SaaStr 262: Box's Jon Herstein on How Customer Success Teams Should Structure, Schedule and Execute on Customer Check Ins, Why Delight is Important But Insufficient & Why Customer Success Is Not Responsible For Upsell

Jon Herstein is the Chief Customer Officer at Box, the company that provides one platform for secure content management, workflow and collaboration. Prior to their IPO, Box had raised funding from some of the best in the business including Andreesen Horowitz, Bessemer, DST, Emergence and Meritech, just to name a few. As for Jon, prior to being Chief Customer Officer at Box, he was Senior VP of Customer Success, responsible for all post-sales services Box provides from implementation to user adoption and more. Before Box, Jon spent 4 years as VP of Professional Services at NetSuite and prior to that, close to 8 years as Senior Director of professional services at Informatica.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How did Jon make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be one of the leading figures in the rising tide of the customer success movement?
• What does Jon mean when he says, “you have to constantly bring your customers to the forefront of your employees minds”? For non-customer facing roles, what can one do to give them that perspective? Does it work to ensure every function spends time in customer support? What is challenging about that? What can be done in the onboarding phase to ensure the individual has the most empathy for the customer, regardless of function?  
• For those in CS, what is the right communication cadence to check in with their accounts? What should the agenda look like? What outcomes should they drive towards? Should they be involved in the upsell process? How does Jon think about post-mortems on churned clients? How do they structure them? What lost client stands out to Jon and what would he have done differently to retain them?
• From Jon’s experience seeing Box in hyperscaling, at what stages do SaaS orgs start to break down? Why does Jon think that is? What can be done to proactively try and mitigate this? How does Jon think about the structuring of roles and responsibilities with scale? What does this done well look like? Where do many people go wrong here?  

Jon’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Jon know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time with Box?
2. What motto or quote does Jon frequently revert back to?
3. What is the most challenging element of Jon’s role with Box today?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Jon Herstein

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