In this episode, we have the pleasure of interviewing Luke Ferrel, Global head of customer success at Deel. They discuss the rapid growth of Deel as a comprehensive HR solution, the importance of customer success in maximizing platform value, and the innovative strategies employed to enhance customer engagement. Luke shares insights on leveraging AI, the maturity stages of customer success management, and the unique incentive structures in place for customer success managers at Deel. The conversation also touches on the significance of setting clear expectations with customers and the ongoing hiring efforts at Deel.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Deal and Customer Success

02:55 Customer Success Roadmap and Engagement Strategies

05:52 Leveraging AI in Customer Success

09:01 Maturity Stages in Customer Success Management

11:58 Incentivizing Customer Success Managers

15:05 The Role of Account Management vs. Customer Success

17:57 Project Cassandra: Setting Expectations with Customers

20:56 Advice for Aspiring Customer Success Managers

24:06 Tools and Processes for Effective Customer Success

27:02 Growth and Opportunities at Deal

Tags

Customer success, customer engagement, global HR strategy, customer success management, employee experience, customer retention, net revenue retention, csm compensation, account management

‍Transcript

Alex Berry (00:00.974)
Hello and welcome to another episode of 42 AI's podcast on all things customer success and post sale. Today we have a very special guest. I'm particularly pleased to welcome Luke Ferrell who joins us today from Deal where he is currently global head of customer success. And if you take a little bit of time to look at his background, you'll also see that he was or started off his career in the US Air Force, moved into operations and has worked in organizations like Qualtrics, Outreach and Deal.

Welcome Luke, great to have you here with us.

Luke Ferrel (00:34.092)
Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alex Berry (00:37.006)
So Luke, obviously, Deal is growing quickly. I think it would help everyone just to get a sense of what is Deal? What does it do? And what does your role as head of customer success there involve?

Luke Ferrel (00:50.946)
Yeah, the deal is growing incredibly quickly. think we talk about being the fastest to $100 million. There were some nice tailwinds too because we were at beginning of COVID. The deal started out as a contractor and employer record provider. And what that is is essentially like if you're 42 AI and you want to hire people in Costa Rica and you don't have a legal entity in Costa Rica.

You hire through us, we manage the compliance and all of that kind of stuff. So that was like the beginning. And then as we've grown, it's become more of like an all in one HR solution for international. Cause we started paying all these people and we realized that like there was a gap in the market where people don't have a payroll provider that is one single pro-arrow provider for their people in Croatia, UK and the U S. And so that's where we've.

grown and now we have an HR is so basically I think I can't remember what our marketing tagline is, but it's essentially like your it's your forever people platform. That's marketing would be proud.

Alex Berry (01:50.936)
Well, it's clear that it's working. Yeah, we've seen so much of Deal's growth recently and definitely want to chat a little bit about the acquisition strategy that you guys are later in the call, like how you've handled that. What does your role encompass at Deal? We'd love to hear just a little bit more about, because I assume you have a kind of global remit, lots of customers in all these different countries. Tell us a little bit more.

Luke Ferrel (02:15.118)
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like I think of it, some traditional customer success. My goal is to help customers get the most value out of the platform. What's interesting about that is there's a lot of like education, because if you're a U.S. employer, you're used to being able to terminate people at will. But if you hire someone in the Netherlands like that's that's not the case. It's much more difficult. And so part of it is educating customers and then working as an advisor with them.

on their global HR strategy. And then obviously we want them to adopt the product, work on automations. And the goal is selfishly to make it sticky, but also to make it better for our customers.

Alex Berry (02:55.906)
Yeah, and I think what everyone has seen, right, there's a massive opportunity here from that consolidated HR approach. So Luke, you've spoken a little bit about how you make customers successful on the platform. I know that you have a specific roadmap which you like to take customers through in terms of how they implement and develop as a customer on deal. Could you walk us through that? I think people who are interested in Deal as a Company and other contest customer success, operators would love to hear a little bit about how you approach it.

