The Secrets to Driving High Adoption

Agour T [00:00:02] Good morning everybody. And I mean, good evening for those who are joining us from Europe or Israel. 

[00:00:08] Welcome to today's webinar, where we are going to talk about The Secrets to Driving High Adoption. 

[00:00:15] My name is also I'm a Senior Customer Success Manager here at Totango. And with me, please. 

Evyatar S [00:00:21] Hi, my name is Evyatar Seri from Radware. Good evening and good morning, everyone. 

Agour T [00:00:29] So really, just before we get to know Evyatar a little bit better, I just wanted to go through what we're about to review today and see today and talk about today. So first of all, adoption, what is adoption and why is adoption and value-based conversations are so important to have with our customers. We'll talk about automated processes and why is it important to build them, these processes and workflows to help us with, you know, achieving the adoption rates that we want, how to do it right and how we are ensuring that we are building the right processes. How do we implement these processes in Totango for those of you who are using us? We'll talk about the hurdles and how you can overcome them when you are dealing with these kinds of situations. And we'll obviously talk a little bit about the practice, what you should do after this webinar, and after all of this. We'll have a short time for a little bit of the Q&A. So if you have any questions during the presentation, please remember them. So at the end, you'll be able to ask either me or Evyatar. 

Evyatar S [00:01:40] Just a little bit about Radware. A well-known company of 22 years traded the Nasdaq dealing with two major lines of business. One is cybersecurity and protection against this attack and life. And the other one, application delivery load balances. And we have the best customers in the world. OK, top of the stock exchange banks, eBay, Johnson and Johnson, Salesforce, you name it. Really the top stock accounts. So a little bit about the team, my team is focused on the cloud businesses, which is the growing segment within the hardware. We are distributed globally. We have teams in the U.S. and in color across the globe. And besides the system, we have a person who is responsible for the marketing of the operations and all the campaigns and all the automatic information. And we are managing. We also have a dedicated team of project managers who runs the onboarding. The reason for that is that our onboarding is a very technical or very project-oriented. It project-oriented. So we decided to split it into other people than the CSM. And the system is involved at the beginning or heads over in case there is an issue, we'll get involved and once we finish, we'll take the lead. 

Agour T [00:03:03] So when we were talking about how adoption is important before that, maybe we should start with what is adoption? Rest assured that most of you, if not all of you, are aware of that. But let's talk a little bit about that. So adoption is part of the customer journey, right? Usually, customers, new customers will start the onboarding stage for most saas companies. I would say that it will take approximately 30 days. Then they'll spend almost the entire year within the adoption phase and then we'll have a very short period of renewal. After the second year, obviously, we don't have even the onboarding stage in adoption will take even a bigger part. Adoption is the part within the customer journey where they really get the value of your product. This is when they learn to learn about your product even more than they did during the onboarding. This is where they are breathing, setting up all of their processes or try to or start using that on a day-to-day basis to ensure that they are getting the value for which they paid for. And this is a very important piece because if your customers are not using your product, they'll never see the value of their investment. And we need to assure that they are using the product, the service that they were paying for. So when we were talking about calculating adoption, there are three, I'll say, general items that we can look at it during this presentation,  and Evyatar will even speak a bit about the way that he tracks it. But for us and sometimes that this example probably will be more suitable for the majority of companies is that we need to track the service utilization. Maybe you are your customers are paying for licenses, be there, are paying for storage in the cloud. Maybe they are paying for tests that they can run on your system. It doesn't matter what are you selling? The question is how there are how much they bought and how they are used and how much of that they are using. Right. 

