147. How to Scale Customer Success with AI Agents ft. LeeRon Yahalomi (Aligned)

I power up all my agents who just start getting to work with me that morning and get my day ready.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Unchurned is proudly presented by the Gainsight Podcast Network. LeeRon Yahalomi had a problem.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
She had just joined Aligned as VP of Customer Success with a team of 2 people and 100 accounts to manage. The math simply didn’t work. But instead of hiring a dozen CSMs, LeeRon did something radical. She built an army of AI agents, her tiny little workers, as she calls them, that turned her team of two into the equivalent of 15. Every morning at dawn, she fires up chatgpt, sounds the trumpet for her digital troops, and within 30 minutes, her entire day is orchestrated by artificial intelligence. This isn’t science fiction. This is happening right now. Today on Unchurned, LeeRon reveals exactly how she’s building what might be the future of customer success, where AI agents handle everything from customer handoffs to meeting prep to communication coaching.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
She’ll share her actual workflows, the specific tools she uses, and why she believes CS isn’t post sales. It’s next sales. If you’ve been wondering how AI will actually transform customer success beyond the hype, this conversation will blow your mind.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Welcome everybody. I am here with a good friend, mentor, one of the strongest leaders and most strategic and thoughtful leaders and best marketers I could go on and on. Liron, you can stop me whenever you want. That I know in customer success. Liron Yahalomi. She is the vice president of CS at Aligned, a series, a startup that is doing some really cool stuff for go to market enablement. Liron, thank you so much for joining us again.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Thank you for having me again. How cool is that? I get to be a returner.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, we’re at like 150 episodes now. Somehow like we blinked and we became a real podcast and now we’re under the Gainsight podcast network. That sounds so fancy.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
It is.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So here we are. Tell us about Aligned.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Align is a collaboration platform that connects sellers and buyers into one shared space. Think rooms, mutual action plans where both sides have visibility into accountability, clarity and how we move forward with deals. But also it’s a great place for customer success and onboarding teams to carry on what is done during the sale and continue moving forward to drive expansions, increase renewals. And it’s a better way for companies to work together closer and faster. For smoother onboarding, for better experiences for buyers, all in one place.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Amazing. You read that, you read that from a script? That’s okay. I’m calling you out right now, but because you’re, you’re so elegant in your words. But I could tell you were reading that.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
This is week eight for me. I get to read my pitch. Call me when I’m here for eight years.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, that’s fine. That’s. Listen, I was still, I’m still reading my, my pitches. I just bought a teleprompter the other week. Right. So I’m, I, I see. So like that’s the ultimate cheat. So here I am calling the Kelly.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I can do that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, it’s great. It’s great. I think people can tell, but it’s fine. So, so you’re again, you’re one of the strongest leaders. You focused on this. You’ve nestled yourself in the growth, early stage, even, even sometimes before growth, like this early to growth stage phase of startups, of companies. You’ve stayed away from enterprise. Why?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I’ll give you the honest truth that probably will. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I’m an architecter, I’m a problem solver, I’m a chaos organizer. I like building, I like solving problems and early stage growth companies where I get to do that in the enterprise, I get to do less of that. It feeds me. I get up every morning super energized to do the work that I do. And I found that in early stage startups that’s every day, every day is different. Every day I solve another complex problem. I get to architect processes and infrastructure that will be long lasting and others can build on top of that later on.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
But for me, that’s legacy. I’m looking to do that over and over again, which apparently is, I’ve heard a few folks say to me is kind of insane. But that’s okay.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s DNA. You can’t get rid of it. Right. It’s your makeup.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah, yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, so you like that messy middle. There’s, there’s a part that in the very beginning is very exciting. Everything’s perfect. We’re going to become a deck of corn. And then, you know, and then there’s, then there’s the trough of sorrow and then there’s the messy middle and then there’s scaling. So I think you like the messy middle. What’s, what’s messy right now at aligned. In other.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Another way to put that is what are the big rocks right now? That you’re focused on at Aligned.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I have what I call rich people problems. I have too many bank accounts and too much money. It’s really hard for me to count. We’re growing so fast, faster than we thought we would. And therefore I have to build an infrastructure for customer success that not only scales over time, but scales right now and scales historically and then into the future. So, so you, you’ve known cs, you come in, you take an organization, someone says, hey, we’ll add about 15 new customers this month. What if it’s 35? And oops, can you handle 35? Hey, and next month it’s another 60. And all of a sudden what you thought would work is actually being stretched to capacity.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
