Customer Success Talks: Real Challenges, Experts' Advice

Join us in this episode, as we explore the dynamic intersection of AI and Customer Success. Joining us today is Mickey Powell, Co-founder of Update AI and author of the ebook "Chat GPT for Customer Success".

Discover how AII, is reshaping customer success and how understanding its mechanics can enhance communication. Don't miss this insightful conversation that peels back the layers of AI in Customer Success.

Tune in now to gain a deeper understanding of this game-changing technology and how it can reshape the customer journey."

Resources:

- Ebook Chat GPT for Customer Success

- ChatGPT in CS: A Beginner's Guide to the AI Revolution- ChatGPT in CS: Super-Charge Content and Process Building

Connect with us on LinkedIn:Mickey Powell Bayron Toruno Nav Thomas

You can find us on YouTube

Some customers never tell you when you've been slow. They keep a private list of

every instance, and they bring it out when it's time to negotiate the renewal

price. Akshat Mathur has seen it happen.

Everyone says be proactive. This episode is about what that actually means day to

day: the signs that a relationship has gone transactional, the questions to ask

before you build a strategy, and why copying a proactive playbook from one

customer to another doesn't work. Two days to resolve an issue delights one

customer and loses another.

Also: why proactivity usually isn't an individual's mindset problem but a workload

problem, and why rewarding it as exceptional stops it becoming standard.

Akshat Mathur has 10 years in customer success across IT, education and fintech,

and leads a CS team.

0:00 What proactive actually means

2:22 Where the theory and the practice diverge

5:57 Value, accountability, and your personal brand

9:56 The signs you've gone transactional

13:17 The questions to ask before building a strategy

26:56 What not to do

Connect with Akshat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshat-mathur-1133535b/

Connect with Nav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navneeththomas/

Connect with Bayron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bayron-toru%C3%B1o-solano-3a9408113/

Customer Success Talks is for CSMs in their first years and anyone breaking into

customer success. New episodes every two weeks.

Follow us on:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cstalkspodcast/

Tik-Tok @customer.success6

Explore Our Podcast Website - https://cstalkspodcast.com/

#customersuccess #csm #Proactivecs #customerretention #saas

Join us in this insightful episode as we explore personal branding for CSMs. We are privileged to have two extraordinary guests: Ty LaFramboise, a former Submarine Officer in the US Navy turned Customer Success Manager, known for his strategic approach to customer success, and Sally Stoewe, the co-founder of Customer Obsessing Consulting and a champion of customer-centric cultures.

Attending in-person events can be exhausting. We asked 10 customer success experts how they handle the common event challenges.

We hit the floor at Gainsight Pulse Europe 2023 in Amsterdam to get real answers. Instead of the usual conference fluff, we grabbed 10 experts and had them pull two questions from a box: one about general customer success hurdles and one about the specific pain points we all feel when traveling.

Whether you are looking for better networking tips or just want to survive the social burnout, these insights will help you show up better at your next conference. It is a quick guide to making your time away from the office actually worth the travel.

Subscribe for weekly customer success breakdowns, and let us know in the comments: what is your biggest struggle at industry events?

0:00 Unlocking Customer Success Insights in Amsterdam

1:49 Defining Your Professional Legacy

4:38 Reframing the Difficult Customer Narrative

6:23 Human-to-Human Post-Event Follow-up

10:11 Essential Advice for Aspiring CS Professionals

14:04 Maximizing Knowledge Retention at Events

Customer Success Talks is for CSMs in their first years and anyone breaking into

customer success. New episodes every two weeks.

Follow us on:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cstalkspodcast/

Tik-Tok @customer.success6

Explore Our Podcast Website - https://cstalkspodcast.com/

#networking #in-person events #event challenges.

Jennifer Peters doesn't like the name. The Q stands for quarterly, which makes the meeting about its own cadence, about KPIs and ticking a box on the CSM's activity list. And the BR stands for business review, which raises the real question: whose business are you reviewing? Yours, or your customer's?

Her answer is to call it an impact review, and to run it differently. The customer should talk more than you do. You should not speak for more than four minutes at a stretch. You should bring no more than four or five numbers to the entire meeting. And if you don't have any data at all, you can still run it.

