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This episode was recorded prior to Teresa Anania’s move to Chief Customer Officer at Verint. At the time of recording, she was SVP of Customer Experience at Sophos.
Teresa Anania (CCO at Verint, formerly CCO at Sophos) joins GTMnow to share how she’s built customer success into a true revenue engine at a company serving 600,000 customers across over $1 billion in annual revenue, and why the old reactive, relationship-based CS model is no longer cutting it.
At Sophos, the threat landscape is compounding fast. AI is accelerating the speed and sophistication of attacks, which means response times, customer journeys, and success motions all have to evolve in lockstep in order to keep up. Teresa has spent her career at companies like Zendesk, Autodesk, and ON24 building the operational frameworks that make that possible at scale.
Discussed in this episode
- Why AI-accelerated threats have made “always on” customer operations a baseline requirement
- How Sophos structures customer success to respond before a customer even knows there’s an issue
- The attribution model Teresa uses to tie CS touchpoints directly to retention and expansion
- Why waiting for a support ticket is too late
- The crawl, walk, run approach for early-stage companies that want to build CS rigor without perfect data
- How dynamic segmentation (not just company size) determines coverage models and CSM assignment
- What “humble confidence” looks like as a hiring bar and why Teresa uses it across her org
- Why retention has to be an all-company play
- The role of inner and outer feedback loops in turning NPS data into cross-functional action
- How to start the digital journey transformation without disrupting the core business
Episode highlights
00:00 – Sophos at a glance: 600K customers, $1B+ in revenue, and why cybersecurity keeps growing when everything else slows down
01:51 – AI vs. AI: how threat actors are using the same tools Sophos is building against
03:02 – The 2026 Active Adversary Report: why attackers are logging in, not breaking in
04:20 – Attackers move in 3-4 hours and how Sophos structures CS to respond before the customer even knows there’s a problem
06:05 – Connecting CS activity directly to retention and expansion: the attribution model
08:45 – Advice for early-stage companies that want this kind of rigor but don’t have perfect data yet
10:06 – Automation as a scale lever: crawl, walk, run and why you should start at the end of the renewal cycle
13:43 – The future of go-to-market: self-serve from first touch through win-back, powered by AI
18:20 – “The customer should never feel your org chart”: building a digital journey that meets people where they are
20:39 – Going from legacy manual to digital without blowing up the business
22:00 – Dynamic segmentation: why hard lines on ACV are the wrong way to assign CS coverage
26:02 – The two-by-two that actually matters: risk, spend, and growth potential
32:08 – The humble confidence hire: why Teresa looks for this specific combination across her entire org
34:15 – The 5-to-1 scorecard and what Teresa has learned about earning customer trust over time
36:14 – Inner and outer feedback loops: how Sophos turns NPS data into cross-functional action
38:11 – Why retention has to be an all-company meeting, not a CS slide
Key takeaways
1. If you’re waiting for a ticket, you’ve already failed your customer.
By the time a customer inbounds a problem, you’ve already missed a window. The best CS orgs are predictive. They identify where customers get stuck, build curated digital journeys around those moments, and intervene before the customer even knows they need help. That’s what “always on” actually means.
2. CS only drives revenue when it’s outcome-based, not relationship-based.
The old model (check-ins, QBRs, account health scores) isn’t cutting it anymore. Teresa builds attribution models that correlate specific engagement touchpoints to retention and expansion. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and most teams aren’t measuring the right things.
3. Dynamic segmentation beats static ACV tiers every time.
Hard lines on company size or contract value lead to misallocated coverage and missed growth. The better model? A two-by-two of current spend, risk, and expansion potential that flexes every few months as customer health changes. Your best CSMs should be matched to the accounts with the most upside, not just the biggest logos.
4. Don’t just treat retention as a CS swim lane.
Teresa runs a monthly cross-functional meeting with product, marketing, sales, and support to action NPS insights together. The inner loop closes individual feedback fast. The outer loop informs strategy. Most companies say retention is everyone’s job. Few actually set it up that way.
5. Start at the end of the renewal cycle, not the beginning.
When building a digital CS motion from scratch, Teresa starts with win-back and renewal, not onboarding. That’s where you can show near-term impact, identify churn culprits, and build the playbooks that eventually get you to a proactive, full-lifecycle motion. Crawl, walk, run.
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Cleverbridge
A clear shift is underway in enterprise software. More companies are rethinking how they segment customers and structure servicing models — especially in post-sale motions like renewals, winbacks, and add-ons.