Luke Ferrel (03:15.469)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (03:24.718)
Yeah, there's essentially like there's a little bit of maturity and I think of it more maybe more internally, but like we have disengaged customers who are just not interacting with us. They're just using the platform and then we have engaged customers who are talking to us. We're helping iterate all that kind of stuff. Then the next level up is we have customers who are engaging with us and they're using the platform in an optimal way. And I'll go deeper into that in a second. And then the next thing we have is customers who are

using the platform in an optimal way, and then they're multi-products. So they're getting a lot of value from it. What's really cool is using the platform in the way we want them to use the platform. It's a thing we call Golden Deal. But essentially what we do is we looked at all the features that differentiate us and that we think customers can get value from. And we saw how many customers were using this.

Alex Berry (03:57.358)
Okay.

Luke Ferrel (04:15.702)
And then it wasn't nearly as many as we wanted. And so then we set goals and we said, hey, we're going to go get customers to use these. We're going to present use cases. And so what's cool about it is it gave our CSMs something to do when they were doing nothing. So instead of just being reactive and seeing what customers had, like now they had incentives and they had goals to be able to say, OK, like I'm not on a customer call.

I need to go look at my portfolio and see like I've got a customer. I can go optimize their instance. And so it makes it like CS change from not losing to now all of a sudden you can go win. And that's a lot of I like to win.

Alex Berry (04:53.57)
Yeah. And I think customer success, right? If you think about the role here, know, HR professionals around the world, they're busy. They've usually got some kind of, mean, most obviously every function is busy to some degree, right? But you're talking about highly sensitive issues. They're always being pulled in different directions. This is people issues. Actually to have the time to go in and understand the full power of a platform in whatever category in HRS, I think is something that takes time. So, you know, obviously this adds a lot of value, especially considering that, you know, Deal's platform is relatively new in the market in terms of

Luke Ferrel (05:21.997)
Yeah.

Alex Berry (05:22.684)
You guys are, I don't know how, what, less than four years old maybe?

Luke Ferrel (05:25.842)
Yeah, I think maybe five, but like I don't like that first year might have been like a couple people in an apartment. Yeah, we're young. What's what's interesting is like in trends in HR that we're seeing is a lot of people are just trying to automate. You know, I mean, we're in the age of AI now. And so people are trying to automate and go do things like Klarna is a crazy cases study. I mean, if you've seen in the news, like they've worked on making so much of their stuff and we're a huge partner. There's

Alex Berry (05:31.351)
Yeah.

Alex Berry (05:48.727)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (05:52.678)
And like, so we've pushed all of helping them do their global payroll and their global HR. And we use a lot of AI solutions. And then we do like, we manage a lot of this. And so it's allowed them to shrink. I don't know exactly, but it's allowed them to shrink that department and really save quite a bit.

Alex Berry (06:11.566)
So this is an example, right, where, you know, deal is, as from what I can understand, right, you're working with your product team, your customer, implementations of AI, and obviously your customer success teams in order to streamline operations even more than, let's say, last kind of thing companies were doing the last few years.

Luke Ferrel (06:30.028)
Yeah, yeah, and it's really fun. we like we've used AI a lot for different use cases. One of the ones that I personally love is we have all this information about international hiring in all these countries. And it's really hard for the lay person to know like how terminations work in Poland versus Ecuador.

Like she is really hard to know. And so we have like an open AI interface essentially that we have external facing to our customers. And then we have internal and it can just make you feel and look so smart. I love showing it to like HR leaders at a company because I'm like, hey, ask me a question right now. And then they'll be like, OK, like I'm going to go hire in Poland. What are the top five things that I need to consider? I just type it in. It gives me an answer right away. And like I look so smart.

Like I'm not the smartest guy, but I look smart. And I'm like, and I tell them like, now you can be in a meeting and somebody can be talking about, Hey, I'm thinking about hiring in the UK. You type in, what do I need to think about? And then all of sudden in the middle of the meeting, you can be like, I think the UK would be great. Here's the three things we need to think about.

Alex Berry (07:37.506)
Yeah, that's impressive, right? And it's definitely the way we're seeing a lot of trends in AI and different software categories moving. So that's exciting for Deal. Just to take it down a level, right? For customer success managers on your team, What are some of the principles, some of the enablements, some of the frameworks that you're giving them in order to make them better customer success managers? We'd love to hear a little bit about that development piece.

