E50: Dave Blake – Founder & CEO ClientSuccess – Built for CSMs by CSMs

      Dave Blake

I was there early on took care of some of our largest customers globally, then was asked to build the global enterprise and strategic teams – taking care of the top brands. I mean every brand – Microsoft and Sony an Apple and all of these, and had a great experience building and scaling that team. At the end I had about 120 CSMs managing the 400 million dollar book of business. And we were trying to do that on customer spreadsheets and dashboards and a few fields in Salesforce. So after a decade of being one of the early customer success managers. And I felt like we built a lot of best practices, I felt like, you know, it’ll be great to go and build a solution that I wish I would have had           for my team. And I left Adobe and decided to go and build a kind of a labour of love and a pursuit based on pains I felt. And build a company that I’m the founder of now which is a ClientSuccess.

Stephen Cummins

Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS. The show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS ScaleUps.

This is Stephen your host and in this episode I chat with Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess – a SaaS startup that delivers software that helps you build lasting relationships. It’s a customer success platform founded in Lehi Utah in 2014 that empowers SaaS companies to maximize revenue minimize churn. After a decade in the trenches of account management customer success, Dave decided to leave and build a solution he’d always wanted, His solution is built for CSMs by CSMs. It’s built to be easily scalable and configured just as easily. It has taken on modest amount of investment capital – just $6M dollars. Qualitrics, a fellow Silicon Slopes check companies mentioned as possible pre-ipo in the interview, but since of course it’s being acquired for the princely sum of $8B by SAP.

Great to meet you Dave here in SaaS stuck for 40 minutes. It’s us.

Dave Blake

Yeah, that’s great to be with Stephen.

Stephen Cummins

Fantastic. Yeah. Could you give us a kind of a short two minute rendition of… of your life, open till the founding of ClientSuccess?

Dave Blake

Yeah. So a lot to… to unwind there. So I’ll just start by saying that I’m a father of 5, married to my wife for 21 years.

Stephen Cummins

I’m impressed already.

Dave Blake

Yeah. And so first and foremost, I’m proud that I’m a father and husband. And had a great professional career. Starting out I actually graduated from Brigham Young university in accounting but I’ve never done accounting for the rest of my career. I’ve been in technology consulting and technology and SaaS for most of my career. I started in tech consulting with Arthur Andersen’s business consulting group  back in the day – doing Oracle implementations. And then I made my way into SaaS for 15 plus years now. And just have had a great experience in that.

Stephen Cummins

That’s a long time to be in SaaS. Yeah, it’s roughly the same amount of time I’ve been in it -and not many people even in this building can say that.

Dave Blake

Yeah I feel fortunate to for the ride that I’ve been on … for the companies I’ve worked for and also to be a founder which I’m sure we’ll talk about as well.

Stephen Cummins

Oh, we will. And you’re based out in Utah. What town in Utah?

Dave Blake

I live in a town called pleasant Grove Utah. Just outside of Salt Lake City. We call Utah Silicon Slopes right now, because it’s a great SaaS ecosystem. But just in general, just a wonderful place to live. I lived in London for a couple of years. I lived in southern California, LA and Orange County area. But have always made my way back to Utah because you’ve got… you’ve got the mountains and skiing in the Winter and you go down south and your in Zion National Park at some of the best the most beautiful places in the world. And so we’ve, we really enjoy our time. It’s been a great place for us.

Stephen Cummins

You’ve got some massive companies SaaS companies up there in Salt Lake City. I’m trying to think of the one that has a huge office here … that bootstrapped it’s way until about two years ago.

Dave Blake

Yeah Qualtrics. They’re about to go IPO. Rumour is sometime this year. I would imagine in the next few months. And we’ve got Domo – which went IPO, InsideSales and Pluralsite. And so the SaaS ecosystem has been great and, you know, it started in Utah with WordPerfect – the better version of Word but if you remember back way back in the Wordperfect days. It was acquired by Novel and was founded in Utah.

Stephen Cummins

I never knew that.

Dave Blake

Yeah. And that’s the seed of technology in Utah. And then the next big company that had a great outcome was a company called Omniture – the leading web analytics company in the world. And Omniture went IPO and was acquired by Adobe and… and put a lot more capital back in … and a lot more innovation in the market. And then Adobe has grown there. And so you kinda have this perpetual ….  you know, some large success. That has an exit … puts more capital back in the market and fuels further innovation and startups. And that’s the history of SaaS in Utah.

