Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Cisco Systems Inc
Customer Success Lessons from Cisco’s Maria Martinez
Watch Nick Mehta, Gainsight's CEO, and Maria Martinez, Cisco's Chief Experience Officer, talk about all things customer success.
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About Maria Martinez
In a May 2020 virtual fireside chat, Maria Martinez, then Cisco's Executive Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, discussed customer success strategies. She stated that at Cisco, the focus had shifted from traditional customer success to managing the "end-to-end experience" from marketing through onboarding. Martinez differentiated customer success from support by describing it as "being proactive versus reactive" and centered on driving outcomes and adoption. She argued that customer success should report high in an organization so that the CEO receives regular feedback. Martinez also addressed churn, calling it "the number one issue for CEOs in software and SaaS." She said that in enterprise settings, churn is often measured as a loss of revenue or footprint rather than losing the customer entirely, and she advocated focusing on use cases rather than products. During the crisis, she advised companies to "not waste a crisis" and to use the opportunity to demonstrate value to customers. She emphasized that partners are integral to the customer experience at Cisco and that human relationships remain important despite technology.
Transcript (30 segments)
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Nick0:10
Maria Martinez doesn't need an introduction but I'm gonna do one anyway just to flatter her a little bit. Maria is probably one of the longest and most distinguished careers in the world of customer support, customer services, and customer success. Maria started her career at Microsoft where she ran a big chunk of all services at Microsoft, then she was at Salesforce through a lot of the high-growth years where she was president of the customer success group at Salesforce. It really helped scale the world's largest customer success organization. Then she joined Cisco as part of this huge transformation Cisco is going through to become a full-fledged subscription business and she became the EVP and chief customer experience officer at Cisco. Beyond all that, Maria has been an amazing contributor to the community of customer success. She helped us way back.
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Maria Martinez1:10
Thank you, that's very kind. It's great to be here again with you talking about this very important topic. We both have said "customer success" more than any two people. And we have a thank you to Maria – she wrote the foreword to the original book on customer success that many of you have read, and she has kindly written the foreword to the new book coming out in May called The Customer Success Economy, about how customer success is taking over industries and going across functions and across companies. We're going to talk a lot more about that, but before we do, just to start with some fun: if customer success was a song, what song would it be, Maria?
Well, that's a hard one because I like music... The one I found... yeah, awesome. I would say it's either a Taylor Swift song about relationship challenges, or country music – you lose your dog, your pickup truck breaks, you go to jail, and you get drunk. That's a lot like managing customers. But I'm really excited to dive into the forefront of customer experience and customer success with somebody who is practicing at a huge scale at Cisco.
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Nick2:44
I want to kick it off with a question that came up in my mind when you took the job at Cisco. Obviously you did amazing things at Salesforce, transition to Cisco, and I was curious to see your title change. At Salesforce you were president of customer success, and now at Cisco you're EVP and chief customer experience officer. Why the shift from customer success to customer experience?
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Maria Martinez3:11
I think it was about the mission that Chuck wanted for the company. He was about transformation for sure, which is a key part of that. Transformation to a new business model, a new customer engagement model. And we realized it was much more than the traditional customer success – that we need to look at the end-to-end experience from the customer, starting from the moment we market to customers, sell to them, onboard them, and so on. So we still have to retain the name customer success for the function, but we're thinking about the experience overall.
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Nick3:48
That's wonderful because I think a lot of people struggle with what's the name of the umbrella. Some people the function is customer success and the umbrella is also customer success, which can confuse the audience. Some people get confused between customer success and the phrase that sounds almost the same – customer support. Since you've explained this a million times, I'll ask you the millionth and one time: give us the definition of how you think those two are different.
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Maria Martinez4:26
I think about customer success as mainly the post-sale experience, for which support is a piece of it. I think about it as a continuum where you need to bring the customer along at every step of their lifecycle, from rewarding them. A lot of people talk about adoption, but I've actually put a lot more energy into things like onboarding, for example. I think about it as almost nested: customer experience is the whole thing, customer success is that post-sale experience, and onboarding, adoption, etc. are part of it, with support as one piece. Customer success is more proactive; support is more reactive. But that might be an oversimplification.
