Aqua Security is the largest pure-play cloud native security company.
Daryl Colborne, Director of Customer Success, shares everything you need to know about working on the Aqua Customer Success team!
During this video interview, Daryl discusses:
- Who is Aqua?
- Details on the Customer Success team
- Team Responsibilities
- The interview process
- Why should someone be excited to join?
Video Transcript
My name is Daryl Colborne, and I am the senior director of customer success over here, responsible for the Americas. I’ve been with Aqua for nearly four years at this point.
Aqua is the pioneer, we’ll say, in securing cloud-native applications. The area that we focus on as a whole is securing applications in the cloud from code to cloud and back. Our specialty is around container security in particular.
We have a global team over here. Basically, we’re broken up by the Americas (which is essentially East, Federal, and Canada), and we have a team that’s really focused on the central and west side of the Americas as well. We then cover really the rest of the world with another part of our organization.
For a Technical Account Manager (TAM), they’re focused on their book of business. They’ll have anywhere between 12 to just over 20 accounts, depending upon the nature of the ARR of the account and the attention that those accounts need.
Within a day-to-day basis, the TAM is going to be managing the journey of the customer, ensuring that the customer is achieving their desired business outcomes. Part of that, of course, means:
- Putting together a joint success plan.
- Having the Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) or Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with the customer.
- Maintaining a status cadence of calls with the customer to ensure that journey is moving in the right direction.
For the interview, it is pretty straightforward. We’d have a conversation at first with myself or somebody on my team, along with our Customer Success Architect team (usually one person from that side of the organization as well).
From there, we move forward into a scenario-based type of interview where it is expected that the candidate put together a brief presentation that involves:
- Pitching what Aqua does, kind of the value proposition.
- A scenario where we actually pose a customer scenario to the candidate, and they have to present back to us as if we’re the customer.
This helps us get a better understanding of how well a candidate is able to deliver, let’s say, a QBR to a customer. It allows us to ask questions and see how that candidate responds to those questions, both behaviorally as well as from a technical standpoint.
Aqua is a great company. We’ve had quite a bit of success all the way back to the beginning in 2015. Specifically, when looking at the Customer Success organization as a whole, it’s a very almost like a family-oriented environment. We’re very close. We get together, obviously virtually, and share quite a bit about what interests us in our free time.
At the same time, we work hard, but we leverage each other. There is never any fear to ask questions of others on the team, and that’s really how we get a lot of the answers and improve ourselves overall.
It’s a great team atmosphere and great leadership on the team. We’ve had a lot of success in helping retain our customers and grow them. So if you’re ambitious and looking to help grow our customers and retain them in an environment that supports you, this is where it’s at.
