161. How To Stop Managing 38% of Your Customers in 2026 ft. Yvette Hill (F5)

And we were like, yeah, right?

Jenny Calvert
Yeah.

Yvette Hill
And so that was so we’re looking for people who are coming with that kind of mindset, because we think that they can help transform the team from inside.

Jenny Calvert
I am Jenny Calvert, host of Unchurned, coming at you live from Pulse Europe in Dublin. And I am super excited to welcome my guest, Yvette Smith. Yvette.

Thank you. Yeah, I’m so glad to be here. Some Eastern US people that made the trek to you a little further coming all the way from LA.

Yeah, I was in LA last week.

Yvette Hill
So, but.

Jenny Calvert
And I understand it was your onsite, right? Kickoff.

Yvette Hill
It was our sales kickoff. Okay. And so it was a big, very big week and a little bit of a very long flight.

Jenny Calvert
So glad to be here more about your kickoff, because we’re a little ahead of, you know, the beginning of the year people. So yeah, some tips and tricks. But before we get started, I would love for you to tell the listeners who you are, what you do, how you got into this world.

Give us the story.

Yvette Hill
Well, thank you. I’m just so honored to be here and so excited to share our story. And yeah, I’ve been doing customer success for a little while.

I was thinking about that as we were preparing for this. It’s been over almost about 15 years. So I started in kind of an untraditional way into customer success.

So I spent 17 years at IBM and then went to Xerox to run the managed services business for the US. Okay. And much like our hardware and SaaS customers are going through commercial model changes, and revenue doesn’t come until outcomes are delivered.

We have that same situation at Xerox.

Jenny Calvert
Oh, sure.

Yvette Hill
We moved from selling devices and printers and toner to selling print and copy by the click. And so if somebody didn’t print and people weren’t making copies, we didn’t get paid. And so it was great.

There were salespeople were out, they were selling all these services, packages, and then no revenue. So a major bit of panic.

Jenny Calvert
Yeah.

Yvette Hill
The typical panic that starts a customer success.

Jenny Calvert
Where’s the money? Yeah, where’s the money? Exactly.

Yvette Hill
Show me the money. Great. That’s how most customer success organizations get started.

And we started, yeah, we transformed our field organization from a team of people who were out just doing managed services for our customers to one that was having conversations with the business users and driving workflows to the devices. And so it’s really the inception of the space. Yeah, it really was.

We didn’t call it customer success, but that’s what we were doing. Yeah. And then I moved on to Microsoft where I’m in the early days of Azure and same kind of thing.

Lots of big Azure commits. Everybody was really excited. And then where’s the revenue?

And at the time when I went there, I went there to lead support. And we realized we had a very large team, about 14,000 people around the world who were out on prem with customers. And we could transform them from, again, just helping customers in kind of a support mechanism to really helping them leverage and utilize the platform.

And that transferred from helping them do stuff to actually driving the outcomes that they care about in their business. Exactly. And so took our TAMs at the time and transformed them into CSMs and CSAs.

And again, re-energize the customer success function. So that was a big transformation. And then I came to F5 where I am today.

And the team there had kind of through the first phase of getting customer success set up. But then over the past five years, along with some various roles that I’ve had, helped really bring the company forward in the thinking. Because F5 is a company that started predominantly with hardware, one product, and has acquired about five SaaS companies.

Okay.

Jenny Calvert
Single products and multi-products. Yes. Transformation for Yvette yet again.

Yvette Hill
Another transformation. Don’t mind if they brought you in. Yeah.

And it’s been wonderful. I mean, helping the company think past one product to multiple products, hardware to software and SaaS. And so it’s been a great evolution.

No long for the ride, of course. Yes. And now we’re moving into not just retention, but expansion.

And really some of the thinking we’ve been talking about here, how does retention, expansion, and growth coming through customer success be a core part of how the company thinks about.

Jenny Calvert
That’s really important and predominant conversation these days. The return to revenue, as we think of it. Return to outcomes.

Yes. The origination of success, as you’ve told us through your story. Yes.

We’re back full circle. Curious about another transformation. Yeah.

It’s going to be obviously the theme of our chat today. We also are in the Agentic era. Oh my gosh.

So not only is there a business transformation within F5 that you’re working on with the team, we’ve got to start to think about. Yes. What happens with AI?

Yeah.

Yvette Hill
I really think about this. We’ve talked about, we’ve transformed processes. We’ve transformed tools.

We’ve transformed some of our thinking. This is really transforming our approach to delivering outcomes, right? And it’s really transforming the Agentics space that we’re in right now.