Luke Ferrel (08:03.874)
Yeah. Excuse me. Yeah. Some of the tools that we're giving them, like we talked through like that engagement curve of how we want to push people right in the customer journey. We talked through Golden Deal, which is essentially like pushing people through there. also, I think that there are maturity stages to customer success. Like, and I would say like the first maturity stage is like Wild West. You'll do anything that you can to make customers happy. And it's just like,

Go make customers happy. And I think that that's like that stage gets a lot of bad press, but it's a phenomenal stage and it's a ton of fun. But if you want to scale and you want to your team and be more effective next stage, you have to move into operationalization. to me, operationalization, it's the phase that like CSMs hate. CSMs hate it because you track everything they do. You give them specific calls to action. You take away a lot of their autonomy and their agency, but it's a super hypothesis driven stage.

So you have a hypothesis and you say, hey, when the customer does X, we think that we should do Y. So now you go do it with a ton of your customers and you see the impact. like sometimes you're wrong and you're like, OK, we don't need to do that. then but sometimes you're right. And so then what you can start to do is you can develop a perspective where you can say, OK, this is what really matters. And so now your CSMs can be efficient.

And they can start to advise customers on things that we know from testing, customers actually get value from. It's not just guess and check. And so then you're able to move into like the advisory phase, which is like you have a perspective on what good looks like and you can really give value. I think that's when CSMs move out of like the pseudo support, which we always talk about. Like we want to be proactive. We don't want to be support. And then finally,

the next stage is that you can start to scale your CS team. I think we, as CS leaders, often get lured by the siren song of margin and scale. And so we jump to that too early and we garbage in, garbage out.

Alex Berry (10:12.791)
And you touched on this earlier, right? I know that you incentivize your team to some degree in terms of what level of customer implementation, et cetera. Could you just touch on exactly what the principles are behind that and what behaviors it's meant to drive in the team? We'd love to hear a little bit more.

Luke Ferrel (10:34.158)
Yeah, I mean, like I'll tell you, I'll just from a very high level, we commented our customer success managers on 80 20 split. And so we have 80 percent base and then 20 percent is Cher and we set a target based on historic. I think I think most people do that. But then going back to like winning, we want CSMs to have an opportunity to go and participate in upside and to go win. It's just like I love being a goalkeeper. Like, don't get me wrong.

Alex Berry (10:44.706)
Okay.

Luke Ferrel (11:02.638)
But like that's a hard job because if any ball sneaks by like you didn't do your job and if you stop every ball, well then like you just did your job. And so then we say to CSMs if you get 25 % of your portfolio to have 10 or more points and we took like let me back up there. So with Golden Deal we said what are the features that differentiate us 40 ish features and then we go.

And I say, if you have 10 of those features turned on and activated for your customer, we're going to call that customer golden. If you get 25 % of your portfolio golden, I will give you $1,000 bonus. And then recurring, because your portfolio stays golden, $400 every month. And then if you get 50 % of your portfolio, $800. And if you get 75 % of your portfolio, $1,200.

Alex Berry (11:51.107)
Nice.

Luke Ferrel (11:58.348)
What that does is it gives you something to chase. It also disproportionately rewards your best CSMs. So you naturally retain the CSMs who are doing the things that drive retention. Sometimes I think we focus too much on retention and not the behaviors that drive retention.

Alex Berry (12:16.972)
Yeah. And I love that incentive program, right? It's clearly designed to, you know, put some control or put some levers in the hands of customer success to do something which, you know, and we'll chat on a second, right? mean, customers, as you said, customer success can be quite a defensive role. This is like, how can I go out there and best serve my client, understand the value, look at which features are driving that and work with towards them with a plan, right? It's about relationship management. It's about working towards these targets. And I think in some customer success teams,

that can be a little bit forgotten, right? So I definitely like the logic behind that. And I might one day use that for myself,

Luke Ferrel (12:54.505)
Yeah and it's fun. Like it's fun because you can gamify it, you can build competitions and I think we all like work is more fun when it's a game.

