205. Headless AI vs. CSP: Where CS Insights Should Live ft. Mark Vovsi (Proofpoint)

With AI, you can also create a helpful narrative.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right?

Mark Vovsi:
It’s really helping you to focus, like, on which accounts, where do you need to, you know, focus your attention? And then what do you need to do for each specific account that pushes

Josh Schachter [Host]:
back into your csp, as well as the control tower?

Mark Vovsi:
Eventually, yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so where does it live? Or you’re just. Oh, sorry, you’re just getting this off the ground now in real time.

Mark Vovsi:
Right now it’s like scrapping fast. The goal is obviously, I’d love for this to live within our CSP. Right? And it seems like all the CSPs are frankly going there. So then it’s going to be like, can this.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All the CSPs are going there.

Mark Vovsi:
I. I mean, I’m seeing that. I mean.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, contraire, my friend. So where do you want your. Let’s let. You’ve just kind of like, lit me up a little bit here.

Mark Vovsi:
It’ll open the headless. The headless door.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So wait, where do you want people to live? You want them to live in the csp or do you want them to live in Slack? Where do you want them to live?

Mark Vovsi:
I think the future is.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast network. There’s a customer success team out there that didn’t assign accounts to anyone. The CSMs were product experts. You called them after something broke. Mark Vovsi joined Proofpoint to fix that, and he did. Then he blew up his own role to chase what CS has promised for 15 years and never quite pulled off. Catching churn before it starts. Now he says he can see a customer at risk over a year out.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack@ 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 unturned.gainsight.com hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unjourned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, senior Vice President of Strategy and go to market development at Gainsight. I am here today with Mark Vovsi.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Mark is the senior Director of CS Strategy and Ops at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Vovsi:
Thanks for having me, Josh. Excited to be here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Excited to have you. So we want to talk about. Well, obviously we’re talking about AI. You’re doing a lot of that these days. Uh, your role in. In you’ve. Cause you’ve had your own transformation in where you came from. You were asked to come from your old colleague Brent, who runs the group post sales at proofpoint and he originally brought you in to.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
To really build out the CS program with him. You’re still doing that in a different way. So tell us where you started in your role and, and where it’s evolved.

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah, and I’d say I would. I was supporting the CS build out from an ops perspective. Right. But we were driving a huge transformation. We had a very reactive role. CS motion. We didn’t even have assigned accounts for our CSMs. We did not have a digital motion.

Mark Vovsi:
So we brought in the new CS leader to stand up that organization, drive that transformation and we needed the backbone from an ops assistance perspective. So we launched a csp. We got all the playbooks on the high touch side going, we got the digital campaigns going and the rest is history.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You had no named accounts, no assigned accounts and no digital motion.

Mark Vovsi:
Nothing. We did not.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I know you weren’t there at the time. Well, you were maybe on like for the first month or so that you started. You saw the environment, right? Like, but what. Paint that, paint that scene. For me it sounds, it was, yeah,

Mark Vovsi:
it was more of a motion that the AM was kind of the quarterback for the account, a full quarterback. And when there would be questions about risk, health, adoption, do they would bring in a csm. So we did have a CS team but. But they were more. Think of them like product experts. They were really strong in products, but they were not focused on success plans, QBRs, renewal outcomes, everything that we think about kind of from a proactive perspective.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow. Wow. Lots of opportunity there. So tell us a little bit about. Zoom out for a split second to just share a little bit more about proofpoint for context for folks. So cybersecurity company, what’s the general size, scope, headcount and within your org as well for whatever you’re able to share.

Mark Vovsi:
Cybersecurity and there are a lot of different cybersecurity companies. I think about it as email security, protecting company from everything that’s coming in, outbound security, so any kind of data leakage and then just training different users of how to be vigilant, you know, not fall to. To phishing scams. And so forth we’re about 15,000 customers or so. Almost all have kind of the fortune, you know, 2000 and about two and a half billion in revenue.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Almost all of the Fortune 2000. That’s awesome.