Agour T [00:05:09] And this is the service utilization that we are looking to see when we're talking about the product that we want to understand. How much time do they spend right in your product or service? Do they log in daily. And when they log daily, do they use a specific feature a lot or are they using your system a lot? When we're talking about the product with we want to understand whether they are really spreading their reach within your service. We want to ensure that they are not using only one fundamental piece of our service because maybe then they will go and find that specific feature at someone else's company. Right. So we want to ensure that they are really using the product correctly and we want to cover all these three areas. When we were talking about adoption rates and we are talking about having value-based conversations with your customers, we need to understand why it's so important. And here are several reasons for that. So, first of all, it creates a tighter partnership with you and your customers. It's typically a good indicator that we are going to have a smooth renewal. High adoption rates mean that there's stickiness. There are used to using your system. You are part of their day-to-day. It will be harder for them to leave you. It's a great indicator that the client is ready for expansion if they are over-consuming some of your services or really using that. And they'll expand as a team or as a company, they'll probably want to buy more of your product. And one of the main things that we as customer success managers are probably in charge of is getting more advocates to our company into our service. So good adopting customers of our product will be great advocates for our future sales. Now, I would like to talk a little bit about the importance of creating processes and workflows to ensure that you have high adoption and even specific, even more specifically, I'll talk about automation. So when we're talking about creating these automated processes and workflows, we want to do it because we want to be able to scale our processes. We are doing great. We are a team of five. We are getting more and more customers. We cannot have more and more the relation between the increasing customer success. And it cannot be linear to the increase in new customers. We want to manage more customers with the team that we have already in our team, obviously. So automated processes will be great for scalability and scalability. As an example, if we're talking about Totango or any other system is. You know, building SuccesPlays or playbooks to ensure that once is certain criteria is being met or the customer met a specific threshold, a task will be created for the CSM - maybe its campaigns or email outreaches to your customers when a customer reaches a certain threshold, one to engage with them. So these tools are great for scalability. We want to also track effectiveness. When we are talking about these tools that we have, our automated processes, we need to ensure that they are working for us. So we need to understand the score of each process and we need to differentiate between good processes that help us to poor processes in a way that didn't get us to where we want to be. In that place, we will know that we need to change them, adjust them, and then hopefully get the resources we want. So it's important for you to create these processes, to measure effectiveness. Obviously, want to be able to adapt quickly to any changes when you are creating these processes that are across your entire team or the entire organization. It's easy for you to adopt. I can share a story of one of my customers that obviously when Covid-19 hit them, they went with new promotions to help their customer deal with this situation. Instead of having everybody and train them and get them in zoom meetings and whatever, they were able to create a unique process within Totango and to spread it across the entire team without the need and obviously very quickly, without the need to really train them about anything because the system really dictates what you need to do. Work prioritization, obviously, as a CSM, when we have these processes and we get tasks and everything that we need to understand that we need to do in order to reach the goals that we've set for ourselves. It's easier for me to understand on why they should focus today. We're creating these processes. This will allow us to understand, ok, that's what I need to do today. These are the tasks that I need to do in the next seven days, a month, or whatnot, which really helps us with that. And last but not least, executive visibility. The ability to have these processes will help us understand from an executive perspective what are we are meeting our goals or not. So what do we have set ourselves to increase our service utilization rates? Or maybe we want to we wanted our customers to start using a new feature that we just released. Having these processes can automatically help us understand what are the actions that we took to help our customer improve their adoption. Just a quick note about this, for those of you who are aware and for those of you who are not aware, we have our SuccessBloc marketplace where you have the ability to download any intended business units that you want to manage within your customers, what are its adoption, what are its renewals, whether are it's up-sales? You can download them directly from our marketplace. Our SuccessBlocs are already compiled out of the SuccessPlays and campaigns and segments that you can use and obviously help you and configure your personal processes that you would want to implement within your team. Without further ado, I would love for you to hear a little bit from Evyatar and his experience with Totango and how he did all the things that we've talked about. So, Evyatar. 

Evyatar S [00:11:41] Yeah, hi again. So I hope you hear me well, there was a fellow in zoom in, I had to switch audio while I was speaking, so I hope you can hear me. Well, so when you start, obviously, to think about adoption and to automate your processes, there is a process that I offer you to use the process that I used. First, ask yourself what are the KPIs? In my case, and I'm sure in most of you, your case as well is the adoption. How much are they using for the product renewal? What is the renewal rate, the churn rate, and how much up sales are you doing and what are the and what is the customer satisfaction? Pretty standard to almost any customer success organization. And then ask yourself, OK, those are my KPIs. What are the areas where I see challenges? In my case, value creation. We provide protection from attacks, if a customer is not attacked, they don't see the value very similar to an insurance company.  Another challenge that I had and it may sound funny. I couldn't measure exactly the usage of the customer. I had a portals. I had the ELP system, I had the support system, but I couldn't really know how much the user is leveraging.  Another challenge that they had is with low touch. I'm sure all of you had this challenge that you don't have enough CSM's to cover everything that you wish. So I want to make sure that I'm touching the low touch accounts in some way, but also in a very effective way. So I won't waste an expensive CSM dealing with a low-cost customer. Now, once you know that, ask yourself, what are the goals, what you would like to improve, in my case, adoption. I want to make sure that users are benefiting more from the services utilizing it so we can improve first and most, the renewal rate, and second, I wanted to improve my team focus to make sure that the CSM is where I need. Such as well, where there is an account at risk. And in the positive side, well, there is an account that I can up-sell. 

