In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Freddie Franklin, Head of Customer Success at zeroheight, a platform that helps design and engineering teams build and manage their design systems. Freddie came from an account management background and joined zeroheight just over a year ago after nearly eight years at Kaisa.
He shares how he structured a team of five CSMs across high-touch and low-touch programs, how zeroheight uses Claude as a reasoning layer connected to their entire tool stack, what changed when he introduced sales methodology and commercial accountability into the CS function, how he handles procurement pressure at renewal, and why understanding the why is the one habit that has shaped everything in his career.
What You’ll Learn
- What zeroheight does and what the Head of CS role looks like across a team of five CSMs
- How zeroheight’s tool stack works: HubSpot, Sybil, Juro, and Claude as the reasoning layer
- What AI agents the team has built and what use cases they are solving
- What Freddie’s first-year agenda looked like and what he prioritized first
- What changed when the CS team became accountable for revenue and how the SPICE methodology helped
- How to handle procurement pressure at renewal without just discounting
- Why the Golden Circle and the Five Whys are the two frameworks Freddie keeps coming back to
Key Insights & Takeaways
Best practice should follow you, not the other way around. Using Claude agents to guide CSMs through price negotiations and downgrade defense means best practice is embedded in the workflow, not just written in a Notion doc that gets forgotten.
Segmentation is the first thing to fix when you inherit a team. If your biggest customers are getting the same attention as your smallest, you are not allocating time where it drives the most NRR impact.
Commercial ownership is not a transition, it’s an evolution. When a team is already commercially minded, adding structure, methodology, and coaching around that is what unlocks the next level.
Anchor high in a procurement negotiation. Start at the highest point and negotiate down from there. And if cost needs to come down, remove features rather than discounting the same product for less.
Bring the champion into the renewal conversation. Procurement only sees a budget line. The champion knows the value. Use them to tell the story you can’t tell alone.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:07 – 0:29)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Freddie Franklin, Head of Customer Success at zeroheight, a platform that helps design and engineering teams build and manage their design systems. Freddie, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Freddie (0:30 – 0:33)
Yes, thank you for having me, Irina! I’m glad to be here too.
Irina (0:34 – 0:45)
You are Head of Customer Success at zeroheight. Think as a quick picture, what does the role look like day to day and what kind of customers are you working with?
Freddie (0:46 – 2:50)
I’ll start with the customers. Like you said, we are a design system management platform. What that means in terms of customers is we typically work with large, global enterprise brands, the sorts of brands who want to move very quickly and build digital products very quickly, and the sorts of brands that have the organizational complexity which means they benefit from having a dedicated solution that becomes their central source of truth for how all of their digital products are built. These are brands that might have hundreds or even thousands of digital designers, and if they don’t have a central place where they can understand how each component is used, their products drift. They become inconsistent and ultimately the UX suffers as a result.
So our platform plugs a really valuable gap for those types of customers specifically. It’s a lot of Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 brands. Really great customers, and something that really appealed to me when I moved over to zeroheight.
In terms of what that means for CS: we have a lot of scale. We work with a lot of customers. We have a team of five CSMs doing a lot. We have a high-touch program and a low-touch program. They are managing a lot of customer meetings, understanding their goals, what they’re trying to achieve, and how our product can best support that. We’re also trying to support that with automation, helping to understand where customers are getting stuck and surfacing opportunities for them to use more of the product and get more value. And outside of the high-touch program delivery, also supporting that through email automation and in-product work as well.
How Freddie Splits His Time Across Strategy and Operations
Irina (2:51 – 2:56)
And in that setup, what do you spend most of your time on? What takes most of your day?
Freddie (2:56 – 4:39)
What do I spend most of my time on? That’s a really good question.
I think my role has two different main parts. I work very closely with the rest of our GTM function: our CEO, head of sales, head of product, head of marketing. We do a lot of work in terms of strategic planning, trying to understand where the risks are in the business, where the opportunities are, where we ultimately want to steer the ship, and then how that trickles down to the individual teams. We have quarterly planning, quarterly OKRs. A big part of my role is feeding into that, understanding how it flows down to the CS function. What are our goals to help support the company strategy? Driving that, monitoring where we are on certain initiatives, where we’re doing well, where we’re not, where we need to optimize, and reporting that back up to C-level and the finance team. Just driving the strategic initiatives.
And then there’s the more operational side of running a team of five CSMs: a lot of coaching, a lot of one-to-ones, helping them drive the goals and understand where they can optimize their performance. And then I work very closely with our CS ops lead, Caitlin, to understand where we can refine and improve processes. How can we make the entire team even more effective using the tooling we have and streamlining the processes?
