Revenue Revolutionaries

"As human beings, we love to hear and watch stories.”  - Brent Dykes Brent Dykes, Founder and Chief Data Storyteller at AnalyticsHero and Author of Effective Data Storytelling, has seen it all when it comes to managing and analyzing data. He has spent years at companies like Domo and Adobe, constructing and implementing data strategies, and now he is now taking his knowledge and experience to the market to help companies become world-class data storytellers. In this episode of Value Builders, Brent sits down with Dave to discuss his new book Effective Data Storytelling.  In the discussion, Brent defines data storytelling and helps us understand how data storytelling can help a company develop a high-performing data culture to drive change.  Brent is also writing about the importance of creating and supporting a data culture within a company.  You'll hear Brent expand on why creating a data culture is so important to fully realize the benefits of investments in data and data storytelling.Effective Data Storytelling on AmazonBrent's Data Culture Whitepaper 

“Some of our most traditional, original ideas of business strategy have turned out to be profoundly flawed.”  The research is in,  the key to driving world-class customer retention and growth rates is not customer happiness or customer satisfaction. While both are important, it's the results the customer achieves with a supplier that matter most.   It may seem obvious, but conventional wisdom and behavior have not always led companies down a path to embracing the importance of ensuring customers achieve results.  In this enlightening episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with customer retention, growth, and strategy expert, Greg Daines, to discuss how Greg's economics background and retention research are providing a clearer understanding of how to  effectively attain better retention and growth rates by changing behavior and creating meaningful results for customers.About Greg Daines Greg Daines is a leading expert in customer retention, growth, and strategy. Throughout his career as both a founder and executive, he has regularly challenged the conventional thinking. He has spent the past several years working with companies around the world to transform their results using his unique Total Customer Strategy playbooks. Greg is known for his thought-provoking and data-driven approach, and he holds advanced degrees in business and economics from MIT and Cambridge University.

“We need to market and sell what things do, not what they are…we need to be marketing and selling pains and gains.” - Aaron Thompson In this episode of Value Builders, Dave is joined by one of the most well-known names in customer success, SuccessCoaching CRO, Aaron Thompson.  They sat down to discuss outcome-based selling.  Aaron helps us understand why it's so important for companies to embrace an outcome-selling mindset and strategy in order to put teams and customers in the best possible position to achieve results - especially with subscription business models. In the discussion, he defines outcome-based selling, shares what we in B2B can learn from direct-to-consumer offerings, and talks about the realities of managing an infinite product lifespan with today's buyers and why new thinking is necessary to retain and grow customer relationships.  About Aaron Thompson Aaron Thompson is a world-renowned Customer Success Keynote Speaker and Educator. He is the Chief Revenue Officer at SuccessCOACHING (www.successcoaching.co), the world's leader in Customer Success training and education. He is also the CEO and Founder of RedSlacks.com, an online library of free Customer Success educational content.  Aaron has decades of training and instructional design experience and has built and scaled numerous Customer Success organizations from scratch. This real-world background in both disciplines uniquely positions him as an educator in the discipline of Customer Success. Aaron is a very active participant in the global Customer Success community and consistently challenges the industry norms to improve and grow the CS function in its entirety.When not evangelizing for Customer Success best practices, Aaron enjoys spending time with his friends and family in the great outdoors as an avid kayaker, golfer, and skier. He resides in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and as best he can, he takes full advantage of everything nature offers.

In this episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with Bill King of RiseNow -  a foremost expert in sourcing, supplier management, and specifically supplier value management. They discuss the differences between the disciplines and break down how identifying strategic, and investing in, strategic supplier relationships can produce case study-worthy results.  Bill explains how he thinks about taking supplier relationships to a place of trust and creativity where ideas and recommendations fuel a path to business impact.  He also elaborates on his process for creating supplier scorecards to drive focus and shares how he once turned the tables on a supplier to drive a QBR discussion in order to bring more focus to what he cares about as a customer.   About Bill King Bill King is a senior director and heads RiseNow's sourcing service line. He brings his proven track record for sourcing, client success and leadership skills. He is a recognized leader and visionary in spend management with over 20+ years of expertise in strategic sourcing, sourcing best practices, GPO/BPOs, contract management, contract development, supplier value management, project management and spend analytics. He has extensive experience in enabling technology to achieve best practices for his clients while also developing strategies to help them build powerful, strategic supplier partnerships.