[00:13:43] Last, which is a very important point. What is the data that you need? And where is this data coming from and I'll speak a little bit more on that later. In my case, there were two systems. One is the traditional legacy ELP and all the finance systems. So I had to pull the data that I need to know what the customer exactly bought. And on the other hand, we had very fancy advanced Searsport hours with all the metrics that I'm sure most of you know. And I had to make the match between those systems and to push it into the system dashboard so they can access it properly. So with that, I was able to measure the license against the usage. And last ask yourself, what are the domains? What are the areas that you would like to make an impact that you would like to show that improved? Very classic based on the KPIs. I chose to focus on the renewal and of course, on up-sell. Ok, so obviously everything that I said before sounds very simple and very easy to do, Ok, but in life there are many, many hurdles. And so when you go to the organization, they are two to approach. One is a top-down and the other is bottom-up. I basically did the mix of two and the first one was to sell the vision to my management. I want people to build integration, to open reports, to express them. Why do I need it even just to listen to me? And so with management, you speak about the KPIs, you speak about visibility. That's the best word. You would like to know what are you doing and how you're spending your time. You can prove them, if you measure that or I give you those reports, how can I improve? How can I make my team more effective. And this is a very funny story that I had, so for me, and I'm sure for you as well, it is very clear that you need to know if a user is logging on or not, if they are using their license or not. It's that's the, you know, the health of our work. Very straightforward. But my management, my executive couldn't really get it until they put this, you know, circle slide with all those different images on it. And this made an impact, Ok. So I call it the equation. Ok, so first I'm talking about support and service quality. How many tickets, how many events are going to it in a second? Second, how much the customer is talking to us is joining a webinar like now joining to the CSM calls cadence Call. How much using from the license in our case licenses. It's like ISP bandwidth or the number of networks and what the CSM thinks, what he or she is seeing into the organization is the champion leaving us. Is there a business opportunity, things that are more human touch, and the last market insight into what's going on on the market in our industry? If one bank is an account that is is being attacked the day after all, the competitors of this bank will stand in line to our services. Now, based on those circles, on those categories, I can measure what is the customer health? Good, bad, green, yellow, what are the chances for renewal? And today, I know to project renewals in a very high rate, thanks to that. And in a positive side, what is my upsell what account I can up-sell and those are my own very specific points. Each one of you of course, is different between organization and even within the organization. So how many cases, how many service impact events in our case, if we take a customer down, it's terrible. The CEO of the bank will call us immediately. And how many security impacts, if there was an attack and some complicated around it, what is the onboarding time? The shorter it is, the better it is. How much the engagement is coming to the meeting and joining the webinar, reading the emails, sending the service, and giving us good feedback and utilization, which again, it's very unique to each organization, login and bandwidth. How many attacks - for us the number of attacks is the value point. So how much the account was attacked, other security events, a good event for us. It's a good world. And what are the other products to use and what is the CSM thinks I spoke and what's going on on the market based on demand, based on the territory? Ok, this is an example of a potential upset, OK? A customer is talking to us more than zero cases. The other issues that he's engaging with us and he had no downtime. We provided the perfect service. The latency is very low, joining our webinars, giving us good service, more than I would say, and not six, but more than seven or more than a utilizing the service logging on. That's a good customer. This is an account I will target to up-sell. 

[00:18:46] Yeah. 

