Stuart Balcombe (00:09):
How do you become a customer-centric company? That's the question that so many businesses are asking themselves right now, because the truth is, it's really, really hard. Over the last three months, I've had tens of conversations with CS leaders about what it takes in practice to be a company that genuinely cares about making customers successful. And there's one thread that keeps being pulled, companies that make customers successful have a strong culture that puts them at the center of everything they do.

Stuart Balcombe (00:44):
Today's guest is Ellie Hutton, Director of Customer Success at Dooly. Dooly has experienced meteoric growth in the last few years, and announced almost back to back rounds of funding in the summer of 2021. And Ellie has been at Dooly since the beginning. So I wanted to find out how Dooly has been intentionally building a culture that continues to put customers at the center, even as they grow.

Stuart Balcombe (01:09):
This is Happy Customers, the show where we're exploring people insights and the world's top companies are really doing every day to go beyond the metrics and numbers on the balance sheet, collaborate across their entire organization and truly invest in making their customers successful. I'm Stuart Balcombe, and I'm excited you're here. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, on with the show.

Ellie Hutton (01:37):
I've been at Dooly for two years. And I joined because I knew the CEO really well. We worked together at a previous company. And I just basically met up with him to have a chit-chat, and he's like, "Hey, we're looking for a head of customer success. Do you want to come do that?" And I said, "Well, what would that look like?" And he explained. I'm like, "That sounds really exciting." Being in a startup environment and getting to build something from the ground up and in the beginning being head of CS, being the only CS person. So big job, big undertaking, especially when you don't have... we didn't have product management yet, we didn't have product marketing. Customer marketing didn't have sales so much either or finance so did literally all the jobs, which is fun. Love getting my hands into all the things. And now I have very happily handed over most of the legos and have taken on the role of director of customer success. And so we have a wide variety of things that we do within our customer success organization. It's not just owning the CSM.

Stuart Balcombe (02:36):
I think it's such an interesting question for a CS org that's when you've built from scratch rather than retrofitting is, where does CS fit today in the broader picture of Dooly as a company?

Ellie Hutton (02:48):
I'd say that we are one of the teams or one of the business units in the company that touches all teams. We have relationships with all teams across the business, and we wouldn't be able to do our job without that. In probably a lot of cases, they would have a hard time doing that without us too. So we're an integral and integrated part of the business. So in terms of what we actually do, our customer success organization owns support customer success so the CSMs. We own all of our external training. So all of our education that we would do out to users, as well as a lot of the internal enablement about how to pitch Dooly, how to talk about Dooly, what is Dooly to all of our internal employees, as well as help the business understand who we sell to and what pains they have so they can make better decisions. So we bring that voice of customer into the business across all teams.

Ellie Hutton (03:44):
We partner with marketing on advocacy and telling stories, showing a spotlight on the success of our successful folks that work with us. Although obviously, onboarding is the most important thing, getting that right means that a company is going to be more successful, get more value faster, fall in love with your product faster, be more likely to renew, more likely to be advocates, more likely to do all the things. So all that focus around earning the right to grow, I think that's our biggest thing that we do. And then we also fill in some of the space for any of the customer journey work, all the digital journey work, all the user communications and all the connections between product marketing and product managing that need to happen for product launches and everything.

Stuart Balcombe (04:26):
So you mentioned that initially at Dooly, it was just you in the CS function as head of CS and that there was no real product management, product marketing, customer marketing. Today, how is the team structured? What are the different specializations or the different facets of the success organization?

Ellie Hutton (04:46):
Great question. I think that I started to answer it that way and then my mouth started going ahead of my brain. So right now we have four main areas. So we have the CSMs, they make the customer be successful. They own most of the big onboarding lift for the folks that are paying for it because we don't do that for everybody. We have support. So we separated support and CS early. So when I was hiring my second person, I'm like, I need somebody to do support. That was a big separation as to get that as a focus area and not a distraction, because it needs to be a focus area. And then our third pillar is enablement. So all of the training. And then our fourth pillar is customer experience. And I was just talking to my CX manager this morning and just a long list of things. So her bucket is customer journey, voice of customer and user communications. And there's a lot of things that fit under all those.

Stuart Balcombe (05:40):
So they all sit under the success umbrella and then how do other functions fit there? This is one thing that I'm always curious about with success orgs. It feels like there are a lot of things that get bucketed under success or like are within a success org that could very well be other functions. Like they could be marketing functions, they could be sales functions, they could be product functions, where do those functions sit relative to success or do those things only exist under success?