What does a customer-centric culture actually look like?  Leslie Pagel, CCO at Authenticx, knows firsthand what it means to develop a customer experience strategy that is truly customer-centric after spending the majority of her career developing industry-leading customer experience strategies.  In this episode of Value Builders, Leslie breaks down the two key principles of effective customer experience strategy - listening to understand and the responsibility of advocating for customers.  She elaborates on how these two key principles are essential for weaving the customer into the fabric of a company.  In the second part of the conversation, Leslie talks about the work she and the team at Authenticx are doing to innovate in the customer experience space.  Specifically, she explains the role interaction data plays in unleashing an understanding of customer behavior and emotions.  She speaks to the power of investing in understanding the dynamics of a customer conversation as a path to unlocking customer experience improvements and extrapolating the data to improve a business overall.   To round out the conversation Leslie explains the concept of The Eddy Effect and how Authenticx is using it to help customers get ‘unstuck' in the development of their customer experience strategy.   About Leslie Pagel Leslie Pagel is the Chief Customer Officer at Authenticx, a conversation analytics company dedicated to improving the way healthcare companies engage with patients. In this role, she leads efforts to work with Authenticx clients to advise and inform customer strategies. With over two decades of working with customer experience (CX) teams, Leslie helps clients actualize the voice of the patient to show how these voices prompt meaningful action. 

What does customer success look like at a venture firm?  A Chief Customer Officer turned venture partner, Cassie Young is tackling this question head-on as she brings her customer success strategy expertise to the world of venture capital through a unique operating model.  In this episode of Value Builders, listen to Cassie explain how Primary Venture Partners is taking a new approach to supporting its portfolio by leaning on customer success principles as a catalyst for portfolio success. She also details the importance of customer storytelling, understanding that retention is a growth catalyst for new business sales, and why she believes that the CROs of the future are the CCOs of today.    About Cassie Young As Primary's Operating Partner focused on go-to-market, Cassie helps founders and portfolio companies to build and scale their sales, marketing, and customer operations.After graduating from Duke (making her a life-long Blue Devils fan), Cassie began her career as an analyst at Citigroup and entered the NYC tech scene in 2006 when she joined TheLadders as an early employee. Cassie took a quick break from NY to earn an MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth, but quickly returned to NY and has since worked as VP Marketing & Analytics at GLG and as VP Marketing & Partnerships for Savored (acquired by Groupon in 2012).Before joining Primary in early 2020, Cassie was Chief Customer Officer for CM Group, where she ran global customer and commercial teams for a $200 million+ martech portfolio. Cassie joined CM Group as part of their acquisition of Sailthru, where she was the Chief Revenue Officer.

What is the best way to create real social or environmental change?   According to David Ehrlichman, impact networks are the best way for a group of people to unlock the potential of uniting alongside a shared purpose. In his new book, Impact Networks, David outlines how impact networks open up new avenues for bringing people and organizations together to create meaningful change for today's greatest social challenges.  In this episode of Value Builders, listen to David define impact networks, discuss why they are necessary and how they can be used to create true societal transformation.  He explains the power of a network mindset and offers advice for those who have an interest in creating an impact network.David has also recently released a documentary to complement his Impact Networks book.  You can watch the documentary here.   About David Ehrlichman David Ehrlichman is author of Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change. He is also a catalyst and coordinator of Converge (converge.net). With his colleagues, he has helped form dozens of impact networks in a variety of fields, and has worked as a coordinator for the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network, Sterling Network NYC, and the Fresno New Leadership Network. He speaks and writes frequently on networks, finds serenity in music, and is completely mesmerized by his newborn daughter. Find his writings at davidehrlichman.medium.com.

Four years into his journey of building the value consulting and management function at MongoDB, Worldwide Director - Customer Business Value, David Moskowitz is proving that a strategic investment in a value practice can pay great dividends for a company. In this episode of Value Builders, David reflects on the history of the practice of value consulting and explains how it has evolved into being a critical part of the business model equation for growing organizations. He shares how he thinks about ROI in comparison to TOC (total cost ownership) and introduces TVO - Total Value of Ownership -  a key measure he uses for positioning value with customers to paint a full picture of the benefits of a customer relationship with MongoDB.David also explains how he is using coaching as a new technique to teach his team's Sales and Customer Success peers how to fish and uplevel value conversations.  The conversation ends with David elaborating on his prediction that value organizations and customer success organizations will grow closer together in the coming years.

