Customer Success Conversations Podcasts

James Lloyd is the CTO and co-founder of Redox. Redox is a company that is changing the way healthcare vendors and providers share data. Prior to Redox, he was an engineer and serial intrapreneur at Epic for five years. He also co-founded 100state, a non-profit co-working space in Madison, Wisc., that serves as a community and home for entrepreneurs. He has a history of creating innovative technical solutions to solve problems.

Shreesha Ramdas is the CEO and Co-founder of Strikedeck. Previously, Shreesha was the GM of the Marketing Cloud at CallidusCloud, Co-founder at LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) & OuterJoin, and General Manager at Yodlee. ​ Prior to that, Shreesha led teams in Sales and Marketing at Catalytic Software, MW2 Consulting, and Tata. Shreesha advises several startups on marketing & growth hacking. You can find Shreesha on Twitter, @Shreesha.

John Kelly is the VP of EMEA at Natero. John has over 20 years of experience leading international customer operations and sales for technology companies. ​ Prior to Natero, John spent ten years building Intel's EMEA Customer Quality Operations, and six years leading the growth of EMEA Services at Citrix Systems. He also led worldwide Customer Support Operations at SolarWinds Software before forming CustomerLink, a Sales and Customer Success services company based in Dublin, Ireland. CustomerLink was acquired by Natero in 2019. John holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway and an MBA from The Open University.

Adam is joined by Sue Nabeth Moore and Jason Noble to discuss a joint collaborative project - Customer Success Outcomes (CSO). Almost every organisation with a Customer Success function focuses their teams’ efforts on higher-paying customers, providing them with a "high touch", heavily customised service. For lesser-paying customers, there is little (if any) outreach due to a lack of time and resources or difficulty in designing scalable and cost-effective engagement models. The ultimate outcome for these long-tail customer segments is reduced adoption, lower satisfaction rates and higher churn. CSO enables companies to remedy this issue by quickly and effectively extending their human coverage model beyond "high touch" and help clients of all sizes and revenues to achieve maximum ROI. CSO provides high calibre, outsourced "virtual CSMs" who can work directly with your clients and help them increase their overall value of using your solution.

Elise Meijer is a Senior Customer Success Manager at LinkedIn. Based in Paris, Elise is a seasoned Customer Success Professional with over 12 years of experience in client focused roles, mainly in the SaaS industry. Elise joined LinkedIn in 2012 when they launched their regional office in France and customer success was still in its early days. She has since then helped building out customer success within LinkedIn France, partnering with key business departments including sales and marketing, and supporting the growth in the region. As a Senior Customer Success Manager she spends her time driving product adoption, expansion and account retention for LinkedIn’s most strategic enterprise segment in France (including major CAC 40 companies). Passionate about data and insights, Elise has a strong appetite for coaching, growing and nurturing team and talent, and driving group excellence. With a ‘people and customer first approach’ she has an unending drive to improve the customer experience and create customer advocacy and enjoys using her sense of curiosity and creativity to bring ideas to life and focus on strategic thinking and operational excellence. As a working mother of three Elise has discovered a whole new concept of time management and how to use time and resources efficiently to get things done quickly!

Andy is the Founder and CEO of Taskfeed and is based in London. Andy is the author of the B2B SaaS Customer Onboarding Handbook and the Founder and CEO of Taskfeed. Andrew has spent the last five years helping Customer Success-oriented businesses get smarter about Customer Onboarding and Implementation through a scalable and repeatable process.

Laura Conrardy is the Manager of Customer Success & Scaled Programmes at Box. Based in London, Laura has over 10 years of experience in client facing roles in EMEA from Account Management to pre-sales (including Channel Enablement to Customer Success). Laura is passionate about technology and the way it can transform lives. Over her last 4.5 years at Box, Laura has held Senior Customer Success Manager roles, acting as a strategic partner with some of Box's largest enterprise customers in Europe and managing a portfolio of over $10M. Today, she has a leadership role for the Commercial and Scaled Team and leads a multilingual team looking for scalable ways to drive more value and deeper adoption for a much larger customer base.