Mark Vovsi:
It’s. Yes. If, if I don’t have my stats right. It’s a big percentage. Yeah. For a while. Kind of industry leader in the space.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. And what’s the CS post sales org look like as far as its layout and size?

Mark Vovsi:
It’s. I would, you know, it’s kind of traditional B2B SaaS. You know it’s, it’s, it’s. I don’t know the exact count. It’s definitely north of 1500 or so because in addition to CS we now have renewals came over. I mean that’s always as in sales is in cs. So that was another big part of transformation. About six, seven months into my stint renewals moved over under CS and we have a sizable managed services business as well.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow, that’s a lot of folks. This is not a 30 person team. That was more reactive mode. This is a large organization of a large organization, correct?

Mark Vovsi:
Yes. And my focus is primarily CS like technical CS on tams and renewals, support and professional services, other pockets of ops. Yep.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What was the biggest headwind you faced in that transformation as you were putting everything together?

Mark Vovsi:
Ever since I’ve gotten here we’ve just had tremendous alignment I think on strategy and the things we want to do and we’ve just been executing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Mark Vovsi:
I think operationally. I know you’re going to chuckle but it’s just like getting the data in order. You can’t really do much and it’s not just AI. You can’t do anything in digital. You can’t launch a new csp, you can’t automate anything. You can’t drive efficiency. Right. In this day and age unless you got to organize that.

Mark Vovsi:
And that has been the long pole in the tent for sure.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What was greasing the wheel that you think others could take away from alignment

Mark Vovsi:
from top down alignment on priorities. Finding. Finding the people that they’ll just take the, you know, kind of the bull by the horns and run with it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
So definitely kind of the people who are driving, building out new capabilities and within the CS organizations like the early adopters of the key motions, we’re like all right now we’re proactive. This is how we’re going to run. Right. Then you see those 10 people doing it and everybody starts doing it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yep. Yeah. Create that groundswell. So you did that for a Couple years at proofpoint, you got the foundation set up for, let’s call it the quote unquote, proper operations here. And then was it Brent that tapped you on the shoulder and said, hey, we gotta try to shift into this next era? Or is that something that you proactively brought to him in the leadership team?

Mark Vovsi:
I think it was just. It was the universe. I think it was the nickname on LinkedIn. I think it became clear, Right. That it was time for us to fully double down on AI. And I just couldn’t do that because my mandate was the tech stack, but also strategic planning, financial modeling, running renewals, ops, forecast calls. And you got to go deep, right. If you want to go fast.

Mark Vovsi:
It just became clear to all of us. So right at the time. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So walk us through that. Walk us through this recent transformation, evolution, we should say of your role, because there’s other folks that are out there. There’s other heads of CSOPs and programs that are thinking themselves. Oh, I want to change my title like Mark did, to AI Ops. AI Go Market. What did it look like for you? What has it looked like for you?

Mark Vovsi:
I think it’s been great. I think just over the years I’ve learned that even though I spent like countless. Not just hours, years. Right. Creating models, doing strategy, I love building things. I love launching new capabilities. So it’s kind of natural that I wanted to do this. When I started out, like, it was Internet and E commerce, huge wave, and I fell into that.

Mark Vovsi:
It just kind of sort of feels the same at a very different speed. Right. I think it also helps that my boss just gravitates towards a lot of the planning and financial modeling. And so naturally, kind of he’s steering that way. This is an area I own. Right. The role, I would say, you know, it’s not that it narrowed is I’m doing fewer things, big things. Right.

Mark Vovsi:
AI or whole tech stack or business intelligence, but just going big on them, going deeper. Right. And it’s been. Just been supernatural, but I think just organizational context is important. The fact that I just. I have a lot of varied experiences, so I’m kind of naturally. Different skills come together to be effective in this role, I think too.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Okay, so you’re able to focus a little bit more on the bigger rocks that relate to AI enablement and transformation within your org.