In this episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with Box CMO, Chris Koehler.  It's a two-part conversation - first, Chris offers his take on the emergence of the MetaVerse™ and delves into some of the big questions that companies and marketing leaders have to consider as MetaVerse™ strategies take shape. In the second half of the conversation, Chris shares his perspective on marketing's role in value creation for a company and a market.   He is tapping his customer success experience to bring empathy to his marketing efforts and explains how he tackles the issue of customers not fully understanding all of the value Box can bring to customers - his biggest pet peeve. Chris also touches on how he thinks about balancing marketing strategy across product-led growth and enterprise selling and he reflects on the importance of communication as a leader in a remote work environment. 

Nathan Stuck is an award-winning leader in the B Corp community and as the Director of Culture & Strategic Impact at Ad Victoriam Solutions, he's an inspiring example of social value leadership. In this episode of Value Builders, Nathan joins Dave to talk about his social impact journey and specifically touches on how leaders can align with their CEO for profit and purpose. He also shares how working within the Salesforce partner ecosystem has been a catalyst for change and accountability and offers advice to those looking to drive new social impact initiatives with their companies. About Nathan Stuck Nathan is an award-winning leader in the B Corp community. In addition to his role as the Director of Corporate Culture & Strategic Impact at Ad Victoriam Solution, a certified B Corp, he also founded and runs B Local Georgia, a nonprofit dedicated to growing the number of purpose-driven businesses in the Peach State. Nathan also teaches an experiential MBA course on B Corps at the University of Georgia and is the founder of Profitable Purpose Consulting, which helps for-profit businesses certify as B Corps. He has appeared on multiple podcasts and spoken at events across Georgia and the Southeast. His unique background provides both an authentic and genuine story that resonates with audiences and inspires them, and their businesses, to be a force for good.Follow Nathan on Linkedin. 

As the newly appointed Chief Customer Officer of high-growth company, Electric, Ellen Terchila is laying the foundation for years of success for her customer success organization and the Electric business as a whole. In this episode of Value Builders, hear Ellen talk about how she thinks about value creation by being one step ahead of customers, building her team so she can directly influence net dollar retention, and the importance of prioritizing hiring manager recruiting and team enablement as part of scaling a high growth customer success strategy. About Ellen Terchila Ellen has 20 years of experience in customer-facing roles in the software industry. Prior to joining Electric, Ellen led the global customer success organization at CM Group, a family of marketing technology brands. Ellen has led teams spanning customer strategy, inside sales, customer enablement, customer experience, and solutions architecture. Prior to CM Group, Ellen led Customer Success for Workday Europe and was previously at Accenture and Ariba. Ellen holds a BS in Public Relations from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

The foremost thought leader on outcome strategy development, Paul Henderson,  Founder of Outcome Leaders, will soon be launching his next book titled Income From Outcomes: How to Drive Revenue and Profit Through A Customer Outcome Program. In this episode of Value Builders, Paul joins Dave to discuss his new book and the best ways to tap into unrealized income by creating an outcome program.  Paul details several concepts that align to building an outcome program including outcome lifecycles, the growing gap in the buying cycle that is handcuffing organizations, and the opportunity to build pipeline through the development and positioning of initiatives in collaboration with customers. Follow Paul on Linkedin or by visiting his website Outcomeleaders.com.  About Paul Henderson Before founding Outcome Leaders, Paul Henderson led the Asia Pacific region for a mid-sized enterprise software company. He had 200 people across nine countries supporting 800 enterprise customers. For the last five years in this role, he led the design and running of an outcomes program across the whole region. He learned what worked and what didn't across diverse cultures.At the end of that five years, he realized two things:1. Lots of other technology vendors were struggling to deliver real success for their customers, and with over five years' experience, he thought he could help them.2. He really cared about customers achieving the outcomes they bought software to achieve.He then left the software company, spent one and a half years researching and writing, and published his second book; The Outcome Generation: How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrives through True Customer Success.Paul's practical experience and his research for the book underpin the Outcome-based Customer Success program.

State governments can have a vision for innovation just like other industries (software, healthcare, manufacturing, etc..). When you combine vision with outcome-based models and a fresh strategy for ecosystem collaboration, state governments can innovate and create a new catalyst for economic development and growth. Lawrence Walter, VP of Entrepreneurship for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), is doing just this - casting a big vision for building a digital ecosystem to cultivate the growth of the state of Indiana in one of the most innovative economic development organizations in the country. In this episode of Value Builders, Lawrence sits down with Dave to discuss how he is thinking about bringing an outcome-based strategy to economic development to put Indiana's ecosystem in a better position for success.  He elaborates on how his organization is creating new mechanisms for stronger collaboration with his customers and partners, and he speaks to how he is using technology, via MetaCX, to create new levels of alignment and progress for his most important stakeholders and strategic projects.