One is so exciting because what it’s going to do is it’s going to enable our team members to do even more when it comes to delivering outcomes for our customers. Be doing, like getting rid of all of the toil, getting rid of things that somebody else, whether they’re a human or some artificial intelligence can do, and letting them spend the deep, rich time with customers understanding their business.

Jenny Calvert
I mean, CS has been craving the elimination of how much work is on our plates to really deliver for our customers. And I’m hearing the excitement around how Agentic can actually make that possible for our team. Huge excitement.

Huge excitement.

Yvette Hill
Because we are the catchalls, right? Because we’re spending more time with customers than most anybody else in the organization. Front line of the business, really.

Customer facing, getting the feedback. I mean, so we fill in gaps, some of which we probably don’t need to fill in, right? And so, it’s exciting to be able to see the possibility of Agentic being able to take care of a lot of that.

Yeah. And we can use the richness of our people who know our customers really well to drive expansion and growth and help them realize more value from the investments they’re making with all of our companies. I kind of get back again to the root of the role.

To the core.

Jenny Calvert
Yeah. Yeah. So, as you’re thinking about your investments in terms of AI and Agentic moving into next year, although it’s next year for your business, what’s that look like for you?

Yvette Hill
100% of our investments are focused around AI. Wow. We’re not investing in additional people.

We are investing in our people. But it is around helping them be more effective in using AI to run their business. It’s about helping feed their curiosity about the technology.

It’s about helping them develop the different skills that they’re going to need to be able to operate alongside an artificial intelligent agent. Sure. But it’s also about experimentation, right?

Jenny Calvert
How have your talent development plans then shifted? You mentioned some of these things, making sure that we’re pulling through the curiosity and kind of the consultative nature of the role. How does that shift how you are actually developing and empowering your talent?

Yvette Hill
So, it’s super interesting. What we’ve decided to do, which now it will be a little bit of having a spy in the room that everybody knows about. But what we decided to do is really target a couple of new hires who come with a very different profile.

And so, we were actually out. Erica Cohen, who leads customer success for me, was out. And we were out and a young woman sat down at our breakfast table.

And she was like, I’ve just finished my master’s in data science, and I want to go into customer success. We’re like, what? Data science to see us?

That’s not a transition. We’re like, it perked our ears right away. We were all into it.

And she was like, I’ve developed these agents. And I’ve developed this LLM. And I’m using this.

And I’m using that. Well, we literally could barely follow the conversation. I was like, Erica, offer now.

Like, let’s get this figured out. And it was really like, she was like, I know how I want to use AI to manage my business as a CSM. And we were like, yeah.

Right? Yeah. And so, we’re looking for people who are coming with that kind of mindset, because we think that they can help transform the team from inside.

Jenny Calvert
Kind of a fresh perspective and energy, right? Like, I’m sure we’ve heard about people coming from service-based industries, whether it be servers at restaurants or teachers, right? That was our big transformation in this space.

And now, it’s really evolving into master’s in data science, knowing how the LLMs and the AIs actually work, and bringing that insight to actually fuel and drive the business team.

Yvette Hill
So, we believe that kind of skill will help us then change the team. I think, as I was just telling our team, because we’re here, we had a team offsite up in Cork as well, where we have a good-sized CSM team. And the whole European team is like, the one thing I want you to do is be more curious.

I mean, like, every day, I need you to be leaning into this and figuring out what are the things that AI can help you do better. Like, quit worrying, and they’re not worried, but quit worrying about, like, it replacing your job. More worry about how it’s going to make you better at your job.

Jenny Calvert
Have you seen that shift a lot? I think last year was kind of the year of worry. Yes.

And then it’s like, we started playing and tinkering, and more people are sharing their stories of how it really has unlocked their teams. You’re seeing that energy in your team. I am, I am.

Yvette Hill
And part of it is because we’re encouraging them to hear the stories around the industry, right? So, it’s not enough for me to tell them, your job’s going to be fine. You know, yeah, right.

But to hear how Gentik has helped other CSMs and other CSM organizations be more effective on behalf of our customers. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert
They’re like, oh, I can see that. That sounds good. I can see that, and that can help me.

Yeah, yeah. How are you structuring teams to really, like, unlock what’s possible with AI as well? I’m hearing some specialized hires, perhaps.

Yes, yes. We’ve got a legacy team. Yes.

Yvette Hill
So, how are you thinking about that? So, I’m really starting with our leaders and getting them really educated so that they can see the art of the possible. I think one of the challenges with how fast AI is moving is that it’s hard to imagine the art of the possible.

If you kind of check in in this space once a quarter, right? This is not that thing. Like, this is every day.

