Digital Customer Success at Scale: How a Small Team Supports 10,000 Customers | EP93

[MUSIC] If you're an account manager, you already know the truth. You're the one keeping the business running. You own the client relationships, drive the revenue, and solve tough problems. But you also know that most companies don't give account managers the playbook or the recognition they deserve. That's what you'll learn here on account management secrets. The strategies, insights, and edge you need to win. I'm Alex Raymond, and after working with thousands of account managers, I know it separates the best from the rest. This podcast is where we talk about all the stuff no one teaches you. How to handle tough client conversations, drive renewals and upsells, and prove your value every single day. No fluff, no outdated sales tactics, just practical strategies you can use right now to grow your accounts and accelerate your career. Let's get started. Most of the conversations on this podcast are about the world of high touch account management, where there's one customer success manager in charge of a small number of accounts building deep relationships. Today's episode is about a different world entirely. My guest is Andrew Carruthers, global head of digital customer success at Proofpoint, where his team looks after roughly 10,000 customers. Before Proofpoint, he spent 15 years at Cisco building their digital customer success function across hundreds of thousands of accounts. In today's episode, we talk about what it actually takes to drive adoption and retention when there's no human touching the account. Why digital first doesn't mean digital only and how the handoff between human and programmatic touch points works. And how Andrew's team at Cisco got so good at driving retention that sales asked them to take over a larger and larger account segments. Whether you run a team of account managers with five accounts each, or you're thinking about how to massively scale your post sale coverage without adding headcount, there's a lot here. I hope you enjoy this episode of account management secrets. Andrew, great to see you. Welcome. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. So you're the global head of digital customer success at Proofpoint. And I find that interesting because on this podcast, I haven't had a lot of discussions around digital or scaled customer success program. So I'm looking forward to getting into that with you and learning a lot more about that. Interesting thing about what I learned about you on the prep for this episode is you really came up in the customer experience community. And I think for a lot of listeners, there's going to be some gray zones between account management, customer success, customer experience. And I thought it would help us to start there. And just say, what are we talking about with these different terms with this different terminology? How can one start to think about where all these things fit together? Great question, Alex. So I've written at the largest level think of brand as the promise that a company makes to its customers and its prospects. And customer experience or customer success is the delivery of that promise. So I would include in that description of customer experience, I would include sales, marketing, all the different touch points procurement. Every touch point that a customer has with a company is part of what helps them create the perception of the experience in their mind. And when we're talking scale, right now we're talking about customers that don't have a lot of post sales coverage. It may be depending on the company and how they operate. It may be that the same team, the same account team that is involved in pre sales and sales is also then responsible for post sales. They may or may not be paid on that. There might be a customer success team that's focusing in on the higher, the customer success managers who are focusing on the enterprise accounts and the higher dollar valuable accounts. And it might be up to the scale team, the digital team, to then provide a customer experience that's going to help customers receive what they're looking for, the value they're looking for. And I'll say more specifically when we talk about customer success or customer experience teams, and I'll just use those terms interchangeably, because I think they aren't interchangeable. We're talking about really post sales efforts to get customers to deploy and adopt what they've purchased and receive value from what they've purchased so that they will renew the contract. That's really the goal and how it shakes out. And so give us a sense of the scale that you're operating at, because I know proof points, big company, the luck went on. You also have had a similar role at Cisco. So you've been doing this with very, very large organizations. Give us a sense of that. Yeah, so when I was at Cisco, I, we didn't have a customer success team at when I started working at Cisco, because we were hardware vendor. As we shifted into operating in the SaaS environment, we needed to change our business process and build out a customer success function and a digital component to that function. So there we were dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers that are digital only or digital within through partners, because a lot of the most of the deals at Cisco go through partners. So we had to figure out a way to engage customers digitally with their partners. So 8,000 partners, hundreds of thousands of customers in the digital sphere. At proof point, large company, not quite as large as Cisco, but we're about a two and a half billion dollar company, over 20 years old. And we have about 16,000 customers, about roughly 10,000 of those are digital first customers, the ones the scaled customers that I'm working with direct. And how big is your team that services those 10,000? I currently have about five people on my team. I got so much already in a couple of weeks, so that will help. >> Okay, yeah, that's a pretty big portfolio. I