Strikedeck

Antoine joins Kristen to chat about the future of Customer Success and factors shaping these developments, including shifts in the buying experience, an on-demand culture, and how Sales & CS will need to evolve to handle this, along with much more. Tune in to hear how CS will shape up by 2020!

Damien and Kristen share the perspective that CSMs should be able to elevate the conversation with customers to the executive level. This episode covers why that is so important, and how to change the conversation from a product focus to a business focus, a useful skill for everyone, but especially CSMs, to learn!

Megan Dilley, a customer success advocate who most recently served as the head of Customer Success at Chewse joins Kristen to discuss compensation for CS teams, including alternatives to variable comp, and how it all relates to human behavior.

Shane Metcalf is the VP of Customer Success at 15Five, a company that has a fantastic product that helps keep employees engaged with managers, and provides a platform for performance management and communication. Kristen was a customer of theirs for years, and 15Five is now a customer of Kristen's business, The Success League! Shane and Kristen discuss how to engage CSMs and help them build their careers in the field of Customer Success.

Joanel Bernardo, who recently transitioned to a new role at Concord Worldwide, joins Kristen to discuss how she managed customer expectations as the previous Global Manager of Customer Success, Service, and Delivery for Hortonworks. This is a foundational and very important topic, which will be explored in depth, including how to get other teams to buy in, how to train your team on this topic, and how to reset expectations if things have gone wrong.

Maheen Memon is the Director of Customer Success at Nulogy, a supply chain aggregation platform based in Toronto, Canada. Maheen really grew up in Customer Success at Nulogy, and has been there for the past 5 years. She joins Kristen to talk about how you can drive revenue through Customer Success.

Manoj has been with YayPay since they were a very early stage startup, and has served in a variety of roles – including Sales, Partnerships, and Customer Success. As they have grown, he has focused his energy on the Customer Success function, and has seen some of the issues that are caused by customers who aren’t a great fit, and how to deal with them!

Loni rejoins the podcast to cover how she's been able to configure Salesforce to fill the needs of her Customer Success team at Entelo. She's our first repeat guest on the podcast, so we're thrilled to welcome her back!

Pallavi joins Kristen to chat about her previous role at Cisco, where she was the Customer Success Lead Product Manager for Cisco’s Next Gen Firewall solution. Join us to hear more about how to approach customer success in a complex, highly technical environment that includes an on-prem solution, which is not your typical SaaS Customer Success environment!

Angie Im is the Director of Customer Success at Lumiata, a company that employs AI-powered analytics to help organizations precisely identify & manage risk at the individual level. Angie has a background at the intersection of healthcare, data, and artificial intelligence, having come out of Carnegie Mellon University and the IBM Watson healthcare team. She joins Kristen to chat about how to apply Customer Success best practices to a Data as a Service company.

Michael Fulvio, the Director of Customer Success for SeamlessDocs, joins Kristen to elaborate on how he got into Customer Success from Inside Sales, and his tips for working constructively with the Product team! Throughout his time at SeamlessDocs, he has built and maintained a positive relationship with the product team and even loops them in on customer calls! Tune in to hear how you can adopt these methods, processes, and more!

Ben joins Kristen to discuss how his background in Customer Success, with a recent role at Optimizely, as well as in entrepreneurship, co-founding two companies helped him develop a very effective, but somewhat scrappy, approach to building a health score. Whether you are just getting started and considering how to adopt health scores in your own company, or you already have an advanced CS tool you’re using, there's plenty to pick up from Ben’s approach!

Jim Kalbach, the Head of Customer Success at MURAL, and the author of Mapping Experiences, a book about how visual diagrams and blueprints can help companies optimize their customer experience, joins Kristen to discuss how MURAL maps their customer journey. Jim also shares his advice for companies that want to adopt visual approaches for their processes and customer experiences! There's lots to adopt from this one!

Evan joins Kristen to discuss how he grew from joining NoWait as an early hire, all the way through leading Sales, and eventually experiencing an acquisition by Yelp. This is great one if you want to hear how you can expand your influence at a startup and take on more responsibility, craft your own best practices, and understand how an acquisition changes things (You decide if it's for the better!)

Cam joins Kristen to share how incorporating discovery into Healthify's new customer onboarding process was transformational for their clients! Tune in for a detailed breakdown of their onboarding procedure, and how they've customized it based on what they've learned from experience.

Michael, who has a long history in both Support and Customer Success, shares how Success and Support can team up to provide an amazing experience to customers.

Boaz joins Kristen to discuss the ins and outs of customer marketing, and how to implement it from the Customer Success department. The first step? - Becoming besties with your CMO! Tune in for more prescient on the future of this partnership, and how to nurture this relationship in your own company.

Matt joins Kristen to talk about everything he's learned about building high-performing teams in Customer Success, including his criteria for determining high-performance, how to generate passion in employees, and win friends & influence people. Tune in for great personal stories, and tips & tricks to get you on the right path to success!

Thomas Enochs, VP of CS at Heptio at joins Kristen to discuss how his company decided to start with a Customer Success team instead of a Sales team! Tune in for the practical and philosophical reasoning behind the decision, and the practical implementation cornerstones, as well as an in-depth look into how Heptio operates around CS.

David joins us at the Workshop Cafe in San Francisco to chat about how Customer Success can benefit from working with Sales, and shares a tactical action plan to get things moving in a positive direction. Tune in for a great discussion including whether CSMs should be responsible for selling! Spoiler Alert - David says 'no' and Kristen says 'yes'!