For too long, too much lower-touch revenue has been routed through direct sales or partner motions where the cost-to-serve doesn’t match the value delivered. Increasingly, companies including Sophos, SUSE, and PTC are using Cleverbridge to move more routine transactions into digital, buyer-friendly purchasing paths while reserving high-touch resources where they add the most value.
If you’re rethinking customer segmentation, servicing models, or how digital and AI should apply across your customer base, Cleverbridge is worth a look. Learn more at grow.cleverbridge.com/lp/digital-commerce.
Follow Teresa Anania
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresa-anania
- Sophos’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sophos
- Sophos’ Website: https://www.sophos.com
- Verint’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/verint
- Verint’s Website: https://www.verint.com
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
Where to Find GTMnow
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
The GTMnow Podcast tells the stories of how the top 1% of founders, operators, and investors build, scale and invest.
Each week, we uncover the pivotal moments, bold decisions, and go-to-market strategies that turn ideas into breakout companies.
GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund – we are an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.
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GTM 184 Episode Transcript
00:00
Sophie Buonassisi: While many SaaS categories are really seeing more of a slowdown, cybersecurity is growing tremendously. What are the real growth levers behind that?
00:08
Teresa Anania: I accelerates a lot of the potential threats. And so we counter that with even better AI.
00:15
Sophie Buonassisi: Theresa Antonia leads customer experience at Sophos 600,000 customers, over a billion in revenue, and she’s redefining how KCS drives growth.
00:25
Teresa Anania: I wait for a ticket that, to me is already a failure. We have to have always on systems, so we create a digital journey, personalized, curated experience even before they identify their stock where they need some help. It’s instantaneous.
00:40
Sophie Buonassisi: What are the core inputs to use to connect customer success activity directly to retention and expansion?
00:47
Teresa Anania: The expectations of the customer must not only be met, they must be exceeded. So then we can do an attribution model to really correlate what are those outcomes in those engagement touchpoints contributing to the ultimate outcome, which is retention?
01:02
Sophie Buonassisi: Do you have any advice for earlier stage companies that want to emulate this?
01:06
Teresa Anania: You might have things that indicate killer issues. I say that because it’s a.
01:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Good.
01:20
Sophie Buonassisi: School. Theresa. What can we do TM now?
01:24
Teresa Anania: I thank you. I’m excited to be here.
01:27
Sophie Buonassisi: So I want to cover a few things. I mean, the security space, digital transformation that you’re really kind of pioneering. But first, Sophos is serving over 600,000 customers with over $1 billion in revenue. And while many SaaS categories are really seeing more of a slowdown, cyber security is growing tremendously. What are the real growth levers behind that?
01:50
Teresa Anania: Yeah, I think obviously AI is accelerating. Even the bad actor threats for our customers. And so the space is never ending. The amount of research and threat intelligence required to counter some of our businesses, that we serve greatest risks. It is an infinite loop. I think AI accelerates like a lot of the potential threat that our customers face.
02:20
Teresa Anania: And so we counter that with even better AI to kind of defend and make sure that we are proactively and, and with, integrity, finding as much as we can in their landscape, whether it be in the endpoints, the firewall, of course, all in between. And then we offer a service that is always on called our MDR Managed Detection and Response service.
02:45
Teresa Anania: So look, the space is growing. The number of threats is growing. The good news is with great AI and technology and a platform like ours, we we feel really solid in the security posture that we provide for our customers.
03:01
Sophie Buonassisi: Sophos recently published the, 2026 version Active Adversary Report. And when I was going through it, it kind of highlights a shift of more of like, you know, the typical breaking in from a security perspective to logging in. So what are the biggest risks with identity driven attacks that people should be aware of, and what should people do differently?
03:21
Teresa Anania: You know, I’ll just share what I heard in the room in our two regional customer advisory board meetings, where we brought together some of our best and brightest customers to the table. I mean, what’s keeping them up at night and what they believe are some of the most, active threats. You know, identifying any gaps in the protection landscape is super critical, making sure all devices are identified.
03:47
Teresa Anania: One of the other big areas that we work with our clients on are tight, very, very tight integrations, that are very solid regardless of what technology they’re using to secure their end points or their firewalls. It’s all really relevant. So those are the two biggest areas that that we tend to, factor in when we want to make sure there is very, structured, security provisions across every checkpoint that they require.
04:17
Teresa Anania: Those two things matter a lot.
04:20
Sophie Buonassisi: Got it. Super helpful. Those two things. And then something else that the report actually showed was that when attackers can actually penetrate critical systems, they can do so in about 3 to 4 hours, which is quite quick, especially considering for a lot of software companies support customer success teams. They operate more of like a 24 hour, 48 hour cycle oftentimes.
