Once the sale is closed, your sales people are no longer the main contacts with your customers. To make sure that your customers will serve as references and that they’ll be interested in further offerings from your company, your support team has to perform.
Since the support team is the leading edge of contact with the customer, it is perhaps the most vital portion of marketing to your customers and the source of any loyalty to your company. Renewals are a function of how happy your customers are with the way you support them, whether it’s with education, direct support or consulting services.
I’m a big fan of the Marketo support team and its director, Miles Goldstein. Over the last several years, they’ve been extremely helpful, patient and good-natured about my questions and support issues. My loyalty to Miles and his team, and to some extent to Marketo, comes from the trustworthiness and reliability that I’ve experienced over the years. In short, it’s been earned.
Marketo’s support team has grown from very small to pretty large over the last few years and it’s scaled beautifully. I wanted to find out how Miles managed to make that growth so elegant while maintaining the high quality of his team. So I asked him.
Q: Miles, as you know I’m a huge fan of yours. I’ve come into contact with most, if not all, of your support team over the last years and I’ve been completely impressed. All of them display integrity, a real passion for helping customers, and a great sense of humor. What are the characteristics you look for in a support representative?
Miles: There are many, but when I’m hiring I look for people who have supported business enterprise applications before. They have the ability to learn how to support another enterprise app and they understand the million dollar minute – if a large customer has an outage on a Friday night and really is losing a million dollars every minute, I want someone who understands that urgency for our customer.
Q: Are there additional personal characteristics you look for?
Miles: Absolutely. They need to have excellent written and oral communication skills as well as diagnostic skills. We give them a mental puzzle in interviews not to look for the “right” answer, to understand how they solve it. I look for natural diagnostians who like solving those problems and can think through problems end-to-end.
Q: You’ve managed to scale the support organization quickly but kept the same values. What was your strategy for making that happen?
Miles: A large part is how we source candidates. We use internal referrals, because we know that our employees understand our values already and they know who will share those. When we use agencies or external sources, the people at the agencies understand what we’re looking for at Marketo. They understand the diagnostic skills and the million dollar minute skills. Also, our candidates have to have done enterprise support in the past.
Q: Do you tell your team that they’re still selling the company and the products as they answer support inquiries? Do you think of the team that way? Are they aware that they’re at the forefront of marketing for Marketo?
Miles: Prior to our conversation, I had not specifically prepped them in those words. Several companies back, I took a support team through sales training. That helped them understand that every interaction is a marketing opportunity: meeting someone in a bar or at a trade show. How they represent the company, how they interact, how they present their answers represents Marketo and our core values. But since you brought it up that way, maybe we’ll change our training!
Q: When people contact support, they’re usually frustrated. How do you help your team maintain its calm enthusiasm in the face of upset customers?
Miles: There are several parts to this answer. One part goes back to your first question. I look for “support lifers.” Not that they’re going to spend the next 30 years in support, but they know about support and it’s what they want to do. It is very challenging, because customers with problems start upset. Part of the hiring profile is that they want to help. They want to support that customer. You have to listen to the customer and listen to the problem first.
Another part is that as management anywhere, you have to worry about people, tools and environment. The tools and the environment are critical. The support team has the support of the rest of the organization, that’s the environment, and they have the tools to track bugs and issues.
Also important is the recognition: we live for the email from the customers that say “Thanks, you rock!” and we publish those to the rest of the company.
Q: I don’t know if you can share this, but what’s the funniest support request or incident you’ve had?
Miles: There’s one that stands out. A while ago, a customer tweeted “Marketo is janky today.” That was a fun exercise: who it was, what it was, and getting it back into the normal flow of support. If that customer is reading this, we appreciated it and rolled with it. We’re lifers.
Q: Your team is still growing, and Marketo’s business is becoming more international. How do you plan to maintain the quality of the team as you start to deal with different cultures and expectations globally?
Miles: A couple of ways: as we expand our staff into EMEA and APAC, one is maintaining the Marketo culture. This is a bit of a conflict with understanding that in other regions there are other expectations. We need to balance the company values with the expectations in different regions. There are differences in expectations and we want to have people in those regions who understand them, not just support the world from California. We want to meet their expectations while maintaining our standards.
Q: What’s the next big thing for the support team?
Miles: That is that same thing: 24×7, follow the sun. The lights are always on in support. We are already no longer closed on Federal holidays and we’re expanding our worldwide availability and presence.
Q: That’s awesome! It’s great growth you’re seeing. Are there any other topics you’d like to comment upon?
Miles: Yes, what really makes or breaks the relationship is customer involvement. We live for the collaborative call, whether they start with “this is broken” or “What are best practices for this?” We like the collaboration. We want to work with the customers, we want to help, and that involvement and spirit of collaboration pays huge dividends. It’s rewarding for us and for the customer. Hopefully you’ll see from your own interactions with the team “I see that it’s supported.”
I’d like to again extend my thanks to Miles and the whole support team at Marketo who have helped me over the years. Thanks, you rock!