Stephen Cummins

Speaking of innovations and Utah, one of my favorite clients is a company called Academic Innovations down in Saint George. Which of course is … I think its over 400 kilometers away from you, which is almost the length of Ireland. You know, we’re just a little under 500 kilometres – people forget how big the US is – even its the same state. And a couple of employees – at least two I know have exactly five kids. So, yeah, you guys have a lot of children.

Dave Blake

Yeah, we do!

Stephen Cummins

Quite amazing.

Dave Blake

And I think part of my story as well is I come from a family of seven kids. My parents had seven kids .. we had five brothers. I have five brothers. I’ve got two of them who are CEO’s as well. Another one who’s a patent attorney and another one who’s a leading marketing leader out there. And so part of my history is having a great influence and kind of having a competitive rivalry with my brothers and… and, you know, each of us trying to beat one another. And we’ve tried to be leaders wherever we are. And then that’s been a great influence on my life and my leadership style.

Stephen Cummins

Well ClientSuccess certainly has that leadership element to it … because you’re a strong leader in the very competitive space, which is customer success in G2 crowd. How important is that sort of validation for you as a company and how did you come to create this company?

Dave Blake

Yeah. I’ve created the company because during my journey with Omniture very early on … I started with Omniture in 2003 ….  and was on that journey from hyper growth to IPO to acquisition by Adobe. And then came with Adobe for another three years. So a 10 year span. I was always in what we call the account management back then … which has now become Customer Success Management or Client Success Management. I was there early on took care of some of our largest customers globally, then was asked to build the global enterprise and strategic teams – taking care of the top brands. I mean every brand – Microsoft and Sony an Apple and all of these, and had a great experience building and scaling that team. At the end I had about 120 CSMs managing the 400 million dollar book of business. And we were trying to do that on customer spreadsheets and dashboards and a few fields in Salesforce. So after a decade of being one of the early customer success managers. And I felt like we built a lot of best practices, I felt like, you know, it’ll be great to go and build a solution that I wish I would have had for my team. And I left Adobe and decided to go and build a kind of a labour of love and a pursuit based on pains I felt. And build a company that I’m the founder of now which is a ClientSuccess.

And we are a  customer success management platform. We’re the solution and the tool that Customer Success Managers around the world use to manage the existing customer base and maximize that revenue.

Stephen Cummins

Now! For listeners who might know at a high level what customer success means … can you take us a little deeper into me customer success is? For me customer success is really understanding what a successful outcome is for your customer and then doing everything you can to make that happen – equally employee success, partner success, investor success even if you wanna take it that far ….  but really customer, employee and partner very strong. Would you agree with that definition?

Dave Blake

Yeah, absolutely. I think the main focus for customer success managers is to understand their customers intimately, understand their objectives, their definition of value, what their desired outcomes is a phrase that several people use. And then do whatever they can to help the customers achieve those objectives with your solution. And they’re kind of the shepherd throughout the life cycle … the post sales life cycle that helps the customer get the value. And also helps the organisation take care of that customer because it’s a team sport. We say customer success is definitely a team sport. And so, our platform drives that process and drives that visibility and ensures that there’s high retention and growth within the existing customer base.

Stephen Cummins

And what separates yourself from the competition because it is quite a competitive space. What makes your solution particularly special in this domain?

Dave Blake

Yeah, great question. So coming from the space and being in the trenches from frontline CSM to an executive … the one thing that I knew when I founded the company was I wanted to build a solution that has an amazing user experiences and simplifies the process. Because I’m a big believer that if customer success teams manage just some simple fundamentals of engagement, of proactive best practices, and those things …. that they have success.
So we’ve from the very beginning built a solution that had very quick time to value. That was more configuration then hardcore implementation. That was built for CSMs by CSMs …  that they can relate to, that they felt it was easy to use.

And so from a from a, from that perspective, we remove complexity. We have short implementation times and a solution that really resonates with frontline customer success managers and their leaders.

Stephen Cummins

So you were basically your own customers before you built the solution.

Dave Blake

Yeah, yeah. The funny thing about it is that it’s a very interesting space … that we use our platform every day, all day. And so I always joke when somebody becomes a customer and asks us about, you know, a feature request …  I can guarantee you that we’ve already got it on the list because we know the strengths, and we also know that some of the pain points and challenges of our platform. And we’ve identified that already.

