Most startup companies in earlier stages don’t have the most mature product. While differentiating your product against the competition is important, you have to differentiate yourself elsewhere as you build your company. This is where customer success comes in.
Drata VP of Customer Success Management, Wen Yao, and VP of Customer Experience, Ashley Hyman, share how to scale customer success from 0 to 5,000 customers. They believe CS is a fundamental building block to the success of your organization.
Your Blueprint for Winning
Some recommended focus areas Drata used to scale to 5,000 customers were:
- Service
- Customer loyalty
- Brand perception
- Focus on ICP
The first three bullets go hand-in-hand. Why is that so important? “You need to make your customer success or customer service, your top priority and your core values,” Wen Yao, and VP of Customer Experience at Drata explains.
Walker Research found in 2024 that the customer experience is now equal to price and product regarding key brand differentiators. Most organizations lose around 10% of their revenue due to bad or poor customer experiences.
We live in a world of online reviews and social media, so any customer can provide their review to the entire world based on their singular experience with your brand — for better or worse. 77% of customers will recommend a brand to their collegues and friends based on one positive experience. Conversely, it takes up to 12 positive reviews to make up for one very bad one. People are listening and care about these reviews, and that’s why customer success is important in the early stages.
Yao further explains: “Make sure your customer success team is really hand-holding your customers, giving them the help and guidance that they need to accelerate their time to value. This will naturally build trust with your customers. Customers you have a bond with will give you positive reviews on G2, become your reference customers, share their success stories, and work together with you on product innovation. With great customer service, your brand is going to be more recognizable within your respective market and help you be more competitive.”
Selling Into Your Ideal Customer Profile
Selling into your ICP is important and maximizes your team’s time and effort. By targeting the right person, you’ll work with people who are more compatible with you, and giving them more product value quickly. You’ll likely retain these long-term, dedicated customers and brand ambassadors.
When Drata took this approach, it helped them scale to 5,000 customers, all within 3.5 years. Organizations that invest heavily in customer success earlier see much higher customer retention and loyalty than the competition. From the very first interaction, you want to help customers drive adoption, value realization, and delivery. Every touch point matters, but you can’t scale like this. Your customer success strategy has to evolve as your organization grows.
From Zero to 100 Customers
“When you hit your first 100 customers, it is such a huge milestone,” Ashley Hyman, Drata’s VP of Customer Experience explains. “But at that point, you’re not thinking about scaling customer success. You’re focused on your reputation, and building your brand loyalty. But it’s really important. You’re going up against products that are probably a lot more mature than your own. And so customer success truly becomes that key differentiator.”
Very few companies prioritize customer success within their first ten hires. If you do, it’s a game changer. Customer success is at the center of Drata, and they built every other department around it. It’s still that way today.
At first, Drata gave everything to everyone, full white-glove, high-touch, VIP service. They knew their competitors didn’t prioritize this, so it’s where they started to cut their teeth on making a name for themselves as a differentiation. At Drata, every customer had a CS manager to walk them through the journey and help them understand the product.
Additionally, they set up as many automated support resources as they could: email, Slack, and in-app support. They wanted their customers to be able to reach a human when they needed it in those first 100 customers. Builingd documentation like FAQs, help centers, and templates helped Drata scale to 100 customers in just 45 days.
Formalize Your CS Program – 100 to 1,000 Customers
Before you know it, you have 1,000 customers and need to create structure around your customer success program. You’re starting to build a community, and you want your customers to relate to and connect with you.
A Customer Advisory Board was one of the first things Drata put in place at this stage. They help shape your customer success and product roadmap, and you want to hear from your most loyal and active customers.
You should also connect with customers in a lot of different ways:
- Dinners
- Trade shows
- Happy hour
- Set up baseball games
Making that personal connection early on is so important because those people become your references and help shape the future of the company.
Extending Your Service Window
As you scale, you may expand your target audience, even internationally. You want people to be able to reach you when it’s helpful for them. Drata expanded its customer care support line to 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.
You also want to expand opportunities for customers to give feedback at this stage. You won’t continue to scale if you aren’t listening to your customers. Put things in place that make it convenient for a customer to give feedback:
- Set up feedback sessions directly with customers and your product team
- Set up group sessions for a few customers to share with each other and your team
- Deploy surveys
- Install a button directly in the app so people can give feedback as soon as they see something they want to work differently and allow them to upvote others’ feedback
Scaling from 1,000 to 5,000 Customers
At this stage, the stakes are incredibly high. You won’t get an unlimited budget for Customer Success just because your customer base has grown tremendously. Your leaders and investors will ask you to be more cost-effective, especially in today’s environment. So, how do you do this?
You want to balance digital and human interaction. You’re now 5,000 customers big, and there’s no way to provide human interaction to every single customer. You have to figure out how to balance that digital touch with your customer support’s high-value delivery. Be intentional about these decisions. Drata uses a Customer Success ops team to analyze and gain insights from its customer data to help scale its support.
Pick Your Battles That Drive ROI
What does that mean? Your company is going to change business goals every year, and your customer success strategy has to move towards and align with those priorities. But you have to be intentional and clear on what and where you want to invest to drive that high-value impact.
For example, say your company is going upmarket to Enterprise. You need to look at your CS segmentation strategy, uplevel your CS team to be Enterprise ready, and do digital implementation in the lower market.
You don’t have to give up service quality at the lower or mid-market, but if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll win nowhere.
Be intentional about where you want to win and drive focus towards that. Be willing to fail fast and make changes as needed, especially in hyper-growth mode. Scaling fast means learning fast. As long as you take what you learn to improve going forward, it’s ok to fail.
Key Takeaways
- You will face new challenges at every stage of your customer success program. It won’t get easier, so tackle things head-on. Don’t be shy about iterating or changing directions.
- Never underestimate customer feedback. It’s not only a differentiator, but it will change the course of your business and product. You have to listen.
- Don’t neglect value delivery. You need to anticipate and exceed customer expectations at every turn. It’ll show up in your online reviews, so take it seriously.