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Cs mainly here. And account management. What are those big rocks that you’re now able to focus deeper on?

Mark Vovsi:
I mean, we’ve honestly been at it for only like six months and. But and it’s, and it’s, I have never, never seen so much delivered in six months. Like that’s what AI is allowing us to do. And obviously we have an amazing team, but it’s been, it’s been evolution 3, 4 parts. I mean the first thing we did is we just, you know, we gave people AI. I think what a lot of people do and you know the personal use case similar is if we’re using ChatGPT at home, it’s useful, there’s efficiency but if you’re a csm it’s not that useful because you need to have access to customer data. Right. So I think the second step was we call them like role based, you know, AI chat assistants.

Mark Vovsi:
So these are assist their assistants that are configured, right. They have access to the customer 360 data. That took a lot of time. They have the context and so they know when you ask like you know, questions like what’s my portfolio risk? Right. What is the next coming up, you know, QBR generate a success plan for me, right. For a particular customer. It knows where to go to get that data. Right.

Mark Vovsi:
And how to which logic to apply to answer that question and what’s the output comes back and right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Where, where so it knows where to go. Where do your people go for it? Where do you, does it live that role based assistant?

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah, we, so we use a platform called Amazon Qwik, very similar to if you were using Claude or OpenAI. We’re experimenting with those as well. And the reason that post sales is using Amazon Quick is because it’s connected to data. Right. We also have ChatGPT and some other teams use that, but it’s not connected to our CSP data, to our telemetry data, right. To our customer data, to unstructured data. And so it’s not as useful.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Mark Vovsi:
Once those agents become connected, they become useful and then you’re interacting with it that way. Right. So I think there are definitely benefits but you still need to go to kind of that tool. And so the next thing was more like automation. And automation can come in like two forms. One is you’re just automating workflows. So we gave people the ability to automatically create success plans. It’s like, like that saves hours.

Mark Vovsi:
Like if you want to create a good success plan with tight objectives and milestones, not just five bullets. Right. The AI is looking through all this data, conversational data, support cases, risk, everything. Right. But now we said we just, we want to automatically load success plans for every single customer. If they don’t have one or based on certain criteria. Every quarter, refresh it. Similar as like if your goals were preloaded into workday for you or.

Mark Vovsi:
Right. Every quarter and they just load it

Josh Schachter [Host]:
straight into the csp.

Mark Vovsi:
Just load straight into the CSP and we’re going in. And like if a customer, it’s a big customer’s got 10 products, like for every product, get very specific. What do we need to drive adoption? Right. To mitigate risk, to resolve some kind of an issue. Yeah, it was. We went from when I was saying we had emotion where we did not have success plans. You know, our folks didn’t know how to create the success plan. And then it came to a point where it was like struggling to get all the information, all the context.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
Right. So this is really just, it’s not just a time saver. It’s creating objectives and success plans that people are not even thinking about who’s

Josh Schachter [Host]:
managing the, the architecture of those plans, who’s managing the guardrails, the. The MD file, the markdown file, if you will, the, the rules and instructions for the creation of those success plans.

Mark Vovsi:
So we, we have an individual and she actually reports to our head of customer success and has like half of her a foot in my team as well. She’s focused on process and really working with the different CSM leaders. Like, what do they need to look like? Right. What are the templates for success plans based on customer segment, which products they own and so forth. Right. So we’re just partnered at the hip. So whatever we’re building out. Right.

Mark Vovsi:
Works for the csms.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So it funnels so all basically the voice of the customer, the voice of the CSM funnels into her. She’s active in understanding what’s working well, what’s not working well. It’s almost like she’s the product manager now with a backlog of iterations to make, I would suppose, on those success plans.

Mark Vovsi:
Yep. And then we have a similar individual, she’s more on my team who engages with our TAM organization and a similar person on my team for renewals. Because each organization is, you know, 100 folks, you know, 80 folks and so forth.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Okay. So so far, just to play this back here, we’ve gone from like nothing. Yes.

