In this episode, co-host Mark Petruzzi welcomes Jack Zimnavoda, Head of Customer Success at Insightful. Jack shares how modern B2B SaaS organizations can turn customer success from a support function into a true driver of revenue and retention.
Together, they explore what it takes to align CS with sales, marketing, and product—without creating channel conflict. Jack reveals how predictive AI, smart segmentation, and aligned incentives can turn expansion into a scalable and proactive motion.
What You’ll Learn
- Customer Success as a Revenue Driver: Jack explains how to reframe CS from a cost center to a growth engine—through structure, ownership, and incentives.
- Avoiding Channel Conflict: Learn how clearly defined swim lanes, compensation clarity, and collaboration between CS and Sales create harmony and momentum.
- Building a Scalable CS Model: From white-glove enterprise accounts to hybrid-touch models, Jack outlines how to maintain personalized value delivery at scale.
- Metrics That Matter: Understand the importance of net retention, lifetime value, and how CS teams can build pipelines and forecast revenue just like Sales.
- AI + Customer Health: Hear how Jack uses predictive AI to monitor product usage, signal risk, and surface expansion opportunities at scale.
Key Topics
- Structuring CS to own post-sale revenue
- Aligning CS, Sales, Marketing, and Product
- Channel conflict: where it happens and how to prevent it
- Using AI in CS forecasting and health scoring
- Segmenting your customer base to drive upsell plays
- Scaling without losing the human touch
- How to hire for commercial CSMs (hint: curiosity and creativity)
Guest Spotlight: Jack Zimnavoda
Jack is Head of Customer Success at Insightful, where he leads a global team focused on retention, adoption, and expansion. With over a decade of experience in B2B SaaS, Jack has helped transform CS into a proactive, commercial function that partners across the go-to-market org to drive real business outcomes.
Resources & Mentions:
- Book: The Seven Pillars of Customer Success by Wayne McCulloch
- Podcast Mention: This is Growth by Daphne Costa Lopes
- Tool: Vitally – CS platform used by Insightful
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Mark Petruzzi (00:04.705)
Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're thrilled to welcome Jack Zimnavoda, Head of Customer Success at Insightful. Jack is a seasoned CS leader with a deep passion for helping companies retain and grow their customer base through intentional customer success strategies. He has built teams that drive renewal, expansion, and adoption at scale, and he's helped shape
how modern B2B SaaS companies think about customer-led growth. Today, Jack will explain how customer success can become a core growth engine through better cross-selling, upselling, and alignment with the rest of the go-to-market organization. Today, we'll explore four areas. One, we're thinking customer success as a revenue driver. Two, building a customer-centric expansion motion.
three, partnering with sales, product, and marketing for go-to-market impact, and four, metrics and models that power scalable CS growth. All right, well, again, Jack, welcome. We're very excited about having you here, and we can kind of kick off into topic one. But again, first, welcome.
Jack Zimnavoda (01:20.93)
Thanks so much. Really, really excited to be a part of this podcast and ready to dive into it.
Mark Petruzzi (01:26.807)
Perfect, all right. Topic one, rethinking customer success as a revenue driver. That is something that I have been in the middle of for many years. And it's funny, you get all different views on this straight up to the CEO and the board. You have a typical customer success mindset of, I don't wanna be selling, I'm not sales. But at the same time, that's evolved as we all know how important
the upselling and cross-selling process is and how that can't be done successfully without the support of the CS team. So Jack, know, CS has been viewed as a post-sales support function in the past. What needs to change in mindset and structure for it truly to become a revenue driver?
Jack Zimnavoda (02:20.609)
Yeah, so it's a totally fair mindset that go-to-market leaders have there of customer success being an offshoot of support, particularly for leaders that have been around in go-to-market leadership for 20 plus years, because truth be told, customer success was an offshoot of support. I started in this career back when it was account management, and then it's gone into its own...
know, evolution since then. But also, I think it's fair to say that that gap in the understanding of customer success being a support function versus what it's really intended to be these days is narrowing, right? I think these days, customer success, especially at SaaS firms, is kind of a core piece of the go-to-market team. And I think most people don't view it the way that they might have 15, 20 years ago.