The case for creating a dedicated value team is increasingly becoming well understood - but how do you create one?  Once you've established the team, how do you scale it?  Anurag Goel has been down this road before multiple times at companies like SAP, Adobe, and Salesforce. As the newly minted Global Head of Value Consulting and Realization at Red Hat, he is well positioned to educate us on how to think about starting and scaling a value consulting and realization function. In this episode of Value Builders, Anurag shares his perspective on how to create and scale a value organization. He offers advice for how to think about using the value organization as a steel thread across the entire customer lifecycle while helping Sales and Customer Success teams position the ‘why' piece of the value proposition. He also offers his take on the most important skills that are necessary for building a strong and successful value team and speaks to the importance of keeping things simple.  About Anurag Goel Anurag is the Global Head of Value Consulting and Realization at Red Hat and is based out of the Bay Area. For the last 16+ years, Anurag has embarked on 4 occasions of building and scaling Value-Selling and Realization functions aimed at accelerating profitable revenue growth and customer adoption for Fortune 500 cloud businesses. After stints at SAP and Deloitte, Anurag led the establishment of the Value Consulting function at Adobe globally which contributed to 3x growth in revenue from $4B to $11B He has spent the last couple of years leading a Business Value team at Salesforce supporting a $200M ARR business before moving to Red Hat at the start of 2021 to yet again build a new value function from scratch. Anurag is passionate about value management and has been a mentor, thought leader, and speaker at multiple events including Dreamforce. Outside of work, Anurag enjoys playing tennis and traveling. Anurag is always looking to connect with others who are passionate about value building - you can follow him on Linkedin here.  

There has been an awakening in recent years in the business community. Now more than ever, companies are understanding their social responsibility to serve their employees, customers, communities, investors, and entire ecosystems. There are two types of value in business - commercial value and social value.  One of the reasons we rebranded the podcast to Value Builders was to create an opportunity to talk more about the intersection between commercial value and social value. In this episode of Value Builders, I sit down with Marcy Twete, Founder and CEO of Marcy Twete Consulting, to bring the social value conversation to the podcast. Marcy is helping companies build sustainable and responsible business value and I'm excited to tap into her expertise to talk more about how companies can create more social value.  In the discussion, Marcy defines social value and several of the foundational concepts that companies need to understand and embrace to serve their stakeholders and communities and compete in the future.  She also shares her perspective on why environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies and investments are good for business. We discuss how social value impacts commercial value and we touch on the recent trends including the rise in transparency, the importance of ESG strategies to investors, and why it matters for customers.  About Marcy Twete Marcy Twete is a recognized leader in corporate responsibility and sustainability for multinational Fortune 500 companies, and has a background both broad and deep in ESG (environmental, social, governance) factors, ethical decision-making, marketing and communications. She is the founder and CEO Marcy Twete Consulting where she advises corporations of all sizes, their investors and key partners on environmental, social, and governance risks and reputation management. In addition to leading her consulting practice, Marcy also co-hosts Office Baggage, a podcast that tackles topics for women in business that are all too often brushed under the office rug. In June 2020, she will launch Table Stakes: The Podcast for Responsible, Sustainable Businesses & Leaders, discussing the issues of sustainability with forward-thinking leaders to forecast the future of responsible business.Marcy is a proud Trustee at the Chicago Architecture Center, and a former member of the Boards of Directors for Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana and Step Up. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from the College of Saint Benedict and her MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In late 2020, after nearly 10 years in Chicago, Marcy and her husband Charlie  relocated to their former home of Minneapolis with their tabby cat Betsey and terrier mix Pearl. You'll find them running on Lake Harriet and Minnehaha Creek near their home in South Minneapolis.