Ellie Hutton (06:10):
A lot of the stuff that we do as a partnership, so our enablement person, her key ally in the business is product marketing. And then our CX person, because she owns voice of customer and championing that voice across the business, her key ally is product management. For anything that's more customer marketing related or user communication, that stuff really overlaps heavily with marketing and product marketing, CSM, of course, its allies is sales obviously. Those handovers have to be smooth and streamlined and crystal clear to make sure that we're not duplicating any efforts. So there's touches across.

Ellie Hutton (06:52):
I think the big thing for me is that if you're putting your customer at the heart of all your decisions internally, then you should be able to have a, I can go to market strategy that is actually going to work and that your product team is building a product that's actually going to solve real paying. And that marketing is going to go out and find leads and get demos booked. That is super easy to do because they have a very clear thing that they out to the market with, messaging and paying and knowing who the ideal customer profile is.

Ellie Hutton (07:23):
If that's all the case, then sales will sell what's on book. They won't have to make stuff up to sell because they get paid based on what they sell and if they don't have anything to actually sell or anything's broken up to that point, then they're going to make stuff up to sell. And if after that, if anything else is broken in the journey, so if something's broken in product or like marketing's making up stuff or sales is making up stuff or just going after the wrong profile and you don't have product market fit, then CS has to inherit that whole bag. And that whole bag could be full of stuff that's very difficult to service or it could be full of things that are a lot easier to make be successful.

Ellie Hutton (08:01):
And I think the starting point that I've seen work the best in a business is where somebody's accountable at the beginning of that journey to make sure that you have the right go-to-market strategy and that soft and product marketing and then whatever is happening on the other side of it, CS is inheriting the broken and the good. And to make it all work, you have to have a nice circle happening there.

Stuart Balcombe (08:25):
For sure. This was one of the very first thing. And I literally just copy-pasted your message. So when we first started talking about recording this episode, which I think is so true, that product marketing is the starting place. And if product marketing doesn't get it right in the first place and CS ends up inheriting and providing air cover for everything, all the errors along that journey. So with that said, and with the importance of alignment through the entire journey and through the entire org, how do you think about setting metrics and setting goals around the success team if your ability to execute against those goals is in part reliant on other teams as well?

Ellie Hutton (09:06):
That's a really good question. We have shared north star metrics across the whole business that include revenue and knowing that users are actually adopting the product properly. Everybody holds pie for that. It's not like the revenue team owns revenue and the product org that their job is to make the product be user friendly, it's just not. Everybody has pie in that and perhaps the sales org is going to have a bigger pie for the revenue side and the product side will have a smaller piece of the pie or a full pie for the dollars, but everybody still has a pie. So when it comes to metrics for the CS org, and this isn't Dooly necessarily it's... If you're in an organization where stuff is broken that you can't control, then don't give yourself metrics for that. Make the metrics be things that are within your control within your team, but also be very clear on how your team is laddering up to those corporate metrics and how you're supporting those and being very clear on what you can control within that.

Ellie Hutton (10:11):
So for us, if net revenue retention is like a top line goal that we're going after, we can still only contribute so much to that. At Dooly, we don't actually own the revenue. The CS org is all about earning the right to grow, but our sales organization owns the dollars. So we still have that revenue retention as a top line, but also as a metric within our team because if we don't make the customer be successful, we're not going to earn the right to grow and we're not going to renew and we're not going to be able to grow those accounts. So that's still a metric that we would hold.

Stuart Balcombe (10:46):
Yeah. I love that phrasing of earning the right to grow. Do you have a threshold for this account or this customer is... we've earned that right with that customer. How do you measure that you've got there or is it just a scale that is relative?

Ellie Hutton (11:03):
I love that question. I didn't think about that more how we will do that. I mean, I think the metrics that we do have show that and you were saying that you came to presentation that I was doing the other day, was about going through some of our top line metrics. And we have very low churn and we have very high net revenue retention. And I think a lot of that is because we do put the customer at the center of what we do.

Ellie Hutton (11:25):
And I mean, every company is going to have a few broken things. We don't have a lot of broken. Most of the stuff that we do across our entire customer journey does just work. And we're very clear in our SLT where the broken things are and are working actively to fix those things. So it becomes a lot less of an issue, but I do like the idea of thinking more about our metrics and how that might align around the concept of earning the right to grow because our top line metrics are very much about revenue, like number of new logos, number of dollars we're trying to hit, like the depth of adoption that we have within account at a very, very high level. So those would align to that as well because if you're not earning the right to grow, you're not going to actually make any money and you're not going to have adoption.