Jennifer is joined by Ken Kreutzer, a frontline CSM, so the advice comes from both sides: the person setting the standard and the person running the meetings.

What's inside:

- Why the name on the calendar invite changes how the customer shows up

- Why junior CSMs hide behind slide decks: "as long as you present, nobody can ask you a question you might not be prepared for"

- The four or five number limit, and why the fluffy extra slides exist to help you skip the discovery conversation

- Why your login numbers are the wrong metric, with a clear edtech example of what to measure instead

- Not "this is 12 and it needs to be 14", but "how did we get to 12, and how much of a stretch is 14?"

- The data set almost everyone forgets: notes from past meetings, support chats, whatever the previous CSM wrote down

- Reading market and company news before the call, and raising churn risk out loud instead of avoiding it

- When to benchmark a customer against your others, and when that number is just decoration on a slide

- Why in year three you cannot bring the year one deck, because by then they could run the meeting themselves

- Running a review when you have no usage data, because the customer is still being measured against something

- Where the success plan fits, and why the review is when you step out of execution and take the helicopter view

- Keeping people off their phones: the three pillars Jennifer asks questions around, why Ken uses people's names, and the difference between "do you have a strategy for next year" and "what strategy do you have for next year"

- Rapid answers on who should attend, how often, how long, and whether a review is the place to try to close an upsell

Jennifer Peters is a head of customer success with a decade of experience, strategic advisor to the CS Connect community, based in Amsterdam, and was named CS Leader of the Year in 2023. Ken Kreutzer is a frontline customer success manager who has worked as a CS specialist, CSM and senior CSM.

Chapters:

0:00 Why "QBR" is the wrong name

2:20 What an impact review changes

4:40 The training gap nobody closes

8:00 Planting the seed at kickoff so the review isn't a surprise

10:34 Why juniors hide behind the deck

12:54 What data to bring, what to leave out, and how to use benchmarks

27:24 The success plan is the backbone

29:09 How to keep people engaged for 45 minutes

Jennifer Peters - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peters-8aab2939/

Ken Kreutzer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-kreutzer-85bb7a21/

Bayron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bayron-toru%C3%B1o-solano-3a9408113/

Customer Success Talks is for CSMs in their first years and anyone breaking into

customer success. New episodes every two weeks.

Follow us on:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cstalkspodcast/

Tik-Tok @customer.success6

Explore Our Podcast Website - https://cstalkspodcast.com/

#CustomerSuccess #CSM #QBR #BusinessReview #SaaS

In today's episode, we delve into the art of communication with senior stakeholders in customer success. We're thrilled to welcome James Lawson, an award-winning Customer Success leader with over 20 years of experience.The challenges we will cover today are:- Over-Communication Pitfalls: James Lawson shares his insights on avoiding the common trap of over-communicating in the customer success industry. We explore strategies for CSMs to convey their messages effectively, ensuring they don't overshadow their customers' needs.- Engaging Senior Customers Effectively: We delve into techniques for effectively engaging with senior customers, particularly during initial meetings. We will focus on how to extract vital information from less communicative customers and build more than just relationships.- Balancing Empathy and Assertiveness: In the high-pressure world of senior stakeholder management, striking the right balance between empathy and assertiveness is crucial. Join us for an episode filled with expert advice and practical strategies to elevate your stakeholder communication skills in customer success.You can find us on Youtube Connect with us on LinkedIn:James LawsonBayron TorunoNav Thomas

"The C in CSM comes from change and success management." That's how Irina Vatafu frames the job. Your customer didn't ask to learn a new tool, change a workflow, or spend forty hours implementing something. They bought an outcome. You're the person who shows up holding the change, and you carry it in both directions: managing it for the customer, then fighting for it internally when your own teams don't want to hear the feedback.

Irina runs customer success and has spent eight years in customer-facing roles. Nav joined one company as its first CS hire into a sales-run organization. Between them they take apart the three things that break change management, and what to do instead.