Bob Burke is the Sr. Director Customer First, EMEA at Okta. He leads the post sales teams focused on driving longterm value for our customers including Education Services, Professional Services, Customer Success Management, Technical Support and Renewals. Bob has spent the past 20 years managing global IT operations and started his journey with Okta as a customer. He joined Okta 5 years ago in San Francisco and moved to London in 2015 where he’s been helping to build the EMEA business and grow the CF operation internationally. As a Californian living in London, he’s learned how to complain about the weather, drink warm beer, redefine the term football, survive without a car, and speak English properly.

Baptiste Debever is the Co-Founder at Feedier. ​Baptiste is a French Entrepreneur with a background in Software Engineering. He has a passion for user-centric products and innovative technology as a whole. He is also very keen on understanding what drives the customers’ motivations for new solutions, and how they create a better version of themselves. Although he has a background in Software Engineering with experience in web products, he is now focusing on the marketing and sales side of things at Feedier, with a taste for growth experiments.

As Rigor’s Chief Customer Officer, Francis Cordón leads the various technical customer-facing teams such as pre-sales engineering, professional services, technical support and ongoing customer management focusing on creating a smooth, positive and valuable customer experience. Francis is absolutely passionate about establishing a results-oriented performance practice and creating an industry-recognised performance maturity scale to help organisations evolve and achieve clearly documented increasing levels of ROI by eliminating outages and improving application performance. In the past, Francis held roles both at Performance Management Software vendors helping Fortune 500 organisations achieve their performance goals, as well as running Performance Architecture and the Application Performance Management practice at The Bank Of New York Mellon end-to-end across the application life cycle from development to production. In his spare time, Francis enjoys traveling with his wife, practicing traditional Martial Arts, and playing the guitar.

Barry Cochrane is the Head of Customer Success at ResponseTap. Barry spent his first year at ResponseTap creating the Customer Success department which includes, Support, Onboarding, Labs and Customer Success Managers. Barry is a Senior Customer Services/ Operations Managers with a range of experience in management from Complaints, Customer Services, Technical Support and Credit Control people management, a strong leader of people, who has an impressive history of inspiring people to develop and succeed in their careers. Barry has spent 20 years putting his people and customer first and designs and delivers the processes and initiatives with both front and centre.

Jaz Broughton is a Customer Success Manager at Trint. Joining Trint in June 2018 as the first customer success hire Jaz is focused on ensuring users are informed, empowered and engaged with the platform. A penchant for people and process has culminated in several roles establishing customer success from the ground up and introducing the mission of customer success to those who are more familiar with customer service. She chose the career path to combine skills gained in real estate, life coaching, hospitality and retail making her obsessed with the customer, diversity and non-coding tech roles.

In his leading role as Director Global Customer Success at Signavio, Steven works with companies of all industries to implement change and gain the full potential from their Business Transformation projects and solutions. Steven ensures a long-lasting relationship with Signavio’s biggest clients, supporting them in achieving maximum value from their investments through his experience and expertise. He began his career in IT projects and software engineering then expanded his expertise through business intelligence consultancy before landing at Signavio.

Paul Ferguson is part of Cisco’s Customer Experience organisation and helps their partners to exploit the shift to a subscription world by working with them to build their own Customer Success practices. As a qualified Learning Mentor, Paul's passion is coaching and developing others, so the role of helping Cisco Partners get to grips with Customer Success was a natural fit for him when he made the switch nearly 3 years ago

Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He started his first eCommerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million online. He is now the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts, such as Entrepreneur on Fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics.

Leanne Chescoe is a career-long Business to Business marketer currently running Field Marketing for the Demandbase EMEA business. “Kicking off an ABM strategy in any organisation can seem like a big challenge. However, once you have the roadmap and tools you can see a clear path to an increase in marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue".

After a career of partnering client-focused initiatives, she decided to dedicate her passion and energy to evangelising customer success in Europe. She has founded Success Track Enterprise, providing CS consultancy services to European recurring revenue companies. She has co-founded Customer Success Europe, a community which aims to federate CS in Europe and unite professionals via different events. She has also founded the CS meet ups in Paris and in Lisbon where she now lives. She blogs and is a regular speaker at CS events around Europe. She’s a proud mum of 3 sons and in her spare time, she is learning and enjoying everything Portuguese in Lisbon: language, culture, innovation tech scene, cuisine, sailing and wine-tasting.