Stuart Balcombe (12:11):
This idea of earning the right to grow based on the value provided to a customer is so powerful. The earlier in the customer journey we can earn that right, whether through content and education before someone even becomes a customer or the product go to market strategy, the more leverage and opportunity we provide success teams to expand their accounts. And Dooly has some pretty incredible metrics to back this up. With 140% net revenue retention, less than 2% churn. So I was curious how these metrics connect to the day to day and specifically how Ellie thinks about measuring LTV to CAC ratio, which doesn't seem to be talked about all that much in SaaS.

Ellie Hutton (12:52):
First of all having a really good handle on what those two things are. Let's define those instead of the acronyms. So LTV is Lifetime Value and CAC is Customer Acquisition Cost. So comparing those two things is really, really important because, I mean, in the early days of a company, that ratio is going to be very different than what it is going to probably be down the road. And it could be very different depending on what your board is comfortable with and what their expectations are for actually becoming profitable because most companies aren't going to profitable for the first little while and you invest heavily to get to that critical mass that you need in order to get hockey stick growth.

Stuart Balcombe (13:34):
It's interesting that you mentioned there that depending on the stage of company, that ratio may be different. And this gets into maybe a bigger topic that we're going to talk about, is customer success and making customer successful being a full team sport. I'm curious, I know Dooly has a very strong brand. There are other teams that are working on things that are success adjacent. How do you see that or tactically, how does everybody coordinate and align on what it means to make customers successful, but also how do you see the impact of other teams on things like LTV to CAC and the metrics that you are looking at in success?

Ellie Hutton (14:14):
Yeah. Okay. Well, let's look at the LTV to CAC thing first. So obviously, you want your lifetime value to be high and you want your CAC to be low, always. If it's costing you thousands of dollars to get a customer and you're never going to recuperate it, you can't do that for very long. So your runway's going to be a lot smaller. So I think that we are always is working to, because we don't have a retention problem yet but as we become a bigger company and we try different things and maybe those things aren't working as well as we've had so far then, maybe the LTVs going to go down. But we're always very, very careful about the CAC and being very clear about where those folks are, who are paying for the product, where are they actually coming from and was it actually because of spend that we did or was it something really tiny?

Ellie Hutton (15:03):
So you really need to have a really good understanding of your data across the whole board, not just on your usage data but how are people actually coming into the business in the first place. And that's sometimes really hard to get a handle on. So making sure that you have good data is absolutely imperative. And then I'd say because I've been in companies before where teams didn't always work great together and teams were very siloed and people didn't put the user first, but Dooly really, like you were mentioning earlier, Dooly really does live our values and everybody is so collaborative. One of our core values as a business is win together. And we are always working so hard to win, but win together. People are not trying to build real estate. We don't hire a leader and have them come in and go, oh, what am I going to take over? And you see that a lot of times in other businesses and it just doesn't happen here.

Ellie Hutton (16:00):
And I think the big thing that drives us, we have a very, very strong, no asshole policy. We do not hire jerks. And in fact, we really only hire somebody, bring them into the business if they're going to be a culture ad. And if everybody who was on the committee for that role is an F yeah. Like if somebody's like, hmm I don't know. It's a no. We don't hire those people. So I think we've built this culture where people are very, very much focused on making our business be successful. And in order to do that, we have to make our users and our customer accounts be successful. So I think that that makes a big difference. If you don't start there, then you can spend a lot of time just fighting all the politics internally. And it's a huge distraction.

Stuart Balcombe (16:45):
Yeah. It's so interesting. I think that if everybody that I've talked to about what does it actually mean to build a customer centric or an org that puts the custom at the center, everything comes back to culture and it's very hard for businesses that are already in motion already have a relatively defined, whether it's good or bad culture. If it doesn't by default put the customer at the center, it's very hard later to make that shift versus if you start from ground zero with, this is the way that we're going to operate with the customer at the center of everything we do. What are some of the practices or habits, I guess, that you see at Dooly that you think are either unique or at least things that Dooly does especially well that maybe other companies are not doing?