In those instances where it is still viewed as a higher level of support, think really what needs to happen is a change in mindset first. And that doesn't happen by somebody saying, this works well at other companies, we should do it. I think it kind of happens by experimentation, right? Letting the customer success team go to their customers and offering new things to them, whether it's new use cases or
expansion to different teams or through different product offerings. And the proof is in the pudding in those cases. So I think with that experimentation, when you show small wins like that, it automatically changes the mindset. And once that happens, you could think about changing the structure of teams.
Jack Zimnavoda (04:43.532)
Yeah.
Jack Zimnavoda (05:17.42)
Yeah. These are really, you know, very real problems that customers have, or sorry, companies have when they start introducing customer success as a revenue generator, right? The truth is there's no one way that this works well. I've seen it done in so many different ways. I've seen pods created where CSMs are coupled with salespeople. I've seen, you know, customer success managers own all revenue operations post the initial point of sales and own a quota.
And I've even seen, you know, and I don't recommend this, I've seen CSMs essentially treated as SDRs to go out and find opportunities and feed them back to the sales team to manage. You know, I'll just speak to the way that my team is set up because I think it works quite well in the way that we're working it today, which is that my team, the way that that insightful works is that the sales team has a certain period of time whereby they're able to expand the accounts that they bring in.
But if that period passes, then the success team has the obligation really to nurture those accounts, find opportunities to take them from identification of the opportunity all the way through through close. And really we incentivize the team to do exactly that. So ultimately, I think any of those types of structures can work. It's just a matter of ensuring that incentives are aligned and that expectations between the teams are
very very clear.
Mark Petruzzi (06:51.86)
Great. So Jack, where do you see most companies going wrong when they're trying to turn customer success into a profit center instead of a cost center?
Jack Zimnavoda (07:02.987)
Yeah, great question. Two things every time. The first thing is that there's a lack of understanding sometimes when you want the customer success team to take on the ownership of the revenue. Lack of understanding of what the CSM team has on their plate already from a responsibility standpoint. And then blindly thinking that they could add opportunity, identification, and realization.
without negatively impacting those other areas that are already on their plates. So I think when you look at bringing this into a customer success team for the first time, it's really crucial that there's a plan in place to offload some of that non-value added work prior to making the shift so that hopefully the customer success team has a bandwidth to focus on this area plus the core competencies that they've always had.
I would say the other thing, and I mentioned this in the previous answer, which is not aligning incentives to the intended outcomes. So, you know, if you're starting this out and you've got your customer success managers judged on things like client sentiment or the number of quarterly business reviews they're doing or gross retention, there's really no incentive for the CSMs to grab onto this opportunity for them with everything they've got.
And just bringing this once again back to my team. I handle this by giving them incentives in two ways. The first is by giving them quarterly bonuses that's based on that retention, which of course factors in expansion dollars, but is really rooted in retention. But then on top of that, there is a small commission opportunity, but they're focused on non-organic expansions, meaning these opportunities have to be identified.
by the CSM, they really have to be the ones responsible for drumming up this business and owning it from identification through close to get that commission.
Jack Zimnavoda (09:19.649)
Honestly, I have not dealt with that struggle too much. And the reason is we set expectations extremely clearly upfront. We explain why the business is going in this direction, which is ultimately to grow revenue business-wide. And also, for me, it's a matter of showing them the previous data. Most of the time, salespeople can get territorial over their accounts, and that's understandable. But when you take a look at their commission payouts,
I'd say nine times out of ten, the vast majority of their commission is coming from new business anyway. It's just kind of a mindset that needs to shift of, I should just be focused on new business and that's the key area that the company needs me to focus on and that I'm getting paid for.
Jack Zimnavoda (10:37.421)
So I think it should work together pretty seamlessly, right? think sales and customer success need to be working hand in hand. And that is regardless of if customer success is owning the expansions or not. There needs to be a very solid understanding, foundational understanding of what the accounts need, what their use case is, what are their goals that they need to achieve to be able to say, yes, this expenditure was worth it.