04:40
Sophie Buonassisi: So how do you as a leading customer success for all of Sophos? How do you structure customer operations to respond at that crazy pace?
04:48
Teresa Anania: I mean, we have to have always on systems and again, we have to be ahead of any of those potential threats. So we have a lot of predictive. We have a lot of preventative, our protections are, you know, starting at the very, very beginning. And so our response times are usually before the customer even knows there is an issue, if there is an issue and we both identify it at the same time, you know, it’s instantaneous.
05:17
Teresa Anania: We have, direct access with not only phone and bridges that we connect on, but there is a very rigorous, research that is done in real time as well as, a lot of the recommendations that might be needed to solve whatever the potential threat is, those are happening in real time as well. But you’re right. It makes for a very, important customer experience at that most critical time of need.
05:47
Teresa Anania: And, that’s that’s what we build and that’s what we continue to provide, our top customers.
05:54
Sophie Buonassisi: You know, for yourself, you’re driving true revenue at Sophos. What are the core inputs are used to connect customer success activity directly to retention and expansion.
06:05
Teresa Anania: So. Well, there’s the obvious that we really line up their engagement model to be outcome driven. So think of, you know, this is not the reactive or relationship based customer success any longer. It’s really about intentional. Again, proactive really making sure that we are building on the expectations of the customer. When they made the decision to choose Sophos, for example, as their partner, those outcomes must not only be met, they must be exceeded.
06:38
Teresa Anania: So we develop a very intentional outreach, I’ll call it touch point plan that really perceptively identifies the key moments of truth during, you know, even deployments, certainly over their life cycle of leveraging the full platform in the capabilities, making sure, you know, that we’re doing health checks and, and tabletop exercises to really understand where all are the vulnerabilities.
07:05
Teresa Anania: How might we help them? You know, solidify and harden that security landscape. And so then we can do an attribution model, which we have built. And I’ve done this a couple times in my past to really correlate not as much causation, but correlation. What are those outcomes in those engagement touchpoints contributing to the ultimate outcome, which is the big revenue driver for any company and that is retention.
07:34
Teresa Anania: We also have some leading indicators that we correlate to, which can be things like identify expansion opportunities. Because as you work through, let’s say, an assessment of a car companies, security posture, you may identify as the CSR, some areas of vulnerability, some areas of weakness and sometimes are solutions, whether they’re integration capabilities or email. It are, capabilities.
08:03
Teresa Anania: They might not have that require in order to get to the highest level of, let’s say, maturity in their security practice. We will recommend those things and make sure that we’re not crossing the line to a commercial relationship. We’re still the trusted advisors, but making those recommendations really helps our customer understand, how to just continue to mature their practice.
08:26
Teresa Anania: So really, it’s the revenue retention through graph that we can correlate a lot of those, those touchpoints from onboarding through adoption to renewal, and then also an additional measure to track the nearer the actual expansion outcomes.
08:45
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. And a very rigorous system. I think a lot of early stage companies aspire to have that kind of rigor built in, but may not have the kind of data or built hub teams around it. Do you have any advice for earlier stage companies that want to emulate this, that are bought into the the actual understanding of customer success being one of the biggest, if not the biggest revenue driver in a business.
09:10
Teresa Anania: So, I mean, I think early on, it’s really important to start with what you have. And I do believe that even if your data is not perfect and you don’t have like the perfect telemetry for a predictive, let’s say, a health at risk type of signal, you might have things that indicate killer issues. I say that because it’s a, it’s a belief around the heuristic data that could actually still get you a good amount of the way to being proactive.
09:39
Teresa Anania: So whether it’s just asking some of your systems or your account managers, what are the things that really indicate a customer is tracking healthy? And what are some of the things that would show as to railers and where the customer might be on an unhealthy track, and really just taking campaign approached all breaches towards those particular killer issues is a way to get started.
10:06
Teresa Anania: I think another thing is just, you know, automation is, is to me, a good way to increase efficiency around a practice or a process that already works. So it’s great to start this kind of engagement even before you might have a fully tooled and operationalize model. And that way you can work out some of the kinks and identify what are the best moments of truth that we should engage with our customers, whether it be during that onboarding experience, whether it be during their use of the platform to, you know, continue to evolve and uptake all of the great, advancements and updates that were made to that technology and then ultimately in the renewal
10:51
Teresa Anania: experience. And actually, we have extended the engagement model to include when back. So I think a great practice. Yeah, we use Clever Bridge for this automation portion of the lifecycle phase. And we’re going to move it earlier in the lifecycle to prior to renewal. But even during the post renewal phase, letting our customers know that you are going to be losing your protections, we give a short grace period as many B2B SaaS companies do, but at some point you know, when customers have not renewed their their contract, that may still think they have the protections of the, cyber technology we offer.
