Oracle’s Catherine Blackmore on the evolution of customer success

Audio Content Producer, Intercom

April 7, 2022

There’s plenty of talk of meeting customers where they are, but are business leaders practicing what they preach? Today’s guest explains what it means at different stages of growth.

The year was 1999 – the end of the millennium was slowly approaching, and everyone was buzzing with excitement. Mark, Parker, Frank, and Dave were developing their prototype in a one-bedroom rental apartment in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill – they wore Hawaiian print shirts, brought their dogs to work, and had a poster of the Dalai Lama from one of Apple’s campaigns encouraging them to “think different.” They only worked on things they deemed important; “no fluff,” they said.

On March 8, they incorporated their management tool. And as you might have already guessed, they called it Salesforce. The company kickstarted the SaaS revolution we know so well today, but as SaaS was booming, so too was churning. Businesses quickly realized they were spending a bit too much on awareness and customer acquisition and not nearly enough on retention. And that, according to Catherine Blackmore, was the dawn of customer success.

With over 20 years of experience, Catherine is an industry powerhouse. After working in retail for companies like Kellogg’s and Nestlé, she switched gears to tech – first at Jigsaw, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2010, where she stayed on as the Vice President of Customer Success, and then at Badgeville, Bluenose Analytics, and now Oracle, as the GVP of Customer Success & Renewals.

Over the years, Catherine realized businesses need to meet customers at their level. It doesn’t matter if they have the best vision of how to leverage their technology or if they’re experts in the ways of the future when all your customers are trying to do is go live. Sometimes, to develop a valuable service for your customers, you have to take one step back and understand what they need from you at that moment and where your gaps are. And there’s no better team for the job.

In this episode, we sat down with Catherine to talk about the purpose of customer success and how to evolve the role to meet customers’ needs every step of the way.

Short on time? Here are a few key takeaways:

Every customer success manager starts as a firefighter. Their job is to help customers go live, solve issues, and feed that information back into R&D.
As the role evolves, it becomes more proactive – the CSM starts advising customers on how to make the most of their service and helps them succeed in their long-term goals.
To create a consistent experience, Oracle assembled a global team to design a framework that would take the best of each region and reflect their customers’ needs, no matter where they live.
Agility is central to the role. You may be set on how you want to serve customers, but until the service hits the market, you have to be flexible.
It’s crucial to develop programs that open the doors to new talent and give them access to new roles and opportunities. Only then can we build more diverse, inclusive teams.

If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode.

From packaged goods to SaaS

Liam Geraghty: Catherine. You’re very welcome to the show.

Catherine Blackmore: Thank you. I’m so pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

Liam Geraghty: To kick things off. Could you tell us about your career journey at this point?

Catherine Blackmore: Oh, it’s been a journey for sure. Perhaps a little unusual when you’re thinking about what I do now in technology. I’ll go back to where it began within customer success and how I was brought into the role and started to engage with the profession.

“As cloud and SaaS companies were starting to erupt and take off and get funding, we started to see this dilemma of customers churning”

It was in 2007, which is not that long ago, but when we think about technology, that was eons ago. 2007 was when the iPhone was launched and when LinkedIn finally became profitable. I think we started to actually use LinkedIn that year. Also, my goodness, that was the year that Facebook and Twitter went global. I mention all of this because it really was the start of the tech boom. And it’s probably no surprise that as cloud and SaaS companies were starting to erupt and take off and get funding, we started to find this dilemma of customers churning. As easy as it is for customers to leverage technology in the cloud and start to get value, if they don’t get value, they’re going to leave. That, in my mind, and we certainly talk about in customer success, gave birth to the profession.

I was drawn in and my background attracted a Silicon valley co-founder, and so my first tech job was at Jigsaw, which later became a part of Salesforce. My background was in account management roles; I had led teams in consumer package goods, and you would say, “that’s really strange, to go from CPG to tech. How did that work?” But if you think about it, a lot of the things that I had been experiencing before joining tech were all about managing customers.

In this case, it was our retailers, helping them be successful with what we were selling to them. And we had to compete and help our retailers compete. My retail customers were not Walmart – they were everybody competing against Walmart. They were coming to me as an account leader and leader of teams to help them be successful, which meant we had to be much more bespoke and advisory and be more data-driven. Those were the capabilities that attracted the co-founder of Jigsaw to talk to me about this new role. It became the center of what I’ve been able to tap into for my entire career here.

“I saw a hundred-year-old CPG company more progressive than a technology company in serving their customers”

Liam Geraghty: Was it challenging to be data-centric at that time? Were people open to it?