Alex Berry (13:03.618)
Yeah. Yeah. There's clear objectives. So, and interestingly enough, like you're still an organization which splits out customer success and account management. Anyone listening who wants to apply to deal, right? Thought that'd an interesting point to top, to cover. You know, how has that come about? What is the difference between the roles? How do you guys work together? Maybe you want to give us some light there.

Luke Ferrel (13:11.342)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Ferrel (13:23.566)
Yeah, so we do split out success and account management and the reason like at a high level why we've done that is we want the customer success manager to be an advocate for the client and so we don't want to like cross any lines like when we're doing things and we're pushing things for the customer we want the customer to know like we are doing it for your good. Now

Alex Berry (13:36.941)
Okay.

Luke Ferrel (13:48.094)
We do have a little incentives like golden deal and all that kind of stuff, but really it's for your good. And then we have the account manager whose sole function is to like upsell and cross sell the account. We find that having someone focus on that just one, it drives revenue, which is great. And then it allows the success manager to really go focus on what they need to do. Now the problems that you have with that model is cross communication has to be really, really, really good. And we're not perfect at it.

It's an area where we can continue to get better. What's really hard is like you have people talking to customers on Slack, on email, on phone calls, on texts, on WhatsApp, on WeChat, and CSMs are doing it and account managers are doing it. So getting a holistic view of the customer, really hard.

Alex Berry (14:25.4)
Mm.

Alex Berry (14:38.562)
Yeah, no, can imagine. but look, it sounds like it's, you know, your team is going above and beyond onto whatever channel that's required. Right. So that's also positive. that's great. So, you know, one of the things that obviously, when you look at deal from the outside stands out, right. Big acquisition, play in terms of driving growth with some payroll companies as well as other HR solutions. And yeah. So.

You have a particular way that you like to kind of integrate these different, how should I say, customer suggest managers, sales people, whatever it may be, into how they help your teams sell and enable, well not sell, but enable those products on the deal platform. How does that work for you? Can you explain more?

Luke Ferrel (15:24.46)
Yeah, generally, I love to have my CSMs be as general as possible. And I want them to know all products because I think it's just like unless you're like an SAP and you're massive and you have 20 million, 100 million dollar contracts, I think it's really awkward to have like one CSM per product. Like if you're spending 100K, you don't want to be talking to five different people. So we try and have people be generalists.

Now that said, when we incorporate a new company, Hoffi is a great thing, which we now is Deal IT. So they have CSMs that are experts and have been driving success on Hoffi for years. so we, rather than give them a full book, we give them like specific Hoffi only clients, and then we use them as an overlay. So I would expect like CSMs to know 70 % of the answers on Hoffi.

Alex Berry (15:49.335)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Berry (15:55.405)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (16:17.208)
But then there's going to be complicated things and things that need specialist help. And then we loop them in almost in a consulting model. And so we do that for a while, could be six months, could be a year, until the team really starts to feel comfortable. And then we start to move those specialists into more generalist roles. But I am a big believer in having the specialist model with an eye towards the generalist model.

Alex Berry (16:40.29)
Yeah, so they develop over time, I'm sure otherwise you'd have a lot of spec... Considering the number of acquisitions the deal is done, you'd probably have quite a lot of specialists running around.

Luke Ferrel (16:42.284)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (16:48.652)
Yeah, yeah, we do, which is great. It's not the most efficient, right? Like the most efficient is you go flat, but I think it's necessary at the beginning.

Alex Berry (16:51.15)
You

Alex Berry (16:59.446)
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Okay. So last one, just specifically on the way that you work with your customers, which I think really stood out in some of the conversations we've had previously. You you talked a little bit about Project Cassandra, which from what I picked up is really about expectation setting, right? We've all been on an airplane where a pilot will tell us that we're delayed by 30 minutes. And then they turn around and they say, listen,

you know, it's actually only 15, we're about to kind of taxi off and you take off. And I think that's a great way to play it, HR, global HR policy, legislation, whatever it may be across a hundred and whatever countries you cover, it's a tricky beast to handle, right? And that's a massive understatement. I worked in the industry. I know some of the problems that can present themselves out of thin air. Can you tell us a little bit more about that approach? Because I think psychologically for other customer success management teams,

Luke Ferrel (17:27.374)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (17:40.546)
Yeah.