[00:18:50] And this is there the flip side, a call for action, not communicating to us, no tickets, uh, not using all the license.  Here, there is a problem, I need to act. Ok, so I spoke about the management a second is the other teams in my case, it was the IT I simply sold them the vision. I told them, you know, you can go and develop in CRM reports all your life or you can build an integration system to a production cloud SaaS environment. Just listen how this will look in your CV. And by getting them engaged, this team basically developed everything that they need and much more. And in the middle of the night, even if I have management support, if you call your friend from the IT, if you have a problem or if you need to add another field, that's that this is what makes the difference. And last, which sounds you know, I am saying nothing smart here, but don't make it your project. Make it the company success, make it organization success. Give credit to everyone. There is a lot of people involved. I heard from one person. It was the first time he saw his email or his name in a thank you letter that was in a wide distribution and that that was very, very meaningful to this guy who helped me a lot. But no one knew it just gave him the credit and became my best buddy. 

[00:20:14] And. 

[00:20:16] So how do how do you implement it within a Totango, uh, which we choose to implement our customer success platform? So first, the data scheme, it put a lot of thoughts around that. In my case, I sit with the developers of the ELP, with the finance people, with all the stakeholders, uh, with the development, with the R&D and define exactly what you want and put yourself in the driver's seat. This is something you need to do. Once you have that, make sure that you have a data that is good, that is meaningful, that you can do something with it, invest a lot of cleaning the data before it comes into Totango - once it's in - otherwise, it's going to be very hard to process and you'll get a lot of noise and false positives. Next is the SuccessBlocs, which is a very useful tool, you know, to organize. In my case, I chose the adoption with a SuccessBloc name, adoption, and everything around usage, I put under it. The SuccessFlows, which is not just the button that you choose and Totango, but it's also the logic step. OK, what is in it for me? So I had SuccessPlay, so I had the flow when customers overusing and when the customer is underusing, when a customer is adding another service or removed another service. And remember, it's not just negative, there's always the positive flip to any flow that you choose. And once you do that, once you have that now, you implement it in segments. The way I did it, I first did segments. I was following up on the segments, cleaning them, running from them, making sure that they are perfect and accurate and contain only the data that I want to see and only the relevant companies. And once I have that and I was happy with it after, you know, the day by day checking and updating everything manually, I automated it with the SuccessPlay and then boom, the once the trust process, the customer success manager waking up in the morning and get the list of the task and has the highest priority to manage with. And last, once you get a little bit more data, build the scorecard. It's an excellent tool. It helps you to measure what's going on and it's a great show off. You show your executive the dashboard, everything goes up, go down. The fact that we can measure the progress by every day is amazing. And you can simply show how the lines goes up and how you are winning your objectives. OK, so we did all this effort, we automated everything. We are happy with the adoption. What will the outcomes? First, we will able to generate 20% of the customers over using just by creating the automation, which means that they are over adopting and we can up-sell to and we created the lead. Now I have a story about Covid-19, which is something I'm personally very, very proud of and wanted to share with you. So we did all the automation. We knew exactly who is our using and we knew that we need to approach and sell. But both the field team, the management after the CEO, you know, it wasn't so important for them and it was just myself and the team chasing and want to make it happen. And then Covid-19 came to the world and then like everywhere, ok, customer success is the focus we need to get each and every penny from the customers that are using it. And we were ready. We made the investment on time and we were able just in one quarter in Q2 when the Corona started and the world was shocked, we were able to up-sell our users half a million dollar just as a direct result of the processes that we implemented and the adoption that we followed up upon. A second and another example, we saw that in one of our products, 50% of the users are not logging in as a regular basis. In our case, once a month into the portal, you know, there is a strict connection between usage and renewal. We did a campaign about that. We did trainings. CSM spoke about it over 81% now. Last is a call for action when there is a problem, we need to act. I can share with you a story about a very large insurance company. The CSM is getting a task. The customer dropped the service. OK, we are calling them two days after they did in response to the knock before. Oh, yes, there was an issue. We installed something on the system. We thought it's your fault. And we went down and they did it two or three times. And every time we pull them, it's not us. It's something in your network. We walk with them, we engage. The world's very happy about the productiveness. We brought them back into the service. The result was not just that they have renewed. They also signed for five years because we increased the level of trust just by doing that and by being proactive and automatically, you know, that was about we didn't even have to press the button. The system did it for us. An otherwise other thing is improved health measurement. A second before I told your story, a story is nice. It's a great sell. But you also need to show your KPI. You need to speak about percentages. You need to show the graph is coming up, ok, and with that, you can show not just a story of one insurance company, but the story of all your companies. Other operational, again, I'm speaking a lot about, uh, being effective in my team. Uh, preparation for a meeting for guidance call went down 25% just by having the CSM read everything all in the same place. And there were many other side effects in the organization, which I did not expect. The operation is using this information product is using this information. This is helping to improve the product and to show how we can increase that, OK? 

