211. Notion’s Outcomes Architects on Why Today’s CSMs Are Builders

It’s not about like AI taking over the work that we’re doing, it’s about making us so much better at the work that we’re doing.

Josh Schachter
I am stoked to be here today in person at the Notion New York headquarters with three Notion veterans, Christina Parra, Ariel Rissman and Kelly Wooden. What is Notion?

Notion is an AI workspace for teams and agents.

Ariel Risman
Every organization has cross-functional collaboration issues and I think Notion really solves that.

Kellie Woodin
We’re not really managers anymore, we’re more so co-build architects with our customers.

I get asked a lot like how is the role of a CSM changing? What stands out about CSMs that are successful now is…

Josh Schachter
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. Subscribe to our sub stack at unchurned.gainsight.com, where we go deep on every episode, like how one post-sales team at CloudBeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com.

Josh Schachter
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Shachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Go-To-Market Development at Gainsight and I am stoked to be here today in person at the Notion New York headquarters down in Tribeca with three Notion veterans. We’ve got six months, four months, six months, but the A team here, part of the outcome architecture team for the Americas at Notion.

So, Christina Parra, Ariel Rissman, and Kelly Wooden, welcome to the program.

Christina Parra
Thank you for having us so much.

Josh Schachter
Okay, going down the list here quickly, tell us what do you do at Notion within the team?

Christina Parra
Yeah, I’m Christina. I lead our outcomes architects team. We are formerly known as customer success.

I lead the team for the Americas, where we have teams in San Francisco and New York across our commercial mid-market and enterprise segments.

Ariel Risman
Easy. My name is Ariel. I’m a mid-market outcomes architect here at Notion.

So, working with our customers on everything from enablement through to AI transformation.

Kellie Woodin
Yeah, super similar to Ariel. I’m Kelly, and I’m an outcomes architect on the commercial team here in New York.

Josh Schachter
Wonderful. We’re going to hear the word transformation quite a bit because Notion’s gone through its transformation. I don’t know if you classify it as a giant transformation.

It’s always been really kind of AI native and ahead of time. I’ve always known it as a project management tool, but then I got to know it over the past year myself, both personally and professionally, as much more than that. Maybe, Christina, start us off a little bit about what is Notion?

Christina Parra
Yes. Notion is an AI workspace for teams and agents. So, what does that mean?

I would say the way to explain it is we have this sort of like cake visual that we use. We’ve got a context layer, we have a collaboration layer, and then we have an agent layer. The context layer, and the way that a lot of companies use Notion from a knowledge management perspective, then you have the collaboration layer, things like project management, docs, and then you have the agent layer, we have things like custom agents, and then ability to bring in things like external agents.

It’s also a connected workspace, which means you can connect Slack, you can connect Google Docs. And so, what that means is that teams and agents get work done, and we use Notion all of the time to get work done, whether it’s an agentic workflow or a team, really strong collaboration.

Josh Schachter
Do you have like an internal acronym for that, like Notion on Notion? We have GONG, Gain Sight on Gain Sight.

Christina Parra
What is ours? I forget.

Josh Schachter
Notion on Notion.

Christina Parra
Notion on Notion. Oh, we’re not. Notion on Notion.

Josh Schachter
I don’t know if we’ve ever had Notion on Notion. GONG has a better ring to it. Yeah, it does.

Christina Parra
Yeah, and then to your point, there’s also a lot of individual use cases. I mean, like I use Notion in my personal life to manage my emails because I have a daughter, and she’s in 20 different activities, and her school is like, it’s tie-dye Friday, and by the way, there’s no school on Monday. And so, I have an agent that reads my emails, and then I have like a hub between me and my husband where we manage all of our projects together, but then it also reads all those emails, and it creates a to-do list of tasks because in work, I’m an inbox zero person, but at home, I’m not.

And so, that has definitely helped. And I think what’s really wonderful about our customer base is there’s a lot of people who love Notion because of how they use it personally. I know you’re using it personally, and the way people’s eyes light up when they’ve had a use case that like really transforms their life, whether it’s at work or at home, is why I love it here because it’s like, it allows you to be a better, you know, wife, mother, head of, yeah, teammate, exactly, because you’re using AI to replace a lot of like the administrative stuff and really like optimize what you can get really good at at the end of the day, and that’s what I love about the transformation of our team that we’re going to talk about today.

