About the Episode

We really enjoyed talking with Adam Joseph this week about his long career in Customer Success, before it was even called that! He shared an employee's perspective on the human-first culture at Gainsight (see Episode 13 for the CEO's perspective...) and the learnings he's transformed into his own nurturing and relationship-based leadership style.

There's also a special cameo appearance from his six year-young puppy :-) and a moment of mutual appreciation and love between Kellie and Adam (extending the love to the rest of the Gainsight crew too!)

Take a listen and let us know your thoughts on the topics discussed and insights shared.

About Adam

Adam Joseph is the Regional Vice President of Customer Success, EMEA at Gainsight. In this role, Adam oversees the delivery of exceptional customer experience and creates long-term value for all of Gainsight’s European customers. Adam brings a wealth of leadership and customer success experience, having previously held the role of Director of Client Services at ChannelAdvisor and the VP Customer Success at Avention.

Adam also founded CSM Insight in 2017, a consultancy service that helps organizations build, manage and scale their customer success operations and deliver voice of the customer programmes.  He is an active thought leader in the customer success space, having created the resource hub CustomerSuccessManager.com. Adam has created and hosted two podcast series in Customer Success (Gainsight Gamechangers and Customer Success Conversations), where he interviews post-sales executives about what it takes to succeed, the challenges they have overcome, and emerging trends within Customer Success.

How to connect with Adam and their initiatives

LinkedIn: Adam Joseph

Website: Customer Success Manager

About the Episode

Another natural, authentic and insightful conversation on this week's podcast episode.

Our host, Kellie Lucas, chats with Kristi Faltorusso about empowered accountability, servant leadership, working in trusted partnerships with mutual respect alongside our people as well as our customers.

They talk about the power and importance of our words and actions, as leaders, as every experience provides the basis for learned behaviour, for someone out there, even if you don't realise they are taking notice.

They talk about being in the people business, doing good work for real people.

As Kristi says: Being in the people business is how you drive a business.

We couldn't agree more Kristi!

The best thing about this epsiode? They had plenty of laughs and shared words of affirmation sprinkled in amongst the wisdom...

Take a listen and let us know your thoughts on the topics discussed and insights shared.

About Kristi

Kristi Faltorusso is an award winning Customer Success Executive with experience in building, scaling and transforming Customer Success organizations at hyper-growth B2B SaaS companies. Over the past decade she's helped many companies redefine Customer Success resulting in increased retention, long term revenue growth and customer advocacy.

How to connect with Kristi and their initiatives

LinkedIn: Kristi Faltorusso

Website: Keeping CS Simple

About the Episode

If you're looking for authenticity and people-first leadership, then this is the episode for you!

Charlotte and Kellie talk through employee engagement, motivations, fulfilment and playing to each individual's strengths to make a stronger and more successful company culture.

They also riff on the subject of embedding company values into the entire people lifecycle - starting at company inception, people hiring, business objective setting and goal planning conversations.

Key takeaway: North Star's are not just for businesses, take the time to understand and develop the North Star for each of the people in your team!

About Charlotte

Charlotte Cobbaert is the Head of Customer Success at Collective Benefits, an insurtech and benefits platform for independent workers. Her entire career has evolved around worker engagement from leading an employee experience programme when working in Spain to joining the world of HR tech in the UK.

Building great teams by making people's careers a core priority is how Charlotte is looking to make an impact in her career. She also strongly believes that bringing authenticity into her leadership style and not being afraid to truly "be herself" will go a long way.

How to connect with Charlotte and their initiatives

LinkedIn: Charlotte Cobbaert

About the Episode

For this episode, we talk to the man who is, essentially, the catalyst for the Inspiring Future Leaders podcast.

Our host, Kellie Lucas, has seen Nick Mehta deliver many enthusiastic and rousing speeches from the plenary stage at the leading Customer Success conference, Pulse (Europe).

One year, he delivered a keynote session on human-first leadership.