Agour T [00:26:02] Thank you. Thank you very Evyatar for your time for sharing your story. So here are some key takeaways, we want you to know take with you when you are leaving this webinar. So, first of all, try to understand what is your equation? Right. I've talked about the very basic fundamentals of how to track the adoption rates and the value that your customers are getting from you. Evyatar took it one step further and really applied it to his company. Try to build your own equation to understand which customers are using your product as they should and which ones are not.  Focus on your goals and objectives. Right. Always keep with the end in mind, where you want to get to where you want to go with that. Based on that, build your processes, focus on what's important, build your processes based on that, where you want to get to. Ensure you have the right processes defined and implemented. OK, that's very important. We want to understand which ones are working for us, which ones are just time-consuming and maybe confusing the team. 

[00:27:07] And as Evyatar mentioned, which is I think a great story to tell, is selling the vision to your management, make it a company-wide effort, and don't forget to give credit to everyone who were involved. 

[00:27:22] So what's next, we really want you to kind of understand and analyze your customers, so. I'm not going to go through that flow chart, this recording of this webinar will be sent to you within twenty-four hours. So here are just two examples of the poor adoption customer and a good adoption customer. The question that you need to ask yourself during this analysis on that customer and understand whether they're good or poor in adoption, if they're poor in adoption, how are you getting them out of this situation? How do you get them out of this status and start to show them some value from your product? So as a practice, choose one good and one poor adoption customer from your company use the flowcharts. You'll be able to see them in the webinar recording. Ask the question and try to answer them and build the right plan in order to one save those that are in the poor adoption phase. But for those who are good adoption phase, what is your expansion plan for them? How can you make them even better? How you can share the mutual success between you two and this is exactly how to determine the correct path forward to realize value. So thank you for joining. We want to give some time for our participants to ask questions. So you have the next couple of minutes to write up some questions that you want either me or Evyatar to answer and we will review the questions we asked. How would you use an Evyatar If you want to help me answer these questions, how would you use a CS Ops function in your organization to best win the goals? What will make a good role successful? What are skills, tools or experience? Evyatar do you want to take it? Yeah, sure. 

Evyatar S [00:29:18] So for us to see this operation, it's something that is very hard to sell to management. And this is a challenge within my organization as well. Besides everything that any CSM needs, of course, customer facing understanding what's important, what it's not important. I believe someone who is a very, very detailed, oriented, and able to track about a lot of the data points and the structure of the information and in control on all the minor details. In my case, there was a lot of efforts around making sure that there was no false positive in the automation and how we will tweak our threshold. For example, we are now changing the accounts into subaccounts. We want to track subaccounts. So there's a lot of detail which contract goes to where and what. And we are also sending a lot of campaigns. OK, so make sure the link is correct. The information is updated. There's a lot a lot of the devil is in the details. So we need someone that can really control that and obviously a good technology. 

Agour T [00:30:21] OK. 

Agour T [00:30:24] And for the second question that we got, it is how do you define your points of measurements, KPI, if your tool product does not contain these metrics, naturally, in order to be able to automate? One of the things that I would like to say and Evyatar you can, obviously chime in after. But one of the things that I think that I'm putting that we've put in our flowcharts before is that I think it's completely reasonable that your product cannot track the value that your customer is getting. And one of the most important thing that I think you should do as a customer success professional is don't be shy or embarrassed to ask your customers on their quarterly business reviews on one of your regular cadence call. Do you get value from the product? You really need to understand why did they bought your product for what they were able to achieve? And if you cannot track it on your own, don't be embarrassed to ask your customers for their help in understanding whether they got the value. I started in a lot of cases with a lot of customers, and that's what I would do, Evyatar, do you want to add more? 