Josh Schachter
It’s very easy to use. I mean, I use it personally as well. As you know, I’m writing a book, and so I’ve used it as my context layer, my knowledge base.

It hosts all of the corpus of interview transcripts and the story briefs, everything that I’ve conducted for the book, and then puts it all together. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise, to be honest with you. So okay, so Notion has transformed from project management to AI workspace and parenting app.

Ariel Risman
Absolutely.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. Okay, Kelly, what is an outcome architect?

Kellie Woodin
It’s such a good question. So we have been working really hard over the last, I would say, since I’ve been here, to redefine how we’re working with customers, and it really led us to, as you know, Notion can be sort of like a blank canvas, and there’s so much you can do with it, and the possibilities are super endless when you connect your tools, and you bring in your AI, you bring your agents. So our role quickly changed from developing use cases to developing workflows, and that is how we began to understand the way we interact with customers, not just getting the team set up on Notion, get your pages, get your docs.

Josh Schachter
To be clear, this is going from customer success to outcome architecture.

Kellie Woodin
Exactly. So in the past, we were thinking about, okay, what are your use cases? Let’s get you set up on Notion.

Now we’re thinking about we’re not selling software, we’re selling work, and how we can save teams time, and it takes a level of care that was kind of going beyond the traditional CSM role. And so we become architects because we’re building alongside of our customers with workshop style sessions rather than just one-to-many trainings to really get end-to-end workflows spun up so they can start seeing value and saving time instantly. So we’re not really managers anymore, we’re more so co-build architects with our customers.

Christina Parra
Yeah. And that’s just one thing I would add is we’ve been on this transformation the entire time all of us have been here.

Josh Schachter
It’s funny because when you guys both talk about like, since I’ve been here, we’ve transformed. It’s been six months, you’ve had a cup of coffee.

Christina Parra
That’s it. That’s it either.

Josh Schachter
You’re right.

Christina Parra
That is it. Two full quarters. In the end time, you get a lot done in a short period of time.

And so when I first started, we launched a CS evolution where we actually merged our relationship manager, renewal manager motion with our CSM motion. So we brought together the commercial piece, and then this next evolution is bringing the technical piece in. And because adoption and consumption and commercials and value are also inextricably tied, we can become a really strong consultative partner with our customers that is technical, commercial, and also focused on value and adoption, which I didn’t know you could do as a CS org maybe five years ago, but we’re definitely doing it.

Josh Schachter
I hear from some CS that everybody’s trying to prognosticate what the future of the CSM is or the outcome architect. It still doesn’t roll off the tongue for me yet, but I’m getting there. And so you have a lot of people that are saying, well, it’s going to become more of a technical role that CSM are going to be able to go deeper into helping to build out the workflows and show by doing type of thing.

And then you’ve got other folks who are saying, no, no, it’s actually the opposite. They’re going to have to be more on the strategic side and more of the domain experience. Are you turning the entire team into builders only?

Christina Parra
Definitely not. I think as an example, one of the things that we started doing with our customers is workflow diagrams. So what do you need in order to do a workflow diagram with a customer to gain commitment and buy-in to implement a really strong multiplayer agentic workflow?

You have to have deep discovery skills. You have to understand their business and their tech stack and what they care about and what value they would need to see in order to implement something like this. And those are core CS skills.

I think what’s different is now because a lot of the internal work that CS used to do, like building the QBR deck, we now have agents that help us do that. And so it allows us to spend more time with our customers. And then to Kelly’s point, I think CS used to do a lot of training, which is like, here’s how to log into our platform.

Here’s how to do X, Y, and Z, relying on someone remembering how to do those things. But when we build beside with our customers, there’s an outcome that’s there right away. They’ve got a new executive report that used to take eight hours a week to put together, and now it’s automated.

I think Ariel is a really good example of doing that with his customers and actually understanding their workloads, putting it down on paper via that workload diagram.