How do you create a true operating model for customer success - one that spans the entire organization and unifies a business?It's an aspirational idea for many but Aaron Fulkerson, GM, Customer Success & Customer Service Products at ServiceNow, is tapping into years of start-up and enterprise experience to create a customer centricity operating model via his customer blueprint strategy to elevate customers, and in turn, ServiceNow to new heights. In this episode of Value Builders, Aaron explains how co-authoring a blueprint strategy with customers can inform product and go-to-market strategy through deep customer understanding.Aaron also discusses the trends he is seeing in the market and in particular, how customer success strategy is maturing to more value experience-based thinking and strategies. He closes with a great perspective on how Value Builders are leaders at heart. About Aaron Fulkerson  Aaron Fulkerson is a Product leader for the Customer Support Product at ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a cloud computing company that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Fulkerson is the Founder, former CEO, and a Board Member of MindTouch. MindTouch is a leader in self-service customer support and knowledge management. Aaron began MindTouch as an open-source project that quickly became one of the World's most popular with thousands of daily downloads. He helped turn this free software project into a successful SaaS company that serves many of the World's most respected brands and provides self-service support to millions every day. Aaron worked at Microsoft in Advanced Strategies and Policies. He has keynoted many conferences on the topics of entrepreneurship, leadership, management, and technology. He has been published by Forbes, CNN, Fortune, and many technology publications. Aaron has informed national policy for higher education at the White House. He has helped to create education-focused non-profits for underserved communities.

How do you partner with your customers to tell their value story? Brian LaFaille, Global Lead- SaaS Customer Success Programs at Google, thinks about this constantly and he has developed a  program and structure at Google to ensure the customer success team is well-positioned to develop and tell powerful value stories with customers. In the episode of Value Builders, listen to Brian share his customer success team founding story at Looker prior to being acquired by Google and how it set the tone for him to now be in a position to develop global SaaS customer success programs at Google. He talks about the importance of crafting value stories to articulate value and get credit for customer work, the role that value mapping plays in that equation, and why change management and storytelling have become critical customer success skills.Brian also discusses why Google has created a cloud value advisory group to support enterprise customers starting in the sales cycle and how this group is partnering with customer success to create a full lifecycle approach to value delivery.   

As many have stated, anyone can be a leader regardless of title or tenure.  Nicco Bosco, Senior Customer Success Manager at LinkedIn, epitomizes this attitude while fully embracing her opportunity to lead and serve in her role managing some of Linkedin's largest customers.In this episode of Value Builders, Nicci opens up about how she relies heavily on listening skills to build trust with her customers, her approach to hunting for the value that she can deliver to customers, and using perspective to solve problems. Nicci also shares how she is using her position at Linkedin to serve the veteran community within the company.  As a sister of a veteran, she has channeled her desire to serve veterans to help develop inspiring programs at LinkedIn that create an environment for diverse contribution, participation, and equity within the LinkedIn veteran community. Tune in to hear one of our most inspiring discussions thus far.  About Nicci Bosco Nicci has spent the last fifteen years in the talent acquisition space, first spending four years at CareerBuilder and now with LinkedIn for over ten years in a variety of roles including her current role as Senior Customer Success Manager. Throughout her career, she has focused her passions outside of work on advocating for both women in the workplace as well as military spouses and veterans, most recently serving as the Global Co-Chair for LinkedIn's Veterans & Allies Employee Resource Group.Nicci was born and raised a Cubs fan in Chicago, but with her heart in the mountains, she currently resides in Colorado Springs, CO where she can always find a trail run and serve the military community that surrounds her.  Constant growth and curiosity drive Nicci and she's always on the lookout for a great book!

You've heard of love languages but how about the language of value?  The language of value is the backbone of today's most customer-centric organizations and the leaders talking this language with their colleagues and customers are catapulting their organizations to new heights. In this episode of Value Builders, Michael Sachs, Head of Customer Success Value Methodology & Strategy at Slack, sits down to share how he thinks about the language of value while explaining how organizations can use it to unify to effectively manage customers. Michael also shares why Slack/Salesforce has decided to bring him on board to develop the company's first value methodology and strategy team. He reflects on his value management leadership experiences at Oracle, AWS, and Salesforce (his first stint) and offers advice to those working to define value strategy and management functions in their organizations.  Michael rounds out the conversation by sharing how he uses the idea of ‘carpe diem' as a personal mantra to champion his work and focus on driving innovation with a value delivery mindset. About Michael Sachs Michael Sachs is currently head of Slack's Value methodology organization. He is an executive value management strategist who transforms organizations and ignites continued growth by aligning core business outcomes with strategic solutions, utilizing Cloud SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Mobile, Analytics, and Collaboration. He brings a broad background across numerous business functions and technologies. His industry knowledge and passion has grown throughout his career, leading him to obtain senior executive leadership roles for Fortune 500 organizations. For the past 12 years, he has launched, scaled, and optimized Value Management organizations at Oracle Tech and Apps, SFDC, AWS, and Slack.

