their industry and their regulations and then be creative within that structure and scaffolding. Versus non-regulated industries where they can actually move likely much faster and more creative, but by the same token, they don't have a core, always understanding of the expectations they're trying to meet in their market. And so being very thoughtful about
something like industry and or really digging into understand the different personas. One of the things I'm playing with a lot in my organization is understanding how our individual contributors, in our case CSMs, operate in our platform versus leaders versus what we call admins or rebots. And so how do we better segment them based on how they want to engage with us, how they want to engage with the platform and meeting them where they are?
Speaker 2 (22:53.752)
So whether you think about an IC, in my case it would be a CSM in our platform, they're going to be in there. They're going to be taking action. On the flip side, my economic buyers who are going to be maybe popping in to see information but aren't really creating tasks, I need to think about different ways of engaging with them that meets them where they are. And so I think about segmentation in an organizational structure, but I also really think about it and how can I make it feel personal to them
How can I make it feel like I understand and respect how they're looking to engage and I meet them with something relevant.
I that. I also love that you brought up that ARR, or Highest Paying Customers, aren't necessarily the only segment. I think a lot of times we get very blindsided by our highest paying customers and it's natural, especially when you're a scaling or growing business, your highest paying segment is probably the one that you think you should focus on more, but there's so many different ways to segment and I really love the one that your marketing team came up with, which is like, let's meet them.
how they want to be engaged because that is super powerful in the world we live in right now. again, everyone knows this, whether you're at a big company or a small company, execs are busy. They're not gonna want to engage with you the same way that your champion or your admin or your rev ops person wants to engage with you. So that's really cool that you guys have all these different ways of segmenting. I guess for listeners who are thinking about segmenting or creative or different ways of segmenting,
What is like some of the impact the different ways of segmenting has had on your customer outcomes? Maybe it's the creative marketing play or maybe it's the regulated versus non-regulated. What are some of the ways that you've seen impact that's not ARR related? Because segmentation is so much more than just ARR.
Speaker 2 (24:47.776)
It is. one of the themes that I have when I think about segmentation is that sometimes people feel like when you segment, that means you're going to have to put in more work per segment. I actually believe that excellent segmentation speeds automation. The better data that you have on your customer, and I'll talk about a couple of examples, the more quickly you can come up with a personalized experience that is widely efficient.
as scalable and able to be delivered via automation. So for example, in one way that I very much look at is sort of maturity. So we identify their sort of feature maturity. How do we see accounts that perhaps have gotten stuck in the early things? In a CSP, something early is probably just taking notes. Everybody takes notes, everybody takes calls, that is a core element. However, if we just stay in the world of taking notes,
The ability to really scale and to get maximum value of that information is limited. So what I'm going to look at is how do I identify customers who have moved farther in their maturity into the more complex or, and I want to say complex, not in the way that it's complicated for the person to use, but in just the power of it, I think in terms of what can be delivered. So in our world, things like playbooks are the most powerful.
The more segmentation you have, the more branches on your logic. You can do everything from sending outreaches based on data triggers, whether it is an engagement levels. Has this customer engaged with us in 30, 60, 90 days, sometimes based on size and segment expectation? Have they adopted this feature? Have they tried it even? How do we not just go, it's been 90 days since you've used this feature, but instead we saw you try it for the first time?
here's some relevant information or here's an offer to join a live event we're doing. We also look at who and how are they engaging. So are we seeing a lot of ICs? Are we seeing more admins and operators? So how can we meet them in the places that they're doing the most work? We're gonna be looking at are you building new things or are you operating perhaps off playbooks or structures or configuration? So when you start really digging into the piece,
Speaker 2 (27:11.022)
that is at your customer, their process. So do we see them actively changing how they're operating? And then tools, perhaps, have they thought about a different kind of integration that we could bring more data in? In a customer space, the more information you have, the noisier it can become unless you can segment it, unless you can use that information to learn something. And I'm a big believer in cohorted. So when you think about sort of big groups, a segment is probably a
big group. It could be 100 accounts. It could be 5,000 accounts. But to me, a cohort is really where the scaled magic happens. Because ideally, you have come up with a mix of three or four traits about that customer that then you can do an outreach. For example, it is a customer that used to do a really complicated element in your system. Perhaps they haven't done it in 90 days. You've also seen that a stakeholder has left. And perhaps
maybe a new IC has joined. The intersection of those three can help you do an outreach that it feels incredibly thoughtful, yet can be set and forget. And so that anytime anyone ends up in that cohort, they get that outreach. And so that's the power, the power to me, and this is where my data soul comes in, is the intersection of very specific segments that then lets you focus in what would matter to that person
in that challenge, in that moment.