As long as you have those kind of key points in play, then the rest I think falls into play pretty naturally. Again, making sure that you're not overloading any particular team with so much that they can't handle their responsibilities.
Mark Petruzzi (11:22.775)
Cool. I've got one more on this to double down a little bit. What are the early signs, Jack, that you see that gives you the indication that a CS team is being too reactive instead of being able to make that jump over to the strategic side?
Jack Zimnavoda (11:42.55)
Yeah, that's a great question. For me, it's really simple. If we're finding examples of churn, customers leaving us, and they come as a surprise to the CSM, it is a clear cut sign to me that they're just too in the weeds of resolving issues that are brought to them and not taking the time to have proactive conversations with their customers about what their goals are, what kind of value they expect to see. Any time that that
churn is brought up and we don't know what's going on there. I need to take a step back and I want my team to take a step back to really understand what happened there in terms of their involvement with that account because it shouldn't be a surprise.
Jack Zimnavoda (13:19.477)
Yeah, think there are a couple of things that are constant, whether it's a new logo or an expansion, right? Those things are, you know, solid understanding of what levers there are to pull for increases or expansions, right? Is this a play to sell professional services or is it add-ons that are available to them? Just understanding, you know, what's in their tool belt that they can rely on. And the other thing that I think is a constant between
whether it's an existing customer or a new customer, is a really solid understanding at the very minimum of the industries that you're serving and what challenges they're facing. Even better, obviously, if you have a solid understanding of the customers specifically and what their challenges are. But then there are things, I guess you call them ingredients, right, that are a bit more unique to existing customers.
The first is incredibly simple but incredibly powerful, think, and that is, are they a happy customer? You can have great products, you can have a really solid process for onboarding those customers, but at the end of the day, if a customer is giving you feedback that, for whatever reason, they're unhappy, maybe they're not able to achieve their goals or they felt that the onboarding process didn't work for them,
The focus can't be on selling that customer more at that point. It needs to be on fixing that problem. So I think there are a ton of signs that you could get for existing customers that you can't necessarily tell with a new, a net new account in terms of whether or not they're set up for a good expansion conversation. And then the other thing, the other ingredient I would say that's really great to have. I don't think it's a must have, but it's...
certainly nice to have, is there's no shortage of tools that a customer success team can rely on to know whether their accounts are primed for expansion. I'm a big proponent of using predictive AI tools that help you analyze the conversations that are happening between the CSM and the account that are able to take a look at the data in your customer success platform or in your CRM.
Jack Zimnavoda (15:37.614)
and predict whether or not this account based on a lot of their traits or whatever are a good candidate for expansion. When you're a company like Insightful where you've got 5,000 customers plus, don't have time, or the CSMs don't have time to sort through all the data on their own. So having that kind of predictive insight is really valuable in using their time wisely and focusing on the accounts that are
you know, really ready for that expansion conversation.
Jack Zimnavoda (16:15.541)
I'm sure there's more, I'm I'm blanking out the others.
Mark Petruzzi (16:19.671)
So Jack, tell us about how you work on training CSMs to have these types of commercial conversations without turning them into full-fledged sales reps.
Jack Zimnavoda (16:32.331)
Yeah, I think part of it doesn't really go into training. It comes into hiring the right people. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I'm hiring for CSM roles and I just actually had a couple of interviews this week for a new CSM role in New York, the two kind of mindsets that I'm looking for that I think are great for this position are curiosity and also creativity.
I think when customer success managers can go into conversations with the mindset of genuine curiosity about, you know, customers' businesses, you know, how they're making money, what their challenges are, and also creative approach towards problem solving for those challenges, conversations that lead to upsells or cross-sells really just happen naturally. So I think that's the first piece of it, is hiring for the right...
sets of soft skills, if you will. Having said that, there's also tactics that we could train on. One of those tactics for my team is when we're running quarterly business reviews, before that takes place, I'm having my team do a lot of research on the accounts that we're working with outside of just the departments we're working with. We're trying to identify stakeholders that may not even know about Encypheal, could find value in it.
