According to Ari Hoffman, customer success is kind of like being a professional sports coach. The coach's number 1 priority isn't to fill the stands with fans, help the team get new sponsors, or worry about the price of food at the concession stands — it's to help the players win games. Help the players succeed on the field (or court, or wherever they play).

 

It's just one of the reasons why Hoffman, Customer Fanatic at MindTouch, spends his days listening to and sharing stories with customers, colleagues, other people in the tech industry, and even his friends and family. He wants to hear it all because he's curious about the stories that "engage people and raise the bar for everyone."

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This episode is so good we had to re-air it. Plus, we are going to experiment a little by going back into the archives once in a while and pull out some gems and bring them back to the front of the line. We'd love to know what you think. One of these gems is of course the episode with Catherine Blackmore, GVP of Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Three things we learned from Catherine are 1) education is a critical part of customer success. You cannot help customers be successful unless you help them learn. 2) Obviously, education is not all of it. With any software project, people have to change how they work. We have to help our customers through that change. Change management is part of customer success too. 3) There seems to be an endless debate about who should own the customer. Lost in this debate is how and whether sales and service is converging. Some signs say, "Yes." This is also a fun episode because we reminisced about stealing one of Catherine's ideas, which by the way, led to two new customer. Maybe you should steal this idea, too. We hope you like the re-broadcasting idea. Tell us if you do on Twitter using #HelpingSells. 

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The first thing they did is insult me by telling me my data sucks. Actually, Your Data Sucks: Join the Club was the name of their talk at the 2018 Gainsight Pulse Conference. Patrick Lawler, Director of Customer Success and Services and Dave Derington, Director of User Enablement both from Azuqua join Helping Sells Radio to help us understand how we can use data to help our teams help our customers. Better. That sounds like a worthy endeavor because figuring out how to deliver customer success in a scalable way cab help our companies grow. 

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It is always a treat when guests come into the studio because in-person interviews are so much more conversational and, therefore, better. Jessica McGlory, director of paid social at the online marketing firm Jellyfish, joins us to talk about how paid media can be helpful. Most of us don't think about paid online social advertising as being helpful, but when it is targeted the right way, contains the right message, and offers something useful, it can definitely help people achieve outcomes.

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What would you do if your CEO came to you and said, “We need to 10X the number of customers who complete our training in the next twelve months. Product use is down and churn is up. I need your plan by next Thursday.” After your panic attack recedes, you probably say to yourself, “How am I going to do that?” If you can relate to this exchange, then keep calm and attend this session. In it you will learn how to be ready for that challenge with customer education strategy design.    In this special recording of a Gainsight Pulse Talk, Bill Cushard shows you how to design your customer education strategy and actually start working on it. Right here in this session.   If you are responsible for on-boarding or helping customers learn your product, this session is for you. 

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CSO Insights found that of companies that push through a CRM software implementation, less than 40% of organizations achieve full scales end-user adoption. That is what Brandon Bruce, COO and Co-founder of Cirrus Insight, tells us in this episode of Helping Sells Radio. We talk about why software projects fail and how to turn them around. He details all of this in his book, "The Shelfware Problem: A Guide to CRM Adoption."

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We spend all of our time on Helping Sells Radio talking about how to help customers achieve outcomes. In this episode, we're talking about how to help employees be their best at work. Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Atlassian, talks about how creating inclusive workplaces helps teams perform at higher levels and do the best work of their lives.

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Sangram Vajre, CMO and Co-Founder of Terminus, joined Helping Sells Radio to discuss how to drive revenue through account-based marketing. Sangram is also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies and is the mastermind behind #FlipMyFunnel, which is on a mission to build the largest and most connected vendor-agnostic community of B2B marketing, sales and customer success professionals by leading them to become masters of their craft and heroes in their organization. 

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Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss her book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Her research has shown that when professional services firms bring multiple teams in to help clients achieve outcomes beyond the original engagement, in many cases without billing some of the early discovery work by the additional teams, that the firm can actually increase revenue per client. This has staggering implications for customer success and professional services teams who should focus on helping customers beyond the singular reason they were hired in the first place. 

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In this episode we spoke to Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword, a leading content marketing platform and services company. Tom is a longtime entrepreneur and co-author of the book Storynomics: Story-drive Marketing in the Post-Advertising World. Tom joined us to discuss approaches to marketing and selling software in a post-advertising world.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit helpingsells.substack.com