11:33
Teresa Anania: We want to give them the benefit of knowing, like your endpoint or your firewall may not be protected as you think. So, you know, renew now and there’s a nice, Salesforce link to our CRM where they have the option to just renew with the push of the button and we track all of that. And again, that correlates to that success motion.
11:55
Teresa Anania: Also think of it like a good, metric of license compliance and enforcement because we just don’t want customers. It’s not about even the contract and the revenue that we’re missing. That’s a part of it. But mainly we don’t want our customers to be operating when they’re unprotected and exposed. So that whole journey to me, can be nascent to start and then automated as you get more advanced.
12:22
Teresa Anania: And, you know, we’re at the point now where we have operationalize calls to action through our, CRM tool. We have identified insights in a portfolio that when you automate, you can widen the ratios of your CSM to account coverage. As long as you’re providing that contextualized like insight on who to call next and why and what is the play that’s when you know you’re you’re starting to achieve scale.
12:51
Teresa Anania: And it’s important as part of the evolution. But it’s to me crawl, walk, run. And you got to start somewhere.
12:58
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13:17
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13:43
Sophie Buonassisi: But you’ve also let go to market at some incredible, incredible companies before that like on 24 and Zendesk and Autodesk. Like when you think just broadly from the go to market side looking 3 to 5 years out, what is the modern go to market look like for software companies? And like what’s forcing this change? Because we’re in a period of huge change?
14:05
Teresa Anania: I agree with you. I think AI is changing the game. I mean, we have taken a very high volume business, whether that be at Sophos in my prior life at Zendesk. I mean, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of customers that we need to transact at that critical final mile to secure. And you know what we’ve learned in a renewal contract.
14:25
Teresa Anania: So, you know, I see the evolution being a way to scale with a digital motion that allows for self-serve from the beginning of the customer journey all the way through to that renewal event and win back, as I described. And I think that self-serve experience is powered by AI. So think of it like all of the telemetry that helps us know when we’re going to get like a high ticket driver on our support side.
14:54
Teresa Anania: Why wait for a ticket? That, to me is already a failure because the customer has to come inbound asking a question that clearly was not intuitive upstream. So instead of waiting for that, we’re proactively identifying here’s where many other customers like you have gotten stock. And so we can create a digital journey. Think of it like a learning path that allows the customer to have a very personalized, curated experience at the time, even before they identify that their stock or they need some help.
15:29
Teresa Anania: And this helps us free up our human capacity to really be focused on the more advanced needs of our customer. And so you get not only like a more, engaging position when you’re hiring for these critical roles because they know 80% of their time they’re going to be engaging in high value customer engagements. But you also get a great customer experience because for the low, effort things they don’t want to have to contact and they don’t want to have to come inbound.
16:02
Teresa Anania: They want to have, great curated learning resources, kind of guided experiences that allow them to self-serve. So I think what I’m seeing evolve is just a way to scale. I think in go to market orchestration in the selling RACI and what our sales team is responsible for and the success, renewals and even support NPS. RACI super critical.
16:30
Teresa Anania: I think AI is allowing us to start blurring the lines of having like our customers have to know our functional or design and instead, like truly allow us to surface the right resource at the right time, depending on where that customer is in the lifecycle. So we have a ton of data, probably a lot of us out there, know what I’m talking about when we say there’s a ton of data, but it’s making it actionable and assuring that that data is basically taking the customer just along that journey at their pace, not at some time BS pace that is arbitrary, not at some vanilla one size fits approach, but rather in a way where
17:14
Teresa Anania: we know, like where the customer is. We have good data that tells us benchmarking, where other customers like them are, and just helping them move along that maturity curve not only to basically unlock more platform or other capabilities, but also to benchmark them against what is best in class in the industry, and that is high value and assuring that CSM support are all driving revenue, not just some relationship metric or account health or adoption depth, but rather attributed.
17:51
Teresa Anania: But even have a direct bridge of all those support engagements directly to a revenue growth target. I think is the future, because we all want to get out of the world of a cost overlay organization or one that is just grounded in, you know, this is my swim lane and this is all I do, and rather have each of our employees really feel like they have a part.
18:17
Teresa Anania: And that overall retention and growth goal.
18:20
Sophie Buonassisi: And I have to say, I haven’t seen this done extremely well at scale for many companies. I think what you’re doing around creating more bespoke engagement and proactive engagement for customers like, is truly the future, but it’s a lot more challenging operational.