Josh Schachter
Let’s get to Ariel, because I’m very excited by what I understand you do here at Notion. You manage them in-market. About how many accounts do you have under your…

Ariel Risman
Oh, just about 30.

Josh Schachter
About 30. It’s quite a few to manage very hands-on. And I love the whole build together in real life workshop type of format.

When I was a founder, that’s something that I indexed on very heavily. Tell me what you’re doing with your customers that come in the door.

Ariel Risman
Yeah. So to Christina’s point, it’s deep discovery and being that strategic consultant that understands AI and how does that fit into what as a business they’re focusing on. So if it’s a financial services firm, if it’s a construction management firm, what’s really important to them, their business needs are different.

And so understanding what is the outcome they’re after, understanding what they have today, and understanding how does Notion play a role in actually orchestrating that work and how does it become that collaboration layer. And so it starts with the deep discovery of saying, okay…

Josh Schachter
Does that start with sales or do you do a refresh when it comes to you?

Ariel Risman
It’ll start with sales and they’ll think about what’s the initial workflow, but then we get to grow the additional workflows with the teams as more and more teams come on to Notion.

Christina Parra
One of the things that we have focused on with our sales team is having a consistent language that is brought over into our success plan motion, which we now call AI transformation plans, but making sure that our sales team is documenting the business objectives, the stakeholders, and one key workflow that that customer wants to implement. And so I think this moment is a big moment for sales and CS collaboration because it just allows us to become one team together for our customers.

Josh Schachter
Are they following Bant or Medic or does Notion have its own?

Christina Parra
Yeah. We do use MedPick, but we also have this new go-to-market evolution. The transformation that we’re seeing is not just on the CS side, although we’ve been going on…

It’s an evolution, not a transformation, maybe. But the evolution that is on the go-to-market side, we took nine sales teams and brought them down to effectively four functions. So we no longer have solutions engineers.

We have technical builders as solutions consultants that are working on the land motion. And then we have outcomes architects that are working with what used to be referred to as post-sales, but in a gigantic world, there is no really post-sales anymore. It’s really making sure that you’re showcasing value, adoption.

And then we also have the forward-deployed engineering side as well for the really complex technical workflows as well.

Josh Schachter
As part of that evolution. Yes, exactly. I like that better, by the way, because I don’t think it’s been a transformation.

You guys have always really been at the forefront. But are people working together more closely throughout the journey, more overlapping activities than maybe prior?

Christina Parra
This evolution is new. I would say we work really closely together with our previous sales partners. I think that the way that we use notion allows us to divide and conquer more effectively because we have that common source of truth.

We have that common language. We have account plans that we’ve got custom agents running account plans, but gong is getting pulled in there. So an outcomes architect can quickly see a solution consultant, how to call with this customer.

What does this mean? And how do we pull it into the work that we’re doing?

Josh Schachter
Yeah. So Ariel, you get a handover from sales. You’ve landed an account.

I love the fact that they’re getting a specific workflow that they want to build out. That’s a very discreet, identified point for you to start. Where do you go from there?

Walk me through, walk us through the workshop format.

Ariel Risman
Yeah. I think what we’re trying to really figure out and understand with these customers is once this workflow has been built, how do we then increase the collaboration that they’re having internally, right? Every organization has cross-functional collaboration issues.

And I think notion really solves that. And so it actually touches more and more teams. And so when we open these workshops up to have product and actually start getting the right feedback from revenue, because we’ve been able to have this workflow that involves custom agents and workers, we’re actually opening the doors that way.

And those teams then get interest. And then we’re actually building workflows for those respective teams that may not have been using notion today. And that kind of feeds into this expand motion that we have as a business, but also the workshops are inherently sparking more interest on the user side to start tinkering and playing with notion and actually building on their own.

And we’re enabling them to do that.

Josh Schachter
Are these virtual? Are these in person?

Ariel Risman
Mix of virtual and in person. So I’ve had customers come to the office here, hosted them in person. And sometimes it’s drawing the workflow diagrams on pen and paper and then uploading it to notion and then actually notion building the mermaid diagram, or it’s doing these virtually on time.