Catherine Blackmore: In the role of customer success, it was too early. I mean, it’s probably very provocative to say that I saw a hundred-year-old CPG company more progressive than a technology company in serving their customers. That is so strange to say, but it is so true. When I think about the days I had managing customers in a very traditional channel, no doubt we had our data challenge, but we had access to information about what our customers bought or our retailers bought, and data on trends and analysis on what made them successful.

We got involved with a lot of change management initiatives that helped them take cost out of the system and become more customer-centric themselves in terms of listening to who was coming into their store and how to attract an audience. We even developed products. In one of the companies I worked for, we actually developed a product that was centered on the profile of customers coming into their store. Again, it was a data-driven decision to build that product and help them develop, go to market, and get it out there. And it really helped them be successful with that and attract more members. And when you think about applying some of those foundations to an emerging area… we certainly could develop the technology, it just wasn’t there yet in 2007.

Meeting customers at their level

Liam Geraghty: Could you tell us about your role in Oracle?

Catherine Blackmore: Sure, absolutely. We’re going to flash forward, and I know we’ll probably get caught up in-between in terms of some of those inner workings of what led me here to Oracle, but today, I lead our customer success organization for North America. I am responsible for helping us facilitate all of our customer success, deliverables, model, framework, and tools for all of Oracle. Our focus is primarily on SaaS because that’s where customer success has been birthed. But we’re seeing an appetite for us to really look at the role of customer success across all lines of business and aspects of how we help our customers. And so, it’s really this approach, methodology, and commitment to being customer-centric that I’m really at the epicenter of.

“You may have the best vision of implementing your solution in the most progressive, advanced way, but if your customers are not at that level, you’re going to go over their heads”

Liam Geraghty: I’d love to hear how you describe your own customer success philosophy.

Catherine Blackmore: Well, my philosophy is you’ve got to meet customers where they are, and I’ll explain what that means on a couple of different levels. It’s certainly important when you’re in the field, working with a customer and understanding what their needs are, but it also has to be in the design of the service. How do you think about where your customers are? Where are they at on their maturity grid of leveraging your technology? You may have the best vision of implementing your solution in the most progressive, advanced way, but if your customers are not at that level, you’re going to go over their heads. You’re not going to develop services that are really valuable to them.

Sometimes, it may mean taking a step back and looking at what you need to deliver to your customers at that moment, where the gaps are within the company, who’s not delivering to your customers, and what do they need to be successful. That’s my philosophy, and I think it provides that important flexibility of how organizations need to think about the role and the purpose of customer success.

“It starts at a point where you are a firefighter. You can’t skip this stage in the evolution of the role. Then, you move to fire prevention – from reactive to proactive”

Liam Geraghty: Many of our listeners are interested in the role of the customer success manager. How has the CSM function evolved since you started in Oracle?

Catherine Blackmore: The evolution of the role of customer success is not different for any SaaS company. I think that’s important. It’s not different for Oracle. It was not different when I worked with my peers at Microsoft, at SAP, and at Salesforce. It starts at a point where you are a firefighter. You can’t skip this stage in the evolution of the role. Then, you move to fire prevention – from reactive to proactive.

But why is it so important to be reactive? Well, when you haven’t launched your product yet, or you’re just starting to launch your product or service, you need to be responsive. You need to learn. Your primary job is to help customers go live, stand up with the technology, start to use it, and start to establish what value looks like. Not value in the eyes of the company, but what does value mean to the customer? Being reactive is making sure you’re listening, you’re there, and your job is to help and feed that information back into development so we can learn and better execute. You have to be nimble and open at that stage before you can scale. You just really, really have to.

“In the beginning, CSMs need to have a very low ratio, one-to-five accounts, 10 accounts. But then you think about being data-driven and being proactive, you can really start to scale”

When you start to make that turn – where you know what success looks like with your customers, and you start to understand what common challenges of adoption or even going live look like, and you know how to solve it, and you have all of these different plays that you’ve been using, and you can kind of start to segment… Once you start to structure that, you can be more in what I would call fire prevention or this proactive role. And proactive looks at how I’m delivering – “I’m aware of what you’re going to need to do, and I’m going to help you prevent actions you could take that could put you in a red situation or lead you down a path where you’re going to have a challenge or struggle to adopt or roll out a business process” –, or it could also be about getting more aware of the information we’re receiving from customers so we can be more proactive by just looking at data.