18:35
Teresa Anania: It’s hard. It is all about crawl, walk, run, you know, developing a roadmap of what data do we have that can inform a more personalized experience? And then how do we leverage AI, third party data, internal, even unstructured data to actually augment that and provide that for customer contacts. So that when we’re engaging, even if it’s digitally, they feel, first of all, there’s an escape valve.
19:03
Teresa Anania: They can raise their hand and say, I want a human, okay. But also before that is even necessary, really take them into a more guided path. Our customers that have enjoyed this kind of experience give us very high marks on CSat, T, NPS, transactional NPS. So we know that it is, you know, when you wire it and use AI to optimize it, we know that it has a good effect internally on employee engagement.
19:36
Teresa Anania: People enjoy their jobs more, and that extends to a better customer experience as well.
19:42
Sophie Buonassisi: And something you said around the org chart, not feeling it made me think of the CMO Figma, Sheila Vashi. She said the number one thing that they do is they ensure the customer does not feel or know their org chart, because it’s truly not. That’s right. While I love the approach, I think there’s a long way to go and most companies can try to emulate that because right now it does feel like it’s still a little bit of the either time bound or a more of just the, play.
20:08
Sophie Buonassisi: So sequencing of drip for time or usage based and it’s generic, like you said, vanilla across the kind of landscape. So I’m excited to see more companies trying to adopt as much more personalized approach like so focus.
20:20
Teresa Anania: Exactly.
20:21
Sophie Buonassisi: And plenty of leaders try to go more digital and and it can be overwhelming. Like, how did you think about that journey? How would you kind of break it down into more practical stages of going like legacy manual to more hybrid and digital without disrupting, obviously, the core kind of business and revenue?
20:39
Teresa Anania: Yeah. I mean, I am a very pragmatic type, leader on this front. You know, it depends on company size. So I’ll just speak to all of us that have built these types of organizations and processes from scratch, like start with the basics, start with what is my upcoming top renewal base like, how can I make an impact?
21:01
Teresa Anania: Not just me, but exact sponsors and or aka SMBs that, you know, we might be starting up? How can we make an impact for very quick wins? So to me, it’s about looking at that existing book of business, identifying where some of the risks could be in that upcoming ETR or available to renew, and then working backwards. Right.
21:23
Teresa Anania: So even in my digital journey design, we started up a customer, journey office think of that is like the hub of a hub and spoke model where, you know, this takes stakeholders around the company, product marketing, you know, sales certainly support success and really assuring everyone understands their part in the customer journey. So we didn’t start at the beginning because to me, starting with an onboarding experience, when you already are, let’s say, inheriting a certain amount of install base feels like you’re missing an opportunity to have a very near term impact.
22:00
Teresa Anania: So I start at the end. I started the win back and renewal experience and really identify maybe 60 days, 90 days before the renewal, depending on how large we’re talking. I’m mostly referring to the volume space, but if it’s enterprise and high dollar ACV, you know you’re going to start a lot earlier, like really taking stock, doing an audit of like, what kind of value have they received?
22:24
Teresa Anania: Have we done our job to either meet or exceed the expectation of the value that was sold to them in the decision they made to join, you know, X company or buy X company and then like a read account program can devolve from that. So once you, you know, just jump into gear of like what are the risk factors.
22:45
Teresa Anania: How do we de-risk this account. It starts to build your at risk playbooks. So then you kind of work backwards and you’re like okay, it’s not good to be reactive and jumping in towards the very tail end of that renewal. How do we get earlier into the install base that are just really starting to adopt and, you know, starting to think about like, is this relationship working with me for me?
23:08
Teresa Anania: And is this company one I see is a strategic partner for our long term. And those kinds of outreaches and engagements can really lead to playbooks that just help customers move along that maturity curve and get that value delivery. I think one of the key elements in that phase is to articulate and even size ROI. I think that is a huge missing factor.
23:32
Teresa Anania: Many of our, I’ll say colleagues, they they think about engagement as like a checklist rather than outcome based. And I think we have to be looking at it through the eyes of the customer. What is the valley value or the proxy that we can use for the value the customer is getting, and how are we showing up?
23:53
Teresa Anania: And then you move to like the earlier phases and you can start with like an amazing onboarding experience. Now I say that, but one of the very first things I do is look at churn culprits, right? That’s at the very end, like why are we losing? And everything I just shared about working backwards should be from that lens.
24:14
Teresa Anania: So that if, let’s say, onboarding and their implementation deployment is one of the bigger churn culprits, that is a place you can start even though it’s earlier on. If it’s going to kind of de-risk and continue to drive health in the base, that’s where to start. So it’s segmentation. Not every like when you’re in a pyramid like I am.
