What Is the One Quality You Need Right Now to Thrive?
It’s January 2022, and for some of you, it likely feels like a fresh start and a new year. Perhaps you have new team members to onboard. With your business strategy set, your budget in place, and a new plan ready to share, you prepare for your upcoming kickoff. Now is...
The Business Model Innovation of Customer Success
We are thinking about customer success all wrong. We think it’s a function. A department. A post-sales team. The enlightened among us think customer success is a philosophy or even an organizational design principle. That’s better, but still not quite right. I mean,...
Executive Playbook: Planning and Budgeting for Customer Success in 2022
Can you believe it is November already?(!) Wasn’t it just Q1 a few weeks ago when we all said: “Hey, can you believe it has been a year since we discovered COVID” and started to work from home?”So, here we are in Q4 - and Q4 means: Budget Time! (cheers in the...
How Customers View Customer Success
When the topic of Customer Success is discussed, the conversation is usually centered around adoption, churn, customer health scores, metrics, and automation. It’s naturally framed from the vendor’s perspective. Most companies view themselves as customer-centric, but...
Engaging with Investors as a CS Leader
You just found out that you’ll be presenting at your next board meeting. This is exciting, in that it demonstrates the importance of customer success in your organization. However, it can also be nerve-wracking – you’ll be in front of your investors. What do they...
Across the Globe: Customer Success in 10 Countries
I have spent most of my career working for global companies and managing global teams. I am grateful for the opportunities and am even more grateful to work with such diverse teams. I have learned that Customer Success is not equal (nor should it be) in how it is...
What’s next for Customer Success? – Post Pandemic Business Decisions
I’ve got this old Bob Dylan song going through my head. “The times, they are a-changin”. Customer Success (CS) Leaders, like everyone else, have been experiencing significant changes as we have navigated through a global pandemic over the past 16 months. The CS...
The Intersection of Customer Success and UX
I started my early career as a UX (User Experience) Professional. If you aren’t familiar with UX, according to the International standard on ergonomics of human-system interaction, ISO 9241–210, is defined as: A person's perceptions and responses resulting from the...
Optimizing Customer Engagement through Data Infrastructure and Analytics
The first in a series, this article examines how Customer Success organizations can develop an analytics framework to help drive customer engagement and improve customer experience. Analytics is a competitive advantage that differentiates market leaders from average...
Customer Success Must Sell and be a Trusted Advisor
In customer success, it is commonly believed that one cannot sell and be a trusted advisor. “If I try to sell something to my customer, I’ll lose all that trust I’ve built up over the past several months,” we say. This is a misguided belief that does not consider the...