Creating Customer Success

In this episode, we were joined by Kevin Scheper, who is currently Vice President, Customer Success at Drift. Kevin shared some fascinating insights on his experience leading teams in Customer Success, Professional Services, Customer Engagement, and Voice of the Customer functions. Here we discussed how CS teams should be structured to drive outcomes, as well as the role that Drift is playing in driving Conversational Marketing.

In this episode we spoke with Gemma Espineira who is an experienced Software Executive, skilled in building and leading global post sales teams (Customer Success, Success Planning, Insight and Education services) with a focus on driving gross retention, product adoption and customer advocacy. Gemma believes that customer success is a way of doing business and is the fastest path to sustainable growth for software companies. Gemma currently leads global Customer Success teams at Decibel where she built Customer Success programs supporting the company's growth from 10-150 employees and raising of $54 million in funding. Having lived in Spain and the UK, Gemma now calls Boston, USA her home.

In this episode we spoke with Sandra Guadagnoli who has over 25 years of experience in customer success, sales, financial alignment and operations. She has partnered with large, international customers to set up, implement and execute a variety of programs, products and solutions.  As well as designing and delivering the CS function within organizations to transform the organizations landscape to meet the needs of the every changing environment. Sandra is an avid New Yorker, and spends her free time traveling and exploring new food destinations with her husband and two daughters all over the world.

In this episode we were joined by Peter Cohan, author of the book, Great Demo! Peter founded Great Demo! in 2003 to address the challenge of bringing a method for consistent success to the process of creating and delivering software demonstrations. Prior to this Peter enjoyed over 20 years in senior management, business development, sales and marketing roles. This episode is one not to be missed if you want to gain practical advice on how to deliver better product demonstrations to your customers. 

In this episode we were joined by Jake Dunlap who is the CEO of Skaled Consulting, and who was previously the Vice President of Sales at Glassdoor, and Head of Sales & Customer Success at Chartbeat. Jake is shaping the future of modern sales and marketing with some of the practices that he implements across organisations. We took this opportunity to learn more about these and how to implement them across Customer Success. This episode is full of great actionable advice and new ideas. 

In this episode we spoke with Nick Mehta who is the CEO of Gainsight, the Customer Success company that helps businesses improve customer retention, accelerate expansion and capitalize on customer advocacy. Nick works with a team of nearly 700 (affectionately nicknamed) “Gainsters.” Together, they've created the customer success category that's currently taking over the SaaS business model worldwide. Nick has been named one of the Top SaaS CEOs by the Software report three years in a row, one of the Top CEOs of 2018 by Comparably, was a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and holds one of highest Glassdoor approval ratings for CEOs. Nick is the co-author of two books “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue,”  and "The Customer Success Professional's Handbook: How to Thrive in One of the World's Fastest Growing Careers-While Driving Growth For Your Company". 

In this episode, we spoke with Paul Henderson, otherwise known as the Outcomes Guy. Paul founded and runs a company called Outcome Leaders, who lead organisations to outcome-based Customer Success. Before founding Outcome Leaders, Paul Henderson led the Asia Pacific region for a mid-sized enterprise software company. He had 200 people across nine countries supporting 800 enterprise customers. For the last five years in this role, he led the design and running of an outcomes program across the whole region. He learnt what worked and what didn’t across diverse cultures. 

At the end of that five years, Paul realised that lots of other technology vendors were struggling to deliver real success for their customers, and with over five years’ experience, he thought he could help them. Paul also really cared about customers achieving the outcomes they bought software to achieve. Paul then left the software company, spent one and a half years researching and writing, and published his second book; The Outcome Generation: How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrives through True Customer Success. Paul’s practical experience and his research for the book underpin the Outcome-based Customer Success program.