Alex Berry (17:53.294)
It's an interesting method, right?

Luke Ferrel (17:57.836)
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for asking about that. It's a, love that project. and just shout out to Ben Greenfield. He's one of our directors, like his brainchild. I will happily take credit for it. but essentially like we looked through, have a really robust escalation framework where anytime there's an escalation, we'll have CSMs raise an escalation in Slack. We pull everybody in and we raise a JIRA ticket so that we can root cause it. So we got all this data around what's driving escalations and it became really clear.

Alex Berry (18:06.744)
Okay.

Luke Ferrel (18:27.48)
that a lot of the things that drove escalations were things that like, if we had gotten ahead of them and if we had told customers and warned them beforehand, like they may still have been mad, but they wouldn't be like red in the face mad. So we grabbed all those things and we said like, we're gonna start doing this interesting thing about Cassandra. The reason we named it Cassandra, Cassandra is a Greek God that her curse was to prophesy, but nobody listens. And so we felt like it was kind of.

Alex Berry (18:53.55)
I think a lot of people in technology startups probably feel like that sometimes.

Luke Ferrel (18:56.914)
Yeah, that's kind of how it feels sometimes. And so we went through and we said, we're going to, as soon as customers onboard and they're turned over to the success team, we're going to grab all the things that we know are going to drive them crazy and we're going to tell them about them. And so we're going to say like, hey, terminations are hard and this is what's going to drive you crazy. If you terminate after a payroll cutoff, your person's still going to be included or like expenses like

Expenses policies are different per country. And so your employees may not have been doing expenses compliantly. And in Portugal, expenses are tough and they're going to have to ask for these things. What's great about it is now the customer gets an opportunity to say, I don't like that. Or like, that's a deal breaker. That's a problem for me. And now we can collaboratively solve it before it's like on fire.

And then like they may, you know, people don't retain everything, but it is nice because then something happens and like there's probably something in your head that's like, I remember we talked about this.

Alex Berry (20:01.73)
Yeah, look, think it's for this industry and for other technology categories, right, it's gonna be, it's great advice. So right now, deal very much hiring. You've got a number of roles open. We're gonna talk a little bit about the numbers later. What's the advice you have for someone starting out in the first few years of their customer success career in today's environment?

Luke Ferrel (20:27.456)
Yeah, that's a great question. We are hiring a lot. So if people want to want to talk about that, I'm happy to talk about that. But I think like I often think of CSMs in like three levels. So the first level is like, you know how to organize your work. You're conscientious. You have grit. You work hard. And so in an interview, like I'll ask people, how do you decide what to work on and how do you prioritize your work? Because I think if you're not consciously thinking about those things, it's really hard to do that actively.

Alex Berry (20:56.43)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Ferrel (20:56.684)
So that's like the first thing I would think about. The second thing is how like, so that's maybe entry level and then like mid career level, a couple years of experience. It's how are you advisory? And I love to ask people like, tell me about a time when a customer came to you and they wanted something and you had to tell them like, no, you don't want that. Or like there's a better way to go about that.

Alex Berry (21:09.592)
Mm.

Luke Ferrel (21:19.148)
Because I think when you get to that, like that's like a mid career CS level skill. And then the last thing that is really important, and this is when you're starting to think about becoming a manager or becoming a senior principal CSM is we close the inner loop a lot, which is like the tactics. So it's like what I solve the problem in front of me, but the senior ones are the ones that are going to be managers and directors and VPs are able to close the outer loop. They can trend spot. And so they say, I've had this problem with three or four customers.

I have 20 other customers that are similar. I need to go develop a program so that I can get ahead of this. And that to me is is phenomenal. And then like maybe your your VP level is when you can go and you can say, I see these customers, but I also can like now I can go look and see what is driving this in product. And that's like the outer loop.

Alex Berry (22:11.074)
Yeah. That's interesting. I just want to take this on a tangent, right? that's typically quite a challenging thing for customer success teams to do. So are there tools, or you've mentioned JIRA already, right? But are there tools, processes, vendors that you're using where you extract some of the data that goes into that kind of outer loop detection?