often talk to people who manage portfolio of one customer or three, maybe five to 10 sort of things. So this is a completely different world out there. How do you start to even measure, are we moving in the right direction? What do these customers want from us? Because when you're dealing with that many points of data, it's just really hard to figure out how we, how we steering in the right direction. >> Yep, absolutely. So the, really the main metric to figure out if we're being successful is measuring the renewables. What's our churn rate or what's our renewal rate, depending on which side of the coin you want to look at? And are we making a difference? Are the customers that are digital, only customers or scaled customers? What is their renewal rate? And then we can back up and look at some metrics that lead to the ultimate metric, the renewal rate metric, which is what's the adoption rate? So that comes down to figuring out, working with different subject matter experts across the company. What are the key features that we need customers to adopt in order to meet, let's call it minimum viable deployment? And then what's the next set of features? And it may be linear or may not be a linear sort of set of feature adoption. So what's the next grouping of features that takes them from deployed to sort of begin or adoption, and then intermediate adoption and then advanced adoption? And we can, got to make sure we have the data, got to make sure we have the telemetry data that tells us our customers using those features. And that might be sort of an off on yes, no, or it might be a what level of license deployment have they attained? Or, you know, so should it be sort of volume of usage? Or simply yes, no usage, depending on what the telemetry is? So being able to measure that, which then leads to greater deployment and adoption leads to greater renewal. So those are really the metrics that we want to look at. And we want to look at that across the whole base. We want to measure what we're doing digitally against what the CSM covered accounts are doing. Right? The different go-to-market approaches that the company has, we want to be able to slice and dice the data so that we can see the relative comparison between digital only accounts and what are they doing, et cetera. And then what we do is, in order to with those metrics as kind of the North Star, what we're trying to achieve, then we build out a programmatic approach to achieving that. So that is, at scale, that means what information do we need to get to customers and when do we need to get it? And who do we get it to? So getting the right information to help them with deployment, adoption, et cetera. At the right time, we want to get the customers when they're just starting off. We want to get them the information for beginners. We don't want to send them power user tips and tricks when they're still just deploying the product or vice versa. So the right information at the right time, to the right contact, and this is where a lot of companies struggle, even in a high-touch world. Who's the right contact for this product, especially if it's a company that sells multiple products? And we want to make sure that we're sending information about product A to the people who care about product A and not product B to those people. Otherwise, we're just simply spamming people and smugging them about things they don't care about. So we want to be relevant to them. And that's hard to do. So collecting the data becomes the first step. It's almost like the first few months or even years in case of Cisco. of building out a successful customer success practice is really a data project. Do we have updated data in RCRM that tell you, A is it updated? B, does it tell us who cares about which product set? Do we have the telemetry data coming in? Do we have relevant and updated information that helps customers with enablement? And can we get it to them in a way that is easy for them to self-serve? And we want to do that through multiple channels. So on the something you might think is the simplest part, which is, well, the content information. Do we have the right enablement material? I've seen places where customers are being sent to get information on how to adopt a certain feature. And there might be three pages in a 100-page document. And customers being sent to that 100-page document, not knowing which three pages that they need to look for, or even that they're only three pages. So they're trying to get information. They don't have it. They're frustrated. And now we're sending them to that experience, which is even more frustrating. So even the most-- what might be the easiest part of the puzzle can be complicated. No, I mean, for sure. This is really interesting because you're talking about such big amounts of data, so much information there. And therefore, a lot of infrastructure required. And it's really a case of figuring out how do we make this work across all 10,000 customers? It's a big, big thing. And I had a couple of follows from what you were just talking about for us to drill into here. The first I'll say is just as a observation, you said we need to figure out how to help them adopt the software, and what the triggers are. And everyone knows these examples of like back in the Twitter days, if you sent X number of messages to Y number of people in Z amount of time, then that was like the trigger that you're successful. And something similar for Facebook, and a lot of software companies have metrics like that. This is the kind of thing that is very easy to say and very difficult to do and very difficult, then to track back to actual successful outcomes for people. So if you're listening to this and you heard what Andrew just said, don't just glance over the fact that he did this incredible journey map and adoption curve and all this kind of stuff. There's a lot that went into that I can imagine. Yeah, absolutely. I think the most common misperception about scaled CS is, well, let's just send people after they bought