Josh Schachter
And who’s coming? What are the types of roles and functions that are coming? How many people are coming?

I want to get into the scenic view of these workshops, if anybody else wants to emulate them, that’s listening.

Ariel Risman
Yeah. So for sure. I mean, earlier this week, I had a foundational AI workshop with a team and there was about 190 people on a zoom meeting.

And we had functions from the entire business, whether it was revenue, HR, EPD, engineering, product design, individuals. And we can have individuals from the VP director exec level down to the IC. I think everyone’s really interested in understanding what AI can do for them and how they can actually kind of create more efficient and effective workflows day to day.

And then if we think about the ones that are in person, they might be a little bit more exec focused or really people who can actually think about enabling individuals internally. So it might be, for example, technical program managers or individuals on IT or even kind of revenue enablement who are really thinking about what’s the right way that we can build the systems that the teams will use and actually kind of get the value out of day to day.

Josh Schachter
And their goodie bag is that they come out of that session with concrete workflows that they can use. Yeah, absolutely.

Christina Parra
One of the things that we talked about was our AI maturity model. And that’s something that we bring to our customers a lot. It’s this concept that a lot of our customers are trying to figure out, what does AI transformation look like for us?

What does best in class look like? And so we’ve been able to sort of categorize that. And the first concept is, are you using AI as a thought partner?

Are you using it to help summarize something you’ve already written? Are you using it as a personal assistant, using the context that you have as the personal agent use case in Notion? And then there’s the, are you using AI as a teammate?

And then the real transformation is when AI becomes the system. And I think the reason that I share that is because we have customers that are all across that transformation, but it builds upon itself, right? So the workshops that we run support each of those.

And so some of them are for, how do you use AI as your own personal agent? How do you use AI meeting nodes? How do you set up your personal agent?

How do you set up an agent that reads your emails, creates a task list for you? And then we also have workshops for creating custom agents that have deeper workflows that are cross-team. So multiplayer, and that would be less people, right?

But maybe a more in-depth workflow. And then our forward deployed engineering function is really where, like if there’s a deep operating system that a customer wants to implement, that’s multi-agent. So yeah, there’s just a little bit of color.

Josh Schachter
And that’s a professional service that you have to push in, that sits in a different group, but obviously we’re close together.

Christina Parra
They’re part of the outcomes organization, which is actually what we’re also- Oh, I didn’t know there was an outcomes organization. There’s an outcomes organization, both Don and Lee at the outcomes organization. So we ladder up through the go-to-market teams, but there’s an outcomes organization.

We have a center of excellence, as well as the forward deployed engineering team now rolls up through Bo. And so what that has helped us understand is where do we build beside our customers versus where do our customers have the support of the forward deployed engineering team that’s actually building for them.

Josh Schachter
So Bo’s son out on the West Coast, we love Bo. He’s the head of the outcomes organization. Yes.

Okay. All right. I’m connecting the dots.

Christina Parra
Yes.

Josh Schachter
Hey, Bo, we love you.

Christina Parra
Yeah. And he wrote an article recently called The Rise of the Renaissance CSM, which is how do you find CSMs that are technical, commercial, and focused on value and adoption and how that’s becoming more and more important as customer expectations change. And we have more time freed up because so much of the administrative stuff is handled by AI.

And so it’s very directionally evolution of what that article calls out.

Josh Schachter
Kelly, what’s the name of your segment that you manage?

Christina Parra
Commercial.

Josh Schachter
Commercial. So it’s a little bit more of a scaled segment. You have about 90 accounts that you manage.

How do you do all of this at that larger scale?

Kellie Woodin
Yeah. I actually think it’s an important call out. In the recent months, we’ve actually transitioned away from scaled into commercial, which has kind of been less scaled and more hyper-prioritization.

So we manage a large book of customers and they’re all at a different stage in their journey. And because now we’re owning renewals and we’re protecting revenue, we think about our customers where they are. And so in this quarter and next quarter, who’s renewing, who’s onboarding, and who we’re in any workflow implementations with, and those become our prioritization buckets.