That’s been the evolution. And when you think about where you are in that proactive phase, you can even take it further. In the beginning, CSMs need to have a very low ratio, one-to-five accounts, 10 accounts. But then you think about being data-driven and being proactive, you can really start to scale that model and be more predictive. You can move to more of a one-to-many approach. You can even leverage technology to be able to deliver some of the work you’ve been doing around helping instruct or educate or drive in-app guidance or adoption, and your people can shift to do more senior, advisory, higher-level work to help with your model of service. That’s been our journey at Oracle, and quite frankly, it’s the journey that many of us in customer success have been on.

A consistent, global customer experience

Liam Geraghty: You spoke earlier about your role, and you’re obviously looking after SaaS customers all across the world and facilitating standards consistently and globally. I’d love to know how you go about doing that. How do you facilitate standards consistently and globally? That’s a lot of customers.

Catherine Blackmore: It is a lot of customers, there are a lot of CSMs and there are a lot of nuances to putting together a global framework for customer success. I’m really proud, and this was a remit that we all raised our hands to help design, especially in a company like Oracle, where we have thousands and thousands of customers, and we hear every day the needs of our customers. Our customers are also global; the experiences they have in one region need to be replicated in other regions.

“The first equation we took was, ‘What are our major deliverables in front of our customers? What can we all agree on?’”

When we think about the delivery of a globally consistent customer success model, it builds trust. It builds trust for our customers who know how to rely on you – they understand what they can expect. But it also builds trust with our people that this is a profession we’re investing in. We see this as a critical role within our go-to-market. When we came together, when I facilitated our first session together as global leaders in our four major regions, we talked about our North star and our purpose. It really is important to think about what our customers need at every stage of their life cycle and how we can deliver it in a global way. And that our people – the profession of customer success being able to come together – will allow individuals to thrive and grow and develop.

When you talk about these lofty goals and ideas, it’s exciting, but how do you actually make it real? That’s where I’ve seen a lot of major global initiatives break down – when you don’t have the ability to execute. Early on, we decided to stand up a global PMO, meaning that we all offered some of the folks from our teams to serve in a global capacity and spend some extra time helping us execute. That global PMO included: how do we design our service? What does that look like? It included training, tools, change management, operations, and even overall program governance. We created this team to help us design and execute.

“The group that has been developing that technology for us wasn’t going to accept 4, 5, or 6 different versions. We had to align on one standard way to deliver success across the cycle”

The first equation we took was, “What are our major deliverables in front of our customers? What can we all agree on?” Thankfully, that wasn’t too difficult because we’d been running a customer success model in different regions that was, I would say, 80% similar. And so, we knew it wasn’t as tall of a task as if we were starting from scratch and there were zero customer success managers or if we were in a reactive stage where there were zero deliverables. But the hard part was to make sure we reviewed every single thing we did in the region. In order to build the best, we were going to take the best from every region and put that into the framework and deliverables so every CSM around the globe could see themselves in the model.

That was also important because we now have one tool that we leverage across customer success. The group that has been developing that technology for us wasn’t going to accept 4, 5, or 6 different versions. We had to align on one standard way to deliver success across the cycle. That is also part of what anchored us towards making these decisions – to be able to feed that team with requirements. Otherwise, we were not going to have a global tool. That was how we got started.

What customer success looks like

Liam Geraghty: I’ve heard you mention before how, a few years ago, Oracle reexamined the structure of the customer success teams. How did you bring that to the customer success team of today, and how is it structured and operated?

“You want to be able to say that this is the role of customer success versus support, versus sales, versus services, and to have blurred lines means that customers will be confused as to who they should turn to”

Catherine Blackmore: That was absolutely part of this process, and we’ve definitely been on a journey. We’ve been on a journey to define the purpose of customer success because it is new. When you think about other roles within Oracle that have been a part of Oracle since it began – engineering, sales, even services –, those are established roles. I think the tricky part with SaaS, as part of our new area of investment, was how it would fit in the go-to-market and ecosystem of Oracle. That’s been our journey, and the goal has been to arrive at clear swim lanes with zero redundancy. And it’s taken some twists and turns to get there, as every company goes through.

That’s been a foundational element of our design. Because you don’t want to confuse your customers. You want to be able to say that this is the role of customer success versus support, versus sales, versus services, and to have blurred lines means that customers will be confused as to who they should turn to. Your job is never done because customers need to see us meeting them wherever they are. What are their needs? What is this role going to deliver to our customers? And we’ve definitely brought that into the framework.

Liam Geraghty: Were customers looking for experts? How did you roll that out?

Catherine Blackmore: I would say that, in the beginning, they didn’t. They needed someone to help them effectively solve issues, partner with development, and go live. Again, reactive. You have to understand what customers need at that moment. If you’re showing up as an expert about how they should be using the technology, in understanding what future processes will look like or what benefits your future teams will gather… I’m almost saying this to make it obvious, but if you’ve not gone live, those things don’t matter to you. Our first job is to help our customers – help, educate our partners, and make sure we develop that service so they can be successful in going live.