something. Let's send them a bunch of information. And maybe we set up a plan so that we're going to drip the information out every week or month or whatever it might be. Or we're going to make some assumptions that maybe after a month they're ready for this next bit of information to do something. But it really comes down to what the goal is. The goal is not to communicate. It's not to send emails. And I think that's where people get tripped out because they understand demand gen, right? That's sort of a longstanding process. So based on that, they're like, all right, well, then post sales will do the same thing. Get an email list, fire off some emails. But really what we're trying to do is get the customer to take action. We're not trying to communicate for the sake of communicating. Or for the sake of informing, we're communicating for the sake of influencing customer behavior. And not assuming that they're going to take the steps that we want them to take. Maybe they don't know what those steps are. Maybe they don't know how to do it. Maybe they have 20 other things on their list of things to do that day. And they just can't get around to it. So we want to make it as easy as possible for them to take the steps that they need to take, to get value, so that they will turn around and say, great. When the time make a decision about renewal, of course I'm going to renew. Look at how the value I'm getting from this. And it's easy for me to get that value. And that's the other forgotten about part, is if we make it hard for customers to get value from what they buy, even if they're getting the value, many of them are going to leave and go somewhere else, where it's not going to be such a grind to get the value. So we're communicating to drive adoption. So to change behavior, we're trying to get them to change behavior so that renewal time comes, the value is very high. And then that's what we're tracking. And so to link back to another thing that you're mentioning before, you said your primary metric, therefore, is renewal rate. And I presume you're talking about gross revenue retention. So-- Or maybe even logo retention. And with a-- actually, I have a whole bunch of questions about this. But with such a big customer volume, getting the cohort is really important. Because when you do a gross revenue retention calculation, you have to put a time box in it. The customers who signed up in Q1 or signed up in 2025 or what have you. And so that's really important. Tell us what goes into your thinking and calculations there. Well, great questions. Because it's easy to talk about. It's harder to do. I like like many things. Because the devil's in the details. So we look at data by-- and slice and dice data by ARR size. We look at data by-- all of these are either alone or in conjunction. They can be mixed and matched, depending on what level of data analysis we're doing. So we're looking at ARR size. We're looking at industry. We're looking at-- I would say those are probably the two largest ones. And then we are looking at quarterly trends and year-over-year trends. So standard looking to see-- the year-over-year, it'll smooth out kind of seasonality. And we're looking at both logo retention, but also then the opportunity for expansion as well. And the number one goal is logo retention. Because we can't expand if we don't save the logo. And it's a lot harder to get new accounts. There's all sorts of data about that, right? 5X, the cost of getting a new account, didn't retain account, et cetera. So number one goes logo retention. And we're looking at what have they done, what steps have they taken. And then we also look at-- we kind of overlay that customer data with kind of best practice and sort of levels of adoption. So customers that had low level adoption versus medium level versus advanced level. And that allows us to kind of do some analysis to figure out. All right, if we've got high turnover here, is it related to adoption? It likely is, but let's figure that out. Is it related to specific adoption when it comes to specific features, for example, or maybe, and oftentimes it is, or another common one is time to adoption, from purchase to adoption. The longer it takes to get to sort of minimum adoption is typically leads to those customers of the ones that end up turning 9 or 12 months later. So we will get kind of time to value, as well as level of value, that we think the customer has achieved. Based on prior conversations, we've had to cut with customers to identify what is value. That's an important element. It's not what we think value is. It's what customers think the value is. So staying close to customers is important, too. And then building out the programmatic approach that we can dive into a little bit more, and then measuring that. And then optimizing if need be. And I will tell you that we're earlier in the journey at proof point to have all of that day that optimized. So I'll look back at then my Cisco-- I'll give a Cisco example-- where when we started this, our retention rate was significantly lower for our scale customers than for our high-touch customers. And we had a medium touch level, as well, one to 20 or 50 accounts. And then the high-touch was maybe one to two, that type of thing. But we got to the point of optimization where we were asked by sales to take to raise the bar of the digital accounts, the digital segment, dollar value. So we started off covering $50,000 and below were digital-only accounts. And then they asked us after a couple of years, because we got so good at driving retention and we were driving retention at a higher rate than the one to many. So we started taking over the one to many. And then they took those one to many CSMs and expanded the coverage for the one to few. So they were able to repress the people. So when done well, it can be just as effective as a human touch. Yeah, that's fine. That hits one of the assumptions that I have here, which is I assume-- I've always learned that small clients turn more than big ones. And