Every day evolving. You have to evolve. So, we really are focused on our managers and our leaders, and then we are putting some things in place.

So, I have moved one of our strong leaders into a space where he is totally focused on data analytics and AI, right? So, we have that spread out across both our renewals and customer success teams. Now, you’ve got a specialized agent, so to speak.

Yeah, pretty much. Human agent, but yes. And brought together that team, we’ve invested in additional data analysts, which we didn’t have.

We’ve invested in some people who are actually building AI on the business side. Wow. So, one of the things that, again, we’ve learned is that this has got to be business-driven.

And I think this is exactly what, you know, we are hearing here is that you can wait for your IT team to do it, but they’re never going to drive it in the way that you need.

Jenny Calvert
And so, it’s on us. Well, they know the context that you’re speaking of, right? It’s the stories within the business.

That’s a really critical piece is how do we get more curious and better understanding of those so that we can leverage all of these tools and teams in-house. Right. And we need to get excited.

Yvette Hill
We’re the ones who can get excited about use cases that really are going to deliver, you know, ROI that is going to be at the C-level and that the board is going to care about. And those are the things that are going to get investments. Yeah.

So, that’s what we’re always trying to drive.

Jenny Calvert
So, how amazing getting the team to start thinking about what’s possible. They have that really deep insight and understanding. Yes.

And then being able to go execute it instead. Tremendous. What are some primary use cases you’re tackling around AI right now?

Yvette Hill
Yeah. So, I think there’s a couple. I always view our customer success team as the first and foremost feedback loop to our product groups.

And so, with the handful of products we have, we need that feedback in a much richer way to be able to then improve our product and drive retention and help understand what is the journey our customers are going to go on to the most sticky features and most sticky capabilities. And as you expanded to multi-product, probably 10 times more important.

Jenny Calvert
Exactly.

Yvette Hill
So, being able to harvest the unstructured data that comes from our emails, our calls, whether it’s sales, our CS team, our renewals team, anybody, and support, of course, and being able to synthesize that back against our product plan.

Jenny Calvert
Silo that feedback, I’m sure. The opportunity to not have it live in its own respective corners where CS is like, hey. Right, right.

Yvette Hill
Well, and we’re part of… We had our own silo, right? But being the curator of that, to be able to go back to the product teams and align that against their product plans and say, okay, we think we see where this aligns to product plans you already have in place, but these five things we’re not seeing.

So, really bringing that insight back. So, that will be really helpful. So, it’s one of the first use cases we want to use around unstructured data.

Jenny Calvert
And question on that front, though. How open is your product organization then to that influence that comes through those insights? We are really lucky.

Yvette Hill
They are very open to it. What we do with them each, we have several different product groups, but we align with them on the insights we’re bringing back and then the ones they’re going to do something about. And that’s really important from an accountability standpoint, because we can say, you know, go fix this, go fix that, go fix this.

And if you do that, we’ll see X amount of GRR or NRR. Tie it back to the business. Tie it back to the business results.

But if they choose not to, that still shows the impact we’re choosing intentionally not to have. I love that word. The word cheesy.

Jenny Calvert
Well, and I think it’s important as a company, right? Because when you go- We’re not throwing darts anymore. You’ve got the insights and the data and he is allowing that to be a real thing.

Make it much richer.

Yvette Hill
We can do it.

Jenny Calvert
It’s not feelings anymore, right?

Yvette Hill
Here it is. Here’s the data. Yes, exactly.

It’s much richer with the data. That’s incredible. You were mentioning another use case.

So we’re doing all the basic things of trying to drive understanding around predictive retention, predictive expansion. Or the signals or the risk workers. And bringing actually many more signals.

So I think, you know, as I looked around the company, I said, you know, what are all the signals that are happening in all the different silos that if we could aggregate up, we could get a much richer understanding of the engagement of our customers, where they really are, and then tie it back to opportunity. And we identified like 175 signals. And that was just me one night.

Just brainstorming. Just brainstorming, writing it all out, right? Like, are they using education?

Are they getting certifications? Are they attending our events? I mean, and so we’re going to start pulling all of those while we continue to enrich the telemetry coming from our products.

But not waiting for that, right?

Jenny Calvert
Because that can become a waiting game that ends up with- Not having to wait keeps coming forward too, right? Where even here at Bosch, we’re hearing, you don’t have to sit back and wait for your teams to do this, or you. In fact, there’s a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t do that.

Yvette Hill
Well, and with the speed that it’s moving, one of my concerns is that because, you know, you can say, okay, I’m going to go do this today. And you get started. And by next week, there’s something like just slightly cooler.

