FatTail: How to Grow by Delighting Your Customers

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This week’s insights come from Laura Boodram, CRO of FatTail.

JZ: FatTail has really long customer relationships. As the CRO, but even for a longer period of time as the head of customer success, why do you think that is?

LB: We've been very intentional about the relationship side of our business since inception. It's the culture of the organization. We are all about solving problems for the customer. In terms of software solutioning, we are willing to continually invest in the platform and make sure that not just what our platform does but how it does it is solving practical, real-life problems for our clients.

Plus, a lot of us have client-side experience, so we show up with that on a day-to-day basis. We seek first to understand. We try to be great advisors who follow through to make sure the publisher's needs have been taken care of.

We've never put a service model in place that differentiates based on revenue, size, or perceived importance of a client. That’s one part of what it really means to treat every client like they are our one and only client. It's expensive to do that, but the results it creates are tangible.

JZ: Every vendor in our industry says, “We're not a vendor. We're a partner.” You touched on a couple dimensions of that just now, in hiring people who have publisher experience, for example, and in not having service tiers. How do you systematize that, though? How do you make it part of the company culture?

LB: Three of our six core values are communication, collaboration, and client focus. Part of how I might explain that is we're a relatively flat organization. Everybody from the bottom to the top is involved in client relationships on a day-to-day basis. The behavior of being client-based and solving problems is modeled throughout the entire organization, and everybody gets exposed to that. As a result, everyone wants to be a part of it and wants to behave the same way because it feels good. [Joe’s note: A FatTail customer once told me he has FatTail CEO Doug Huntington’s cell number, “which no other adtech company would do.”]

In terms of how we systematize it, when people ask me what I do, my answer isn’t that I'm the CRO of FatTail. It's that I help organizations with smart people and great products scale. I always ask, “Are we creating scale for ourselves and our clients?”

The question I'm always challenging the success team with is are you doing absolutely everything you can to build repeatable processes and the right resources that help you win and help our clients win? Clients want to self-serve. They want to have good collaboration tools. They want to be informed. They want to make as few decisions as possible. What can we package and provide to make that happen? Whether it's a knowledge base, whether it's a really easy-to-use service desk, whether it's always improving the implementation process and toolkit. Those are very tactical things, but they all work together to deliver that client experience.

JZ: It's not just the product. It’s the entire organization being integrated and working together to say, “How can we make this as easy as possible for the customer?” Also, clients like people, and therefore, they like organizations where people stay around. How do you keep your own people for so long? Is there a parallel between the really long tenure of FatTail employees and the long tenure of customers?

LB: I do think there's a relationship between employee and client retention, and I think the same values and culture contribute to both client and employee tenure.

For our customers, the person who is your implementation lead stays on as your client success manager. There's nothing worse than someone new with no context about the customer taking over after the implementation phase. We don't do that.

Also, it takes a certain type of personality and interest to be a highly effective client success manager. We tell people in the interview process that you can probably predict about 40% of what's going to happen in your week. The characteristics and competencies we look for are problem solving, tenacity, good analytical skills, and relationship building. We also try hard to build a team that's got a diverse set of experiences and interests. I very much believe in culture add, not culture fit, when it comes to building teams and organizations

JZ: As CRO, you're in charge of new logo acquisition but also retention and upselling. Is there any tension there? Do those two functions inform each other?

LB: My path to CRO is a little less traditional than that of other CROs. I don't have a background in sales, and there's this misconception that a CRO is a head of sales when the real intention behind the role is to drive revenue outcomes through strong alignment across all of the parts of the business that affect the client: sales, marketing, and client success.

I don't think about sales versus client success as two separate parts of my world; they very much inform each other and need to work together. I’m successful if there is alignment and actionable feedback loops between sales, product, and success. I am really looking across the organization and figuring out how to bring the leadership, processes, and strategies together so that folks are thinking holistically about each of those components and work more cross-functionally.

JZ: If you were talking to someone new to the CRO role, what are some of the most critical building blocks of success you’d communicate to them?

LB: Focus on business metrics such as addressable market, cost of client acquisition costs and lifetime value because in a role where you are accountable to a revenue outcome, you need to put together all of the pieces to be successful.

JZ: You get clear on what you’re being judged on, and that clarifies what you need to achieve that goal and whether you have the pieces in place.

LB: Right. It's making sure that all of those pieces come together and are well understood by the team because they’ll be the ones spearheading execution. I also need to be able to have an informed conversation with my board about what adjustments need to be made, whether it's additional investment in the business, more sales capacity, additional marketing budget, whatever that might be.