so I would guess that you're already playing defense a little bit on the scale customers. And so interesting to learn that at Cisco, you actually were able to match and then exceed-- does that what I heard you say, match and exceed the retention rate for the more hands-on accounts? Yes, indeed. And here's-- so this is not going to be the truth for every product in every industry. Somebody who is buying purely in a commoditized world. So if you're selling pens or something like that, it's only about the price. That's going to be different. But when customers are looking to get business value from what they've purchased, from software in particular, that they purchase, although it could be hard to purchase. But when they're looking to get that business value out, of that, they're not looking to, they don't, they would prefer not to change. I mean, so so change is hard. Change is hard. So let's do this once and, and be good. The thing that I think is overlaid into this is a massive customer and sort of human trend over the last certainly 20 years, but even more specifically over the last five to 10. And that is the move to digital engagement. So I argue that every customer, even your largest enterprise customers, want a digital first experience, not digital only necessarily, but digital first, because digital when done well is the fastest easiest way for customers to get what they're looking for. I travel a lot, can't remember the last time, it's been years since I picked up the phone and called the travel agent. I make my travel agent's online. I do my research online for where do I want to stay or what do I want to see in the city that kind of thing. So just one example, but for services, for software, for even a lot of hardware, it's easier for customers to get the information. If they can any time of the day or night, you know, they just go get the answer. I don't have to fill out a form. I don't have to wait for somebody to call me back. I don't have to stay on hold. If it's done well, I think what happens is that a lot of times people say, oh, I don't want a digital experience. And what they're really saying is, I don't want a bad digital experience. Like nobody wants to engage with a chat box that doesn't know what they're trying to do. No one wants to go into a retail store and work with somebody who has no idea about the products that are in the store either. So no one wants a bad experience. But because even before COVID and then dramatically accelerated by COVID, people got so use to engaging with companies and even with their peers in digital means. A lot of those fears and concerns have gone away and it's just sort of the way people operate now. So it's easier for them to get the value they want and to renew, etc. You know, maybe 20 years ago, the digital, absolutely 20 years ago, the level of retention, etc., for digital only clients would have been a lot lower than the human touch clients. But what people expect in terms of what they're used to getting, but also in terms of the speed that they're, you know, expectations are just speed and etc. Amazon, I think had a huge role in changing people's expectations. I had Chef Hiking on this podcast and he shared a lot of perspectives on that and the expectations that are now in place versus what might have been. Let's talk a bit about the programmatic approach that you've assembled. So we talked about, you know, it's hard to manage such a large volume of clients and help them get value. We talked about shrinking the time to value and, you know, getting them communications that's going to drive behavior or drive some kind of action on their part. Tell us about what you have in place and what building that program looked like. Yeah. So the goal is to be able to communicate with customers in multiple channels so that we're sure to reach customers in the channel where they operate. Within reason, we can't operate in every channel. We're not still not staff for that. So the key channels that we're focused in on are email, still the number one channel that people do business in. So email in product, so with messages that come up in product to guide to people or to let them know if there's information they need in general. And through, I'll call it sort of community. So the opportunity to not only find information easily in a community, but also engage with peers in a company moderated environment so that if there's, if they're, you know, wrong information being shared that somebody from the company can monitor that and correct it. But in general, customers like the opportunity to engage with their peers, especially my learning best practices or work arounds, whatever might be. So email in product community and then webinars and office hours and I'll kind of lump those together. They're similar. So give me the opportunity to go and you have somebody talk to me and give me more information and then I can ask some questions in the case of a webinar or their office hour. It's just, you know, a lot of particular topic. Let me just kind of ask questions and engage. So it's almost like free consulting. So those are the main channels that we're focused in on building out and optimizing. Other channels, depending on where people might be in Asia, you know, WhatsApp is heavily used. So that might be a channel that companies might want to invest in. Loinked in is a way to reach people. That's quite effective by it. And I would love to add that to my, to my remit, but first things first, kind of sort of do the building blocks and then move forward. And then it's a matter of again for each one of those, understanding what do we need customers to know and what information do we need to share with them in order to get them value and move them along kind of the value lifecycle that we've mapped out previously. And it starts off with at the point of sale or at, I'll say at the time of sale, reaching out to customers with a congratulations. Thanks for becoming a customer or adding on a product that they already have. And then setting