And then you’re going, oh, wait, should I stop doing this and go do that? And then the third week, you spend a couple days, and then there’s something else. And so if you don’t just get going, right, you could spend all of your time getting ready to get going.

And so that’s the thing that we’ve just said this year. It’s like, it may be wrong. It may be right.

It may be good. It may not be. I don’t know.

We’ll figure it out. But we won’t know until we actually get going.

Jenny Calvert
That kind of permission to get started, to find, I guess, play your way into it in some ways, bringing back some of that curiosity, that innovation, that what might be possible you mentioned, and just starting.

Yvette Hill
And the willingness to fail fast and make adjustments. And I think that’s the thing that we’re learning, whether we like it or not, with this whole AI space, especially in Agentic, is it’s not going to be right the first time. And you have to be OK.

Jenny Calvert
Has that always been a part of your culture at F5?

Yvette Hill
No. So there’s a cultural transformation. No, it is a cultural transformation.

And part of that is because we had a product that had a very, very long product lifecycle, right? Big IP had a very long product cycle. Customers bought them and kept them for years and years and years and years and years.

And so the pivot to a SaaS environment where you’ve got that much faster product lifecycle is a whole cultural shift for us. Wow. Yeah.

It’s exciting, though. Wow. It’s really exciting.

Jenny Calvert
It’s a good thing they have a tremendous change leader like you at the helm. It’s fun. So let’s talk renewals.

Yes. Mary, we talked about those risk signals, obviously, to be able to fuel and drive retention. I know renewals are in your remit.

Yes. It’s the beginning of the year for you. Yes.

How are you? What is kind of the messaging and the mantras to your team to ensure that the next renewal cycle is success? You’re hitting your GRRN and our targets.

Yvette Hill
Yeah, so it’s really less, but I’ll tell you a little bit about what we’re doing now, but what we’ve done over the last year to get us here, right? And so we brought together our customer success and renewals teams because, again, we had them in silos and the signals were not aligned, right? And so over the last year, we’ve really brought that together to be able to identify faster and earlier where risk is and then being able to try and swarm around that to be able to- And now focusing on layering AI on top of it.

Right. We’re building a machine. We will.

I mean, that’s the goal, right? Is to be able to leverage technology. And so we’re still kind of doing it like very, you know, brute force right now.

But that is what we did in preparation for this year. The other thing that we’ve done, we started this year is we’ve pulled our renewals team to engage earlier. So we have a lot of one-year contracts.

They were engaging kind of a typical, you know, 100-day cycle. I’m like, man, you got to engage way earlier and start doing some light nurture motions, especially where we don’t have customer success. We’ve got a very long tail and we work through it.

We had distribution and channel a tremendous amount. So kind of bringing that whole team to the point where we’re having conversations about driving adoption and expansion. Sure.

And so that has been a big part. The other thing, which may sound a little odd, is we have moved our renewals team off of the long tail this year. OK.

And we have about 38% of our volume generates about 2% of our bookings. So we took them off of that to make capacity for the earlier engagement in the nurture motion, but also to force the discussion about automation. OK.

Right. So in the absence of having automation, which we’ve been asking for and looking for, we’ve now got a couple of centralized people that were just kind of working those quotes with the channel, but really demonstrating that we can standardize the process. And then, you know, while we’re waiting for our core system automation, we’re starting, we’ve got teams who are innovating around agents and starting to automate some parts of this.

You can treat every customer like your best customer, as Chuck said this morning.

Jenny Calvert
That’s it.

Yvette Hill
And so, you know, we were talking about this just, you know, with that thinking, it’s like, maybe this is the place we have an agent who can be the end to end, you know, driving adoption, consumption and renewal. Right. Because again, on the low end, Capacity limits.

Jenny Calvert
Gone.

Yvette Hill
Right. Capacity limits. All the data context built.

Right. And it’s more the touch than they’re getting today. And with the agent, we can also work through the channel.

So we’re really excited about that.

Jenny Calvert
Just things we’ve never been able to do. Exactly. Are all becoming possible.

It sounds like you all have been investing and continue to invest to make sure you’re set up for success there. We really expand the value of your team, your human team. Yes.

And leveraging those agents to reach those places that were really inefficient or unreachable before. Exactly.

Yvette Hill
I mean, renewals are non-events when a customer is really clear about the value. Yeah. That they are getting from, you know, the investment they’ve made.

And that is like, I keep the mantra that I keep saying to our team is we are the customer value realization engine of this company. And if we’re doing that, then renewals are no big deal. Just like on things that we like at home.