Luke Ferrel (22:33.548)
Yeah, I mean, I use I use Gainsight as a customer success platform. Big fan of the platform. I think it's great. I think there are a lot of other great platforms out there. So no magic sauce there. But use Gainsight. I love Slack because it's a way to swarm a problem really fast. And so what we'll do is we'll like automate that. If you file an escalation, auto pulls all these people in. One of my secret weapons and I always hesitate to give it away because it's so good. I love Pylon.

And the pilot team, I think they just raced around, so they're doing great.

Alex Berry (23:06.392)
Yeah, they did. Yeah. From, I think, A16Z.

Luke Ferrel (23:08.77)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're great. They're great team. Because now I can connect every communication platform into Slack. can also get an idea of like, Slack can be terrible for workforce management because you don't know what's actually happening. But with Pylon, you can go and see all that. And you can also like pull your support team into Slack and they can stay in Zendesk. So.

Cool tool. Marty owes me five bucks now, I guess. don't know. it's a great, great tool. And then I use Looker to be able to go and visualize all the data and then Jira so that I can go. Our job in the escalation is to go and solve the issue. And then we'll go and work everything in Jira so that we can go close that outer loop. And that helps us immensely.

Alex Berry (23:53.134)
Wow, yeah, nice. That's a neat stack. yeah, that the stack is changing quite rapidly nowadays. I think there's there's definitely a few players in different parts of the GTM funnel, which are really rapidly rising in prominence. And it's exciting to see even even challenging some of the unchallenged challengeables, right, like Salesforce and Zendesk.

Luke Ferrel (24:06.317)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (24:12.186)
Yeah, we're looking right now like the other tool that I'm interested in right now and maybe I shouldn't say this because now I'm gonna get a bunch of things in my LinkedIn inbox. But like we want to go and aggregate all of these things that happen in in silos like phone calls, phone call. You got your gong recording or whatever. You've got all your we also use outreach. I forgot to mention that. But you have you know what your team is saying in emails, all these different platforms.

Alex Berry (24:25.582)
Hmm.

Luke Ferrel (24:39.502)
And like, how can I get a good view? And then how can the sales rep get a good view? How can we all be on the same page? Because oftentimes what you'll see is the AE is like pitching a deal. And then like worst case scenario, they get to the end of the deal and there's a stakeholder who's mad and they block the whole deal. And the AE spent a month on this deal that never had a chance of closing because they aren't happy.

Alex Berry (25:01.346)
Yeah, that kind of challenge is definitely one which I think is on the cusp of being solved or is being solved today. So lots of different approaches there. Exciting to see what develops. So just to round off here, maybe a couple of short fire questions and we can... So, I suppose we already answered one of these questions, right? Like absolute favorite AI tool today other than ChatGPT is the one that stands out.

Luke Ferrel (25:27.918)
I mean, other than Open Deal, which Alex would kill me if I didn't say that. I don't know if I consider Pylon an AI tool, but I think it's really cool. I'm sure there's elements of AI. I just think Pylon's a really, really cool tool.

Alex Berry (25:31.522)
Yeah.

Alex Berry (25:41.23)
Yeah, it looks like it. Okay. And three principles you rely on to manage your team. I loved one that you mentioned the other day to me, which was what's the one thing that you're to get done this week? I'm not sure if I remembered it correctly. Like, I don't know you want to build on that. Interested if you have any other principles in the way you lead as you know, your team.

Luke Ferrel (25:55.726)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (26:03.552)
Yeah, I very much like to I like to be super clear with the team like I'll post oftentimes on Slack and I'll say like, here's what matters to me this week. And sometimes it's really tactical, simple stuff, but I'll just be like, need to get all of our compete channels, like cleaned up. And so like, that's what I care about. And that's what I hope you should care about this week. So I love to just be like one or two things. So I love that. I love

Alex Berry (26:21.55)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Ferrel (26:33.606)
I'm a big believer in like, and maybe this is micromanaging. Maybe don't read this in book, but I love like when customers, when I want a customer to do something, I want to know like, did the CSM reach out? Is it done? Is the customer aligned? And then like notes. So oftentimes I'll just put together like a simple sheet so that I can see visibility because CSMs have so many things going on and I want to make it so easy for them.