Stephen Cummins

We were talking a little earlier about customer success. And as you know, I was one of the early CSMs. The interesting thing was that we were paid by sales believe it or not initially and … I left the company a couple of times … the first time to go travel around the world honeymoon with my wife for a long period of time. And, so I left as a CSM the first time. And I was part of the sales department believe it or not. I think about 6 months or 12 months later Salesforce kind of separated the two. And created a healthy tension … tension is probably not a good word. But, you know, what I mean. A healthy balance between driving forward and ensuring that you’re doing things right on the way forward. What do you think about that? For me it actually worked … but I know as a general thing across the globe it didn’t work … having the two mixed. What are your thoughts on that?

Dave Blake

You know that I get that question all the time – and it’s always in the context of who owns the renewal and who owns the expansion. And my answer really depends. For me the decision comes down to is how complex are your renewals and your expansion discussions? Are they involving procurement.
Or are they in deep negotiations? And if so, I recommend that sales owns the renewal and expansion.
If it’s very simple and easy and your customer success staff and team members can handle those conversations … and that part … even a in a simple form … then it may be okay to have customer success own it. But regardless, what I really like to foster is .…. it can have a little tension … that’s what you typically see. I really believe that if you can get sales and customer success on the same page, you clearly define roles and responsibilities. And you both look at it as … we both share … we’re both successful if the customer success manager takes care of the customer day in and day out and drives value.

Like we talked about. The understanding the definition of value and drives it. And the sales rep comes in as an equal partner and takes care of the commercial side of the business. You can have some really healthy growth in that model. And I saw that at Omniture. I see that in a lot of organizations.

Stephen Cummins

I think to make it work … I think for that to work inside of sales domain … I think you gotta hire somebody who both is capable of getting good product knowledge and good relationships with customers. Who isn’t afraid to actually then come back after doing that good work and negotiate with them and work with them to renew and expand. And I suppose it’s about hiring for those sort of skills. Or that potential to grow into that role. What what’s your vision for clients success over the next three four years, because it looks like a space that still has a lot of growth.

Dave Blake

Yeah, we’re in a great space. We love this space. Customer Success Management – that title is one of the fastest growing titles in tech … and so we feel like we barely scratched the surface on our potential. We’re looking forward to continuing to be in space, leading in the space, innovating in this space. We see the customer success going beyond just B2B SaaS. You see a lot of other types of industries that are managing an existing customer base … and we want to be in the forefront of innovation and thought leadership in that regard.

Stephen Cummins

Now … if you were to give 1 golden or 2 golden pieces of advice to anybody looking to set up a business of their own in this magic world of SaaS – in this magic garden here in SaaStock, what are the one or two things you’d say before they jump out of that plane?

Dave Blake

A couple of things. Maybe I’ll give some specifics on customer success. And then I’ll talk about that as a founder?

Stephen Cummins

That’s all good.

Dave Blake

If you’re jumping out of a plane and starting customer success at your organization, I think it starts at the top. The CEO has to be bought in. And they have to look at customer success as a culture, not a department. So that’s a big advice that I have.

I think is a founder … I think it’s all about hiring the right leadership – and building off leadership. And making sure they’re customer focused. Because a lot of times you focus on just SaaS and your sales … you focus on product, but it’s but those. Those are not aligned to your customer. And really understanding your customer well. And some people say don’t listen to your customers because if you do you’re going to build …. I disagree with that! I think you listen intently …  a lot of times your most vocal customers will be your best source of learning. And so embrace your most vocal local customers. Make sure all of those excellent leaders that you’ve hired are listening to your customers. And I think that’s a recipe for success.

Stephen Cummins

Dave Blake … It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for coming up and giving us the interview here 14 minutes assess.

Dave Blake

All right. Thanks, Stephen. Great to be here.

Stephen Cummins

Thanks a million.

In the next episode we stay in SaaStock in Dublin and listen to the remarkable story of Dr. David Darmanin’s startup awakening at 4 o clock in the morning in Malta that led to the founding of Hotjar – software used by marketers, product managers and UX designers that helps you rapidly understand your customers with website session replay, heatmaps, analytics, surveys, and in session questioning.

It had 60K sign-ups in the 1^st 6 months. And it now is used by over 350K companies  in 184 countries.

Stephen Cummins

You’ve been listening to 14 minutes of SaaS. Thanks to Mike Quill for his creativity and problem solving skills and to Ketsu for the music. This episode was brought to you by me, Stephen Cummins. If you enjoy the podcast, please don’t forget to share it with your network, subscribe to the series and give the show a rating.