And so we think about it in more, we’re kind of entering more of the high touch world with just a really hyper-prioritized part of our book of business. And so we have a very high level of operational rigor on our team where we rely deeply on our systems and our agents to help us be higher velocity individuals and focus a lot on async and self-serve resources where our customers can help themselves outside of our calls, but our calls can still drive a lot of impact. And we still do host workshops and onsites and bring customers into the office.

It just kind of, we have to be selective on who we can spend that time with. In the best way possible to make sure we’re driving the most outcome with the customer at the best time in their journey with us.

Josh Schachter
What’s an agent that you’re particularly pleased with that’s helped you?

Kellie Woodin
Oh, there’s so many. We have such a squad, an army of agents, if you will. Personally, I have Replywood, which is my email agent that helps me draft responses to my customers based on product questions or overall best practices and recommendations.

So when I come to my computer in the morning, instead of having 20 unread emails, I have 20 drafts waiting for me to tweak or to add my flavor, and then I can send them off. But from a team perspective, How much time does that save you? A few hours a day, an hour, an hour to a day, so maybe 10 a week we can go with.

And that agent runs on under 500 credits a day as well.

Josh Schachter
These are Notion credits. When we talk about agents, I mean, not everybody may know this, that we’re talking about building agents within Notion. So this is the Notion agent, which is running off of, I believe you can choose your flavor of LLM, right?

Kellie Woodin
Model agnostic, yeah. So we’re model agnostic. And for us, for knowledge workers, we can run all of our systems on Notion custom agents.

We do have some customers in engineering and product orgs who like to bring in their external cloud cursor agents into Notion. But for knowledge work, we can pretty much do everything with a Notion custom agent. So that’s kind of our first pass at building a system.

And then we have our AI transformation plans, which are really, really key milestones for our customers. And we have an agent that helps us build those plans because they are very robust and in-depth, tailored documents for our customers. And for Ariel’s customers where they’re higher revenue, higher ARR dollar, he has the time to really go in there and to go really deep.

The commercial AI transformation plan is a little less in-depth, however, still tailored. And we’re able to do that with our AITP agent.

Josh Schachter
Great. A-I-D-P.

Kellie Woodin
A-I-T-P. Oh, T-P. AI transformation plan agent.

Lots of acronyms. Don’t worry.

Josh Schachter
Right. Did we talk about the transformation plan? Is that what you were referring to with the maturity model?

That’s the transformation plan?

Christina Parra
Yeah. Well, a little bit. What’s embedded in the transformation plans is that maturity model because we walk customers through it.

It’s usually a good…

Josh Schachter
These are old. These are success plans, formerly.

Christina Parra
Yes. So we’ve updated our success plan model. I think depending on the customer, we might still call them success plans, but calling them A-I transformation plans has been really effective for a lot of our customers that are looking for guidance on how to both use Notion AI, but also drive adoption in service of some of their wider business objectives.

So rather than doing a basic success plan, we do a lot of similar things. We understand a customer’s business objectives. We talk about the pain points.

We talk about success metrics. But then we go through the A-I maturity model. We have a discussion with our customer.

We diagnose where they are, and we have a conversation about where do you want to go, and how can we help you get there? And so then we pull together a mutual action plan. And then we start to document.

These are the workflows that we want to build together. Here are some recommendations of the workflows that we think you should build based off of your business objectives. And what’s really great is that we’re starting to build a library of the best-in-class workflows that our customers are implementing.

And so we’re able to be really prescriptive and align to a customer’s business objectives, which I think customers are really looking for right now. What’s the prescription? What do I build?

Josh Schachter
Can you help them benchmark against other similar cohorts? Like benchmark the outcomes and the usage that they’re getting versus similar types of companies or verticals or industries, or not quite yet?

Christina Parra
From the agents? From what they’re building, yeah. I mean, while we have a lot of value conversations with our customers, we were just talking earlier about how there’s a number of metrics we look at.

I think general A-I usage is something that we would look at. But then when we start to talk about value, we’re able to… And that’s where the qualitative stories with the customers is always still important.