“You may have all the best ideas in a conference room on how you want to serve your customers, but until it hits the market, you’ve got to be agile”

Then, there’s a moment where you have to evolve your service. I remember being at a conference years ago when we were making this shift, and customers were telling us, “We are starting to see our CSMs show up as advisors, and that is so critical. We want them to know our business. We want them to understand what we’re up against in the marketplace, serving our customers, running our teams and business goals. At first, we needed them to help us be responsive and solve problems. But we’re beyond that. Now, we need someone to help us think about the future, challenge us and help us understand other aspects of the technology we could take advantage of.”

Liam Geraghty: The word that pops in my head is agility. It’s so important when it comes to this.

Catherine Blackmore: Yes, it is. I would argue it’s central to the role. It has to be in the leader’s DNA. It’s certainly been a big part of how I’ve been leading customer success, and not just at Oracle. I’ve always thought customer success, as a service, is like any product you’re trying to take to market – you may have all the best ideas in a conference room on how you want to serve your customers, but until it hits the market, you’ve got to be agile. And if your primary goal is to help customers early in the journey and your design doesn’t accomplish that, it’s going to be a miss.

We know there’s an evolution of how the service changes – customer success and what you’re trying to accomplish with technology go hand in hand. You see this constant evolution where the product is changing, which means your service needs are changing, which means your customers are changing, and then your customers are going to advance so you need to bring it back into the product team. The CSM role is at the center of it all.

“The people you’re hiring and what you’re asking them to do means that the compensation plan needs to match that”

Liam Geraghty: What advice would you give people on incentivizing their customer success teams?

Catherine Blackmore: That means different things to different teams. It’s coupled with your customers and how you’re going to make them successful. Start with the people you’re hiring and what you’re asking them to do. That’s foundational. I’ve met with many leaders, and in some cases, the role is very team-oriented and collaborative, where goals are centered around how the team performs versus the individual. In some cases, it’s on the shoulders of one.

And in some cases, customer success managers are asked to help customers not just achieve value, but get to a point of renewal and growth. For those go-to-market teams, for those companies, that’s critical. You end up hiring a different professional, and obviously, how you pay them needs to look different. The people you’re hiring and what you’re asking them to do means that the compensation plan needs to match that. Then, my last piece of advice would be to make sure that the individual has some element of control in delivering that.

Paying it forward

Liam Geraghty: As a leader and someone who’s made this incredible journey, I’d love to hear your thoughts on allyship.

Catherine Blackmore: Oh yeah, absolutely. We could probably have a whole other conversation about the topic because it is so important. It goes back to how I got started. So many of my opportunities came through allyship, and I didn’t know it at the time. We didn’t really talk about it, but it really was. These individuals really unlocked doors for me. And it wasn’t just unlocking the doors – it was motivating me, seeing who I was, knowing what I was able to accomplish, seeing the future bigger than what I even thought of myself at that time, and really believing in myself.

To me, that’s the definition of allyship. Giving me access to power, meetings, and assignments that helped me grow and get exposure really helped me advance my career in CPG. And when I think about coming into technology, it was allyship that got me in the door. The co-founder of Jigsaw saw something bigger in me than I saw in myself at the time. He designed a career around me. It’s amazing to have a leader see something in you and design a role around you and say, “I think you can help us here,” and design that role.

“When I think about where I am now, the legacy that I now think about is: how many people have I done that for? How am I developing talent for the future?”

Finding leaders that will believe in you and help open up areas for new career growth has been central to my success. When I think about where I am now, the legacy that I now think about is: how many people have I done that for? How am I developing talent for the future? I am challenging myself and my team to build a diverse team, to think about equity and an inclusive culture. When we think about the profile and the makeup of our organization, we have to look like our customers, we have to look like the rest of the organization, and that is the future. And so, having strong programs that really push us to improve is central. Again, it’s allyship that’s going to help individuals have access to build that future of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team.

Liam Geraghty: 100%. I think that’s a great note to finish up on for people to think about. Lastly, where can our listeners go to keep up with you and your work?

Catherine Blackmore: Absolutely find me on LinkedIn. I try to share what we’re doing. I think you’ll see that we do a lot of celebration of our team on LinkedIn. I’m really, really excited about what my team has been up to. I also share my thoughts on customer success, leadership, diversity, inclusion, allyship, and all of that.

Liam Geraghty: Perfect. Well, Catherine, it’s been so lovely to chat with you today.

Catherine Blackmore: Thank you so much.