All posts by Dan Gamito
What is Customer Success…?
After surveying over 700 Customer Success professionals, we’ve gotten a surprising amount of responses that sound like this: ”Nobody at our company understands what the Customer Success team does all day.” The responses contained phrases like ”nobody gets it, so we get ignored until we lose a big customer” and “I constantly feel the need […]
Read MoreIs Customer Success the same thing as Customer Support?
There’s a common misconception that Customer Success is just a more advanced version of Customer Support for SaaS companies. The core logic looks something like this: When customers aren’t happy, you throw Support at them until they’re happy. Happy customers = successful customers = renewals. Ergo, Support orgs that drive happiness = Customer Success orgs. […]
Read MoreHow to get Customer Success and Sales on the same page, without stepping on toes
Have you ever had a customer who just wasn’t a good fit? Whether you sell monthly subscriptions to a marketing automation app, or complicated annual contracts for an enterprise compliance and risk management solution, supporting these customers can quickly become a nightmare. Whether their use-cases aren’t a good fit for your product, or they’re just […]
Read MoreAre you a firefighting Customer Success Manager?
How much time do you spend every day making decisions? If you’re anything like the hundreds of Customer Success Managers we’ve surveyed, you probably spend the majority of your day firefighting. When I was a new CSM, this is what a typical day of decisions looked like: What shirt am I going to wear today? Should […]
Read MoreHow to build your Customer Success calendar as a CSM
As a CSM, I tried really hard to think ahead and put stuff on my Customer Success calendar. Even with meticulous planning, projects seemed to take about 5X longer than anticipated, and deadlines flew by like Tom Cruise in an F-14 (an excellent Top Gun reference). My brain seemed to work against me when estimating […]
Read MoreConfessions of a Customer Success Manager [Part 2]
In the previous installment of this series, I introduced one of the strategies we implemented to turn our flatline SaaS startup into a growth machine. A more viable Customer Success strategy emerged from the mindset shift I outlined. Among several other factors, our new CS strategy helped us handle 70x growth over a period of […]
Read More