And then we're going back to our champions and we're saying, Hey, let's bring them into the quarterly business review so they could understand what we're doing with XYZ firm. and it's just a very natural conversation. So I think, you know, we have the benefit of being able to have these non-sales conversations, that very naturally go into a direction of expansion in one way or the other.
Jack Zimnavoda (18:46.413)
Yeah.
Jack Zimnavoda (19:00.373)
And also I double down on that. think that serving and selling are absolutely not mutually exclusive. I think in order to serve, sometimes you need to sell and that's not a conflict of interest in my mind.
Jack Zimnavoda (19:22.188)
Mm-hmm.
Jack Zimnavoda (19:26.057)
Exactly, right? That's ideally that's what they're doing. Yeah
Mark Petruzzi (19:33.569)
So when you look at this overall, Jack, so what kind of role does customer segmentation play in the whole entire expansion strategy, the entire growth go to market?
Jack Zimnavoda (19:47.596)
Yeah, it's for a company like ours, it's massively important. You know, we've got, again, 5,000 customers across, know, across the globe, truly serving dozens of different industries. You know, if I were a CS leader of a company that sold a $5 billion product and only had 30 customers, it's not as important, right? Segmentation matters less in those instances. You just have to be insanely knowledgeable about each and every one of those.
businesses. But in cases where you have a larger customer base, yeah, absolutely imperative. We segment by customer size, their industry or vertical, what their potential use cases are. And these are really just goals when it comes to setting up expansion plays. The way that we handle, let's say, a massive organization that's only using us for one department is going to be
completely different than the way that we try to upsell a 300 person company that's already using it for all their employees. There's just different plays that are going to go into effect for each of those scenarios. But also the value propositions are going to be wildly different between these segments. There are some propositions that are going to be game changers for certain industries that are completely meaningless to others.
kind of summarize all that, the more that you can slice and dice your segments based on whatever you have, key traits, personas, use cases, know, whatever you have, the better your opportunities are to create messaging that is, at least feels personalized to your customers and can be done in a scalable way.
Jack Zimnavoda (21:43.15)
So right now our customer base is segmented mostly on revenue size. And yeah, we do have our enterprise segment, which as you might expect, is essentially white glove service with custom or bespoke onboarding, regular engagement through the adoption and renewal cycle. But from a scale,
scaling standpoint, can't do that with 5,000 customers. So the next segment down, we've got a hybrid approach. And in that scenario, it's really set up to give our customers the resources that they need at the right point in their customer journey, and also make those resources available to them when they want to have it as well. So it's more of a one to many, and it's a hybrid touch model, but it seems to work quite well, and our customers are still getting a lot of value from it.
Jack Zimnavoda (23:43.852)
Yeah, so I think there's a couple of, there's a lot that goes into this, right? I think the first thing that needs to be considered is are you making this change for existing enterprise businesses? Because at that point, it does become potentially contentious between sales and success, right? If you take a massive enterprise account that the sales... Okay. If the answer is yes, then I think...
What's really important there is mapping out that account and working with the sales team in making sure that sales and success are aligned to be able to Execute on the mapping that that is done. So if you get a large enterprise account, you're working with One two three departments there and have an opportunity to sell additional products or two additional teams there
I think the success and the sales team have an opportunity to work hand in hand to pull in those stakeholders from the other organizations and work together. And then it's just a question of how everybody is compensated for those expansions.
Mark Petruzzi (24:56.631)
Yeah.
Jack Zimnavoda (25:28.555)
Yeah, absolutely, it applies. We go through sales stages that we essentially stole from sales. We've got our own pipeline that we're using to manage those opportunities and make sure that they're going from stage to stage in the time that we expect it to, and that they're meeting the med-pick kind of results that we need to along the way. So it's not all that different from sales.
Mark Petruzzi (25:38.071)
Thanks.