24:37
Teresa Anania: We have top of the bulk enterprise and we have a long tail and both matter. We don’t have an 8020. It’s like 5050. So we have to address both. And the churn culprits in each of those segments are very different. So it’s basically, you know, hearing why we lose working from the end of that renewal cycle backwards. And really starting to operationalize that with a a crawl, walk run mentality, because a lot can be accomplished even with a few people devoted to the practice.
25:12
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25:36
Sophie Buonassisi: If you’re evaluating your outbound stack or renewing legacy tools, check out Nook’s dot I. That’s not KCI. Speaking of sequential and sequencing, how do you think about segments specifically? So more of a segmentation between SMB and mid-market or enterprise and or even sales assist like the motion itself. So you’re not just trying to boil the ocean because there’s there’s so many possibilities there.
26:01
Sophie Buonassisi: It feels like.
26:02
Teresa Anania: I mean, I start with data, I start with again, where is our risk drags or our culprits in our renewal rates? Where is the volume and the rate making the biggest drag on our numbers? And then taking that and making sure that our coverage model is addressing the high value, high risk areas so that you can get a pretty good return on that investment pretty quickly.
26:29
Teresa Anania: Segmentation to me, you know, is is meant to be flexible. I feel I wrote a white paper on this at one point with Gartner called Dynamic Segmentation. I think too many of us think of it with these very arbitrary hard lines on spend, let’s say ACB size, the average contract value, size. And that’s very arbitrary. I think what we need to do is be looking at a two by two of like not only size of span, but risk and also potential spend.
27:03
Teresa Anania: So some of the attributes that could help you grow that account, even if it falls below a particular threshold, may still need a higher touch or medium touch experienced by a CSM. So having enough agility and flexibility in your segmentation to allow for that dynamic. I wouldn’t say like monthly, but every few months we’re looking at who are the customers that are just at risk, high spend we need to protect and maintain.
27:30
Teresa Anania: Who are the customers that are, you know, high spend, but have high growth potential and then not really sweet spot. And then where are some of the medium spans. But there’s high risk and, you know, lower effort to solve it. And what are some of the low spend low risk. You can digitize all of that. So I think starting with segmentation of where your customers fall, by the way, it’s a great proxy for matching customer needs.
27:56
Teresa Anania: Like for like because their needs in those quadrants are fairly similar. So your playbooks and your touchpoint plan can follow suit. And even your assignment of your CSM can match those quadrants because, you know, some systems are better at risk and prevention and others are better at growth. So that really lends itself to then, okay, how are we going to segment our high touch or medium touch.
28:22
Teresa Anania: And then everything else is, you know, tech touch, although we do Tech Touch across the base. But some customers only get tech Touch. So you want to be super thoughtful about that and then be able to identify ratios that are best in class or benchmark levels. So you don’t overload your cousins. And then you could flex that up or down depending on your level of automation.
28:46
Teresa Anania: So when it’s pretty nascent, they might not be able to handle as many accounts when it is pretty automated and powered by AI for contextualizing and higher productivity, you might be able to get like on the High touch 15 accounts, even though over $1 million each in the medium, you know, touch area, more like 30 to 40 accounts.
29:08
Teresa Anania: And then Tech Touch is always going to be your way to have a default experience that is digital first, but then allow for human interventions and hand raising so that you’re always aware that no matter how great your digital experiences, you may need to deploy some humans to actually assure, you know you’re mitigating the risk and and serving that, co-work customer need.
29:35
Sophie Buonassisi: That primarily how you organize customer success folks at Sophos is actually that quadrant around kind of quality, if you will, of customer as opposed to segment like SMB and enterprise.
29:46
Teresa Anania: Yeah, I think market segments are, a misnomer in success coverage. Depending on how you define market segments. Most companies I work with and I’ve been part of segment for sales based on company size or potential footprint where our technology could play but necessarily may not yet. Right. Yeah. So I look at that as being almost the high bar when you take the footprint you could have in that company and multiply it by your average contract value as the potential spend.
30:21
Teresa Anania: And then I take the current spend as grounding us. And let’s be practical here. If I have a $10,000 ACV customer right now, that even could be a $300,000 customer. I can’t give them a high touch experience. It’s just not, you know, a good ROI. Play unless you have unlimited CSM resources. So there’s certain thresholds where to me you start digital regardless of potential span.
30:49
Teresa Anania: But then those customers that are kind of in the middle ground where there’s high growth, we absolutely will provide a medium or high touch experience for that customer. And then after three months, if we don’t, or six months, we don’t see that playing out and that customer is either not engaging or there needs clearly indicate that, you know, it’s more than what a CSM, let’s say the CSM is more than they need then will, you know, demote promote, if you will, customers in and out of that dynamic segment.