Evyatar S [00:31:39] Yeah. In addition, some points are very hard to measure. For example, we have a challenge of what is the size or the length of the attack. But you should ask yourself why the customer purchased the product for and based on that, if they are seeing the value or not. So, for example, we have some customers that apac, that really hate us. They hate us. They don't want to speak with us. They're always angry about us. On the other hand, they are being attacked a day after a day, a day after day. So, you know, I put my helmet on and talk to them, but I know that they will renew. Why, because I give them the value. On the flip side, I had to start with the customer who told me he's so nice. He's spoke with a bank and he loves me. He always send me nice things. But, you know, we took the system down and I'm not so sure if they have a strong business. Then at the end, they were very nice, but they didn't continue. So so we'll remember those objectives. Even like I said, you need to ask and you will get honest questions, but also a come from the point of why you bought the product. What what is a product about and are you really getting the benefit of the product, whatever it is. 

Agour T [00:32:46] Thank you. So we got another question from Vitka. I want to ask if the fact that the CSM is not involved with the on-boarding as an impact on his or her's ability to create a positive relationship with the customer afterwards. Evyatar, do you want to take it or you want me to? 

Evyatar S [00:33:04] Yeah, yeah. I can share with my own experience. One of the first things that I did in my role was to map the customer journey. And I noticed there is a problem with the onboarding. It was taking up to 50% of my CSM time and then I decided to make the split. But the question is excellent. It is a challenge. It is a problem. And I think and there's always a trade-off. On the other hand, I make my system more effective. On the other hand, I do pay in creating the relationship on the whole time. I think the goal the way is that the system is gets involved whenever there is a need, whenever there is a problem such as possible, just try to listen in to feel the customer temperature and project managers are more task-oriented and the CSM is more relationship-oriented and to measure that. But you are correct - it is a challenge. 

Agour T [00:33:55] Thank you, Evyatar and for our last question from Ed, how do you re-engage with a strategic client versus user of the product to show value or drive the value of the product? I can speak from my experience, and obviously, Evyatar can do it afterwards, but I think that we you know, this is a great example of two different audiences for which we need to work with. Right. If we're talking about our end users, the users who are using our product, it's a great the campaigns that we've talked about as an example is a great tool to engage with them automatically based on a certain criteria. If an end-user is not getting to the system within 14 days, we can send them a campaign asking if everything is OK or whether we can help with something. If a specific end user is not using a feature, we can send another complaint with the training materials and help them better get familiar with our product and maybe encourage them to use that. When we're talking about our strategic context, we need to ensure that we have the relationship with them right. We need to build this relationship. We need to have this regular cadence. We need to ask them about the value that they're getting as a whole. As a company and as an organization from our product. So the relationship between these two audiences, obviously different, but we should focus on what's important to each and every user. If it's the end-user, we want to make sure that he's getting his personal value from the product, that his life got better since he is using our product, and obviously from a strategic point of contact perspective. 

[00:35:30] Now, he bought our product. He signed up for it. 

[00:35:37] He wants to get the value we need to during our conversation with him, look at the bigger picture and understand where they're getting the value or ROI that they were looking to get when they bought our product or service. 

Evyatar S [00:35:52] Yeah, thank you. I think we definitely need to map, uh, the stakeholders in the organization and let the technical people speak with the technical level and definitely make sure there is a relationship with the executive. We do it normally through the QBR. Then we bring our business people and we don't hesitate to call even the CEO, even though we're a very large company, in order to talk with the customer so they can speak the executive language. And I believe that - don't try to do everything yourself. I mean, you are the CSM, you can make sure that the user is ok and the CEO of the user is ok. Leverage the organization and the hierarchy. You have an organization for that. 

Agour T [00:36:34] And add to your follow up question, QBR means quarterly business review. So it really doesn't matter if you have them on a quarterly basis, on a bi-annual basis, or once a year. The business review is a great opportunity to set up a meeting with your key stakeholders to talk about everything that we were able to accomplish. Until now, what are the plans for the upcoming year, for the upcoming quarter? And during that conversation, talk about the value that we were able to get to our customers. And if we can track it, it's a great opportunity for us to ask the customer itself whether they got the value or not. So that's what QBR means. OK, so I think that we've answered all the questions. So thank you everybody for participating. It was great fun, especially for me. I'm sure that for Evyatar as well.