Jack Zimnavoda (25:57.78)
It is just a matter of where in the business we're doing this and when in terms of the relationship we're doing it. So we're always on the lookout for those opportunities and we're always going to capture those opportunities in our CRM or in our CSP and we'll be tracking them just like sales would.
Mark Petruzzi (26:18.635)
Great. Perfect. All right. Let's move on to topic three here, partnering with sales, product and marketing for good market impact. So, all right. So how, you know, what does good or great look like here from the standpoint of collaboration between CS and sales? And how do you avoid channel conflict when you still, you know, when you have to own that expansion side within CS?
Jack Zimnavoda (26:45.783)
Right. So I guess I'll start with the second half of that question, which is avoiding channel conflict, right? And I think it's such an important question because it's totally normal for conflict to exist when this is introduced to an organization where historically sales has zoned expansions, right? And again, in my experience, this happens because of one, possibly two reasons. The first is, you know, the swim lanes are not set and not made clear.
to both teams early on. And the second is compensation misalignment. So when you're talking about what good looks like, in my mind it's regardless of whether or not everybody's happy, because listen, there's always going to be people that wish things looked differently. But regardless of if everybody's happy or not, everybody at least understands the rules of the game. There needs to be clear rules of engagement for existing customers.
Again, just going back to my team, there are two very specific scenarios where the customer success team knows that they're not going to get credit for an upsell. Those scenarios are if it happens within a certain timeframe of the business closing, or if the expansion opportunity has already been charted out by the salesperson during the sales process with a set timeline in play. But the other part, again, is compensation misalignment.
Nobody wants to take money out of anybody's pocket. We're not trying to take money out of the sales team pocket. But again, in the vast majority of cases that I've been involved in, this territorial feeling about these opportunities don't necessarily mesh well with the data. Meaning that when you take a look at where salespeople are getting paid from, it's really far outweighed by the new business that they're...
bringing on versus upsells at existing companies.
Jack Zimnavoda (28:49.165)
Mm-hmm.
Jack Zimnavoda (29:09.301)
Yeah, in so many ways. And this is really a core responsibility, I think it always has been, of customer success. And there's a number of ways that this happens. One of which is, just like with big whales during the sales process, there's gonna be some customers just like there are some big prospects that are just too large to fit. The big players who, if they say jump,
I'm just starting to jump. don't even ask how high because, you know, they just need that. But, you know, those are, think, are a few and far in between, right? I think the more common scenario is that, you know, features get asked for through every stage of the customer lifecycle journey, know, from, you know, even before the sale is complete to onboarding, engagement, renewals, and
I think it is absolutely the customer success team's responsibility to capture those requests and also to help the product team prioritize those requests and enclose the feedback loop with customers. So internally for us, use a solution called product board that allows us to create a running list of who's asking for what and that feeds to the product team so they could do their work on prioritization. But on top of that, we meet with the product team
at least bi-weekly, where we tell them what we're seeing in the field, what we're hearing from customers, both large and small, and where we think we can make an impact from a product standpoint that'll add value both to existing customers, but also prospects in the pipeline.
Jack Zimnavoda (30:57.449)
Absolutely when we have those bi-weekly calls with product, it's my entire team that's involved.
Jack Zimnavoda (31:05.99)
It takes some time, but it's a well worth while exercise.
Mark Petruzzi (31:11.553)
Perfect, so Jack, so let's cover off on the third part here of go to market and that's marketing. What has been your experience? What are the best ways to involve marketing and the post-sale customer journey and the overall adoption side of the equation as well? How do you keep them integrated?
Jack Zimnavoda (31:30.71)
Yeah, I think that's a massively important question because I think a lot of leaders look at this incorrectly in my view, my humble opinion. I think it's so natural for business leaders to think of marketing as solely a top-of-funnel function that's really exclusively focused on pre-sales impact. And frankly, I think it's a huge missed opportunity. So for Insightful, know, just last week, we blocked off almost the entire week
in one of our offices where members of the customer success team worked hand-in-hand with marketing to do a full gap analysis of our communication strategy post sales. And yeah, this included everything from welcome email communication to renewal notifications, but what I think really relevant to our conversation today is that we're also focused on how we can educate our customers on new features, new products, as they come out.
in mass so that our customer success team has a real shot of drawing interest before we even reach out individually for those conversations.