31:22
Teresa Anania: Not look, we have not fully operationalized this it yet at Sophos. But we are I have done this in my past at Zendesk, and we are working towards a more dynamic segmentation model, and using our best systems for the I told you that green space where, you know, it’s high growth, high spend, and, and just, you know, making sure you’re trying to match customer needs with who you deploy as your CSM and then also, how much they can cover and, and what is that?
31:55
Teresa Anania: What does that engagement model look like. That’s where the touchpoint play on the outcome based metrics of that engagement all come into play.
32:04
Sophie Buonassisi: You’ve also talked about the humble dent higher.
32:07
Teresa Anania: The yeah.
32:08
Sophie Buonassisi: A little bit about this. Yes. It’s a tongue twister. But why is that that kind of specific mix of traits essential? I’d love to hear a little bit more about it.
32:17
Teresa Anania: I think it’s a great combination. I thought that was a Zendesk term and I fully embrace it. And I’ve like used it now and I just constantly reference it. It is the perfect combination of being humble enough to be able to acknowledge customers empathy, have recognition that we don’t do everything great all the time, even internally with your employees, but also externally with your customers.
32:44
Teresa Anania: We’re not, you know, perfect and we will have flaws. And then having the confidence that you couple with that to be able to, you know, be very clear in your value proposition, very clear in value for price, making sure you’re delivering on that value and recognizing the differentiators that you have against the, the competitor and other, ways the customer may spend their money like the use of their, you know, budget today for AI versus some of the other technology that is so imperative.
33:19
Teresa Anania: So it’s the combination of skills that I think every human being in my organization should have. It’s that customer empathy, that humbleness. Being able to admit when you’ve made a mistake because we are not going to be perfect, and then the confidence to really be able to position, have a data driven point of view, have that ROI articulation for value delivery so that we’re not just going in and expecting to earn the customer’s business, but that we actually earn it.
33:49
Teresa Anania: We don’t just expect it. I think that’s the combination of a great, set of behaviors that that drive the right outcomes.
33:58
Sophie Buonassisi: So anyone looking to join your team should definitely read a little bit more about the humbled hire. We’ll give them a little tip here. Thank you. And I mean across all your your experience Teresa, I’m curious what your biggest learnings have been about the customer reflections now from accumulating experience?
34:15
Teresa Anania: What I’ve learned is that, you know, in order to earn that business with our customers each and every day, I always go back to the 5 to 1 scorecard again. You can read up on this. It’s real research that’s been done about ten years ago in relationships. Like, again, nothing is ever perfect. But over the course of a time period, making sure we have five great experiences to one bad one, 90% shows that relationship or that customer relationship will continue.
34:47
Teresa Anania: If you have the opposite or your scorecard is imbalance, then you know you’re probably not going to earn the trust that advisor status of a long term strategic relationship. So I’m really big on listening and learning. I’m really big on recognizing where we need improvement, listening to the customers, making sure they feel heard. Responsiveness. Half of my customers tell us that, like, you know, if they just hear back and we are actioning on their questions or challenges or things they think could be better, that solves half the battle.
35:25
Teresa Anania: It’s not even always addressing everything they asked for. It’s just being responsive and making sure that that they feel heard. So I think that’s, just some of the things I’ve learned over, over my years. At the end of the day, customers.
35:40
Sophie Buonassisi: Want to be seen and heard. And if you are responsive, which is a great process, that is, I mean, a huge, huge part of it on top of obviously solving for the specificities.
35:50
Teresa Anania: Yeah. One like pragmatic, example of that is all the surveying that we do. We do a lot. We do try to watch that. We’re not over surveying, but I’m a big believer in T or transactional NPS and then also relationship based NPS like you must have your inner and outer loops for actioning that that feedback before you ever deploy.
36:15
Teresa Anania: So like if you don’t have a method to very quickly let’s say on, you know, a support interaction, something goes awry. Those managers have to be able to get that immediate feedback and be able to action that with the customer. It could be a digital and human kind of, inner loop engagement. But still, to let the customer know we are taking this feedback seriously and obviously have it with patterning.
36:41
Teresa Anania: Inform your strategy, your rubric, the way you want to engage. Same with the outer loop. What I mean by that is just the actions that might need to happen across the organization. I mean, let’s put it, straight C becomes a hub. In that hub in spirit world for identifying and being the voice of the customer, even though much of their feedback has to do with other organizations.