And so I’m, I’m having.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’ve experienced that just in your first couple months. You’ve, you’re, you’re outpacing the plan.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
We’re outpacing plan. And so the things that I thought I could do, I now am stress testing them in ways that I didn’t even think possible. And I’m excited to do it. It challenges me every day to think differently about how I think about hiring, how I think about systems, how I think about process, how I think about the customer journey, which at the core, that’s everything that I do. I want our customers to feel. It’s not even a five star experience. I try to design 11 star experiences out of this world. Something you’ve never experienced, experienced before.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
How can you create that? Because you’ve experienced a five star experience. Maybe you’ve even flown first class. You know what that’s like.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’ve been a startup founder for five years, so.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
No, you fly southwest.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You know, on the C list.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah, row 31 by the bathroom. Yeah, but you’ve seen what first class looks like. What if I told you that there is even better than first class and I was able to showcase that. That’s my challenge. That’s what I want to build in every organization I’m in.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re building the Dubai hotel, the one with the helipad, the seven star hotel of startups. Okay, so not intended, but perfect segue. How does one keep up when their company outpaces the plan and they have these growing pains?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
You have to be agile, elastic. You have to be able to move fast and constantly test, let go of any anchor that’s ever held you before.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Where I was going was just two letters later on.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Two letters?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I think it starts with an A and with an I.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yes, yes. With nothing.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Use AI. There’s nothing in between. I have to. In the past you would build a capacity model and a spreadsheet and think about how you hire and slice and dice. Today I have to do it with AI. I can hire an AI agent in five minutes into my team to start doing work and help my team and I do the work that needs to get done without having to go post a JD and interview and references. So I put AI agents to work with us in order to create that scalability.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So this is why I wanted to have you on the show. You and I are friends. We were catching up last month or a couple weeks ago and you were just telling me about how your building process for your team and everything was.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All AI and agentic.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And then I said, okay, stop right there, right there. Let’s pin this conversation, let’s get you on the podcast because we need to, people need to hear your story here because I know whatever you do also is going to be done at a level of excellence. You’ve been working, this is your self attestation to me earlier. You’ve been working with LLMs for 17 years, AI for 10 years and Agentic for 4 years. So the AI for 10 years, I buy the LLMs for 17 years. Feels to me like that’s hyperbole. And agentic for four years. I mean I thought agentic was only, you know, the year of 2025.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So tell us more, elaborate on your experience here and then I want to talk about the actual practice right now.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah, so when I started my career in startup, we built LLMs and that’s how we used information, we fed it. That’s how we build products, that’s how we build everything. At the end of the day, there’s still LLMs that are working out there. They’re not gone, they’re still part of some of the process. AI has been an unlocker. Like think of it as a key that opened a door to new possibilities over the last 10 years. But in the last four it has really become something so unique that allows you to, I don’t know, even say it as a. It’s a magic wand that I get to wave and all of a sudden I can have a team of 15.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
And this morning I woke up and there were two of us. Agentic AI in general, generative AI helps us build a team that can outperform any human team. I have today because there’s zero ramp. They go to work the minute I need them. I can deploy as many of them as I want at A much lower cost than I had to do before. And they’re constantly learning? In some cases, yes. I’m still teaching them, I’m still training them. I won’t tell you lies.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I retrain my agents every week based on the work they did last week, based on what I saw, what I liked, what I didn’t like. I still have to train them. I like to tell folks that my AI agents are like toddlers. I have to constantly tell them what’s right, what’s wrong, and then help them set that gauge. But that’s my job as a parent.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So I view them as part of what I build and part of the work that I do. And when I joined Allian, I had told you this. When we started, it was myself and one other person, and we had a hundred accounts we needed to take care of. You can’t do that with two people. So my solution was, on day two, to start building AI agents that can help us by solving some of the problems that we had. How can they help us communicate better, prep better, show up better to meetings, and elevate the level of service we gave to customers so they didn’t feel like they were one of however many, but they felt like they were the one and only.