Perry Monaco leads the Customer Success Organisation in Canada for LinkedIn, as well as a team of CSMs focused on CS activity in a pre-sales function in the USA. His teams work with talent acquisition departments and companies building social media recruitment strategies while focusing on the end user to manage retention, customer experience, and account growth through customer success planning. Perry was one of the first 4.5 million members of LinkedIn and was previously a recruiter before helping to build the Customer Success practice at LinkedIn. Perry currently resides in the Greater Toronto Area with his wife and three children.

Ben Heavens is the VP/Head of Customer Success at GlobalWebIndex, and having worked there since the inception of Customer Success, has really seen and enabled the team to grow and evolve alongside a rapidly growing business. Heading up both Customer Success and Support, Ben has a solid understanding of how both proactive and reactive best practice can make a user base successful. Coming from a diverse client-facing background (from world-leading telcos, software companies and start ups) and working with some of the world’s biggest and best known brands gives Ben a great edge in understanding and driving Customer Success in any environment or situation.

Shannon is Global Head of Customer Success for the Financial Times where she leads a team of 27 based out of London, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Manila. She joined the FT in 2016 from Reed Business Information where she launched Customer Success within their HR strategy product and chaired RBI's data forum. Shannon has 10 years experience in customer success and sales roles and credits her success to an innate sense of curiosity - curiosity about how to make customers succeed, how teams are working (and could work!) and how products add value. When not taking things apart to see how they work she can be found spending time with her daughter, walking the dog and enjoying good South African wine.

Jason is the Director of Customer Success at Goodlord, based in London. He is an established figure in the world of Customer Success and SaaS, with over 20 years experience in technology start-ups, financial services and digital media, working across customer success, account management, support, service delivery and professional services operations, with major global brands and more niche technology startups.

Laura Fay is Head of Research at TSIA's Product Management Practice. Laura is a customer-centric business executive with over 25 years’ experience driving enterprise solution growth via leadership roles in customer success, product management and business operations. Over the course of her career, Laura has lived the XaaS transformation journey at multiple companies and in multiple forms. Past tenures include Good Technology, Salesforce.com, E*TRADE Financial, IBM and a number of early stage companies. Ms. Fay brings her career of experience to her XaaS practice at TSIA. Laura holds a Bachelors in Computer Science (Honors) from Trinity College, Dublin University, Ireland, and an MBA from Santa Clara University, California.

Jeff Gardner has spent the last 5+ years building Intercom’s Customer Support and Success teams from himself to nearly 100 people across 3 offices and several remote locations worldwide. As the first customer support hire (and the 4th hire in Intercom), Jeff helped define what customer support at Intercom stands for which included building and managing the hiring processes that were instrumental in growing the team from 1 to ~100. Jeff also built Intercom's first iPhone app and contributed regularly to the codebase both writing new features and fixing bugs. Prior to Intercom, Jeff worked as a software engineer for Bonobo.

Emilie is the Manager of Customer Success at Sana Commerce, a Rotterdam-based eCommerce software company. She joined the company in March 2017 to help with the development of Sana’s newly created Customer Success team. Prior to this, Emilie lead the EMEA Customer Success team for mobile event app provider, DoubleDutch. Although she had similar roles before she discovered and fell in love with Customer Success in 2013, and has since then tried to share her passion with fellow Customer Success professionals with the creation of a Customer Success community in Amsterdam in 2015 and more recently in Rotterdam.

Katy is a Customer Success evangelist; currently Global Head of Success at Avecto but also shares her thoughts and experiences with the Customer Success network. Her years spent working alongside customers to ensure that they successfully adopt, implement and obtain the original benefits sought from security solutions means that she is an experienced voice on every aspect of the customer journey. Katy has been with Avecto 7 years and has built their Global Customer Success department from the ground up.