And I also want to make it easy for me to monitor. So I'll just put something together and that way I can just like tag any CSMs and be like, hey, I don't see action on this. It's just very straightforward. I also love we have a team that like audits our processes and I think it's the coolest thing ever. So we'll put together a process that we think we should do and then we'll have this this I can't remember what we called it. It's like a QA type team.

Alex Berry (27:19.362)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Ferrel (27:31.532)
And they'll go on it and we'll say, this is what we do on escalations. And then they'll come follow and they'll look at, you know, X number of escalations. And they'll say, you scored like 90 % against what you said you were going to do. It's great because it holds us accountable.

Alex Berry (27:45.358)
Nice. Yeah, I've never heard of that before. That definitely sounds like an interesting approach, really valuable because it's in a remote organization as well, because the other is fully remote, The interaction, especially through your digital systems becomes the lifeblood of the company and for sure, there's a lot of efficiency and a lot of the activity is so measurable, right?

Luke Ferrel (27:56.514)
Yeah, fully.

Luke Ferrel (28:04.332)
Yeah, that's the office.

Luke Ferrel (28:11.363)
Yeah.

Alex Berry (28:11.894)
And retrospectively, it's also quite easy to access. So I think big opportunities there, very interesting that you do that. think that's a smart move.

Luke Ferrel (28:16.972)
Yeah, it's a great team. And what's great about it is we get really intellectually curious people on that team. And so oftentimes they'll say like, here's what you're doing wrong and here's how to go fix it. So it makes my job really easy because I can just say like, yeah, I agree. Like, let's go do that. And it just like it's I love thinking of like operations like a zip tie, like just slowly getting tighter and just never letting it get looser.

Alex Berry (28:41.176)
Yeah, I like that. Well, I think that speaks a little bit to your background as well. So Luke, deal growing, like where do you have customer success managers today? What segments, like is there a split? How much is the team growing by? What's exciting happening there? If you want to get involved in customer success at Deal, tell me a little bit more about what's happening.

Luke Ferrel (29:07.126)
Yeah, we are fully global remote everywhere. A big belief at the company is like where you live doesn't dictate your talent like they're talented people all over the world. You should be able to be hired anywhere. And I fully believe that. So we hire globally anywhere in the world. I mean, almost anywhere in the world. We don't hire in North Korea. Almost anywhere. And then we segment by like enterprise, mid market, SMB.

Alex Berry (29:23.608)
great.

Okay. Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (29:35.19)
And then we also look at like spend in those categories. And so like for a customer success manager, they can be in any segment because there are a lot of like SMB customers that expand globally now, which you probably didn't see 20 years ago. And so they can be like large customers. And so we look at like we have entry level, which is like a customer advocate, and that's more of like your pooled scale. And then we have like associate CSMs and then we have CSMs and then we have senior CSMs. So there's a lot of room for growth.

Alex Berry (29:47.874)
Yeah.

Luke Ferrel (30:03.63)
which is great. It's nice to have a career path. And then we're going to hire quite a few in this coming year. Like revenue growth necessarily dictates CS growth. We always want to get efficiency, but I don't think we're at the stage where we're like trying to squeeze margin out of CS. We care a lot more about satisfying and making our customers happy because we feel like we're like 1 % of the way done and there's so much more to do.

So like I would say anywhere around the world we are hiring and for various seniority levels from new grad to you know 10 plus years of success experience.

Alex Berry (30:44.536)
Fantastic. Look, I think that's a pretty exciting way to end. So Luke, really appreciate your time. Thanks for telling us all about the various programs, principles, hiring goals, all the different stories you have, some of your unique tactics in terms of managing customers and driving engagement on the deal platform. It's been thoroughly fascinating. Hopefully we can catch up again sometime soon. And thank you very much.

Luke Ferrel (31:10.114)
Yeah, thank you, Alex. Great to talk. Bye-bye.

Alex Berry (31:12.206)
Ciao.

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