expectations, here's what to expect. Now, in the case of proof point, every customer gets a professional services implementation. So here's what to expect. Someone from professional services will reach out to you in the coming days, collect, depending on what product they bought, there might be, there might be government regulations or requirements around data protection or whatever my fee. So letting them know that that exists. And either suggesting that they come prepared to that first engagement with professional services, you're going to need this bit of information. So make sure you got it. So they can prepare for a productive meeting or we might even suggest, hey, our record show, this is the latest data protection requirements in the healthcare industry, but please confirm, right? So, so welcoming them, letting them know what to expect in terms of the next contact, letting them know what they can do to prepare in advance of that. And then once that professional services implementation is completed, congratulations. So like you've graduated, right? And here's information now to get you really started with with getting value and giving them this, then we get into the steps of these features. Here's the information, etc. And then tracking. That's interesting because I had this assumption in my head that you're dealing with customers who never talked to a human, but you're saying that's not true. There's actually, there's a professional service component. So there is a human relationship that gets established and then they go back to, then they go back to the digital touch. Correct, correct. Yeah, exactly. So does that cause any friction or issues? Does that work? No, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. And one thing that's important is that they understand, and this is this is on us, to build out the the opportunity to connect with humans if they want. And there are multiple ways that I've seen this done effectively. And it really it comes down to resourcing. But it's a one way is I think the webinars and the office hours and even to an extent, the community provide a way for people to get answers from humans if they need to be. Another way to do it is to have a set of pooled resources that customers can reach out to connect with. Proofpoint Cisco both use both work with partners and kind of scale through partners. So it's figuring out a way to direct resources to partners who can then handle that. That might be a way to to do that. You know, that's tricky though because now you're dealing with other organizations and you've got to make sure that the partner involved in this sale is the one who gets the the definitely asking. And that the partner is it has a process in place for handling that incoming request. So but there has to be a process in place for handling that request and getting back to people quickly. This is not customer support. I want to be clear about that. If you need customer support help, you go to our customer support team. If you're if you need more information on how to adopt this particular feature, so it sort of sits in between implementation and support. So it's important to clarify for customers what to expect when when they reach out to this pooled resource. If that's that's a really interesting question. And it comes up is you know people will list people listening to this or people who are aware of scale and digital customer success will sometimes say well geez that just sounds like a glorified support team. We're a support team by a different name. And so you're saying they're very distinct. How do you how do you define that? And then how do you maintain that in the eyes of the customer to ensure a good experience for them? Yeah. You could use a support team for this function. I but it's not cost effective to do so. So this is really where the support team is looking at either sort of quick troubleshooting password reset or how do you know I'm struggling with X but this or in depth sort of case analysis and figuring out there's something's gone wrong. There's a bug or there's a there's a or implementation that is led to something going wrong. So that's a fixing it versus this which is which is teaching it almost right. So it's there's a sort of a learning and development component too. Here are the best practices for implementation of this product in your vertical you know for with your peers. Here's how you do X, Y and Z. Let me point you to some more information if I can answer it quickly. It's almost like a learning and development triage that can also point people to other areas if they're like all right I really need a class on that. great, they'll let me point you to that. - So being like their guide, essentially. - You're being their guide, that's exactly it. As a customer success manager would be their Sherpa, this is, I'm not gonna call it a Sherpa 'cause that's more intense, this is a guide, yeah, exactly. - You're like, you're like, you're like, ways, you know, Google Maps, like showing it in the way, getting them there. - That is exactly it, yeah, exactly, yep, yep, yep. Versus, yeah, I'm very nervous. - I gotta call triple A or my mechanic, that's my car broke down, that's customer support. - So you're running this gigantic program, it's got, it's got emails, community, it's got the webinars, it's got the office hours, it's got the in-product stuff, so huge, huge sets of, of behaviors and intricacies, all very complicated there. So you've gotta go in, every time there's a new feature, new version of the product, you know, we didn't even talk about like looking at the help desk, literature, but I'm sure you guys have gigantic, systems for dealing with all that stuff too. So you're really, really embedded in, you know, in the product and in the operations of the business. So part of it is literally just figuring out, how do we sync up all that information, let alone, how do we communicate to the customer? You don't want the stuff to be broken, you don't want your tool tips to go to a dead article or whatever