Ellie Hutton (17:38):
Yeah. I mean the starting point is what I just said. It starts with good humans. So you have to have a very clear line of where you're going to go with that because that makes a massive difference. A massive, massive difference. In terms of the rituals or things that we do in order to connect the dots, two years ago when I started, we were fewer than 10 people. So it was easy. We were all in Vancouver, we sat in an office mostly together. We only had one person who was remote. I mean, the bulk of the business were engineers but we did a daily standup and everybody was there including the CEO and me and marketing. And so everybody was very, very, very well connected. And so we had that great muscle memory and then we grew super fast.

Ellie Hutton (18:22):
So how do you do that at scale? You have to figure out how to make those human connections and the stories and the user workflows and the voices and bring all of that to life wherever you can. So some of the rituals that we do, we have a weekly fired up. We always open with a user insight. So maybe we try and start all those big meetings and really all meetings should start with some kind of a user insight. And it's not just a random thing. It should align with something that you're already noodling. Whatever the focus is like if you know that your quarterly roadmap includes these three big things, then make sure that the things that you're sharing actually line up with those themes so people can go, oh, because I think really the whole goal of voice of customers isn't just go, blah.

Ellie Hutton (19:09):
Here's what our customers are saying, it actually needs to line up with whatever is on fire for people in the moment so that they can use that insight, that nugget, that piece to hold the user very front and center in their mind so that they can make better, faster decisions around that persona that they're building for because without doing it in a very coordinated and organized way, then it can become really messy. I'd say that because our customer success org is the champion of the voice of customer, we aren't the only listing post. Everybody in the business is the listing posts, especially our customer facing teams and our PM and our UX folks who are regularly talking both to the market and to our current users. And they regularly are feeding back insight. We use Gong. It's amazing. I'd say that our product managers and our designers probably spend as much time watching Gong calls as our sales leadership does to give feedback which is... that's huge in itself.

Ellie Hutton (20:09):
And both CS and sales are in Gong, so they can access any of the calls that we're on any time. So if they're interested in what an SDR is talking about in an initial first qualification call or all the way to the other end, if they want to see what's customer assess talking about at an advocacy conversation to tell a customers' story, what does that look like, they can do all those things. Anybody in the business can go and access that stuff anytime.

Ellie Hutton (20:32):
And I think also making access to that insight, but also the data be more self-serve. And I don't mean that somebody has to start from scratch, because then you'll come up with 20 different interpretations of what the data means, but at least giving people a place where dashboards exist and where your research repository is. I'd say we're not a 100% there yet, but we're getting there because everybody has to be able to have access. I mean the ultimate goal of making those connection points is that everybody has a closer connection to the persona that you're building for and can make better decisions and faster without having endless debate about something that shouldn't even have been a debate in the first place. You should be able to eliminate some of those things and your velocity should grow as a result.

Stuart Balcombe (21:17):
Yeah. I think that's such a great point that making things self serve and I have follow-up question on what that actually looks like in practice for different folks who maybe not customer facing all the time, but making the voice of the customer self-serve gets you round a lot of politically charged debates. And not using that in the internal politics states. Instead of some VP being able and maybe this isn't a thing at Dooly at all ever, but like some VP saying, Hey, I have this big idea and we're doing it because it's my idea and I say, we can do it, but to be able to counter that with, well actually the customer says this. And that being the norm that customer data or the voice of the customer is included in that conversation from the very beginning, I think makes such a big difference to ground everybody in, well, this is what the customer has about and we can make interpretations and go from there.

Ellie Hutton (22:13):
Yeah. Well, let's go back to point number one, which is no assholes. So we don't have people who are coming in stompy foot saying, this is the way, because they don't do that. Nobody does that. We're all very much more curious about things and ask a lot of questions. And that doesn't mean that it's necessarily slows things down, but it's important to invest the time to plan first and then you can run fast. But if you just start running, nobody's going to be on the same page at all. We also have a scrappy not crappy policy. I wouldn't say it's written into our values, but we're all about doing the hustle but doing it in a very clear and obvious direction and in a scrappy way so that it's fast, but that it's not crappy. It requires some thought and effort upfront to do things in the correct way.

Stuart Balcombe (23:08):
Yeah, totally. So to start to wrap things up here, I feel like we could talk for hours about any... we had three big topics that we touched on a couple of them and got a little deeper into one of them. But yeah, there's so much here. It's so exciting to hear how this all plays out. The things that people talk about as this is what you should do, could do, how that actually plays out at Dooly. I'm curious though everything seems like it's going, and you said earlier like we don't have a lot of things that are broken at Dooly, is there a CS problem or a CS adjacent problem or challenge that especially maybe as you're thinking about going into 2022 that if you had a magic wand you were just like, Nope. That's, that's not a problem anymore. Let's get rid of that one and focus on the other things.

