AMA: LinkedIn Vice President of Go-to-Market Operations, Akira Mamizuka on Customer Success / Revenue Ops Alignment

At LinkedIn, we believe that customer value is a "true north" objective. In fact, we know that successful customers tend to expand their relationships with LinkedIn over time, leading to revenue and profit growth. On the B2B Tech space, multiple functions interact with customers and users along their journey, from pre-sales to post-sales. However, often those functions roll under different parts of the company, which results in misaligned goals, inconsistent measurement and inefficient resource allocation. Such misalignment can lead to poor customer experience, value delivery, and missed revenue growth opportunities. Revenue Operations can play a key role in removing those silos and inconsistencies. In the Customer Success example, the main goal of this function is to ensure customers are making the most out of their investment (i.e. value is being delivered), which leads to future revenue growth. Since the CS function is part of the Go-to-Market equation, there is tremenduous value in having Revenue Operations take CS responsibilities, in addition to Sales, Demand Generation and Support. Within CS, Revenue Operations can: - Harmonize Roles & Responsibilities between Sales and CS Reps (aka "swim lanes") - Define and track input metrics (e.g. # quarterly business review meetings) and output metrics (e.g. seat utilization) - Allocate Sales and CS resources consistently by segment, aligning resources to value.

At LinkedIn we use the TAM (Total Addressable Market) approach to tackle this problem. First, we separate the "New Business TAM" from the "Existing Business TAM", in order to understand penetration and "headroom" in each category. Startups, early stage companies (and even mature companies potentially) tend to have a "New Business TAM" that vastly exceeds their "Existing Business TAM". This tends to be the main reason companies prioritize New Business over Existing Business. A secondary and more mundane reason is, from a financial standpoint, all new business sales contribute to growth; however, a flat renewal has zero growth contribution. I believe both motions are critical to achieve short and long term growth aspirations. A B2B Tech firm should have a well oiled New Business Engine (Marketing Lead Generation -> Sales Development -> Sales Hunters/ Closers) to capture the New Business TAM as fast as possible. At the same time, we know that successful customers tend to expand their relationships with LinkedIn over time, leading to revenue growth. Therefore having a Go-to-Market model that ensures value is being delivered to customers is also critical for future growth. P.s.: in SaaS, it can be difficult to measure growth within existing customers - especially when a portion of customers are on multi-year deals. A "same store sales methodology" can be an effective way to measure existing customer growth.

Although I am not a Systems expert, I have experienced this challenge as part of my RevOps career. From my standpoint, the root cause maps to the fact that most CRM Systems are built with the "Sales" use case at its core, and often the workflows and capabilities for Customer Success and Support can be limited. A separate ticketing system for CS is not an issue on its own; however, if you respond "Yes" to any of the questions below, you might have an opportunity to enhance your Tech stack: - Do Sales Reps have proactive visibility and alerts on CS tickets? - If a Customer mentions a CS ticket to a Sales Rep, can they check the status and interact with the ticket (i.e. ask for an update)? - Are there clearly defined SLAs, and are CS teams accountable for the SLAs? - Is the ticket data ingested in Data Warehouse and aggregated with account and opportunity data, in order to enable effective performance reporting?

Correlation between Go-to-Market actions and renewal success is one of the most studied areas in SaaS firms. Although the answer will vary for each firm, having a data driven point of view on actions and indicators that lead to positive renewal outcomes is imperative. Examples of actions and indicators: - Seat utilization - Renewal meeting 90 days ahead of renewal date - Account continuity - Customer-specific metrics (e.g. HC growth) - Documented and updated customer objectives With clarity around actions and indicators that influence renewal outcomes, the next step is to define: - Which team own each action/ indicator? Roles and resposibilities/ "swim lanes" - What "good looks like" for each action and indicator? - How to report performance against each? - How to ensure accountability? In my experience, the "blame game" as referred comes from lack of clarity and alignment on the steps above.