Built Hexus's Customer Success Function and Early GTM Motion from Scratch

Thanks, @Erin! 1) Shifting onboarding away from a general product walkthrough and toward the specific job the customer was trying to accomplish. Instead of trying to show everything Hexus could do, we focused the early experience around a real use case. My goal was to help the customer create something useful right away, whether that was a product walkthrough, demo asset, or another piece of GTM content they could immediately use, and then expand from there. That was especially important because Hexus was a very horizontal product. Almost every GTM team and product organization needs product content or customer-facing assets, which created a massive surface area of potential use cases. The challenge was figuring out which use cases were urgent, repeatable, and valuable enough to support a strong buying motion. 2) We were still early enough that I wouldn’t say we had one perfectly defined north star metric. The closest was activation. For us, that meant a customer successfully creating something real with Hexus, seeing enough value in the content to use or share it, and having a clear reason to come back and create more assets. Plenty of people could see the value conceptually, but the more important signal was whether they actually incorporated Hexus into a recurring GTM or CX workflow. Paid conversion was a key metric, but activation gave us an earlier read on whether we had real product pull or just curiosity. 3) Early on, the goal was to help almost anyone who expressed interest or entered a trial understand the product and see value. As the ICP tightened, both our selling motion and onboarding became much more about validating fit quickly and getting the right users to repeatable value. One lesson I’ve learned more broadly with horizontal products is that a large TAM can actually make early GTM harder. For us, product marketers, sales teams, CS teams, founders, and product teams could all see potential value, but they did not all have the same urgency or buying behavior. As we learned more, onboarding became both a value delivery motion and a qualification mechanism e.g. who had a painful enough problem, frequent enough use case, and enough organizational pull to become a real customer.

Thanks @Peter. What often works best in these situations is not presenting it as a new process. We started with a handful of prospects and accounts, ran the new approach in parallel with what others were already doing, and let the results show what was working. In larger orgs, I'll typically pick a couple of people to pilot it, or a couple experienced CSM's per customer segment. Once people see and hear about consistent improvement e.g. improved time to value, more expansion opptys, fewer accounts at risk... it becomes much easier to roll out to everyone. Two other things helped: I kept it light, with a short dynamic playbook rather than a manual, so it was easy to follow and build on in public. Since I revised it often based on what everyone was seeing, it felt like something we built together rather than dictating to the team.