Hey, CS Pros, I wanted to quickly jump in and let you know if you're enjoying this episode but wondering how you too can become a revenue-focused customer success pro, then I have the answer for you. Some of you might not know this, but I run a cohort-based coaching program that walks you through step-by-step on how to align customer success strategies with revenue. RevUp Academy is my complete step-by-step coaching program.
Speaker 1 (29:08.482)
that helps you elevate your skills and mindset to focus on driving revenue for both your customers and your company. And a few times a year, I run a completely free masterclass and it always fills up. My upcoming free masterclass is happening on July 10th at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And trust me, you're not gonna wanna miss it. If you're a customer success pro who's tired of
constantly reacting and struggling to prove your value, or you're unsure how to drive more revenue without feeling like a salesperson, then this masterclass is for you. It's a one-hour live session where I'll be walking you through the Customer Success Revenue Framework, which is the three steps that will show value to your customers in every call. So you can start building deeper relationships that actually unlock revenue. You can create success plans that drive accountability.
And finally, you'll learn how to lead value-led upsells and conversations with confidence. It's a practical and tactical and completely free masterclass, but spots are limited and it always fills up. So if you're ready to start being more strategic and driving renewals earlier and landing upsells easier, then go to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash masterclass and save your seat.
That's the customer success pro dot com forward slash master class to save your seat. I look forward to seeing you there. Now back to our episode. I also love that you just highlighted the big things with segmentation is you're able to really grow and scale when you have segmentation because a lot of people think it's just more work because, okay, now I have these different cohorts of customers and I have to build something new every single time. But you did highlight that there's still personalization with
all of this segmentation, which I think is the power behind segmentation and the power of playbooks and the power of having automation. But I think for a lot of people, when they first start doing all of this and they first start building any sort of segmentation, it just looks overwhelming. And it's like, how do I keep the personalization while trying to automate and scale? And so
Speaker 1 (31:24.014)
I'm curious, you mentioned all these wonderful playbooks and I'm sure obviously using your own tool is very helpful, but I'm curious how you find a balance when you're reaching out either to the different stakeholder, to the different segment, to the different life cycle journey of that customer. How do you find balance between automation and scale, which I know your team is trying to do to push out the right notification or the right engagement at the right time?
But how do you keep it personal and human, especially now in the world that we live in that's AI this, AI that, how are you guys keeping it that you really know what your customer wants and you know what sort of personalization to give them so that they do engage with the scaled automation you're building for that segment?
So I'll give you one example. So one the CSMs on my team, we were looking through her book and we have a set of customers who just had not engaged. That's the fear of everyone. When we talk about discovery, if you have a customer who's not talking to you, your ability to really learn about their business, very limited. And so we wanted to do an outreach that would target those folks. And so what we did first was we actually looked through her book and we identified some core profiles of those customers.
and what were the stickiest things that we saw them doing? Who were the folks that we would say are using the platform in the most excellent way? And what were the couple features or, actually probably just features that we were seeing them use in the platform? And so we targeted that feature. We said, hey, this is a feature that we feel like if this set of customers who isn't engaged right now could try
that we feel like we see other folks getting value enough in it that it will make it worth their time. I think the world of just, spend 30 with me to check in, that's done. You have to have to bring something of value to the customer, whether it's an audit. People love data. People love knowing they're winning or they're losing. They love knowing how they're performing against their peers. So benchmarking in data is huge. But in this case, we picked pretty much one feature that we knew in this cohort.
Speaker 2 (33:33.39)
is something that we see engage people in a different way. And then what we did to make it personal is we did three different messages. We did a very specific message about that feature to our individual contributors. We did a different message to managers and leaders and a completely different message to admins in what we call our operations team, all focused on, we've probably heard it, the whiff of them. What's in it for me?
Yeah, we have. Why does me? Why do I care? What? Why does it matter to me?
Exactly. And what matters to an IC is wildly different than matters to a rebops first. And if you just try to do one message straight down the middle, you're going to get a little bit of both, but neither one is really going to land. And so we were able to use the segmentation. We were able to then create what we call playbooks, which are automation, to be able to send out a series of messages to these customers based on their personas. So for the CSL, it was very much, hey, have you tried X?