Ellie Hutton (23:58):
Yeah. I mean, I think the scaling is always challenging and I feel like we've built... I knew it was going to be problem. I've tried to build all the foundations for scale upfront, including hiring early for roles that I might have held off on hiring. We're in the lucky place of we have money that we can do that because we're in a very happy place because of that. But I think that set us up for success to be able to scale quickly.

Ellie Hutton (24:25):
I'd say if I could wave a magic wand, the place that we are today and the place that we're going to be a year from now, there's some big steps to make. And I know where I want to get to. It's the path to get there that's probably going to involve restructuring the team a couple times maybe. And maybe that's not in the next year, but for sure in the next three years, the team will completely restructure. And it's all going to depend on probably what has happened in product and what has happened in sales and what do we still need to work on and are we going after huge enterprise accounts or are we going after mid-market, it all depend. It all depends on what the tractions and where you see that happen.

Ellie Hutton (25:06):
And I think always the flow is be flexible and have a plan but be willing to change it if you need to. So I think that that was a long one to answer. To shorten it, it would be waving to magic wand to be like, I know where I am today, I know where I want to get to. Let's just get there. And just to wipe out some of that bumpy stuff along the way, but I think part of it is knowing that something might be bumpy and then having a plan to make sure that it's not bumpy for the customers and it's as unbumpy as possible and frictionless for the team that exists too.

Stuart Balcombe (25:42):
I love it. That's a great way to think about pretty much doing anything. It's a great experience for the customer and try to make it as unbumpy for the team as possible.

Ellie Hutton (25:56):
Unbumpy, yeah. Take the friction out of it.

Stuart Balcombe (25:56):
Yeah. Well, this has been really fun. One final question for you which is not on the list of questions that we ask, but who would you like to hear from on this show? Somebody else to have another similar... Is there a company or a CS leader that you look at and say, yeah, I want to know how they do that at their company?

Ellie Hutton (26:18):
Interesting. I don't have a particular company in mind, but it would be interesting to hear... Because I think I have some pretty strong opinions about what CS could or should have in their organization and that's probably going to change depending on the company size, but it'd be interesting to hear from others who maybe have a very particular opinion that that thing should absolutely not be in CS or this should absolutely be in CS. For me, I've taken on stuff in RCS or because of the experience that I have. I don't come straight from a CS background. I've been in a lot of different roles across the business. And I think that's probably why I've taken on more things into the CS org than maybe somebody who had a straight CS background had. So I'd be interested to see other people's first tips about that.

Stuart Balcombe (27:03):
Yeah, absolutely. That's a good one. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. This has been super fun. Sounds like everything, I mean at Dooly, amazing brand, amazing company, amazing product, but yeah, it's really, really cool to see for a company that is in so much in growth mode how things are inside the company and how focused on the customer that is even as you are scaling so quickly. So thank you so much for your time.

Ellie Hutton (27:28):
Yeah. Thank you. This is really fun for me too. I appreciate you reaching out and asking. And yeah, let's do it again sometime when we've got more stuff to talk about.

Stuart Balcombe (27:37):
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much to Ellie for joining me, and taking us on a journey through her experience building CS at Dooly. Let's get back to a big idea from the start of the episode, how do we create a culture that puts customers at the center? By starting with the people, but in customers at the center starts with hiring good humans who truly care and have empathy for the customers they serve. From there, building habits and practices that keep those people connected directly to the voice of the customer, ensures that instead of playing politics, decisions can be made and strategies formed without ego, but instead rooted in a deep understanding of what customers are trying to achieve. But we know changing culture is a challenging and lengthy process. So I'd encourage you to start small. I loved Ellie's tidbit about how every meeting and presentation at Dooly starts with a quote directly from a customer.

Stuart Balcombe (28:38):
I know that's something I'll be taking away and applying with our team too. Adding a voice of the customer item to every agenda and deck template. Easy to do with a big impact over time. We talked a lot in this episode about the people and in our next episode, I'll be chatting with [Consellera 00:28:54] from Carro about how to strategically loop people into the conversation at the right time to help customers experience the outcomes they want. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd really love for you to reach out to Ellie on LinkedIn and let her know. If you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear from you too @stuart@arrows.to. See you next time.