Not only did this resonate soundly within Kellie but she also had a conversation with a colleague where it seemed possible that if we adopted Customer Success principles and human-first business leadership, we could change the business world for the better AND motivate every person to be more human-led, community focused and committed to helping resolve the world's social challenges. Because we would all remember to care about each other, rather than only putting profit first.

Nick refers to this in his talks and in this episode as Success for all (one of Gainsight's core values) which includes their people, customers, community, family, investors and shareholders.

Gainsight's other four core values are also inspirational, not least Shoshin - listen to the episode to find out what this is and how magical and brilliant it truly is!

Listen to this fun, engaging and inspiring episode and let us know your thoughts. We'll be sure to entice Nick back onto the podcast soon.

About Nick

Nick Mehta (he/him), is the CEO of Gainsight, the Customer Success Company. He works with a team of over 1000 human beings who together have helped create the Customer Success category that's currently taking over the SaaS business model worldwide. Gainsight is a five-time Forbes Cloud 100 recipient and Nick has been named the #2 CEO by the Software Report, has a 99% approval rating on Glassdoor, and was named Entrepreneur Of The Year for Northern California Award. On top of all that, he was recently rated as the #1 CEO in the world (the award committee was just his mom, but the details are irrelevant). He is a member of the Board of Directors at F5 (NASDAQ:FFIV) and has co-authored two books on Customer Success, Customer Success and The Customer Success Economy. He is passionate about family, football, philosophy, physics, fashion, feminism, parody music videos and SaaS Customer Success. People told him it’s impossible to combine all of those interests, but Nick has made it his life’s mission to try.

How to connect with Nick and his initiatives

LinkedIn: Nick Mehta

About the Episode

This episode is a very open, authentic and vulnerable conversation between our host, Kellie Lucas and Sean Ruane. They cover some fundamentals in relation to the topics of culture and leadership before delving into the vulnerable conversation around mental wellbeing at home and at work.

Our favourite takeaway of the session: It's fundamental to see someone as a person first, their job role second.

Hear! Hear!

Sean, as always, it was an absolute pleasure to speak with you and already looking forward to the next time and the launch of your MInd Data platform.

Take a listen and let us know what you found most interesting and valuable from this discussion!

About Sean

After graduating from the University of Buckingham with a First class degree in Business Enterprise, Sean joined the two co-founders of Clear Review, an HR cloud platform.

Sean was responsible for building an award winning customer success team that took the business from pre-seed to acquisition.

Sean is currently HCM Director of Customer Success at Advanced, one of the UK’s largest software providers. He is also currently building a mental health start up, Mind Data, which aims to improve the existing counselling and therapy experience for counsellors and patients alike.

His life’s mission is to improve the mental health of 1,000,000 people worldwide.

How to connect with Sean and his initiatives

LinkedIn: Sean Ruane

Mind Data App: Coming soon!

About the Episode

Dan Steinman is often referred to as the Godfather of Customer Success and has a wealth of experiences to share with the world, not least about human-first leadership.

This episode is full of worldly advice and is no doubt the first of many conversations we will publish with Dan.

A few of the takeways that resonated with us were:

>> Live your culture and principles through your conversations with people

>> Leadership is about communication and vision; and the ability to bring these two things together to motivate those around you in a common, clear goal

>> Leadership is difficult to define but we each know it when we see it

>> Giving power to the powerless is very powerful

>> A great leader is always looking for ways to give more authority, opportunity, responsibility

Take a listen and let us know what you found most interesting in what Dan had to share with us all!

About Dan

Dan Steinman is the Chief Evangelist at Gainsight.

Prior to joining Gainsight as Chief Customer Officer, Dan was the first Vice President of Customer Success and Renewals at Marketo. Dan is a globally recognized thought leader in the Customer Success space, an active blogger and speaker on its behalf, and co-author of the seminal book on Customer Success.

How to connect with Dan and his initiatives

LinkedIn: Dan Steinman

About the Episode

Dale Roberts is a dear friend and colleague of mine and we often have business and culture conversations so this time we recorded one of them!