it is, it's tremendous about a highly detailed operational work in there. How do you handle that stuff? So that is one of the things, that's what I love most about CX is that, it's the only function that I found in a company that in order to be effective has to tie it all together and has to be engaged with all those different components that you just talked about. I don't need my team to run all the webinars, I can work with marketing or professional services or others to run them, but we'll manage the process of heading webinars and make sure they happen. So we don't control, we don't own the knowledge base where our self-help articles are located. But we work with that team, we identify new knowledge based articles that need to be written or created or videos or whatever, we might create some of those ourselves, they're housed over there with that team. So we work very closely with that team. They've got certain processes of their own to periodically review articles for timely to skip them up to date, et cetera. They're starting to use AI for that, like a lot of different organizations are. So part of how my team scales so that we can scale to 10,000 customers is we leverage other parts of the organization that are doing kind of in the Venn diagram, there's some overlap there. So that's a key element here. You've got to be good in this role. You've got to be good at managing stakeholders and making friends. - Yeah, I was gonna say, you're doing a lot of, you're in a lot of meetings, I would imagine. - I've been in a lot of meetings and here's another reason why that's so important is we don't want to build a parallel structure for webinars or content or whatever might be. One, that's not an effective use of the company's resources. Two, we probably won't get resourced enough in order to do that well. And just as importantly, three, it's easier to have an effective customer experience if there's one sort of team that's driving the content. There might be others contributing to that, but we don't want to send customers to one spot for marketing related content and another spot for support related content and another spot for success related content. So working with teams together is better from a customer facing perspective as well? - Yeah, I like that approach. I mean, I like the way that you phrase that a lot because it only works if there's a single experience that the customer is on. And one of the biggest customer complaints is, well, hey, I just already told this person the answer to that same exact question. Or like, I don't remember which one of you six people am I supposed to call for what? You know, like customers do not like that. And so the fact that we're trying to unify it, it's hard work to do, but it's super value from the super valuable from the client point of view. I wanna talk about something that I heard you mentioned kind of in reference here. You said that once you stabilize the churn or the retention number, that you can then add to that. So that you do actually have some responsibility for upsells, cross-sells, and expansion. I was surprised when you said that 'cause I thought how do you possibly get involved with that? How does that work? So you're looking for signals, or you're getting an email from someone who says, "Yes, I wanna buy more." Like what are you doing? And are you seeing that through yourself in an entirely automated way, or are you somehow interacting with sales at that point? Walk us through that. - So there are a couple of different approaches to take, and then there are different levels within those approaches. The big picture, you can either kind of go sort of blunt force and do these sort of customers like you with this also about that type of approach. So I'll call that the blunt approach, and you can apply that to all customers or segment out who you think should get that information, maybe just your smallest customers, however you want to do that. The other way to do that is to use data science to do some predictive modeling. That looks at customer bases and determines these are the ones with a propensity to buy this product or to upsell the cross out to this product. And then that's much more, right? So that's a bigger effort. - And that could be based on company size or what industry they're in, or presumably if they're growing or not, or there's a million things you could look at. - Correct, as well as their own tool, what have they bought, what have they renewed, what have they used, right? Customers who use this feature often, maybe then have a higher propensity to buy that product, because maybe there's a connection between the two. So it's also looking at what have they bought, right? The wealth of information you can look at. And doing the data science analysis to look at all that, to come up with A, let's really make sure that the data is proving out what are the factors that lead to a higher propensity to upsell the cross out. We may think we know what they are, but it may be something we haven't even considered, or haven't prioritized. So one, we can really make sure that the data is informing who we reach out to. And then we make sure that we are, again, by bringing in data, we are then able to target it in an automated fashion communications to those customers with product A that we think are likely to be, to purchase product B if they knew about it, or they knew the value of it. And then we can either send them specific messages on product B in the value, you may be interested in this, so that's much more of a marketing type function. I personally would leave that to the marketing team to do that, because I think customers expect that for marketing and from customer success, they expect, help me out of use this. Don't not try to sell me something. So then I would then add it on. Kind of, if it's a service level, for example, kind of good, better, best, you're at good. Here's what you get the additional value, you get from better or best, and you can provide that to them at appropriate times. It might