Mark Petruzzi (32:40.651)
Yeah, you know, that's something that we at at AGS think about a lot. Pretty much everything is marketing, right? Every interaction with a client in the way we look at it is either increasing or decreasing their perception and their opinion of the company. And very few things leave it where it was before. There's always a there's always a measure either direction.
So I love that idea of just making sure that you just go through that process that you guys did where marketing is in the middle of these relationships after they become clients. Because as we know, there are certain perspectives in marketing that they just kind of, that's not my job anymore from that perspective.
I totally agree that it is always their job and really every interaction is marketing one way or another.
Jack Zimnavoda (33:41.917)
I totally agree. Just like, you know, everybody's responsible for the company's marketing. think to some extent, everybody's responsible for customer success as well, right? That case could be made across the board.
Mark Petruzzi (33:51.093)
Yeah, yeah.
Jack Zimnavoda (34:02.775)
So I consider myself extremely lucky that my work bestie, if you will, is the head of lead generation. So while we don't typically have regular syncs, although there are probably monthly syncs that we have with marketing operations, I also sit directly across from Alex and we work incredibly closely together.
Jack Zimnavoda (34:31.287)
She is far more entertaining than I am, so I highly recommend.
Mark Petruzzi (34:34.999)
That's excellent. All right, let's move to our final topic here, metrics and models that power scalable CS growth. So tell us about, what are the must-track metrics for any customer success leader who wants to be seen as a revenue leader as well?
Jack Zimnavoda (34:55.103)
Yeah, so there are a couple of no brainers here, right? The one that comes to mind first and foremost is net retention. Again, that's going to factor in expansion revenue, but it also bounces out with revenue churn that happens in the business. So, ultimately, if you're tied to number as a revenue leader, it's going to be expansion revenue.
On top of net retention, just like any sales leader, and I mentioned this in a previous answer, just like any sales leader, I've got a pipeline that I manage. And I'm looking at conversion rates across the stages. I'm taking a look at where things are held up in the sales pipeline for expansion opportunities. And then lastly, I think, you know, metric that all go-to-market leaders should be looking at is customer lifetime value, right? CLTB.
You know, think, you know, this is something that that myself, our CEO is tracking really closely to ensure that not only are we able to sell to our existing customers and grow that account from a revenue perspective, but what we're selling is relevant enough to them that they retain our offerings over a longer period of time.
Jack Zimnavoda (36:40.619)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you it spoke a little bit about the importance that I feel predictive AI has on customer success. And I think that is, you know, this is clearly a good use case for it is incorporating it into health scores. And, you know, I get that AI is a new tool and not everybody has a tech stack that allows them to incorporate this. But yeah, it's really, really powerful. Short of that.
Yeah, we do take a look at usage trends. We take a look at specific engagements with the product that kind of signal that an account is adopting well or that they are engaging as often as we expect. But I'd also say that qualitative data is your friend when it comes to health scores. There's no problem.
in my mind, of relying on things like the opinion of the customer success manager via a rag indicator or a happy face or a sad face, right? It may not be spot on 100 % of the time, but when you use it in conjunction with that quantitative data like product usage, NPS scores, whatever else you have, it becomes a really valuable data point.
Jack Zimnavoda (38:12.395)
Yeah, so we're hoping to embed AI into our customer success platform, which for those that are not in customer success, CSP or customer success platform is essentially a CRM, but more focused on the post sales motion, right? And what we're doing is we're using AI to take a look at data points that are coming from different sources. So product usage trends, the MPS scores.
the notes that are taken by the CSM, whether it's taken through a system like Gong or it's manually typed in by a CSM. And it's able to aggregate this information over a course of time, provide insights as to not only is this account healthy, like going into the health score, but also what are some next steps that AI would recommend that you go through with this account? Are they at risk? And if so,
what can you do to minimize that risk? Or are they doing great and by the way because of the industry they're in, this may be an interesting use case where you could find some expansion opportunity. So, I'm sorry.