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So I want to go deep into those agents, those flows that you’ve built and are still building. What I heard from your previous comment a second ago was that your magic wand, you wake up in the morning and you have a team of. You’ve turned 15 people into two. So on a serious note, two into 15. Oh, you’ve turned two into 15. Ah, okay. The leverage that you get from AI. I thought that Liron’s magic wand was job elimination of 13, folks.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, good. And I was going to ask you a little bit philosophically if you have thoughts around some of the fear that’s out there from folks that are maybe a little bit less tenured in their career around job replacement through AI. Any comments on that?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I’ve been saying this for years. I stole it from someone. This is not mine. AI will not replace you, but will replace you is a person who is willing to use AI. I truly do not understand why we are shaming or telling people that using AI is wrong. As I was saying earlier, like, did you use Google today? I don’t recall anyone shaming you. Wasn’t there a meme of, like, did you Google that first before coming to me? No one would expect you to do anything without using Google. I wouldn’t expect you to drive from New York to come see me in Seattle without using a GPS and expect you to stop at a gas station and pick up a map.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
You have tools that are available to you. You should be using them to better yourself. AI is your assistant. It gives you superpowers. It enables you to do things better and faster or do the things you don’t like to do or do the things you don’t have time to do. Not using it is no longer an option. It’s almost like saying, I’m going to do my SaaS work today on a typewriter and a fax machine and a dove, and I’m going to send you messages by smoke. We have to use the tools that we have, and not using AI should not be an option anymore.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds crass, but the only people that should be concerned are the people that are not going to learn how to use it, make the most out of it, which actually could give an advantage to a slightly younger generation in their career who have grown up to be, you know, native digital and native AI savvy. So. But I think that that’s a call to caution for folks that have more years of experience that you gotta. You gotta embrace.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Right.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
We have to embrace. We have to learn.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yep.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, okay, you’ve got these workflows. I don’t know if it’s five, six, seven of them. These agents. Tell us about them. Let’s go. I want to go through these as much as you feel comfortable, one by one, because I want to expose these use cases to the world listening here, what they could be doing in their practice.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So I’ll give you a couple of example. The first agent that I built was an agent that. Their job was to help myself and the other CSMs on the team to better prepare when accounts are being handed off from the ae. So that agent ingested the notes from the ae. The last few calls that the AAE had with the. With the Prospect now customer, it went out into the web and searched about that company. What do they do? Who are their competitors? How do they position themselves? Who do they serve? How do we think about setting them up for success based on all the information we collected? So we show up on our kickoff call not with a deck, but with knowledge about who you are, what market you’re working in, what are some of the forces pulling and pushing? Where can we help you leverage our platform to position yourself in a better place than your competitors? So we show up to that first kickoff ready to success you into a better position than you Were and that type of work that a CSM does and hopefully they do, that’s hours of preparation. That’s hours of going to collect information, reading, listening.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
But if you use an AI agent, it can summarize all of that for you into a one pager, take that out and build a project plan, build your talking points, get you an intro email to show that you’re coming prepared, knowing all these things and guiding you. So that’s the first agent I built.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are the, what are the most common data sources for that AE to CS agent?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So we use a handoff doc today that just gives a little bit of an overview from the ae. I use all the call recordings that we have and I use Google News to learn about the company. Any information out there, 10k reports just to help me understand where they’re at, where are they, how do they position.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Themselves and are you plugging the call recordings directly into what platform is running this particular agent?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So today I’m working with ChatGPT. I just put everything into it and then feed it information. Not fully automated today. I like to build agents and then make sure that they work right. Correct them before connecting them to other platforms just in case.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you take the transcript you do. I’m trying to get very tactical here. Right. For again for people listening.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I download transcript. Yeah, download transcripts and feed it all into the GPT. So for example, you can zip download everything and just feed it into it. It’s not capable of listening to calls on different call recordings and third party. So just download it and then feed it into and say take all this information, everything you can tell me about this customer to get me prepared and it puts out all that output for you, downloads.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So call transcripts. It sounds like there’s manual note taking just like your own subjective notes. Sorry, what were some of the other.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