100%. Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:34.688)
of me as a CSM, because it's coming from a CSM, this is how I use it every day. No. Okay. Leaders, have you thought about looking at this feature in your dashboard? We see leaders who use this get X degree more Intel on this very specific element of your customers. DevOps, we see this as a repeatable play. You can build it once, you can set it and forget it. Here's how to do it quickly. We'd love to get on a call with you.
So all of them have a degree of personal offer and call to action, but are targeted to who that human is and how they would best like to interact with us.
Yeah, I love that. You guys have built out segmentation into so many layers and so many things. It's just, it's so amazing because I think a lot of people just think of segmentation as account level segmentation, which is fine. I think it's really important to start somewhere. Especially after a week. You've done persona level and then you've done like segmentation on how they want to receive information, whether it's email or I don't know, however other methods you're doing it, but there's so many different
layers of segmentation that has to feed into the conversation. It can't just be, okay, we now have three different types of key users and let's just email all three. Yeah, okay, great, but they're not going to respond and then you're going to end up with just customers ghosting you. But segmentation, as you said, is so much more than just the account level. It's segmenting on the information they want, segmenting on how we're delivering that information, segmenting on who we're delivering that information to, which is
which is really, really powerful. And actually what was going through my head funny enough was there's probably a lot of companies who are like, that sounds so awesome. That sounds so inspirational, but we are just limited in the number of resource, the data. We don't have any data. I've heard that so many times. And also I don't know what the exec wants versus the operation person versus the admin person. like for someone like that, who's out of business where
Speaker 1 (36:38.508)
Maybe they've segmented on the first level that we've talked about, which is like ARR or persona or something like that, but then they just don't know what to do next. Like, is there a low lift, high impact starting point that you would recommend to get to the inspirational level that you guys are at?
No, I would pick one key stage or feature in your platform that you see people truly getting value out of. It can be a view. It can be something, a button that they click. It doesn't have to be very complicated, but being able to identify those who are using that versus who are not and focus on those who are not is huge.
I'll give you an example. For me as a leader in Vitaly, one of my favorite things about Vitaly is something that nobody ever really talks about is that my team can completely ghostwrite emails for me and set them up to go out to customers and I can take a look at them, I can personalize them, but it is wildly efficient.
your busy executive. That's amazing. That's so much time safe.
And it takes away the guilt of me being a bottleneck.
Speaker 1 (37:53.378)
Yeah, it does. They are. are. If you're waiting for your exec to get approval on something, you're going to keep waiting.
I guess our bottle.
Speaker 2 (38:01.262)
And I keep waking. And so this way, I don't feel guilty that I haven't been able to write this. It is fast and efficient for them. It is repeatable. If we see an email works really well, we can then turn that into a playbook coming from me. But more than anything, I know that it works and it works well. And so that is a sticky thing that when I talk to other execs who are in the CSVs, I say, have you tried this?
And I go, my gosh, that would be amazing. My team emails me, they Slack me, we have spreadsheets, we have trackers. We can just do this in one place and I say yes. So to me, that is actually a sticky feature that I know just lands with folks who are similar to myself. And so identifying, it doesn't have to be a complicated thing. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing you've ever done. Sometimes it is a new feature, sometimes it's a new push or a new release, super exciting. But sometimes it's that thing that you know if they get into it.
They're going to go, that saved me a moment. And that moment is valuable. And so just being able to say who's tried the moment and who hasn't, really good starting point.
It is, it is. And like you said, it doesn't have to be overly complicated. I think that's something we're probably all very guilty of in customer success. We're like, I want to make the best impact with my customers. I want to give them the shiniest, coolest new toy or feature, whatever it is. And sometimes it's just a quick win. And sometimes just getting started with segmentation can be a quick win. Like what can you do that just gets your customers on side that helps you scale them? As simple as like you said,
Hey, I do this. Maybe it helps you too. And that can be as easy as that. So I love that you shared that. So thanks for that. I'm curious how you guys measure success because I mean, in customer success, NRR or GRR tend to be North Star success metrics. And that's cool. But segmentation is almost like a project under all of that. And of course, it's probably affecting NRR and GRR to some degree, but
Speaker 1 (40:02.956)
If someone is just starting out with segmentation and building out segmentation strategies, how could you know it's actually working? Like how do you measure effectiveness or output of segmenting your customer base? What is it that you guys measure?