Mark Vovsi:
Literally.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yes. The pre mark. Then we’ve gone to, you know, simple systems in place or the foundation in place. Then we’ve got the prompting, everybody out there prompting to save them time and a better version of Google Search. And now we’re at automation. And you gave the success plans as

Mark Vovsi:
an Example success plans as an example. They’re other examples, countless examples as well. And then I think we’re. A lot of things are coming together is where we are building. About to release kind of the first version in a couple of weeks, what we’re calling an early warning system. And that’s bringing in all the different risk signals together. Right. Structured data, unstructured data, human reported calculated machine learning.

Mark Vovsi:
We’ve partnered with somebody called more predictive Metrics.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s quads. You can say it, Mark, you can say quads. I want to, I want to support startup founders. Like, they’re still early stage. I hope that doesn’t actually throw shade on them. But they, yeah, they punch above their weight. They’re doing good stuff. So shout out to quads I days.

Mark Vovsi:
But we’re super excited, super excited to partner with them. I can tell you more about kind of what we partner with them for, but it’s, it’s not just bringing together like, you know, we think about a traditional customer success. Health score, Radio green with AI, you, you can also create a helpful narrative. Right. Here’s the risk summary for your account. Here are the key issues. Here are the recommendations for the next kind of steps that you as a CSM need to take. Right.

Mark Vovsi:
It was really helping you to focus, like on which accounts, where do you need to focus your attention and then what do you need to do for

Josh Schachter [Host]:
each specific account that pushes back into your CSP as well as the control tower?

Mark Vovsi:
Eventually. Yeah. And so where does it, where does it live?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Or you’re just. Oh, sorry, you’re just getting this off the ground now in real time.

Mark Vovsi:
Right now it’s like scrappy, fast Amazon Codex. It’s, it’s a separate website. The goal is obviously, I’d love for this to live within our CSP. Right. And it seems like all the CSPs are frankly going there. So then it’s going to be like, can this.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All the CSPs are going there.

Mark Vovsi:
I, I mean, I’m seeing that. I mean.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, contraire, my friend. So where do you want your. Let’s let. You’ve just kind of like lit me up a little bit.

Mark Vovsi:
I’ve opened the headless. The headless door.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, now, now, now, now we’re done with the perfunctory questions. So wait, where do you want people to live? Do you want them to live in the CSP or do you want them to live in you guys? You have slack or you’re too like corporate for that, right? But do you want to live in Slack or do you want them to live in. In Amazon quick or whatever it is that you’re using? Where do you want them to live?

Mark Vovsi:
We are too corporate for it. We use teams.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I figured.

Mark Vovsi:
I, I think the future is combination.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Combination.

Mark Vovsi:
I, I could see how there are certain things that are just more accessible via, you know, ask. Ask it via Claude mcp for sure. But I still, at least in the, in the next couple years, I mean, I’m just, I’m seeing people. There’s a need for a platform. People want to see a cockpit. People want to see. Be able to see the information in a view. So that’s already kind of the insights are there for you.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, right.

Mark Vovsi:
I think the challenge with text, you get all this great summary, but it comes back to three pages.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Mark Vovsi:
I still, you know, in a tool, it’s organized, it’s telling you where to focus. It’s sort of, you know, that’s where you start your day. That’s what the CSP is for.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
Right. So it’s, it organizes everything in a way that’s easier to act on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
Maybe we’ll get there. Like, I don’t think we’re there yet in the headless motion.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think a combination is a fair answer. I like, I dig that. I mean, we’re building gainsight to be as headless as you would like it to be. Now what does headless mean? Because it took me years to figure that out. It means basically we meet you where you are.

Mark Vovsi:
Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We serve you the data. We don’t need to be the, you know, you don’t need to iframe into gainsay, you can go and retrieve it from Claude or from when AI or Slack.

Mark Vovsi:
Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s headless in that sense.