The human-to-human piece is so important because we’ve got great relationships where the customer will say, I just saved eight hours doing X, Y, and Z. I think the differentiator for what we’re seeing is that the adoption is really pragmatic compared to some of what our customers are looking to roll out. And then I also think that a lot of times we fit into a customer’s A-I tech stack.

A lot of times our customers use many A-I tools and just figuring out what is the best way to bring all of that together. And Notion is just a really pragmatic and simple way, especially for a non-technical team at its core.

Kellie Woodin
And if I could add too, the best part about my book is that I’m exposed to so many different businesses and so many different industries that might use Notion. We certainly have an ICP and our wedge, we call it, but so many different businesses can run on Notion. And we aren’t a point solution.

We just see so many different industries and so many different setups, so many workflows, so many use cases. So to your question, I feel like because I have so many customers, I’m able to easily point to at least a similar industry or size or setup that I’ve worked with before and able to give them some proof points there.

Ariel Risman
I think it makes the conversations easier because they want to learn what maybe not someone in financial services is doing, but what’s the construction management firm doing? Because they also have physical assets that they might not even think about how A-I can help them manage that. And then it becomes, okay, what can the facilities team of that office building take from the construction management firm and what agentic workflows can they actually create?

And like Kelly and Christina were saying, it’s not necessarily that point solution. It’s kind of how can Notion be that hub for all that activity?

Christina Parra
I also think our customer stories are really strong in terms of the outcomes that we’re driving. And even the agents that we have the library of, I think some of them actually say this is the estimated ROI.

Josh Schachter
At the front lines there, as you’re working with customers, Ariel and Kelly, you’re talking about these notion, or excuse me, these agentic workflows, and you mentioned, Kelly, tokens that are consumed. Now, when we go into a consumption-based model, everybody I think is thinking about how they can build their pricing towards outcome-based and consumption-based. It can get expensive for customers and you need to be more efficient with what you’re using, which model you’re using, what you’re using it for.

Do you feel any more pressure to prove value given this model of charging based partly on consumption?

Kellie Woodin
Yeah, I think it’s a good pressure. It’s a great challenge to get deeper and closer with our customers. To Christina’s point, we have so much data on our product usage, but it really doesn’t tell the full story.

So I think it requires this level of care and detail to really understand the time that’s being saved. In our custom agent hall of fame, as you like to call it, we have a few agents that we built internally and some of our most amateur customers have built, and we’ve been able to include a small calculator of how to understand what the credits are worth. So we can use my email agent, for example, if that saves me two hours a day, that’s 10 hours a week minus an hourly rate of my salary, we can start to understand how much dollars that’s saved from a headcount perspective from those agents.

If they’re the credits, it’s like $500 a day of credits, which is like under $5. And so we can use those calculations and our customers are coming to us for guidance and best practice on how they calculate this because we are positioned as a model agnostic credit. So based on their other LLM usage and their Notion credit usage, we can begin to draw some calculations and help them prove an ROI story of what their credits are doing for them.

And it’s the best challenge in the world because it brings us closer to them and closer to their work. And if they’re not seeing that value from their other tools, we’re able to translate that into how they could see it with Notion.

Ariel Risman
And I think that makes us strategic to your earlier point around how can CSMs bridge the gap between being strategic and consultative and building alongside them. I think, at least at Notion, I think our customers see us as strategic and see us as thought leaders in this space of actually helping them define what does value look like. And value could be just reducing friction between teams that otherwise wouldn’t necessarily work as well together before.

And that’s a major win for the organization because they can move faster and more effectively and move with the velocity that AI is demanding across so many different businesses. And sometimes it’s about actually decreasing the amount of time that they’re spending on these more administrative tasks. So it really depends on the team and the organization, what their biggest issues are in that moment.

And I think once you understand what those are, you complete those areas or at least improve them and then continue to focus and iterate from there.

Josh Schachter
I guess it goes into your workshops. You show up and it’s not just like, hey, cool, let’s build some stuff here. It’s, okay, what are you trying to accomplish?

What’s the why?