Absolutely. So I do want say I think it is important for anyone in CS leadership or otherwise to understand GRR and NRR. End of day, that's what goes to the board. That goes to the leadership. And I think CS leaders who can also be business leaders have a great opportunity to grow. agree. However, that is a wildly lagging indicator. And if your sales team and your account management team or your renewals team is doing a great job, those renewals should only be happening
every end.
Speaker 2 (40:47.534)
couple years, three years, the longer you can get a multi-year renewal, the better window you have to truly show value and expand in ground. So you have to come up with some earlier indicators in terms of how your engagement is going. I do believe there are different levels of engagement based on whatever sort of the sizing is. A large impactful customer that has a fully built out organization is likely going to engage in a different level than somebody who's just starting out.
So do think there's some foundational sort of segmentation in that. Then within that, there are key moments and engagement levels that you do want to track. at a most strategic level, are we talking to these folks? When is the last time we had an executive? Have we been able to show and confirm that they have received value? Whether you want to put it in a success plan, a presentation, or other, being able to make sure that are you making connection?
understand their goals and are you getting confirmation with them that you are driving forward with them the change they are looking to make?
I love that qualitative metrics, but a bit of quantitative as well, but there's a lot of qualitative bits in there that you just highlighted.
So that is engagement. And these are often the elements of a health score. A health score should advise what your end game is, what you think your NRR will be, what you think your GRR will be, because these are the components. So we've talked about engagement. The second one is absolutely core usage. So once again, you can just measure, has everyone done X, Y, Z in the platform? My point of view is all features are not created equal. Some are just table stakes.
Speaker 2 (42:29.214)
and being able to understand which ones truly you can see, like, these customers tend to renew more if they've hit this moment, they've hit this feature. I think that is incredibly valuable and I would track that. So I am very, very focused. I think the first 90 to 180 days after implementation or onboarding, absolutely critical. If you do not build the foundations, the scaffolding for customers to receive value,
You're going to have to spend so much money afterwards trying to find that again with them. So that's key. And then also, whatever your critical window is also coming up to renewal, getting very early reads on where is their feature adoption? Where is their engagement? When have we last made last touch to know, do we know their business goals? Do we understand what they're trying to accomplish? Because any pitch that is not about value is likely going to fall flat.
Yeah, for sure. And I think that it's so important to highlight that it isn't just all quantitative data. I think that sometimes it's really hard, especially in the world we live in in cost-per-sales. Like you said, it's super important to be a business leader, have NRR, GRR as our North Star metrics. But they're hard. They're lagging indicators, like you said. And then it's like, how do you end up making sure that you have a good effective segmentation strategy? And some of it is
comes down to qualitative measures that then affect the quality of work that you are doing. So I'm so glad you shared that because sometimes it feels like a losing battle when it comes to measuring success, especially for something like segmentation as well, because sometimes it's like, we're just creating more work for ourselves. But it's not. There's so many milestones that you can track to make sure that your project is successful in this way.
And when you get to the advanced levels, and I will tell you my favorite metric I've ever measured of success in CS, that comes to creating referenceable accounts, that comes to identifying folks that truly can be ambassadors. But my all-time favorite metric, and I'll be transparent, I haven't gotten to it where I am today, where I am yet and vitally, but it's on my list, is the number of people at a customer who have been promoted based on bringing.
Speaker 1 (44:45.134)
That's a great metric. I love that because that's a metric all about them. Yeah. And I think sometimes we get so stuck in the us and the we. And it's natural. Like we want to be there to support our customer success, but we are working for our company or our product. And sometimes we get so sucked in like, more usage, more revenue, more, more, more us. But them getting promoted is the most powerful and coolest thing. I remember the first time I helped.
someone got a promotion and it still sticks with me. I still have that story in my head and it's something that will never leave in my career of customer success. So I love that that's a cool metric you want to start tracking. Awesome. Listen, Kelly, we can keep talking about segmentation for days, probably or anything for days at this point. But I want to ask one more question before we go into our quick fire round, which is if you were to look into the future, how do you see segmentation evolving? And I'm going to ask the AI question mainly because
You brought it up at the very beginning that you guys are evolving with AI as well. But with AI and the help that AI can give customer success professionals, like how do you think segmentation is really going to transform in the next six months, year, whatever amount of time?
think AI is going to be essential to segmentation and change what is possible in the most broad strokes. So for example, today we think about, well, what are the right segments based on ARR? That is a question we should be able to ask AI. Here is my customer book. I want to be able to match the right level of resources to balance ARR across books, to balance logos, to be able to identify, here's some additional information about these accounts. Here are ones we expect to grow. Here are ones are at risk.