Jack Zimnavoda (39:58.792)
I would say that we are using predictive AI from a forecasting standpoint less on the expansion side and more on the retention side. I'm using it to forecast, you know, there's always going to be some level of churn at a SaaS organization. It's a painful truth. But it's important for us to understand, you know, how leaky is that bucket and what do we have to do on the sales side to make up for it.
Mark Petruzzi (40:25.889)
So Jack, as you grow like you guys have been growing, what do need to do to evolve the CS structure or the overall operating model to support this new scale?
Jack Zimnavoda (40:39.629)
Yeah, scalability is an issue, right? I think I mentioned when I joined Encyphe, maybe I didn't mention this, I apologize. The customer success team that was here was really just focused on the top revenue accounts. And that meant that they were only engaging really with the top 2-3 % of our customer base. So I think in order to make this work when you're a larger company and are growing at the rate that we are,
Segmentation and putting in hybrid touch models where it makes sense really matters. And the goal there is not to take away personalization, but to add tools that will allow you to offer personalized messaging and value without having to focus on just the top piece of that iceberg of your client accounts.
So for us, that meant doing a hybrid touch model like I spoke about earlier.
Mark Petruzzi (41:50.497)
Sure, let's do it. And Jack, that's our rapid fire question. So we'll move pretty quickly through these. A little different for you in the CS function, but what was the first product you ever supported? And then have you ever sold directly at any part of your life or career?
Jack Zimnavoda (42:07.777)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, my first job directly out of college was I was recruited as a financial advisor in Taston. That's really just a sales job. have a brain on new. Um, the timing of that was interesting. Four months later, Lehman Brothers failed and we entered the financial crisis of 2008. So great.
Mark Petruzzi (42:23.063)
Yes.
Jack Zimnavoda (42:37.864)
as quickly as I could,
Jack Zimnavoda (42:53.909)
It wasn't our fault.
Jack Zimnavoda (42:57.901)
Not so far off.
Jack Zimnavoda (43:05.485)
So does it have to be CEO? Okay. Yeah. I follow Daphne Casa Lopez. She's the global director of customer success at HubSpot. She also hosted a wonderful podcast called This is Growth. And I just think her insights are so spot on all the time. She's wonderful.
Mark Petruzzi (43:28.353)
Very cool. Yeah. Okay. What is a tool that you believe every CS leader should be using?
Jack Zimnavoda (43:36.523)
Yeah, so definitely a customer success platform. take your pick. There's Vitaly, GameSight, think Tatango, although I think they merged with somebody, TurnZero. I'm a huge fan of Vitaly. That's what we're using here at Insightful, and it's been going very well for us.
Jack Zimnavoda (44:01.689)
man. yeah, I would say I would tell myself to prioritize results over recognition. think, you know, when you're young in career, you want to get some kind of recognition, but, especially when you're young in career, it really doesn't matter all that much. that, comes later, right?
Mark Petruzzi (44:23.831)
That's pretty cool. Cool. And the last question is favorite book on customer success or growth or leadership.
Jack Zimnavoda (44:33.163)
Yeah, easy one. The seven pillars of customer success. I'm forgetting the author's name. It's by the former chief customer officer of Salesforce.
Mark Petruzzi (44:44.535)
So Chief Customs Officer, so I've done a lot of work with Salesforce. I'm wondering who wrote that one. I wonder if it's Mike Milburn, would that, not him? Okay, interesting. Yeah, no worries on that. We'll make sure on the show notes that we tie it to the right area. And again, I just wanna say,
Jack Zimnavoda (44:55.103)
I don't believe so. I could look it up.
Mark Petruzzi (45:10.559)
Jack, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us and spending some time together. KK, thanks for being a part of this as always and to that incredible audience that we have. Thank you for joining in again.
Jack Zimnavoda (45:26.743)
Thanks so much for having me, I really appreciate it.
Mark Petruzzi (45:30.165)
Awesome. All the best. Bye.
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