Customer Success Conversations Podcasts

Jason is the Director of Customer Success at Goodlord, based in London.

He is an established figure in the world of Customer Success and SaaS, with over 20 years experience in technology start-ups, financial services and digital media, working across customer success, account management, support, service delivery and professional services operations, with major global brands and more niche technology startups.

Laura Fay is Head of Research at TSIA's Product Management Practice.

Laura is a customer-centric business executive with over 25 years’ experience driving enterprise solution growth via leadership roles in customer success, product management and business operations. Over the course of her career, Laura has lived the XaaS transformation journey at multiple companies and in multiple forms. Past tenures include Good Technology, Salesforce.com, E*TRADE Financial, IBM and a number of early stage companies. Ms. Fay brings her career of experience to her XaaS practice at TSIA. Laura holds a Bachelors in Computer Science (Honors) from Trinity College, Dublin University, Ireland, and an MBA from Santa Clara University, California.

Jeff Gardner has spent the last 5+ years building Intercom’s Customer Support and Success teams from himself to nearly 100 people across 3 offices and several remote locations worldwide.

As the first customer support hire (and the 4th hire in Intercom), Jeff helped define what customer support at Intercom stands for which included building and managing the hiring processes that were instrumental in growing the team from 1 to ~100. Jeff also built Intercom's first iPhone app and contributed regularly to the codebase both writing new features and fixing bugs. Prior to Intercom, Jeff worked as a software engineer for Bonobo.

Emilie is the Manager of Customer Success at Sana Commerce, a Rotterdam-based eCommerce software company.

She joined the company in March 2017 to help with the development of Sana’s newly created Customer Success team. Prior to this, Emilie lead the EMEA Customer Success team for mobile event app provider, DoubleDutch. Although she had similar roles before she discovered and fell in love with Customer Success in 2013, and has since then tried to share her passion with fellow Customer Success professionals with the creation of a Customer Success community in Amsterdam in 2015 and more recently in Rotterdam.

Katy is a Customer Success evangelist; currently Global Head of Success at Avecto but also shares her thoughts and experiences with the Customer Success network.

Her years spent working alongside customers to ensure that they successfully adopt, implement and obtain the original benefits sought from security solutions means that she is an experienced voice on every aspect of the customer journey. Katy has been with Avecto 7 years and has built their Global Customer Success department from the ground up.

Jan Schlosser is a Customer Success activist living in Switzerland and helping organisations to build their own Customer Success practices in Europe and the Middle East with his Customer Success Enablement (CSE) consultancy.

Before he started his firm as an entrepreneur a year ago, he pioneered the Customer Success project in Cisco with hiring the first Customer Success Managers that the company had employed globally about six years ago and led the fast growing and successful EMEAR (Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia) part of Cisco’s Customer Success organization as Director of Customer Success EMEAR.

In 2017 he trademarked his “Customer Success VIM framework” and made it available to accelerate time-to-success for his clients and customers to make “Customer Success” work in practice, fast, and with measurable results. Jan is a public speaker at conferences, is actively engaging with his human network, practices as an active coach, and strongly believes in the value of the human touch in Customer Success to connect people and cultures to generate business outcomes through trusted relationships and culture-aligned scalable processes. Jan holds an Executive MBA from the Robert H. Smith School at the University of Maryland and an equivalent of a Masters (Dipl-Ing.) in Electronics and Informatics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

Alan Armstrong is founder and CEO of Eigenworks, a boutique strategy and research firm that services B2B software companies ranging from series-B startups through large public companies. Eigenworks currently employs 10 people and has demonstrated 35% CAGR for the past 5 years. Eigenworks clients include industry giants such as Oracle and Cisco, mid-size companies such as Blackbaud and ReturnPath, and rocket-ship startups including Gainsight and VictorOps.

Alan is a regular contributor of articles and expertise to industry publications including Pragmatic Marketing, Gainsight's Pulse series, and the popular blog OnProductManagement, of which Alan is a co-founder. Alan speaks regularly at industry events, including Pulse (San Francisco 2015, 2016, 2017), TSIA (Las Vegas 2016), Strategy & Competitive Intelligence Professionals (Atlanta 2017), and Product Marketing Community (Toronto & San Francisco 2016, Boston 2017).

Prior to founding Eigenworks, Alan held senior director and vice president roles in three startups and participated in three successful exits including Fortiva (to Proofpoint, 2008), Wily Technology ($400M to CA in 2006), and Canada's largest self-funded exit of Sitraka to Quest Software, where Alan was Director of New Products and Innovation. Alan's experience includes Vice President-level positions covering Product Management, Business Development, and Sales.

Russell Gray started his professional career as a litigation attorney. He was drawn to the practice of law to fulfil a desire to help people solve their problems. After a few years, Russell left the practice of law to consult with large law firms on software solutions for LexisNexis. In this position, Russell played a crucial role in helping attorneys utilise technology to streamline their practice and manage their e-discovery needs. As the practice of law moved into the digital age, Russell played a crucial role in educating his customers in how to use litigation solutions to manage and grow a successful practice.

In 2016, with almost a decade of experience helping customers achieve their business goals through the use of technology, Russell transitioned this expertise to build a team of Customer Success Managers at LogicMonitor, a SaaS-based IT performance monitoring solution. At LogicMonitor Russell built a Customer Success program focused on helping customers achieve their business goals and eliminating the frustrations that come with adopting new technology.

Steve Willmott is a Customer Success Manager at Dun & Bradstreet and he joined me for the second Customer Success Conversations pod.

Steve has over 30 years experience in customer service delivery and management roles, starting out in the tourism industry with Cosmos and the London Tourist Board before moving into the corporate business information sector, working in customer support and training with Lexis Nexis before moving into service management and leadership roles at Butterworths, OneSource Information Services and Thomson Reuters.

Gerry Sweeney is the founder, CEO and CTO of Hornbill and has revolutionised his business by putting Customer Success at the heart of everything they do.

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Gerry set up Hornbill in 1995 as he felt that the helpdesk market needed a new and innovative tool to enable IT service management success. Today, more than 30,000 analysts at thousands of public and private sector organisations use Hornbill's service management solutions every day with the aim of helping people at work communicate and share information across business, geographical and cultural boundaries while simplifying the process of getting things at work done.