37:05
Teresa Anania: Not alone. It is an all company play. So being able to action that we have like a monthly meeting where we review all the insights that are coming in through, especially the relationship based NPS, where there’s a lot of verbatim, there’s a lot of, you know, scoring and detractor information and or promoter information that is basically their experience outside of it’s product related.
37:31
Teresa Anania: It might be a renewal experience, it might be a sales, piece of feedback. So how do we as an organization set up an analytics engine that is constantly providing insights to the rest of the business to be able to action that? And again, those action and ability, you know, stand up meetings are to me essential even when you start small with some surveying, getting that customer feedback and actioning on it at the same time really helps our customers understand that we take your feedback seriously.
38:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Who is in that meeting? Is that customer success or is that cross go to market function?
38:11
Teresa Anania: It’s cross. It’s cross not yes. Even beyond go to market it’s cross organizational. So we’ll have our product management team at the table like a leader. We’ll have marketing at the table. We will have head of sales head of you know my organization’s and then we all work together to really identify the actionability and what we’re going to do next.
38:33
Teresa Anania: And this is our way to, again, make retention an all company play. Everyone says that. But do they really set up a programmatic way? That, by the way, is not just said or, you know, a sales rep on the floor said this is customer voice, so it is invaluable. And the stakeholders around the table value it because they they otherwise would have to go find this insight information on their own.
39:02
Teresa Anania: So we set it up as a practice inside of KCS. But it is truly cross organizational.
39:08
Sophie Buonassisi: I think what we’re seeing a lot of companies trying to transition to is a lot more centralized data and information sharing across the customer to every single node, and spoke of the company itself.
39:19
Teresa Anania: That’s exactly right.
39:21
Sophie Buonassisi: And then on the security side, Teresa, what are some of the or one everyday behavior that people are doing either on their phone or email that you think is quietly kind of leaving the door open for risk?
39:33
Teresa Anania: I think every time we’re clicking on suspicious links and I mean, we’ve all got one, right? They look so good now they are disguised by eye to turn no longer with typos. And you know, things that before my kids, anyone would say, oh, that’s that’s a scam. Now they’re getting in through what looks like a very legitimate email.
39:55
Teresa Anania: So I think really having strong protections. I also think governance around I, you know, our customers and even myself as a big departmental, I, you know, driver like we’re doing things in departments. We’re not just waiting on it through their very, you know, rigorous, governance process. We’re wanting to be agile. And I think every company wants to unleash the capabilities of whether it be, you know, cloud bots or ChatGPT or any of the of the great solutions out there.
40:27
Teresa Anania: But how do we do that with like a governance structure that provides guardrails, that lets our, you know, our employees know, like, hey, we want you to go at it to continue to innovate. But we also need to have some security and recognition that this cannot be ungoverned. So I think those two areas, like we really have to be strong.
40:49
Teresa Anania: On the email side, we’ve rolled out some really great new email capabilities that customers are raving about that just give them additional insights, give actually the end users additional insights that help us identify when something looks suspicious. And I think if we can get better there and then provide more governance around AI to keep it extremely agile and, and, and self-serve, you know, you do not want to create just a hierarchy to deploy.
41:21
Teresa Anania: But that still, you know, put in the guardrails. That’s that’s very important.
41:25
Sophie Buonassisi: Theresa, any favorite books from your career overall or things that have inspired you?
41:31
Teresa Anania: I mean, I love the table group and Pat mentioned, if I’m saying that properly, the advantage and just, always been a big, from great to, you know, from good to great, saying I love that book. Yeah. There’s just so many great books that I’ve learned from also, how to influence. That’s a key one.
41:53
Teresa Anania: The Dale Carnegie book, like from my old, stomping grounds in Pittsburgh, the, the, CMU organization and what he started there and those are just some of my favorites. But, I’m a big reader and I think actually just joining as many, great summits as you can enjoy, you know, even remotely hearing from other industry leaders and thought leaders.
42:17
Teresa Anania: That has been a big part of why learning fast and failing fast and knowing some of the, you know, moments that others have had and how to either avoid them or kind of reach that point faster with, some of what you learned from the space. I think those are all the best ways to stay on top of everything that is foundationally still relevant, like some of the books I cited.
42:42
Teresa Anania: But then also the what’s coming, some of the great new, information. And I like to self learn that I think is super important. You can’t just wait, you know, for someone to roll it out on a silver platter anymore, you have to self learn.
42:56
Sophie Buonassisi: Curiosity and think another process is definitely a necessity to be able to keep up with that pace right now. Brilliant. Well Teresa, this has been fantastic. We really appreciate the time. Appreciate you coming on the show and we will catch you next time.
43:09
Teresa Anania: Well thank you so much. It was great.
