I am fortunate to have known Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, for more than ten years. We first met when we were both members of a "breakfast club" of SaaS startup CEOs. We spent mornings once a month meeting over Specialty’s pastries and coffee (or McDonald’s the day I was supposed to cater and only

Last month I had the opportunity to join thousands of my fellow Customer Success professionals at Pulse 2018 in San Mateo. Besides the food and networking, I came away from the event with a clear idea of how to better serve my customers here at Liferay. Specifically, attending Pulse reinforced my belief in the power

We conducted a survey polling over 200 Customer Success Management (CSM) teams asking about their primary responsibilities. The results were incredibly insightful—and not what we expected. We found there were three types of organizations that emerged: Customer Lifecycle Focused Product/Support Focused Revenue/Sales Focused That’s not what was surprising, however. Here’s what was so interesting to

This post was co-authored by Ashvin Vaidyanathan. The Customer Journey Is evolving One of the biggest trends in Customer Success is the move to “outside in” Customer Success. Instead of only focusing on internal metrics (churn, retention, NPS, etc.), the most sophisticated companies are looking from the outside in, starting with the customer’s experience and desired

A common question we hear from customers and prospects all of the time is, "How does your Support team use Gainsight? At Gainsight, Allison Pickens, our Chief Customer Officer, owns the Customer Success Organization, which includes Onboarding, Services, Client Outcomes, Technical Account Managers, Customer Support, and Operations. Customer Success is not a siloed department but

With Nick’s foray into the rap game: And the subsequent hit single : I’m hearing the words, “Pass me the ball when the deal is done!” everywhere. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that Nick is referring to the Professional Services team repeatedly in the song. Who else gets the

In my previous post Why Product Qualified Leads Are Rapidly Being Adopted In SaaS I wrote about the main drivers that led many SaaS companies to adopt a new and more effective approach to qualify prospects. That new approach hinges on leading with the product and using feature and usage as primary lead qualification metrics.

It’s the end of the quarter and your client has been having a ton of success with your product. Your Point of Contact (PoC) is eager to share the ROI your product has delivered with the executives on their team. The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is on the calendar and all that’s left to do

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m obsessed with feedback. I’m that neurotic CEO that reads every Net Promoter Score (NPS) response (Promoter or not), responds to every Glassdoor post (good, bad, and ugly), and even engages on Twitter (speaking of ugly). Why? Partially, I do it because I believe Customer Experience (whether the “Customer”

G2 Crowd just released their 2018 G2 Crowd Grid Report for Customer Success. Download the full report here to learn more about how vendors in this space stack up and how users truly feel about them. “What is the best Customer Success software?” This is the question we posed in last year’s blog post on the 2017