Jan Schlosser is a Customer Success activist living in Switzerland and helping organisations to build their own Customer Success practices in Europe and the Middle East with his Customer Success Enablement (CSE) consultancy. Before he started his firm as an entrepreneur a year ago, he pioneered the Customer Success project in Cisco with hiring the first Customer Success Managers that the company had employed globally about six years ago and led the fast growing and successful EMEAR (Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia) part of Cisco’s Customer Success organization as Director of Customer Success EMEAR. In 2017 he trademarked his “Customer Success VIM framework” and made it available to accelerate time-to-success for his clients and customers to make “Customer Success” work in practice, fast, and with measurable results. Jan is a public speaker at conferences, is actively engaging with his human network, practices as an active coach, and strongly believes in the value of the human touch in Customer Success to connect people and cultures to generate business outcomes through trusted relationships and culture-aligned scalable processes. Jan holds an Executive MBA from the Robert H. Smith School at the University of Maryland and an equivalent of a Masters (Dipl-Ing.) in Electronics and Informatics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

Alan Armstrong is founder and CEO of Eigenworks, a boutique strategy and research firm that services B2B software companies ranging from series-B startups through large public companies. Eigenworks currently employs 10 people and has demonstrated 35% CAGR for the past 5 years. Eigenworks clients include industry giants such as Oracle and Cisco, mid-size companies such as Blackbaud and ReturnPath, and rocket-ship startups including Gainsight and VictorOps. Alan is a regular contributor of articles and expertise to industry publications including Pragmatic Marketing, Gainsight's Pulse series, and the popular blog OnProductManagement, of which Alan is a co-founder. Alan speaks regularly at industry events, including Pulse (San Francisco 2015, 2016, 2017), TSIA (Las Vegas 2016), Strategy & Competitive Intelligence Professionals (Atlanta 2017), and Product Marketing Community (Toronto & San Francisco 2016, Boston 2017). Prior to founding Eigenworks, Alan held senior director and vice president roles in three startups and participated in three successful exits including Fortiva (to Proofpoint, 2008), Wily Technology ($400M to CA in 2006), and Canada's largest self-funded exit of Sitraka to Quest Software, where Alan was Director of New Products and Innovation. Alan's experience includes Vice President-level positions covering Product Management, Business Development, and Sales.

Russell Gray started his professional career as a litigation attorney. He was drawn to the practice of law to fulfil a desire to help people solve their problems. After a few years, Russell left the practice of law to consult with large law firms on software solutions for LexisNexis. In this position, Russell played a crucial role in helping attorneys utilise technology to streamline their practice and manage their e-discovery needs. As the practice of law moved into the digital age, Russell played a crucial role in educating his customers in how to use litigation solutions to manage and grow a successful practice. In 2016, with almost a decade of experience helping customers achieve their business goals through the use of technology, Russell transitioned this expertise to build a team of Customer Success Managers at LogicMonitor, a SaaS-based IT performance monitoring solution. At LogicMonitor Russell built a Customer Success program focused on helping customers achieve their business goals and eliminating the frustrations that come with adopting new technology.

Steve Willmott is a Customer Success Manager at Dun & Bradstreet and he joined me for the second Customer Success Conversations pod. Steve has over 30 years experience in customer service delivery and management roles, starting out in the tourism industry with Cosmos and the London Tourist Board before moving into the corporate business information sector, working in customer support and training with Lexis Nexis before moving into service management and leadership roles at Butterworths, OneSource Information Services and Thomson Reuters.

Gerry Sweeney is the founder, CEO and CTO of Hornbill and has revolutionised his business by putting Customer Success at the heart of everything they do. ​ Gerry set up Hornbill in 1995 as he felt that the helpdesk market needed a new and innovative tool to enable IT service management success. Today, more than 30,000 analysts at thousands of public and private sector organisations use Hornbill's service management solutions every day with the aim of helping people at work communicate and share information across business, geographical and cultural boundaries while simplifying the process of getting things at work done.

Gerard Dunne is the co-founder of the Customer Success Network, which was set up in June 2017 with the aim of developing Customer Success as a profession and provide an outlet for people to meet and share ideas, experiences and knowledge. Prior to setting up the Customer Success Network, Gerard worked as the Engagement Director at OpenLink Financial where he operated as a senior member of their Professional Service / Customer Success team in EMEA. Gerard supported the client engagement life cycle from a Professional Services perspective, ensuring a successful delivery of business outcomes for trading houses, both established and new initiatives, and major tier one organisations where trading is a key function of their operation.