In this episode, we talk about Dale's five principles of leadership:

1. Lead by inquiry

2. Balance of confidence and humility

3. Natural motivation first

4. Resilience over repeatability

5. Business is Human

Grab a cup of your favoruite drink, settle in and listen to what Dale has to say - it's definitely worth a listen. 

About Dale

Dale Roberts has led customer success and professional services teams for over 20 years and has advised some of the largest businesses in the world on customer experience, customer success, analytics and digital strategies. He is the author of Decision Sourcing (Gower, 2013), World of Workcraft (Ashgate, 2015) and has contributed chapters to Leading the Project Revolution (Routledge, Edited by Darren Dalcher, 2018) and The Customer Success Pioneer (Practical Inspiration, Authored by Kellie Lucas, 2019).

Today, Dale advises rapidly growing SaaS companies on customer success programs and mediating win-win outcomes between digital businesses and customers in dispute or in stalled negotiations.

How to connect with Dale and his initiatives

LinkedIn: Dale Roberts

Twitter: @DaleSRoberts

Courses: Dale Roberts on Udemy

About the Episode

We're starting 2022 with an authentic conversation with Liz Shipsey where we explore topics such as leadership by example, vulnerable and human leadership and the mental wellbeing of all and how to support this.

About Liz

Liz has been working in the charity sector for 9 years, with a particular focus on volunteering and supporting individuals into employment.

Liz is passionate about: curating meaningful connections, encouraging local volunteering, supporting communities, listening to and developing people. She believes it's about real and lasting impact on individual lives and the diverse communities in which we live.

How to connect with Liz and her initiatives

LinkedIn: Liz Shipsey

Website: Octavia Foundation

About the Episode

Today's episode is small and mighty!

Tom Goodman is one of our favourite people and leaders and we're thrilled to have had him on the show.

We talk about:

** leading culture through well-defined, understood and embedded values, including shaping your people team from the start and your interview process around these values

** recruiting for values alignement and culture "addition" rather than culture fit

** providing a space for belonging and voices to be encouraged and heard

** leaders showing up every day, authentically and willing to listen, learn, fail and improve

** providing support and resilience to allow people to try innovative ideas with the security of knowing each success AND "failure" provides a learning opportunity

** placing personal development at the core of the business practice

** investing in young leaders with high potential

About Tom

Tom Goodman is the Director of Customer Operations at Goodlord.

He's also a Man City fan so feel free to connect with him to talk footie as well as Customer Success and interpersonal leadership!

How to connect with Tom and his initiatives

LinkedIn: Tom Goodman

Email: Tom Goodman

About the Episode

Another gem of an episode!

Today, we talk with Morika Georgieva around the neuroscience perspective and impact on business today.

She loves the discipline of Customer Success so much that she finds it difficult to shut up about it and can be found discussing as part of her day job, her involvement with the CSN community and in conversations with connections within and beyond Customer Success.

She's also passionate about finding ways to extend the reach and depth of Customer Success, not just as a field but as an embedded organisation-wide philosophy, to ensure success for all involved as well as progressing customer relationships to strategic partnerships rather than just as a vendor-supplier situation.

We really enjoyed hearing her perspective on these topics, including some really tangible steps to creating and promoting an open, inclusive and proactive culture.

About Morika

Morika Georgieva is Customer Success Lead, EMEA at Permutive and heads up the digital events team at The Customer Success Network (check them out on Linkedin and YouTube). 

Her career focuses on Customer Success for enterprise B2B SaaS start ups in a multitude of industries, including advertising, recruitment, and hospitality. 

She is passionate about Customer Success, not only as a key part of business growth, but also as a corporate philosophy that should guide how companies conduct business with their customers and partners as well as how they approach their culture and employees.

She has also just been voted one of the Top 100 Customer Success Strategists 2021!

How to connect with Morika and her initiatives

LinkedIn: Morika Georgieva

Join the Customer Success Network here!