From Revenue Revolutionaries to Value Builders. I set sail on the Revenue Revolutionaries podcast journey to create a space for genuine conversations with today's best customer-focused leaders. Through MetaCX's growth and the many conversations I've had, I've noticed that enterprise companies and the leaders within them are more focused on value creation than ever before. With this evolution, there is an opportunity to elevate the podcast to facilitate more conversations focused on value creation across a variety of roles and industries.  I am excited to announce a rebrand of the podcast from Revenue Revolutionaries to Value Builders. Why Value Builders?  Tune in and learn more here.Thanks for listening! Dave DukeHost, Value Builders Podcast  

Is your product marketing team talking to customers?  In this episode, Dave sits down with Brian Hall and Lauren Decker of Carema Consulting to unpack this very important strategic question and others while discussing the opportunity organizations have to capitalize on the power of product marketing and customer success collaboration. Lauren stresses the importance of connecting the product marketing, and the marketing team as a whole, to customers to develop strong and productive messaging.  You will also hear Lauren and Brian share their perspective on how journey mapping needs to evolve to become more customer-centric. With a nod to Clayton Christensen, Brain shares his perspective on the evolution of journey mapping and how organizations should think about the opportunity to understand the job customers are trying to do and then build journeys for customers around the customer's job in collaboration with the customer.   About Brian Hall Brian Hall has over 25 years of experience growing revenue at founder-led B2B SaaS and technology companies. His expertise in building and leading customer success organizations is informed by his experience in marketing, sales, product management, product marketing and professional services with early- and growth-stage technology companies.Brian started Carema Consulting to help SaaS companies navigate the customer success pitfalls that inevitably happen when starting and scaling a business. In his role as President and Founder, he works closely with customers' leadership teams to uncover their most important opportunities and challenges. Leaning on his experience, Brian builds out and helps implement strategies and tactics that address these opportunities and challenges, with a particular focus on achieving account expansion.Brian is an Entrepreneur in Residence with both Sales Assembly and growth accelerator VentureSCALE; a Mentor at coworking accelerator Workbox; and a co-founder of the Chicago Customer Success Leadership Group.Outside of work, Brian looks to combine his passions for golf, running, travel, and food & drink. In fact, the name Carema Consulting is in reference to an Italian municipality and especially favored wine-producing area in Piedmont.About Lauren DeckerLauren Decker has spent the last 10 years executing and leading product marketing at high-growth SaaS companies. Her integrated approach to product marketing is informed by experience leading product management and brand management functions at B2B start-ups.As Carema Consulting's product marketing consultant, Lauren works with clients to develop strategic messaging for their product solutions and lay the foundation for their product marketing practice using proven go-to-market frameworks that improve internal communication, enable client-facing teams to confidently solve customer problems, and increase product adoption.Lauren is a member of High Alpha's executive network, High Alpha Navigators.Outside of work, Lauren enjoys spending time with her husband and son, Owen. She spends as much time as possible outside and can often be found on a run with Owen along for the ride in his stroller.

What does customer success look like at a hyper-growth company like Gong?  Well, there's nobody better to ask than Gong's VP of Customer Success, Steve Sanchez. In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Steve gives a peek into what has fueled the Gong business to greatness.  He shares how creating raving fans is the #1 operating principle for the company alongside his charter to build customer loyalty through value delivery.  Steve also explains how the revenue intelligence innovations Gong is introducing to the market are helping his team innovate and stay focused on the needs of their customers. The technology is opening up new opportunities for the business to focus on reality (i.e. real conversations) and spend less time on opinions which have created a powerful dynamic that is driving improved internal alignment. He touches on the work he's doing to build the success planning muscle through architecting a scalable strategy that reflects on the things that have been done to make customers successful in the past. He introduces the idea of creating an opinionated infrastructure for his team so Customer Success Managers  can understand and serve their customers better.  Dave and Steve also discuss the learnings Steve has extracted from the pandemic. He opens up about the importance of finding balance and creating room for team members and customers to find balance as well. The conversation wraps up with Steve making a prediction about the future of customer success in public markets and offering up some advice to leaders on how to ensure a team is set up for success from the get-go.  It's a power-packed conversation chock-full of ideas and learnings that can help any customer-focused leader improve and grow. About Steve SanchezSteve is the Vice President of Customer Success at Gong, a Revenue Intelligence platform transforming how customer teams run their business. Over the past decade, he has specialized in building or leading customer success teams at high-growth sales and marketing technology companies. 