CRM data Google news that you can find, 10K reports that you can download about the companies. Anything I can find out there in the interwebs of Google and others.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I have like this vision in my mind of you as like a witch. I don’t want to call you a witch on air, but like, but this vision of like this is all going into your cauldron, all of these ingredients and then you’re like magically stirring this pot, I guess. A wizard. A wizard.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I will be a wizard or a witch. I have no problem being a witch.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, well I know you’re tough but. And then out come the magical recipes, right, for this engine. Okay. So AI, excuse me, AE to CS agent. Anything else to share there?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Any.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Any. Any outcomes or other anecdotes or should we move on to the next agent?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I can just say that as someone who hates decks, this has made it possible for us to have kickoff calls without presenting a deck to you. I can actually come with a conversation. I can come with recommendation. I can come with a plan. And you’re not having to sit through another call of like, yay, let’s kick off this relationship.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I don’t get. I don’t get that. Because you’re like, you can still have a deck for all the output of that stuff that you put into it.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Absolutely. As a result of it, I’d love to have a conversation with you about the things we’re doing versus coming with prepared documentation for you to walk through.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I see. This helps you prepare to then make those conversations more strategic and more valuable. So it’s not more of just like a here collaborative.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Next agent.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
My other favorite agent is the one that prepares me for meetings. So I have it connected to my calendar. I feed it every. Every time I have a call with a customer, I feed it that call recording it looks at my calendar and says, hey, Liron, good morning. Here are the calls you have today. Here’s what you spoke to them about last time. Here are some action items that were left. Here’s where you should pick up the conversation.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
And based on what we know, here’s what you should discuss this time. It helps me get ready for my day. It helps me get ready for my conversations. I don’t have to go back and look at my notes. I basically get a morning newsletter that preps me for my workday and the calls I’m going to have with customers. So I walk in, even if it’s back to back, I’m ready to jump straight in into, hey, Josh, here’s what we covered last time. Here’s what was left over. Here’s what I’d love to pick up so I can jump straight in without having to block in between.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
30 minutes to prep for a call. Go pull everything out so that one gives me more speed and agility.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And that’s also being run off of OpenAI ChatGPT?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Does it send you an email in the mornings? Like, did you log into. Has ChatGPT become your new homepage that you log into? Our. You know how.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yes. I start my day on ChatGPT. Every morning I fire it up and say, let’s get ready for work. I start my day about 30 minutes before I actually jump into meetings. I power up all my agents who just start getting to work with me that morning and get my day ready, get my preparations, my call notes, set me up for success for that day. My agents are not currently connected to every single platform we have internally, so they’re not doing it on their own. I do have to fire them up, but why not sound off the trumpet and get my troops and my army of tiny little workers going?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you open. You open ChatGPT and you press kind of go, and then it runs all those. And while you’re brewing your coffee, then you come back and you’ve got your. Your day ready for you.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yes.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
I love that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I was just in a call and I’m. I’m not supposed to confess to these things, Right. But this morning I. I’m side swiveling and I’m looking, I’m like, what does this company do? And who is this guy? What’s his or her role, you know, during the meeting? And I’m sure there’s folks out there that are listening. Yep, we all do that.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
But this is eliminating where you’re from, pulling up LinkedIn, pulling up on stuff. This preps everything for me.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Which allows you to have a much more constructive conversation to drive better outcomes.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
And you come into those calls at ease. You’re prepared, you’re not scrambling last minute trying to figure out, where am I at? And in cs, that’s a lot of what happens. We run from one thing to the other, and you’re hoping that you can just show up and things will be fine. But it shows when you’re unprepared. So I’d like to be there ready for you.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You have a communication agent.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yes, my communication agent helps me a lot with just communicating overall sometimes. I shared this the other day with a colleague. I said, sometimes I feel granola. And she said, what’s granola? I’m like, I feel crunchy, like I’m upset about something. She’s like, I think granola, and I think yummy. And I’m like, I’m not a soft brownie, though that day I’m just a little bit crunchy. Could hurt your gums. And so my communication agents just help soften it.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
