Last week we had a conversation with Manny Ruiz, Vice President of Customer Success at JumpCloud, a cloud directory platform. Manny's unique background spanning engineering and customer success brings a fresh perspective to CS. Here's what we learned:
Last week we had a conversation with Manny Ruiz, Vice President of Customer Success at JumpCloud, a cloud directory platform. Manny's unique background spanning engineering and customer success brings a fresh perspective to CS. Here's what we learned:
I'm an engineer by trade. I studied computer engineering in school and started my career in very technical customer-facing roles. Initially, I worked in QA and QA automation. However, early on, I was thrust in front of customers because I could communicate effectively. In those days, engineers who could put together a sentence were often told, "You talk to customers."
From there, my roles progressed through technical customer-facing positions. I primarily focused on implementation support, helping customers understand and implement various products. Eventually, I moved up the management chain.
I had a particularly successful run at MobileIron, where I was the first customer-facing employee. When I left, we had grown from zero customers and zero ARR to a post-IPO public company with 10,000 customers and $150 million ARR. I was running a CS team of over 150 people worldwide. It was an incredible eight-year journey, something I'm incredibly proud of.
Since then, I've taken on executive CS roles, typically at mid-stage startups looking to mature their CS strategies. I pride myself on applying and building modern-day SaaS CS organizations.
I strive to take modern approaches and avoid classic support and services models that aren't conducive to SaaS businesses. My goal is to build strategic CS organizations which are integral to growth.
In the first half of my career, I was very operationally focused. I'd say, "Hey, give me the dirty work, I'll proudly do it." But I came to realize that CS in SaaS should be strategic. It's not just about keeping customers happy—it goes beyond that when done right.
Now, I ensure that CS is a strategic part of the business, a differentiator that drives revenue growth. That's what I pride myself on building and advocating for. When I talk to companies looking to figure out CS, I always start with strategy first. I try to open their eyes to the possibilities and help them see CS as more than just a support function.
My career has been exclusively focused on technical personas. I've never worked for a company that sold to HR, marketing, or consumers. I typically sell to and support IT, DevOps, and developers.
As engineers, we tend to see a problem and immediately want to fix it. We feel compelled to make technical things work and provide technical solutions. However, I've learned that this isn't always the best approach.
Even though the actual work often involves technical solutions to unlock customer value, it's crucial to understand what the customer is ultimately trying to achieve before jumping into problem-solving mode.
I used to be guilty of this myself. I'd talk to a customer and say, "Yeah, I can fix it. Don't even tell me more, I know what to do." Then I'd set it up, only to realize that wasn't really what they were trying to accomplish.
One of the keys, especially with a technical audience, is to understand clearly what the customer is trying to do and why. The "why" is particularly important because sometimes customers want to do something that isn't the best solution. So I always ask, "Tell me why you want to do that." Once I understand their motivation, I can guide them toward the most effective solution, even if it's different from what they initially thought they needed.
The simplest thing you can do is to metric and goal the team on growth metrics. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) should be the key metric for a CS org. It's made up of Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), of course, but it also includes the expansion component. While this is easy to implement from the top, applying it effectively on a team-by-team basis can be more challenging.
I believe variable pay for CSMs is a must. We're currently implementing this at JumpCloud, and we're getting some pushback. People say, "Hey, I'm used to a fixed salary. Why variable pay?" I have to ensure the team understands the reasoning behind this change.
If we want CS to be a strategic part of the business and a forward-facing org, we need to put our money where our mouth is. I can then say, "I'm signing up for GRR and NRR targets, and I'm aligning the team's goals directly to these metrics."
CSMs are jack-of-all-trades, responsible for everything happening in an account. While there's a lot they can do, we need to focus them on activities that most impact retention and expansion. This means they sometimes have to say no, even when a customer is insistently requesting something.
This is one of the million-dollar questions in the CS to product feedback loop. It's challenging to do perfectly, but you don't need to be exact—you just need to be directionally accurate enough to move the needle.
I start by looking at past results. We examine accounts that have churned or decreased significantly, aiming to understand why. We start with broad categories: Is it a product issue? A support experience problem? On the product side, are there feature gaps, bugs, or outages? Is pricing the issue?
Then we look at our current accounts that are in an unhealthy state or at risk. By combining this information, we get a valuable dataset. The level of scientific rigor and available data can vary, but it's always a useful exercise.
At JumpCloud, we have extensive data on feature requests. We capture these not only through our CSMs but also by making it easy—perhaps too easy—for customers to submit requests directly. We can then easily correlate churned accounts with their associated feature requests, and compare these to the requests from our current at-risk accounts.
What's been particularly eye-opening is analyzing both the volume of requests and the Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) tied to them. When we bring these two factors together, it often highlights the top three priorities we should focus on. These items, ranking high in both categories, definitely become our top priorities.
Building a strategic, growth-oriented customer success organization requires several key elements:
1. Understand the "why" behind customer requests
2. Align CS metrics with growth
3. Focus on high-impact activities
4. Use data to prioritize product improvements
5. Balance request volume with ARR impact
By applying these principles, companies can create a more strategic, data-driven approach to customer success. As Manny said, "CS in SaaS is very strategic and *should* be very strategic." It's about fostering a culture where customer success is seen as a key driver of growth, not just a support function.