Building a strategic account management team and function from scratch is no easy task but Irvine Sloan, VP of Strategic Account Management, has tackled it head-on at Duke Energy Corporation to lay a foundation for putting the business in a stronger position to serve customers.  'Superpowers' have been a key ingredient to building Duke Energy's strategic account management team and strategy.  On this episode of the podcast, hear Irvine share how he thinks about building the strategic account management team through a curated collection of skill sets to ensure his team is in the best position to serve and deliver value to customers. Irvine discusses how he thinks about meeting the customer where they are to drive alignment between Duke's vision for the customer and the customer's needs.  He sees this as being critical to ensuring Duke Energy remains competitive in the energy market.  He shares his vision for helping customers expand beyond the core Duke Energy products and services.  He elaborates on what he's driving with his team to expand customer relationships into more community and diversity and inclusion-related initiatives - all underneath the umbrella of working diligently to deliver on a big vision for customers.   

With a relentless focus on being mission-driven, driving internal alignment, and putting value realization and outcome management in the heart of customer success strategy, Mary-Beth Donovan is pulling all of the right levers to help guide VMware's digital transformation to the cloud.  In this episode of the podcast, Dave sits down with Mary-Beth to discuss how she uses a core set of pillars to make sure her team, and VMware as a whole, has the right tools and knowledge to be effective.  From developing the right set of metrics to run the business and measure customer performance to establishing critical frameworks for customer health monitoring and success planning, she shares her work and perspective on what it takes to deliver customer success at scale.   Mary and Dave also discuss the evolving trend of value management roles and how she is thinking about the best ways to drive value realization at scale through education and conducting the right conversations with customers.  About Mary-Beth Donovan Mary-Beth Donovan has been recognized for her expertise in leading customer success change management through business transformation to subscription, influencing adoption of recurring revenue best practices, building teams, designing and launching operational frameworks, and delivering actionable insights enabling growth. Mary-Beth  is the Vice President, Customer Success Operations for the Global Customer Success Organization at VMware. In this role, Mary-Beth is responsible for strategy and operational execution of the Customer Success portfolio, committed to driving value realization and excellence in customer's experience with VMware products and services.Since joining in June 2020, Mary-Beth has launched the Customer Success Operations team, designing, hiring, establishing the operational foundation for the now centralized Global Customer Success Org. Mary-Beth led the delivery design of VMware's Success 360, and methodology best practices focused on consumption, retention, and health of our customers. The team is implementing proactive, prescriptive, and predictive capabilities to manage customer's outcomes, scale customer success coverage, and grow the business.Prior to VMware, Mary-Beth was VP, Customer Success Operations and Customer Intelligence at PTC.  Mary-Beth led operational excellence across a unified organization of Customer Success, Support, and Renewals teams. In this role, Mary-Beth scaled strategy-to-execution through global operational effectiveness and efficiencies, and an aligned go-to-market segmentation strategy. Mary-Beth created and launched PTC's Customer Intelligence team, executing end-to-end customer data, analytics and governance, integrating leading and lagging insights to enable actionable data-driven business decisions. In her 15-year tenure at PTC, Mary-Beth had responsibilities leading business transformation across the Finance, Strategy, and Customer Advocacy teams.Mary-Beth has experience in Finance and Sales across medical device and defense industries. She holds a BS and MBA from Babson College.  Mary-Beth lives in the Boston area, and enjoys spending time with her husband and three sons.