Jenny Calvert
We don’t, we don’t, we don’t have the outcome of all of the, all of the inputs of our work. That’s tremendous. Okay, Yvette, I could sit and talk to you for hours.

What are you most excited about?

Yvette Hill
Oh, that’s a big question because this is like, I mean, after being in this industry for over 35 years, right? This is a incredibly exciting time.

Jenny Calvert
Mm-hmm.

Yvette Hill
Right. You can feel it, like walking around here, Yvette. Right, the energy.

And so I think, you know, the thing that I’m really excited about is getting our teams this excited about the possibility of being better on behalf of our customers every day in partnership with AI, right? And I think if we can keep that approach and that attitude, we will accelerate. If we are having to pull people along, if we’re having to pull leadership along, it’s going to be slow, right?

But if we can like be leading and people are seeing that we are like, that they’re as excited about making this happen as we are, I think it’s a tremendous opportunity. So I’m excited about the potential. I’m excited about the potential for our customers.

I’m excited about the rate of change. And the fact that what we’ll be talking about this time next year, we probably won’t even have conceived at this point. We’re going to have another conversation.

We should, right? Should. I mean, yeah, because the things that we are going to be doing, we’re going to be like, did we even know that was possible this time last year?

I mean, I think that’s what’s super exciting.

Jenny Calvert
The opportunity to, I think, play and innovate in this space is, I think, what CEOS has needed, right? We went through a few years where engagement was down, people are leaving the field and to be able to say, we no longer have to just focus on all of the doing, but really leaning into the curiosity, the relationship development, the outcomes, the value realization, all of the things that are the staple of CEOS that you saw as you grew up in the field, really.

Yvette Hill
Really? No, I mean, CEOS is such a, I mean, it’s the core to what gets me energized, right? Solving customer problems, helping customers realize value.

I mean, that’s what I’ve loved doing for my whole career. And we are so, this is such the sweet spot. And then, I mean, we’ve heard, this is our time, I think, with leveraging this capability.

Jenny Calvert
Really, it sounds like teams are getting bought in. Yes. Everything’s coming together really well.

Any last thoughts that you want to share with listeners or the audience about what you’re working on or anything around all of your experience in change management? Any just kind of words of wisdom or advice you’d share?

Yvette Hill
Yeah, the biggest thing I would say right now is just get started, right? I mean, that is it, because you can spend forever trying to figure out the perfect use case, building the perfect ROI. I mean, and what’s awesome about this is it’s democratized.

So there’s little things you can do. There’s big things you can do. I think we have to do both, right?

So as leaders, we have to think about the Titanic shift kind of use cases. But as individuals, we can think about the small use cases and that we haven’t even envisioned could be. And then take on, quite frankly, the tough stuff, right?

Because honestly, the tough stuff isn’t any harder than the easy stuff at this point. I mean, it’s kind of, you know, it’s all can be sold into the unknown a little bit, right? Like lean out into things that it’s like, OK, that can’t possibly be done.

Well, I’m, you know, in two weeks, somebody will figure it out and you’ll be ready to go. So a lot of it’s building foundation and getting ready to go. So that would be it’s just get going.

Jenny Calvert
That leads me to one more question. Yeah. How do you get buy in?

Buy in and change is so important. We’re seeing the shift. You mentioned your team just being around it and hearing it and seeing that it’s not coming for your jobs.

Yeah, we’ve solved that. Yeah. How do you get them bought in and really excited?

Yvette Hill
I think, you know, we’re figuring it out, right? I think right now they’re excited about the possibility. I think the thing that we’re leaning into is that we’re investing in them as part of this.

So making it not just about, you know, everything that’s going to be done unto them, but everything that’s going to be done with and through them so that they are even better. And their careers continue to grow. Right.

Their careers grow. They’re more effective at taking care of the customers they love. They’re more effective at feeding insight back into the company that they love.

So, you know, making it about enriching their capability instead of putting a whole bunch of stuff into something that is not going to be, you know, they don’t view as helping them.

Jenny Calvert
So I think that’s the biggest thing. The investment is them as professionals and individuals. Yes.

And what’s possible for the business. Right. It’s magic.

It’s magic. But it’s been so amazing sitting with you. Thank you.

Your insights, your experience, your wealth of experience in the space of change, as you’ve shared with your friends at Xerox and Microsoft and now at F5. So excited that you are here. Can’t wait to talk to you next year and see where we are.

That’ll be great. Thank you so much.

Yvette Hill
Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for letting us share a story. You bet.

Jenny Calvert
All right.

Yvette Hill
Thank you.