The Tool Stack and Operational Foundation Behind CS at zeroheight
Irina (4:40 – 5:15)
Speaking of this, you mentioned the tooling and the CS ops part, which I would say is central, and it’s becoming more obvious in the conversations I’m having with CS leaders. What’s the tool stack and how does the operational foundation look in your case, in order to be functional and provide the team the time they need to focus on the qualitative part? What’s the setup you’ve built?
Freddie (5:15 – 7:52)
It’s something that with the scale we have, we have to be very mindful of. We want our CSMs spending as much time as possible with customers and doing the human work: understanding the objectives, helping them understand which parts of the platform are going to help them solve their problem and how that can be implemented. So anything that takes time away from that is something we need to solve for.
We understand the importance of investing in a good tool stack. For us, that is HubSpot and a customer success platform working together. Our sales team primarily use HubSpot. The CS team primarily use the CS platform. We have a really great integration between the two. CSMs can do things in the CS platform and that will reflect in HubSpot. Sales teams can do things in HubSpot that will reflect in the CS platform. So that is our control center.
We also use Sybil as our conversational analytics platform. We were using Gong and have just migrated over to Sybil, which handles all of our video and call transcriptions. There are really great AI capabilities embedded into Sybil as well, helping the teams with follow-ups and that kind of thing.
Those are our three main platforms. We also plugged Juro in as our contracting platform. The tight integration between the CS platform, HubSpot, and Juro means our renewal and contracting processes are generally more streamlined than they would otherwise be. There’s still a lot we want to do within that. It’s probably one of the biggest areas of manual CS time that isn’t adding tons of value, so there’s definitely more we want to do, but it’s in a much better place than it was.
And then we have a central Claude account. Claude is our reasoning layer. We connect all of those platforms into Claude via the various MCPs, and that handles the AI intelligence side of how we’re working, understanding insights at scale, taking action at scale. A lot of that work is being handled within Claude. We have a two-way integration, putting data into Claude and sending data out to various platforms using Claude as well.
The AI Agents the Team Has Built and Why
Irina (7:52 – 8:00)
I know that you’ve also built some dedicated AI agents. Can you reveal a bit of what was the use cases?
Freddie (8:01 – 10:38)
There are two main areas that we’ve looked at. The first is productivity: what are the things that the team are generally spending a lot of time on because they’re having to go to three or four different platforms to build a picture of a customer? Things like daily briefings, meeting briefs, meeting follow-up skills, and so on. Just things that are really driving productivity in the team and shortcutting the time it takes to build a picture of a customer, since all of that information sits across multiple sources, and shortcutting the time it takes to send a follow-up email.
The second area where we’ve found a lot of value is in terms of building best practice, but then making that best practice a living and dynamic part of how the team works. Before Claude, the way you would try to implement best practice is someone would write something in Notion or a Google Doc, the CSMs would be tasked with learning it, and then they’d have to do the mental arithmetic to apply it to the situation in front of them. Because we’re humans, there’s going to be variance. Some people are going to follow the best practice slightly better than others, some are going to do things slightly differently, and there’s going to be a bit of drift.
What Claude has allowed us to do is use agents that guide the CSMs through certain scenarios using that best practice. Things like price negotiations, downgrade defense, procurement negotiations. I can set the best practice up and then the CSMs can not only self-serve it, but follow it in a much more consistent way.
There was a phrase I heard from Whale that really stuck with me: you no longer follow best practice, best practice follows you. That perfectly describes what we’ve set up in Claude. The CSMs don’t need to remember the best practice. They have the agent helping them follow through on it.
The First Year as Head of CS: Agenda, Wins, and What’s Still on the List
Irina (10:39 – 10:52)
Awesome. Now I want to go back to you. You and your role, you stepped into a headset at Zero Height just over one year ago after nearly eight years at Kaisa.
Freddie (10:52 – 10:53)
Yes.
Irina (10:53 – 11:02)
What was your agenda for the first year and what did you manage to deliver and what’s still on the list?
Freddie (11:04 – 13:27)
Lots is still on the list, but we’ve also done a lot. I have a very agile team who are very open to trying new things, testing, learning, failing, and feeding back on what works well and equally what doesn’t. We have a very open team, so that’s really helped.
In terms of where the team were 12 months ago: really great team, really knowledgeable in the product, great relationships with customers, really good commercial ownership and good instincts already. Where I wanted to add value initially was just building a bit more structure and best practice around that.
One of the key things I identified early was that we had a bit of a one-size-fits-all approach. There was little in the way of segmentation or segment-specific engagement models. Some of our biggest customers were in effect getting the same amount of attention as the very small customers who aren’t really going to drive the NRR needle. One of the main things I wanted to do coming in was build some structure around that. As a CS team, we can’t give equal attention to everyone, so where are we best focused? For us, that is typically our large customers, because that’s where any NRR pain would be in terms of churn. But also, where are those smaller customers where we can invest some time, achieve significant growth, and improve NRR that way?