What's inside:

- Irina's rule on internal pushback: never bring raw feedback to your own team. If it challenges their process or pushes them out of their comfort zone, they say no before you finish the sentence. Lead with the business impact and the numbers, never with "it makes my team's job harder"

- Nav's $100,000 moment: how a sales team that wouldn't let go of their accounts changed their mind the day a CSM landed one expansion for them

- Why change management starts in sales, not in CS, and what has to be true before the handoff

- The honeymoon problem: sales is the honeymoon, onboarding is when the customer realizes what it actually costs them in hours

- Telling customers up front how much of their time you need, and why hiding it guarantees the complaint later

- What to do when a customer won't make time for the training you built for them

- Why the job isn't teaching the software, it's embedding it in their workflow, which makes you the expert on their industry and not just your product

- Circling back to the original pain to keep people motivated when implementation gets hard

- Celebrating small milestones, and teaching your champion to show those wins internally

- The signs a customer is resisting: unfocused questions, a sharper tone, and the champion who says "I see the value but the others don't"

- Irina's intuition rule for her team, and why she tells them to act on a hunch before it becomes an escalation

Irina Vatafu is Head of Customer Success with eight years in customer-facing roles, having worked as a frontline CSM, a CS leader, and now a head of function.

Chapters:

0:00 Why change management is a CSM problem

2:21 What change management actually means

4:08 Running change on two fronts, internal and external

7:40 Never bring raw feedback to your internal team

10:41 Why change management starts in sales

15:31 The honeymoon ends at onboarding

19:18 When the customer won't make time for training

27:35 How to spot a customer who is resisting

Connect with Irina Vatafu - https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-vatafu-406b5314a/

Connect with Bayron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bayron-toru%C3%B1o-solano-3a9408113/

Connect with Nav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navneeththomas/

Customer Success Talks is for CSMs in their first years and anyone breaking into

customer success. New episodes every two weeks.

Follow us on:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cstalkspodcast/

Tik-Tok @customer.success6

Explore Our Podcast Website - https://cstalkspodcast.com/

#CustomerSuccess #CSM #ChangeManagement #CustomerOnboarding #Saas

🎙️ Explore Your CS Career 🚀

In this episode of Customer Success Talks, we're delving into the fascinating world of Customer Success careers. Join us as we tackle three crucial challenges that every CS professional faces at some point in their journey:

3. Beating Burnout: Tips for Resilience: Explore effective strategies to prevent and overcome CS burnout.

Tune in for career-transforming insights and empower your CS journey! 🌟

- STAR Method

- CS Insider

In this episode, we delve into the world of "Exploring Digital Customer Success" with our special guest, Alex Turkovic, known for his YouTube channel "Digital Customer Success." As businesses shift towards digital landscapes, customer success strategies are undergoing significant transformations. Tune in as we address key challenges, including implementing digital tools, ensuring data privacy and security, and striking a balance between automation and human touch. Discover how organizations can harness the power of digital customer success and gain insights from Alex's expertise in this realm. Join us for an insightful conversation that unravels the complexities of digital customer success strategies.

Your Hosts ⁠Bayron Toruño⁠ and ⁠Nav Thomas⁠ are also open to chatting with you!

In the fast-paced world of Customer Success, the initial months of a CSM role can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. How does one strike the right balance between learning and demonstrating immediate impact? How can a new CSM ensure they're on the right path to long-term success?

In this episode, we're joined by two seasoned professionals: Bhumika Arora, a customer success career coach with a proven track record in various CS roles, and Lara Javalyn, who brings a rich tapestry of diverse experiences to her current role as a Senior Account Manager.

Together, they unpack:

Whether you're stepping into the customer success domain for the first time or are a seasoned professional looking for fresh insights, this episode offers a goldmine of advice to set you on a path of excellence. Dive in and discover the art of transitioning from a rookie to a pro in Customer Success.

Take a look at the resource below:

- Code for Success Coaching certification: BALAUNCH39, and this is for 60% Off.

- Take a look at Bhumika's coaching program and resources, Ruffday Coaching

- What is a RACI Chart?

- For CS free learning materials and certifications check the following academics, Udemy, Aspireship, Gainsight, Planhat, and Catalyst.io

- We recommend you to join, CS Connect a Customer Success Community.

Connect with Lara Javalyn on LinkedIn.