January 03, 2025

Episode 18: Using Customer Success to Drive Growth and Boost Retention

36 minutes

“Customer success is no longer just held accountable for adoption and NPS; CS teams now have to own a portion of the number, as we should,” says Maranda Dziekonski, the new VP of Customer Success at ID.me. In this episode, Maranda joins Alex Raymond to talk about the transformation of customer success into a strategic driver of revenue, providing insights on how CS teams can align their goals with executive priorities and board expectations.

From tracking customer success qualified leads to leveraging quarterly business reviews as more than just check-ins, Maranda explains how CS leaders can demonstrate tangible business impact. She shares strategies for identifying untapped value, creating effective ideal customer profiles, and helping teams document and achieve customer goals. How can CS leaders turn customer insights into a flywheel for growth? How can teams secure resources and prove the value of CS initiatives in a tight economic environment?

Join Alex and Maranda’s discussion as they share takeaways on how CS teams can evolve from reactive support to proactive growth partners, cementing their role as a vital part of modern business strategy.

Quotes

“Customer success is no longer just held accountable for adoption and NPS; CS teams now have to own a portion of the number, as we should.” (04:37 | Maranda Dziekonski)

“You have to earn the right to do that with your customers. You have to be solving for the problem statements that they’ve already invested in before you start looking for additional problem statements to solve for. And that’s the beautiful thing about customer success. When you do it right, you queue it up and it is a flywheel. It starts to get that momentum going and then it’s a no-brainer.” (19:17 | Maranda Dziekonski)

“The business review really is us doing a report card together on how the relationship is going. Once upon a time, you had a problem. These were the problems that you identified we were going to solve together. Here’s how we’re doing.” (20:27 | Maranda Dziekonski)

“If you tie your teams to revenue outcomes within your organizations in the same way sales does, it becomes a formula, a mathematical equation that for every CSM, we can print this amount of renewals and this amount of upsells.” (33:52 | Maranda Dziekonski)

“You have to look at your green space. How much available green space can you have? Make a projection on how much of that is actually real. How much of that can you actually help get across the finish line? What does the relationship between CS and sales look like in regards to getting that across the finish line, but tying yourself to a number, making it a mathematical equation rather than just a feel. That’s how you get a budget these days.” (34:19 | Maranda Dziekonski)

Links

Connect with Maranda Dziekonski:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marandaanndziekonski/

Connect with Alex Raymond:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afraymond/

Website: https://amplifyam.com/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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By Alex Raymond

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