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Nick5:34
Do you see customer success as a simplification agent for organizations?
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Maria Martinez5:37
It's a really good question. In a lot of companies, customer success is created because there's a big gap after the sale before the renewal – who's proactively driving that customer to value? There's also a different kind of gap where the structure of product groups and their incentives isn't something we want customers to focus on. In the early days, customer success becomes this navigator that helps customers understand where to go. But if you get stuck there, the problem is you're not adding enough value for the customer. Eventually you have to be able to add value as a customer success person around outcomes and ROI. But as a starting point, helping to simplify the organization for the vendor is a good way to start.
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Nick6:45
Yeah, I mean that's a really great point. That's one of the first things we did at Cisco – try to integrate a lot more of the experience. It's about experience. For our contact centers, we help customers figure out how to navigate. For example, Splunk has done a really good job managing this post-purchase journey. At Salesforce, you put a lot of work into helping customers be put through a journey end-to-end, particularly in the low-touch space, automating some of that. One of the things I was going to ask you is: you've run three huge organizations, three of the biggest in the world. How do you think about the organizational structure for customer success?
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Maria Martinez8:12
Customer success becomes a function that really reports at pretty high levels in the organization. Many times it gets buried so deep that it becomes tactical. I am a big believer that if you believe in making customers' experience the best it can be, this becomes a pretty important function that needs to report high up. It's great that Cisco chose to put it directly reporting to Chuck. That doesn't necessarily always have to be the case, but you have to make sure it becomes a peer function to other important functions like sales.
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Nick9:10
You said it well – it's not just about the org chart, it's about the philosophy. I remember speaking to a CEO and chief revenue officer about a year ago. He said he had customer success put under him, but it wasn't the focus of the company, so he spent maybe one hour a week on that and 55 hours on sales. I think that's the mistake. If customer success reports to somebody who can't put the time in, who doesn't have the passion and strategic thinking, it's going to be a failure. In some cases, because the organization's history is so different, having the CEO involved every single day is important. But if you already have it going, I can see it reporting one level lower as long as that person takes it really seriously.
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Maria Martinez10:26
I think it's important that person has the right title. For example, if you're a chief customer officer, they need to own the whole customer go-to-market. But many times when that person carries a sales or marketing title, you're not really valuing the function.
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Nick10:48
I fully agree. The title says what the mission is. I've even seen some chief revenue officers change their title to emphasize customer success. One of the things I think is really interesting is it's not just about the organization – it's about the experience, how you're making people feel. When you think about building a concierge-like experience at Cisco, what are the keys to making customers feel like they're at the Four Seasons?
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Maria Martinez11:37
It's very important that every company puts deep thinking into what they want their experience to be. When they're transforming, they need to think about what they want to be, leveraging their strengths but also having aspiration. As you build concierge functions or contact centers, you have to live the values you've set for your company. I really like how we came up with our mission statement – just three words, very simple. That gives marching orders to everyone designing the experience, from customer support leaders to service designers to customer success managers.
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Nick12:44
If you're watching, I encourage you to think: what's your mission statement for your experience? Do you have something as clear as what Maria just articulated? One of the things we talk about in customer success that is the most challenging in the enterprise is churn. It's quite difficult to think about because churn today might be the result of things that happened a long time ago. How do you think about churn differently in the world of a big enterprise organization with big contracts and big customers?
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Maria Martinez13:27
We have customers from small to very large, and it's quite different. For small customers with point products, churn is about whether they return and adopt more. In enterprise, we measure churn by whether we lose the customer – though you hardly ever lose a customer entirely. It's more about expansion or contraction. You need to think about the right measures. One thing we're doing is focusing on use cases versus products, helping customers advance their use cases to value rather than just thinking about products. That's a hot topic in customer success right now – building out that use case taxonomy and mapping it to different offers.