be time of renewal. You can renew this, but would you rather renew that? Or it could be at time of renewal for additional products, the cross-selling component there as well. So finding the right time, like when they're just getting started, that's not the right time to upsell them on the next product. Even when they're in the middle of adoption, but when you find that they are adopting, they seem to be getting, let's assume they're getting value because they've got a good adoption going. Now I think you can start to look at communicating to them without the products. Being targeted with the data science is much better than just blasting everybody, but you could just blast everybody if you needed. - And then you're getting sales involved, or is your team doing those closes with the program? With the program? - Yeah, great question. Great question. So that gets into what is the process that the company follows? And I've seen it done both ways. If there's a, depending, and really often comes down to the cost level of the product, if it's something customers are comfortable with just purchasing online, then you probably don't need your sales involved at all. If it is something where people need to get involved in process the paper, or if it's complex and they might wanna ask questions, you can, if it's just about processing the paper, but you need to have people involved, you can then essentially, once you've got the, you get the customers to say, "I'm interested now wanna learn more," then you send them off to sales. Or if it's, I just wanna process the paper, and then maybe that goes to procurement, or whatever, whatever the processes of that company might be. So if you don't need to invite sales, it includes sales, don't. And that's not to exclude anybody, that's about simplifying the process for the customer. We don't wanna have to shop in card. If they do need to be involved, then let's have a process that pulls them in right away. We don't wanna send it to some mailbox or someplace, it's not monitored, and then the customer's sitting around wondering, "why nobody can contact with me." So if you're gonna get involved, you need to build out the process and get their buying on the process. - Awesome, so Andrew, what's next year? What's coming? Are you soon gonna be looking after, not just 10,000, but then 12,000 and 14,000, and then all of them, like to what extent is the digital touch, like really bleeding into the other areas? is AI going to take everybody's jobs and eat the world? You know, is this going to be just be a team of one in the future instead of a larger team? Like, what's coming down the pike? - Yeah, I think that, first of all, I think that digital is already what all customers want. They still may want a human, right? So I would say it's already bled up into the higher value customers that have a higher touch approach. It compliments that approach, doesn't replace it. So I think that AI is already playing a role in operational efficiencies. So I can have a content person on my team work with my, with such a matter of experts, to create content in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks, and then be able to take that content and slice and dice it in multiple formats, long form video, short form video, whatever it might be. Doing that with AI to allow for the creation of multiple types of content, multiple file formats so that customers have the option to pick what works best for them. Some people like, I just want a video, other people like, I want to read the manual. So we can now provide all of that. So that's how AI is already on the scene today, improving the customer experience. I think that AI will continue to be used in the next, I'll say one to three years, primarily to optimize existing processes, workflows, content creation, type of thing I was describing. I think after that, I think that in the world does become different. I think that's where we'll have an environment where we can start having the, what I've been calling the digital first with the human off ramp, that human off ramp can, can, will become digital, I think it likely. So that might be, and I'm just gonna call it an AI agent, it could be a bottom avatar or whatever, but that's somebody that can reactively have all the answers when a customer calls in and asks for it, or we reach his out to ask for it, and it could be a call in, it could be voice, or it could be text. It also might be proactively reaching out to customers. It's been a while since you've had a CVR or whatever it might be, right? And just to schedule it, or actually maybe even to deliver some of it, right? I've seen a short-term world, being able to communicate out to customers, on a quarterly basis, monthly, pick your timeframe, all AI generated and distributed automatically to individual customers saying, here's your CVR, and it's gonna be at a high level. Some customers only want at a high level, but here's your CVR, and maybe here's a two-page document, and here's an avatar walking through it, and comparing it to the last quarters one. And if you want a more in-depth information contact, and then you send them to the CSM, or sales, or whomever it might be. So I see that happening in the next probably year. So there's a little bit of bleed there. >> Yeah, certainly lots of moving parts. Well, hey, Andrew Carrothers, thank you for joining me, really appreciate learning about proof point, about these digital customers' success. Touchpoints is an area, like I said, where I don't have a lot of exposure, so I like the fact that we're able to go deep here. Thanks so much for joining me here on Account Management Secrets. >> Alex, thanks so much. I've had a great time. >> I hope you enjoyed this episode of Account Management Secrets. If you're ready to boost your career and sharpen your skills, come check out Amplify. Explore our elite community of top performing account managers, packed with courses, tools, and a vibrant network at amplifyam.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week.