Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Account Managers need to know everything about their customers that there is to know– in real time and all the time. With the constant flow of new customer data to and from different systems, it is a sisyphean task to keep rolling that data management rock up the hill (so

Tracey Bozzelli is the Director of Competitive initiatives at Blackbaud. Blackbaud, a $2 billion software and service organization, is a world-class supplier of software tools, financial services and fund raising/gift management consulting expertise to non-profit organizations around the world. Blackbaud has an active customer success program. In late October 2015, Tracey participated in a conversation

You are a sales rep working for an innovative organization with a great product. You’ve just been involved in pitching an opportunity to new prospect. They turned you down in favor of a competitor’s product. Your sales manager asks you what went on – why did we not win this business? You answer to the

Modern businesses rely on a vastly different methodology for creating revenue than their past counterparts. While the basic tenets of acquiring new customers, perfecting product and ensuring customer experience still remain true, the relationship with your customer means more today than it ever has. This is due to the change in many business models into

Do you ever feel that you need to do more in less time? With the recent growth of Customer Success, this pressure for efficiency is making a significant appearance in the daily lives of Customer Success Managers. The obvious starting point for improvement is to automate a large volume of the interactions a CSM conducts

Have you ever called a customer and been asked a question that caught you off guard? Has any customer issue or opportunity surprised you recently? At Gainsight, we dislike such surprises. In fact, we dislike them so much that we have designed Gainsight to ensure that you never get blindsided by any of them. As

In customer success, we often hear the words: “retention, upsell, churn, renew, etc”. Some of these are opportunities, while others areas risks, but all of these have one thing in common – your business needs to have a strategy to handle them. You need a plan to quickly capitalize on the opportunities and minimize the

When you read the stories of the great entrepreneurs – Jobs, Musk, Edison, Ford and others, there is frequently a common theme. These people got a lot of no’s. Their hearts were broken many times before they were anointed as heroes. And while most of us may never ascend to those heights, anyone trying to

Have you ever been the forward scout for your team? There have been many famous ones written about in history. Joshua and Caleb scouting out the Promised Land for example. Lewis and Clark were forward scouts, too, for all of America, but there were probably also forward scouts within their traveling team helping them to

No matter how confident we all are as business leaders, if you’re like me, you constantly wonder if you’re on the right track compared to your peers. Unfortunately most of us don’t have a mirror on the wall to tell us how great we are. In Customer Success, in particular, one of the most common