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Nick14:54
Is your team taking the lead on building that, or are you working with product management?
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Maria Martinez15:10
We're trying to unify use cases between marketing, engineering, and customer experience so they're the same. That way we can tie how we market, sell, and deliver. We've come up with two levels of use cases: one is the selling value proposition, more at a high level, and the other is more at the execution level for running the business. We've taken the lead on bringing that together for the whole company.
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Nick15:55
I love that. It sounds like there's a high-level mapping tied to your sales value propositions, done with marketing, and then taking those down to the execution level where your team is leading. What other trends are you seeing in the industry?
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Maria Martinez
We hit on one: going from adoption to outcomes. Adoption is great, but people buy products to get value, not just to log in. Another big trend is customer success becoming part of a bigger picture of customer experience. If I had to simplify it, think of a triangle: customer success post-sale is one vertex, sales and marketing is another, and the third vertex – which is the latest big trend – is product. Product needs to be involved in designing offers and use cases that map to delivery. That virtuous triangle of customer success, sales, and product is a really big area right now. The third trend, which we should have seen coming, is that we still have human relationships. Despite all our technology, relationships with both our team and customers really matter. Training on relationship management and getting deeper in accounts is a third big trend.
All those things are top of mind. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with your team and the ecosystem you've built in these areas. Speaking of trends, one unfortunate trend we're all dealing with is COVID-19. We start by thanking the people taking care of us in hospitals and being empathetic for those affected. How has your customer experience team at Cisco responded in this new world?
It's certainly changing things for all of us. I like the phrase "don't waste a crisis." We need to be agile, fast, and adjust to what customers need. At Cisco, the needs for web conferencing are on the rise. We offer free Webex and are helping customers with network capacity. The relationship has shifted from commercial to one where the customer success function plays a more important role. This crisis allows us to elevate things to higher value in customers' eyes, and our job is to capture that as an ongoing motion.
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Nick21:41
I use that same phrase too. It creates an opportunity to move forward. I was on a call with CEOs of public software companies where an analyst said that... It's interesting because this crisis is causing us to remember that the core of our business in a recurring revenue model is our customers. That should be obvious, but it becomes more obvious when other things slow down. This is the time to make customer success the priority.
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Maria Martinez
I totally agree. I tell customer success leaders that your job has never been more important. You have this amazing partner network. People ask me how to do customer success with a big partner channel. Cisco is a few steps ahead. How are you thinking about partners as part of customer success and customer experience?
Partners are a big part of the experience because most of our business goes through them. The model we're designing is completely integrated with partners. We design it for partners to lead, but we also support them. Many customers work with multiple partners, so the unifying force has to be us. In our playbooks and approach, partners are integral. We're training partners on customer success and expecting similar technology and data standards. We're certifying partners – we launched our first two certifications, one for customer success managers and another for renewal managers. Partners are tiered, and being a certified partner requires having certain certifications to tell customers you're qualified to deliver customer success.
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Nick25:23
Wonderful. Great. Well, Nick, you're coming out with a very exciting book, The Customer Success Economy. What does that mean to you, and tell us about the book?
What's interesting is you wrote the foreword to the first book. Five years ago, customer success wasn't widespread – Salesforce was doing it well, but it was still small. Now it's become a company-wide thing. Customer experience is about changing your growth strategy to focus on your customers. In this book, we talk about how customer success is not just post-sales but affects marketing, sales, finance, services, and product. It's not just for software companies but hardware, medical devices, services – all rethinking their mission to drive customer success and go from reactive to proactive. We share dozens of stories of companies that have gone through this transition.
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Maria Martinez
After Microsoft and Salesforce, you must really like this customer success stuff. I do, for sure. I want to thank you for all you do for our community, for your thought leadership, and for the activities you put together in the book. I don't know how the community could do it without you. Thank you.
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Nick
Well, thank you so much to you, Maria, for being an inspiration to all of us. To everyone watching, please be well – best to you, your families, your friends, your companies. We'll get through this together.