Kellie Woodin
Always start with the why. And it’s really anchored on the business outcome too, that ideally we’ve been aligned with from the beginning with our solutions partners. If your overall goal for the next three quarters is to release five new products and to expand your product in the market, then how can we set up workflows that increase your collaboration with your engineering and GTM teams so that you can ship products faster?

So it’s really taking the big picture and translating it down to workflows. And then that’s where the value, it just happens. There isn’t like a re-justification because we’re really tied and anchored to that business objective.

Christina Parra
We hear a lot of customers that have a C-level initiative around AI adoption. And they are trying to figure out how do I actually tie this to the work that’s actually happening. And I think that’s where we see a lot of our conversations become more successful is because the work is happening in Notion already and because it’s a connected workspace.

And so you can get Slack and you can get Google. And therefore, I think a lot of people have what I would call experimental AI adoption. This is much more pragmatic.

And many of the workflows, whether it’s an individual workflow or a multi-agent operating system, to their point, if it’s aligned to the customer’s business objectives, that’s what drives the stronger adoption. Yeah.

Josh Schachter
And did I hear you say that there’s been a little bit more commercial muscle building on the outcomes team?

Christina Parra
Yes. So we merged our RM and our CSM team.

Josh Schachter
So in your longstanding 10 years here, you guys have been ramping up those muscles as well.

Ariel Risman
I think my background has kind of always been in the CSM 2.0 model. So I’ve always actually owned the commercials from the post-sale world and with the kind of traditional CS elements. So for me, it’s really been honing more of the technical elements.

And I think what makes our team great is we do have individuals with different skills and we’re always kind of relying on each other to learn. And now with the RM team coming in as well, there’s always new tactics that we’re learning from a commercial standpoint. But then Kelly?

Kellie Woodin
Yeah. My perspective is a little bit of the opposite. I come from a professional services and implementation specialist background.

So this was a really great opportunity for me to lock in on the renewal and the commercial motions. Luckily for me, I also have such a high volume of customers that I get a lot of reps and a lot of practice and a little smaller deals. And so I think this muscle has been really fun to flex and practice a lot with our customers.

And then ideally the customers that I’ve been onboarding and implementing now in a year when they’re up for renewal will be extremely fruitful. So it’s been a really great full circle moment.

Josh Schachter
Can any of you think of one key learning in the time that you’ve had more of these commercial responsibilities that you’d share with listeners?

Christina Parra
I mean, I think owning the renewal gives me more conviction in CS generally. I’ve been an AE, I’ve been an AM and I’ve been a CSM. I think us owning the renewal motion showcases how important value is, how important it is to check in with your customers, have those value conversations.

And that human to human interaction is still so important. So I don’t think it’s a learning. I think it’s just a lot of conviction.

And I think a lot of conviction that the CS role can and should own commercials because a lot of the value conversations that we’re having about the workflows are going to translate into how a customer thinks about our partnership. So it’s just given me a lot of conviction. When I’ve been on one side or the other, I’ve always known it, but you just feel it a lot more when you own both sides of it.

Yeah.

Kellie Woodin
I think my perspective has really widened because I said earlier that we are not selling software, we’re selling work. And with our new usage-based pricing, there’s just no ceiling of what we could do with the customer. So previously, if they had some kind of contraction in seats, the best we could do is try to get them back up.

But now if there is a little bit of contraction here, maybe we talk about some workflows where we can get some custom agents, increase credit usage, and then we can make up some revenue there. So I feel very creative and we can have a really wide array of levers and options to pull. So I think my learning after doing my first few renewals was that it’s just not black and white anymore and we can get creative and we can bring in power users and other stakeholders to paint a much bigger picture of what Notion can be beyond just XYZ licenses.

Josh Schachter
Sounds dynamic.

Kellie Woodin
Yeah. Very dynamic. Very multifaceted.

Josh Schachter
Maybe a little more motivating even.

Kellie Woodin
I mean, there’s certainly that piece for sure.

Ariel Risman
And you have all the context of the account as well. So when you’re going into these commercial conversations, there’s not that friction around you passing on something. You have all that knowledge there and all that knowledge lives in Notion.