Here's what our forecast is for new accounts. Give me my play. That should be able to be done by AI. The other piece too, and I think we're going to get a lot more of this, is sentiment analysis from AI.
Speaker 1 (46:42.816)
I love that. I already love what I'm seeing about that. It's crazy. Like, read the sentiment of this call and tell me if there's risk or a chance of churn or a chance of an upsell because of what they've said.
Exactly. Even more to that, I actually had this conversation with Jamie, our CEO, the other day, because as the model of our economic buyer at Vitaly, I get to see the different prototypes we're doing with AI. And our product team came to me and said, hey, we're thinking about these three different default call summaries. Which ones do you like? I said, well, I love this one. It's super operational. But this one, it was all about sentiment. The call was open. The call was interesting. The call...
how to forward looking bent to it. And I want that to start feeding into the contact sentiment. I want to be able to know in an AI automated way, tell me the last time that we've had a conversation, tell me the sentiment of our last interaction. So I can then target that person for community opportunities, for possibly referenceable conversations, somebody who might want to do a beta. Right now you think about how many times you send a call
question out to your CSMs and go, who's happy right now that might want to try something with us? AI should answer that question like that with real data based on real conversations that did not require someone to remember how good a conversation was last Tuesday versus six months before they talked to someone could be even better.
Yes, I love that. was already just thinking of the sales team asking, can you give me a referenceable customer that's willing to get on a call with a new prospect? That has to be the number one question I'm always asked by my sales counterparts. And I'm like, okay, let me think about like the 50 conversations I've had in the last month and which customer I can, but that shouldn't be me. That should be AI. I love it. I love that. That's a great, great future prediction.
Speaker 1 (48:38.442)
Awesome, Kelly. Well, listen, we are going to jump in to the Q Fire questions where I challenge all of my guests to try to answer the next few questions in a sentence or less. Are you ready? OK, let's do it. My first question is, if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?
I'm ready, let's go.
Speaker 2 (48:58.526)
using AI to make faster, better decisions that move immediately into action versus just depending on static data.
Ooh, I like that. I like that a lot, actually. I'm so excited for the future of AI and customer success. know a lot of people get nervous about it, but I think it's really cool to live through this era of customer success. Awesome. Okay, next question is which app or software do you use every day or every week? And it can be on your phone or on your laptop. It can be CS, but it also can be any other tool that you use every day.
I the email tool Superhuman, I think it is called. Love it. I had been a Gmail girl for life and my team for the first time introduced me to this tool and it has been game changing for me once again to focus.
Yeah, I love that. I've heard of superhuman. I'm a Gmail girl, but I think there's something there because a lot of people who've told me, like, it's changed my life. I cannot live without superhuman. So that's really cool. Amazing. Next question is if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be?
Setting goals in product whenever we release new features so that CS knows immediately what to measure from the first day of adoption all the way through the end.
Speaker 1 (50:19.904)
Ooh, that's really powerful. Because sometimes we just release products because we're like, the market wants it or a customer wants it. But how do you measure success of that product release? That's really good. I love that. OK, awesome. Last question I have for you is who should be my next podcast guest?
Statistician.
a statistician. Ooh, that's something new that I would have beyond the show. my gosh, you have someone in mind or someone that you would think
Apparently, my husband is a PhD in statistics. specialize in survey design, so I aimlessly use him. And I would recommend anyone wants to understand what correlation versus causation is when you start thinking about leading and lagging indicators. Statisticians have the unlaw.
my gosh, that's a new unique answer. I love that, Kelly. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your time, your energy with us today. I really appreciated this conversation. If my get, if anyone on the show wants to hear more from you or continue the conversation, what's the best way to get ahold of you?
Speaker 2 (51:23.662)
So my LinkedIn is Kelly Turner. It is K-E-L-L-E-Y Turner, just LinkedIn slash or Kelly at vitally.io. One of the reasons I joined Vitally was the opportunity to spend my time with other CS leaders, other CS teams, and I am in for any and all of the conversation. Just reach out and we'll connect.
I love that and I'll be sure to link all of Kelly's information in the show notes of today's podcast. Thank you again, Kelly. It's been an honor and I absolutely love this conversation. Me too.
Thank you, cheers to it.
Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show. And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify,
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