I have to admit, I’ve had my fair share of career crushes throughout my professional life. When I dreamed of becoming an investment banker, Michael Lewis was a major influence. When I pivoted that dream into a short-lived attempt to join the Pittsburgh Steelers, “Mean” Joe Greene was whom I looked to for inspiration. That
I had the opportunity to sit down with Neil Jain of Waterstone Management Group and ask him about the challenges and opportunities in bringing Customer Success to Hardware companies. Q. What are some of the challenges facing hardware companies today? A. We are seeing a few key challenges in hardware. First, hardware is becoming a commodity,
Allison introduced this framework for managing risks at Gainsight’s annual Pulse conference earlier this month. We’re making it available to the community for the first time in this blog post. In the past, we introduced the concept of Code Red as an approach to tackling risk in our customer base. In our original Code Red
The hardware ecosystem is complex in many ways. Thousands of companies build and assemble hardware components to support networking, communications, storage, data management, electronics, and countless other technologies that the world relies on everyday. Even more complicated is how and to whom hardware companies sell their products. Depending on their business model and the nature
Salesforce just announced that they have passed 3 million app installs from the AppExchange, the world’s largest marketplace of business applications. Congratulations – an impressive milestone! No other company in the world – SaaS, Cloud, or otherwise – has had such a profound impact on the way the world does business; delivering cloud-based solutions that
Customer Success is the new trend worldwide and many SaaS and non-SaaS companies are now discovering the challenge of global expansion. This is brand new territory for most businesses, with very little guidance and expertise available. I have been working for many years now successfully building and developing Customer Success teams across Europe and I
Customer success managers and leaders: Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? “The customer was upset during our kick-off because we asked them the same questions that the sales team had asked them before close.” “I’m not sure what Services actually implemented for this customer.” “No one scheduled the kick-off meeting yet; I
Everyone in the Customer Success world is primarily focused on – in one form or another – monitoring and managing Customer Health. This is the one that everybody is talking about and thinking about. Everyone understands how important this is. And there’s a lot of information about customers that can help you understand and manage
In the Customer Success world, the idea of handing-off a customer from one group to another is a big deal. Whether it’s from Sales to Onboarding or Onboarding to Customer Success, these handoffs can make or break the customer’s experience with you. I’ve even written about the less-often-discussed nailing of handoffs between Customer Success Managers (CSMs)
Customer Success is not just an organization, but is really a philosophy and requires the whole company to be behind it. If that isn’t true, then the odds of being successful at this are pretty small because like most organizations, Customer Success does not live on an island. Retention truly depends on every part of