If I’m upset or I’m running or I’m rushed. I know that my communication style often is more abrupt, more transparent, more in your face. And not everybody appreciates that or values that. And so it helps soften me, especially on those days when I’m granola. Helps me recraft those email messages helps me recraft situations that are tough. Whether it’s a tough email from a customer or I need to disassemble a complex situation and I feel like I can hear myself very defensive. I’ll have my communication agent read it, suggest different things and kind of give me options into what I want to then copy, paste and hit send.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is that an agent or is that just you’re copy pasting your email draft into into.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
It’s a full agent that I have trained. So I have downloaded here’s all the secrets. I’ve downloaded my disc personality. I have downloaded everything I could tell about myself. I literally wrote like here’s my background, here’s how I speak, here’s how I communicate. Here are some sample examples of how I write and here are examples of people that I wish I could write like them. I want to be more like that. So it knows a lot about me, but it also knows about what I want to be and.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
And what I consider the right approach in the middle. So it has that baseline of like here’s who Liron is sometimes that’s okay and here’s what she wants to sound more like. And then it helps me find the middle.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love that you still have to plug in the data manually to get the output right. You’re not. There’s no plumbing here. That’s like passing all of your email drafts through through before it sends out. No, that would be cool.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
That would be cool at some point. But I think even myself as someone who works with AI all the time, I still want to read it before it. Autom they sense just in case. It’s not a lack of trust, it’s just. It’s a control. You want to know what you is being sent on your behalf. So I want to see it and maybe I could have written it better. Maybe I’m.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Maybe I’m a staff Brownlee today.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Orchestration Orchestration.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
That’s probably my favorite agents. Once I can get it all into the right place and doing all the things so there’s so much going on in customer success. Or the Orchestrator agent monitors our platform and it goes beyond usage of who logged in but what did they actually do when they were in there? It connects to our CRM. So it gives you information of what is happening in the CRM. It listens to the calls and listen for sentiment. More than anything in the call, it listens for sentiment. Red flags things for you to watch. It looks for missing or misaligned data and creates flags for you.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So the things that you’re missing because you’re so focused on listening to Josh right now, but he actually dropped two nuggets that you left behind that weren’t in the CRM or I’m missing in the platform today, and it raises that flag for you. And I called it the Orchestrator, because I hope that when all those platforms work well together, it creates beautiful music and you’re not off key in one of them. But we’re always off key. You’re missing data in one point or you haven’t updated in another, or the delta of the integration just isn’t there. There’s always something missing. But if we had an Orchestrator that could just bring up all CS systems into one place and help you see it holistically and raise those flags early, you could be so much more proactive with the customer. And it almost. I think the way I see it is, allows me to be in the CRM, in the call, recording, in the conversation with you, in the platform, all at the same time, while I’m just me.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
That’s why I think about my AI agents. They’re just mini mes. So I have a lot of minions and they come with me every day and Kevin does one thing and Bob does another, but they’re working with me while I’m doing work. They’re not replacing me. I’m not replaceable, but they’re helping me become better.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Nice call out to the names in Despicable Me. I think those are the names of the minions, right?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Just the two main.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, Great. Great movie. So you’re the conductor in this orchestra. How are you building out this orchestration layer? This is also a chatgpt thing.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So today it’s a chatgpt as I’m feeding it. My goal is eventually to connect everything with NA8 into our platforms. And that is something that while I’m capable of building these agents and training them, that is a little bit beyond my capabilities today. Maybe it’s superpowers I develop in the future, but I’m working in close collaboration with our head of technology, our engineering teams. My goal is to I build these agents first and then test them. I may be AI native more than others on my team, so I’m intrigued in seeing how I work with them and what I’m getting out of them. What kinks does my team find until they’re in a really good place? I don’t think they’re ready to be connected to actual platforms and do the work on their own. But my Goal is to get there in the next few months.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so you’re planning on using N8N for those listening out there, which is a growing rising platform for, for agentic orchestration, kind of a build at your own retail level. But yeah, it sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time on this. I mean, are you, where do, how do you have the time to set these things up? Because that’s the other issue that comes up when you talk to leaders, especially that want to experiment with AI. Everybody claims not to have the time to be able to focus on it. So how do you create this environment for yourself to set all these things up?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Prioritization. It’s not an option. So every leader has a billion things out there that they have to do. We all do. But I know that if I don’t solve this and I know what the solution is, if I don’t spend time and energy into building it, then we won’t get beyond, we’ll just remain in the same problem. So I prioritize ruthlessly to make this work work. In my first two weeks, I took the entire time of day that I had. There were learning moments what I had to learn about the platform.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
