Episode Summary
An important segment of any organization is its employees — on whom the company’s success depends. It is just as important to take care of your current employees as it is to find suitable candidates when recruiting new ones.
That’s why many choose to transfer employee management from manual to digital and use platforms and tools that quickly find suitable candidates.
In healthcare, the Apploi platform can help you attract, hire, and engage talent. Their comprehensive analytics dashboard gives you complete visibility into every stage of the hiring process, and you can actively follow and analyze workforce, recruitment, and hiring trends at each of your facilities.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, our host Christina Brady welcomes Natalie Lambert, the CRO at Apploi. Natalie describes the quota-carrying AM, retention-focused CSM, and enablement-focused CSM roles, and she gets into the importance of using discussion, debate, and commitment to reduce moments of friction at work. Natalie and Christina discuss how to structure a CSM team and how to start creating a compensation plan.
Guest Profile
- Name: Natalie Lambert
- What she does: Natalie is the CRO at Apploi.
- Company: Apploi
- Noteworthy: Natalie is an expert in the HR tech space with a bachelor of science degree in marketing and operations management from Indiana University - Kelley School of Business. She is a highly motivated sales and success leader with experience in leading hyper-growth sales organizations through critical growth phases with disruption in mind. With over 20 years in technology, Natalie has worked with clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to large SMBs. She has extensive experience in building and scaling teams, ensuring confidence through managing change across the organization, deploying and developing leaders, and directing focus and expertise for teams through process design, all while creating a diverse culture of learning, driving, and having fun.
Key Insights
- The importance of discussion, debate, and commitment. In any business, especially one that involves teamwork, there will be moments when everything will go smoothly. However, there are inevitable frictions at work that you have to overcome. Natalie points out that she reduces moments of friction by practicing discussion, debate, and commitment with her peers. "When I seek an organization, and I'm looking and examining leadership teams I'd be joining, this is what I look for, 'Tell me about a time when you've, as a leadership team, come together in agreement and committed to the organization what you want to do.' And, second, I noticed that at times when there's friction, it might be an opportunity for me to take a step back and see if the business is serving me, and what my needs are, any longer."
- How do you structure a CSM team? While working in a post-sales environment and leading different types of organizations, Natalie noticed that they differed in custom-builds, and she quantified three main areas where CSM teams settle. "You typically see a traditional quota-carrying CSM team that acts or feels a lot like account management, handling everything post-sales from upsells to cross-sells, retention. That's one that I've seen, and I've seen it be very effective. There's another that I feel might be more usage, adoption, and retention, where they have an account management function that's separate outside of that. And that also works; also, a really important part of the revenue is making sure that we are encouraging our customers to use, adapt, and see the meaningful results of our platform and retaining those dollars. And then the third, which is a very unique one, and also very indicative, in the SaaS space is what I tend to circle around as like product enablement. So, it is different than a support function, but a CS team that really helps enable and optimize how the product works."
- Make compensation plans as simple as possible. A compensation plan is a complete package that details your employees' wages, salaries, benefits, and payment terms. More comprehensive compensation could include additional perks such as bonuses, commissions, health insurance, or retirement benefits. Natalie explains how you can start creating a compensation plan. "Make it super simple. Nobody wants to create pivot tables or be in an Excel sheet. Make it so painfully easy and obvious and simple for your reps. They want to sell; they just want to make money; they just want to win. So, make it as simple as possible, taking the decimals and the fractions out of it. […] The secondary piece that I've learned about compensation is not changing it too often. You have to be very mindful that once your reps get in a rhythm, after you've rolled out the super simple-to-understand comp plan, you don't change it right away. You keep it consistent for as long as you can until it makes sense to change again. Then they get confident in how they're getting comped.
Episode Highlights
The Quota-Carrying AM Role
“In my experience with a quota-carrying AM, you have to have a function of relationship building. And I say that because that’s where it starts. You need to intimately and deeply care about your customers, the problems that you’re solving for, and how deeply you understand their journey to this point. Most account managers are given a book of business or an existing customer base, and their job is to upsell, cross-sell — in some way gain more revenue from that customer base. And you cannot do that unless you understand their journey unless you understand why they embarked on the partnership, to begin with. What has their onboarding or implementation journey been thus far? How much are they using and adopting the platform, and are they seeing the results they expect from the platform or the services that you offer, and has that evolved since the time they purchased? And a great account manager will be passionate about learning about their customers, their journey, their experience, and their pains as it exists today — and does your product and service even offer a solution for them?”
A Retention-Focused CSM
“Some customers will churn. That’s something you need to bake into your expectations. You’re not going to keep every customer, even if you are solving big problems for them and even if your platform is delivering. There could be a change of the guards who want to bring their new favorite service to the table because that makes them more successful and efficient in what they’re doing, and they don’t want to learn a new tool or software. And so your post-sale team could be doing everything right, and there’s still just some innate churn. You can help mitigate that, but that’s an important piece of it. You should also understand what the business needs from a retention perspective.”
An Enablement-Focused CSM
“Depending on how the entire revenue pre-sale and the post-sale team is structured, there is potentially a need for product enablement, meaning their work is incredibly important to ensure that the customers are onboarded in a way that’s smooth and efficient. A lot of times, onboarding, implementation, and configuration can be very manual. Maybe there’s a migration that has to happen that the product can’t just easily do or build.
The other thing I think about is post-sale or post-implementation; there are things that our customers need that are unique to them that we can’t necessarily build. […] The product enablement type of function can be really important, and where I think it should be used is when you are trying to validate your product/market fit.”