That’s a lot of what we did at the start: building structure around that, identifying those customers, building out segment-specific engagement programs, providing some standardization in terms of how we run our EBRs, introducing account planning, and tightening up forecasting. It was really just coming in and building structure around the great work the team were already doing, and helping us utilize the time we have in the best way possible.
What Changed When CS Became Accountable for Revenue
Irina (13:28 – 13:40)
Remaining on the team part, I know that you’ve put a commercial edge on CS. What changed for the team the day it became accountable for revenue, not just the support side?
Freddie (13:40 – 15:39)
I think I was very lucky, and it was maybe one of the things that drew me to zeroheight, that the team were already commercial owners before I started. So there wasn’t a huge transition in terms of not owning revenue to then owning revenue. That’s always been very important to me. I’m from an account management background, and at Kaisa the CS team were very much commercial owners. That structure being already in place was part of what appealed to me about zeroheight.
My main role has been building a bit more best practice, structure, and sales discipline around that. Three things spring to mind in terms of what was implemented that has helped the CSMs.
First is building out a sales methodology mindset. I’ve always used the SPICE methodology, so we got the team trained up on that, operationalized it in our tools, provided visibility around it, and coached around it. That was something I brought in from my more commercial background.
We’ve also tightened up our forecasting routines, built that into weekly routines, and have weekly meetings around forecasting and upsell pipeline.
It wasn’t really a case of, oh, you’re not owning revenue and now you are. It was more of an evolution of what the team were already doing. There was a willingness from them to have more commercial ownership, and they really appreciated having more structure, standardization, and coaching around it. They’ve all responded really well. They were already commercially minded to start with, and you can see that’s improved even further just by putting that structure in place.
How to Handle Procurement Pressure at Renewal
Irina (15:40 – 15:53)
Staying on that, let’s envision a scenario. When procurement comes in at the renewal, trying to cut your price, what’s the actual move? What does the conversation usually start?
And what’s worked for you?
Freddie (15:54 – 18:12)
I feel it’s happening more and more. In the age of AI, there is even more budget scrutiny. SaaS is being compared now to a $200 a month cloud subscription. Procurement, and it’s probably the case in a lot of SaaS companies, are never the day-to-day owners. They are just looking at a budget line and are incentivized to bring that budget line down.
Some of the things we try to do: first, bring the champion into it. Use the champion to explain that we are delivering value for this spend and that the value exchange is there. In the design and UX space, you’re not necessarily attached to the transaction, you support the transaction. So putting a dollar value against the work we do is challenging, but it can be done. We have our ROI calculators, we look at things like time saved.
The main thing is building that value story with procurement to justify and defend the cost, using the champion to help communicate how it’s helping the team. Moving from a pure budget line to something that the team is using to drive business value and ROI.
If it does come down to negotiation, which it very often does, anchor high. Start at the highest point and negotiate down from there. And if budget is a problem and we need to bring the cost down, ask what needs to be removed rather than just discounting for the sake of discounting. Where are there features and usage that aren’t being utilized that we can remove to bring the cost down that way? That sends a much better message than just bringing the cost down on the same product for the next five months.
The Habit That Has Shaped Everything in Freddie’s Career
Irina (18:13 – 18:24)
To wrap things up, you’ve spent close to a decade in CS. Is there a habit or a way of thinking or something you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you run CS today?
Freddie (18:25 – 20:27)
It’s probably really cliche now, but one thing that has always stuck with me, something that we were onboarded onto when I was an account manager in my first sales roles, was Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. It’s been around the block, but understanding the why is something that I’ve always tried to instill in myself and in my teams. That’s why the SPICE methodology resonates with me, because we are really trying to understand what is the pain that you’re trying to solve. Let’s understand that first before we show you how we’re going to solve it with the product, rather than going to features first and doing that textbook feature dump.
Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle is something that has resonated with me throughout my career, really trying to deeply understand the problem that our customers have that they want us to help them solve.
And alongside that, the Five Whys methodology. One thing I always push my teams to do is try and go one or two questions deeper than where you are. Something I see in a lot of CSMs is the habit of taking the first answer and moving on to our own agenda, whereas the more interesting information comes from pushing once or twice more. If you understand what the product problem is and can elevate that to how it’s impacting their workflow and their overall business objectives, you stand a much better chance of giving them a recommendation that’s going to land and that they’re going to see the value in.
The Golden Circle and the Five Whys, deeply understanding the why, is something that has really stayed with me throughout my career.
Irina (20:28 – 20:32)
Freddie, this was a really good conversation. Thanks for joining me!
Freddie (20:33 – 20:34)
Yes, thank you, Irina. Appreciate it.
Irina (20:35 – 20:42)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