There were hours where I was meeting with customers to learn them and there were hours that are dedicated to building my team. This is my team. So the same way I spend time on one on ones with my human team members, I spend one on one time with my agents, training them. They are part of our team and so it’s just part of what I do and part of the work that I think is, it’s part of my day to day actually.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s interesting, we think as managers that, you know, we obviously are accustomed with spending time with our team one on ones to help, to help them ultimately to help the business. Right. To help them perform better. It’s also, you know, for the humanistic side of things too. But in many ways you’re right, there is an equivalent we, there is this new normal coming where we’ll start to understand that team managers are not only people managers, but they’re agent managers. And yeah, maybe for the humans you’re focused on more the human side of managing them, but for the agents, it’s more on these calibration types of opportunities.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Absolutely.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think we nail all the agent stuff. They’ve given some really concrete examples for people to follow here. What’s your take on where customer success as a market is heading today in or outside of this new world of agents?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
So let me climb a Little soapbox. So I just, I get just that much, a little bit taller. But I’ve been saying this for a while. Customer success needs to come out from behind the scenes into the front of the stage. Customer success is not post sales. It is the next sale. So your sales team closed the deal and now you have to reclose it. At every given moment, at every single interaction, CS has an obligation to continue the sale, continue to grow the account, develop more and deeper relationship, expand the account.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
They are part of the go to market engine. They’re not sitting remotely somewhere being a cost center. They’re a revenue generating center. They are a revenue generating engine and if we treat them as that, then we treat them with the right tools, the right resources, the right, the right seat at a table. I think cs, I’ve seen this, I started seeing it around Covid time when we couldn’t sell to people. And the only way to keep companies alive was the current customers you had. And so the importance of CS really stepped up. And those customer success teams who truly really had customer success, and by that I mean it’s not that they were successful.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
The customers were more successful because they used their platforms. Those were the teams that accelerated. Those were the companies who were able to maintain their livelihood, who were able to jump ahead because their customer relationships and their customer success teams were the ones keeping the lights on when you couldn’t bring in new deals. I read an article the other week from Emergence and It stated that 58% of expand of sales coming up right now are driven by expansion. That is a CS and sales combined engine that needs to work together. In some companies you’re early on and your sales team still does expansion and larger companies, your CS team is the one in charge of expansion. If 50%, if expansion drives 58% of growth and you’re not investing in your CS organization, what is wrong with you? Why? Why are you leaving that much growth on the table or ignoring it or even torching it by not investing in it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sometimes words are just words, but sometimes words are incredibly powerful. And what stuck out to me there is you mentioned it’s not post sales, it’s next sales.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Next sale.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love that. I love that. I want to start a movement to do it. You change the name, right?

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Change the name. We’re not post sales. We are the next sale. They either came in with a certain amount of users or one use case. And our job is to continue selling that use case and verify that. Like you’re right. And here’s the value and I’m selling you on that and I’m delivering on those but also add new use cases and add new users and expand and grow with you or just the next sale. It never ends the sales cycle.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
The sales funnel never ends, just restarts. I see CS is just another sales funnel. We’ve got discovery validation negotiation. It goes into CS as well. It should be a circle instead of a funnel.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Maybe we’re going to leave on that note. So for this episode will be memorialized from here on out and you will forever be known as the person, the leader who coined next sales. Next sales. Yes, the new process of SaaS companies and beyond SaaS as well. Okay thank you lira and hopefully we can have you back fairly soon and we can hear about all the delightful growing pains and how you’ve addressed them as you guys continue to soar. Wishing you the very best of luck.

LeeRon Yahalomi :
Thank you so much for having me again.