But then you’re partnering with, in this case, the SEs on the sales side if there is something that we should queue up for the next three to six months that’s outside of the renewal, for example. But I really enjoy having all that context there so that you have full breadth and understanding of where, like what’s Kelly saying, what are the workflows that are working? What’s not?

How can we work with other teams? What can we improve? What can we implement?

And how can we ensure that we’re protecting the revenue? Because inherently, we are mini CEOs of our own book internally.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. That’s a good point. You’re not chasing down data or information about the customer.

It’s all there in front of you because of the way that you’re nodding out there. You’re using Notion on Notion. So that’s a key enabler for you guys to do that well.

What’d I miss? What’s a question? Where do we want to wrap this up here?

What’s something you want to share about your roles or the company?

Christina Parra
I will share two things. One is, I get asked a lot, how is the role of a CSM changing? I’ve been hiring CSMs for the last seven years, and I’ve gone through a lot of significant market changes during that time.

I think what stands out about CSMs that are successful now is curiosity, agency, urgency, and a lot of that is baked into our values. But it’s not necessarily about having a ton of experience. It’s about being really willing to learn and having that hunger and then trying it out for yourself, which is what I see in both Ariel and Kelly.

Anytime we launch something new at Notion, they are the first ones to say, okay, how do I do this? How do I implement it into my own workflow? And so now when I hire, I really look for those qualities in addition to skills.

But I really think that that is the game changer now. It’s more about this spirit. And then the other thing that I would share is, you know, we talked a lot about different workflows.

I think, like, another thing that I’ll call out when we’re using Notion is that there are many multiplayer workflows that we’re using every day that, like, the entire company is really relying on. And I think that that’s where we’ll continue to focus. There’s an agent called Data Scout, which is basically imagine there’s a data analyst sitting next to you, right?

And you can just natural language prompt, ask any question you want. And as a CS leader, it’s so valuable to me because then if I have something that, like, really does require a data scientist, I, like, develop this level of trust because I’ve already, like, said, like, hey, I tried this and I tried this and I ran this data. I’m able to uncover insights about my business so fast.

And those kinds of multiplayer deep agent use cases, I think, are the ones that we will continue to benefit from at Notion. But, like, we need to continue to find more of those at our customers. And a lot, like, can I share one more?

Josh Schachter
Sorry.

Christina Parra
Another one that I think is really valuable that’s more of a system is our feature request intake process, which one of our former solutions engineers designed, but the CSM team uses all of the time. We used to get feature requests from our customers in a variety of different places. I’ve been a CS leader for years.

And, like, you have to document stuff. You don’t know, does this exist? Does it not exist?

We have a system of agents that there’s an intake agent that listens to gong and also monitors a Slack channel where CSM can literally just say, talk to a customer, they want this. There’s another agent that actually, like, puts in natural language, what is the feature request? There’s another one that checks Salesforce to see, is this a customer?

Is this not a customer? And then there’s another agent that starts to document it in a database. And we actually have a list of our top ten feature requests across all of our customers, which is so valuable for us as a team.

But then that’s also, we can take those, put them in our transformation plans and say, this is a feature request that you have. We’ve got it tracked. And then the next phase of that and where I’m excited about how our team operates is, like, we’ve got that system in place.

Now, how do we bring more to it? How do we say, when this feature request ships, we’re going to get an alert that’s going to go straight to the customer so the customer’s not left wondering, which helps develop trust. So I say all that to share that, like, some of the really, really, the more in-depth, complex systems are helping us develop trust and collaboration in really different ways.

And I think that’s where, like, the best fully transformed organizations are going. It’s not about AI as this, like, scarcity. It’s about AI as abundance.

We always talk about, like, think together. That’s the campaign that we have. It’s on billboards all over the city.

And I just, I think, like, those two workflows, it’s not about, like, AI taking over the work that we’re doing. It’s about making us so much better at the work that we’re doing. So long, long way of saying.

Josh Schachter
Well said. Well, great way to wrap it up. Christina, Ariel, Kelly, thank you.

So you guys are one of our favorite customers. So thank you so much for being on the program. Thank you for having me at your beautiful facility.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Thank you. Thank you, Josh.