Mark Vovsi:
Perfect example. It’s end of quarter. Right. My, my CCO will ask me about. He’s in the meeting with our CEO or going in to speak to a customer. It’s a big renewal is coming out. What’s. Hey, Mark, what’s going on with the customer? Right.

Mark Vovsi:
They don’t log into the csp.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Mark Vovsi:
Well, they want to access that information very quickly. Right. Via Amazon quick or Claude or a tool like that. So that’s definitely a use case.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But, but I also think there is something to what, to what you’re saying around. There will still be some like core use cases where you do want to have the daily cockpit where quite frankly, you don’t want to necessarily rely on the LLM from like to have to generate all this stuff all the time because those tokens we think may add up in the future. So you want to come back into your CSP as well for like the core stuff. There’s probably going to be some cost savings there to have a, you know, kind of a home base.

Mark Vovsi:
I mean, I think so, for sure.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Right.

Mark Vovsi:
It’s also a csp. The UI organizes a lot of things you want to do in one single pane. You could see a summary about the account, you could see the next actions. You could see, hey, do you want me to draft a potential email to this customer? And it’s on this one kind of canvas. Whether it’s hard to engage, there’s a reason we went from command prompt to Windows to macOS for that reason.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
Like who you are,

Josh Schachter [Host]:
what would be if you could paint the future, what would that look like for your team a year from now? So the middle of next summer, if there’s one milestone that you’ve achieved scenically, what does that look like?

Mark Vovsi:
I don’t know what you mean by scenic.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I don’t know. I’m writing a book and everything I write has to be scenic, according to my coach. So, like you’re sitting there in New Jersey, it’s fresh air.

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It may sound a little bit cliche, but it’s. It’s just. It all comes down to churn. Right. And it’s the early warning system to really make it so it’s very effective.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Mark Vovsi:
Like the tool that a truly people feel that they’re identifying risk earlier and then they know how to act on it more efficiently in the. Effectively. But we’ve been saying the same thing 10 years ago in CS, 15 years ago as well. But I think now it’s really becoming possible. Right. Like you can pick up on signals using telemetry, not three months, not nine months, a year in advance. Right. You, when you are identifying what you need to do with a customer, you can generate documents, you can do analysis in minutes instead of hours.

Mark Vovsi:
Like I’m doing this analysis now. So being able to identify things and act on it and it’s. I wouldn’t say it’s like, it’s not like it’s a problem here. It’s more, I think because the tech is here, the expectations are higher. Right. It’s like, hey, you got AI. Weren’t you able to identify everything right away in act immediately?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We know that roles in CS and in CSOPs are evolving. Your role has evolved. How do you think the role of a CSM will Evolve will change over the coming horizon and then specifically what’s the type of person you’re looking for on your team?

Mark Vovsi:
And so I think there’s csm, customer facing and ops, right?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sure.

Mark Vovsi:
I think csm, I think coverage ratios are going to expand. I think that’s going to come naturally and hopefully companies do it that people are actually empowered to feel that they can be effective with the right tooling in place. And I think it’s going to be expected that like a CSM is. Right. A jack of all trades is, is that’s going to be even like times two or three, you know, for, for CSOPs. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s the same thing. Right. It’s like the things that we have built in six last six months did not exist here a year ago or two years ago.

Mark Vovsi:
Right. And I know that the things we’re going to build in the next six to 12 months are going to be like problems that haven’t been solved before. So like I, when I hire people, or at least leaders on my team, people who are confident or super excited about it and are just confident with starting with a blank piece of paper and are just running with it. Right. I think that’s super important. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So ownership, curiosity, leaning in all of those things.

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Mark Vovsey, Nick Offerman’s doppelganger, as I affectionately refer to you as. Thank you so much for being on this show. Really congratulations on really almost like the 0 to 1. I don’t want to say that those guys were 0 before, but you and the team, I know it’s a team effort, have really taken some huge strides and continue to do so. So wishing you all the best and congratulations on everything so far.

Mark Vovsi:
Yeah, it’s been an awesome journey here.