Jeff is an innovative Customer Success Executive whose current role is Pre-sale Practice Lead for SaaS Deployments at ServiceSource International. During his tenure Jeff has worked over 100 client engagements helping SaaS, Hardware, Software, and Healthcare clients build and deploy top notch Customer Success practices. Driving excellence throughout Customer Success organisations has been a centrepiece of Jeff’s career. As one of the first members of the ServiceSource International’s management team, Jeff built the Customer Success practice from the ground up. His customer-first focus and codified Customer Success best practices ensures that every engagement meets both internal benchmarks and external expectations. Jeff is also writing a series of articles based on the 6 Pillars of Customer Success he developed.

Lauren Denault is the VP of Customer Success at Skupos and is based in San Francisco where she helps her customers in the convenience retail industry streamline their ordering and operations. Previously Lauren was the Senior Manager of Customer Success at Demandforce where she was responsible for retention, health, and product adoption across 25,000 small business accounts through one-to-many interactions with a CSM as well as automated marketing based on usage and health metrics. Lauren created a team that surged to 65 employees to increase billable retention by 6% and Net Promoter by 22 points and developed a new Customer on-boarding program responsible for a 5% lift in trial retention.

​With over 15 years of Customer Success experience, Customer Success truly runs through Marc Sason’s veins. A San Francisco Bay Area Native, Marc’s professional background includes 15 years of Client Services and Engagement in many different industries, including corporate training/consulting, audio and web conferencing, and targeted marketing (both digital and direct-mail). He is currently a Customer Success Manager at CoSo Cloud (formerly ConnectSolutions), a managed service provider and strategic partner for Adobe Connect, where he works with large US Federal Government accounts on their training and virtual meeting initiatives.

Dan Steinman is the General Manager of Gainsight EMEA and, and is based out of London, UK. He leads Gainsight's regional growth initiatives from the company’s regional headquarters located in London and helps Gainsight's European customers successfully understand and adopt Customer Success technology. Previously, Dan held the position of Chief Customer Officer, where his ultimate responsibility was the satisfaction and success of Gainsight's customer base. Customers are his passion - going all the way back to his days as an SE at IBM. Dan's career includes being a very early employee at Epiphany, Co-Founder at NearbyNow, and VP of Customer Success at both Mozes and Marketo before joining Gainsight.

Raman Bindra is a Customer Success Manager at Sentieo​ who has 7+ years of extensive Customer Success and Account Management Experience in Indian and global markets. Raman has worked with some premium clients throughout his career (e.g. Dell, Jabra, WMG, Microsoft, Wargaming) to help them achieve success using SaaS solutions. Currently as part of the Customer Success (India) Team at Sentieo, Raman is laying down the foundations of building and maintaining long-lasting professional relationships with his clients.

Stuart Pocock is a Director at Kompass UK (a leading business intelligence firm) and has spent his career in customer facing roles within the B2B environment. Stuart has had an illustrious career within the business information world, working at senior level positions at such organisations as Dun & Bradstreet, Perfect Information, OneSource, WoltersKluwer and Graydon. From working with Stuart, I can personally vouch that he is the consummate professional and always puts the customer at the heart of whatever he does to ensure that they get maximum value and return on investment.

Leanne Spencer is an award-winning entrepreneur and founder of Bodyshot Performance and she joined me for the third podcast. Leanne is a popular and engaging speaker, and recently delivered her first TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight'. Leanne is the author of the bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork: the highly personalised approach to health, fitness and nutrition that puts you first' and 'Rise and Shine: Recover from burnout and get back to your best'. She is one of the leading authorities on using exercise, biohacks and lifestyle interventions to recover from chronic stress and burnout, and frequently delivers workshops to companies and corporates on how to promote employee wellbeing in innovative and exciting ways.​

Matt Myszkowski is the Head of Customer Success at Rant & Rave and he joined me for the inaugural Customer Success Conversations pod to discuss a range of CS topics. Prior to joining Rant and Rave, Matt managed the EMEA & APAC Customer Success Team at Autodesk for 4 years and has been in Customer Success and Account Management leadership roles for nearly 10 years in the SAAS and technology space.