Where are we in the customer experience evolution cycle? How should we think about NPS in 2021?   What does voice of customer innovation look like in the coming years? How has the pandemic supercharged our motivations to innovate? In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Dave had the unique opportunity to sit down with one of the co-creators of NPS, Richard Owen.  Richard has been working in the heart of customer experience for the majority of his career and is credited with materially advancing CX strategy through his NPS work.  In this discussion, Richard reflects on the evolution of NPS, the role it has served in shaping customer experience strategy, and the ways it can be used as a catalyst for CX innovation in the future. About Richard Owen Richard Owen is one of the best-known thought leaders in the Customer Experience industry. While CEO at Satmetrix, his team led the development of the Net Promoter Score methodology with Fred Reichheld, which created the most widely used approach to measuring customer experience in the world. Together with Dr. Laura Brooks he co-authored “Answering the ultimate question” which quickly became the “how-to” guide for NPS practitioners. Richard launched netpromoter.com which was supported by over 20,000 subscribers; the NPS Certification program with over 6,000 companies taking part and a conference series that ran for 10 years and 20 conferences.Today he is the founder and CEO of OCX Cognition, a consulting and data science company using machine learning to create real-time NPS and customer health performance data. Richard has enjoyed a 30-year career centered around the use of technology to transform business operations. As an executive at Dell Computer Corporation, he oversaw the re-engineering of the companies supply chain operations, the growth of Dell's consumer business in Japan, and as VP of Online, the scaling of the world's largest electronic commerce business of the 1990s. He has led two software companies to successful exits, with AvantGo (mobile enterprise software) achieving a public listing on the Nasdaq and Satmetrix, the cloud software co-creator of NPS, sold to NICE Systems. Richard has held several board positions in both public and private companies and has served on compensation, audit, and special board committees.An active venture investor, he most recently joined the board of Ajua, an innovative pioneer in customer data based in Nairobi, Kenya. Having lived in Japan, the UK, and the USA, he is a true international business thinker and Africa is a new and exciting passion for him.Richard holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Nottingham, England, and an MBA From the MIT Sloan School of Management. He lives with his wife Susan and son Alex in Scottsdale, Arizona, and in London, England.

What happens when a product-led organization finds success? Interestingly, the customer management strategy can go through a dramatic shift.  A shift in maturation that goes from being product and feature led to one that is more focused on understanding customer needs at a deeper level and talking strategically about value realization.  Seth Shaw has helped lead product-led growth strategies at some of SaaS's most recognizable brands including LogMeIn, Invision, Wrike, and now as the CRO at Airtable.  At Airtable, Seth is navigating the product-led journey as the company matures into embracing a value delivery mindset.   In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Seth explains what this looks like and shares his approach to developing the organization to be in a better position to solve customer problems through a vast library of use cases on a path to better serving the company’s customer stakeholders. 

There is a growing trend shaping the next wave of customer success strategy. Innovative customer success teams are working side by side with value realization teams to ensure customers are achieving their desired outcomes and receiving business value.  In this episode of the podcast, Natalie Fedie, Vice President of Customer Value at HighRadius sits down to offer her perspective on this evolution and explains how her customer success strategy has evolved to include this new internal structure.  Natalie also shares how she thinks about training her team to work with customers to formulate a well-crafted success strategy and navigate a shift from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset.  About Natalie Fedie Natalie Fedie is the VP of Customer Value for HighRadius, a fintech enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company specializing in automating the order-to-cash process with its Integrated Receivables platform. Natalie has over a decade of executive leadership experience managing and scaling customer success teams at fast-growing SaaS companies both in the Public and Private sector, where the focus is ensuring clients achieve measurable value to increase retention rates and drive predictable revenue growth. 

What are expectations? What role do they play in business? What role do they play in managing the customer relationship?  These are critical questions and the answers need to be well understood by everyone managing business relationships and specifically customer relationships.  In this week’s Revenue Revolutionaries episode, Dave sits down with Ed Powers of Service Excellence Partners for a fascinating conversation that unpacks the role expectation setting plays in developing strong and successful customer relationships. Ed shares how neuroscience is a key contributor to determining the health and fate of a customer relationship and our ability to develop a productive success plan with customers. About Ed PowersEd Powers is a senior executive with a passion for creating high-performing organizations. As an electrical engineer with fifteen years of experience in high technology, he implemented Hewlett-Packard’s performance improvement practices in multiple organizations and later co-founded multiple start-ups. As an entrepreneur and chief operating officer, he built the highest performing organization in a demanding service industry, delivering industry-leading customer loyalty of 96% and at 30% less operating cost.  As a management consultant, he helped start-ups to Fortune 500 organizations learn and apply leading approaches, improving everything from strategic planning to reducing PC user failures by 22%.  He is a board member and Examiner for Rocky Mountain Performance Excellence, an Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Performance Excellence program, and a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. 

Shifting from defense to offense is the name of the game in the outcomes economy according to Matt Myszkowksi.  It’s the essence of the mindset shift that customer management teams and organizations need to go through to compete and win.  In this episode, Dave sits down with Matt to talk about the evolution business has gone through to create the outcomes economy and how innovation in customer management is necessary to effectively deliver value to customers in order to mitigate churn and cultivate growth.   Matt also shares his perspective on what customer success and experience leaders must do to better prepare their c-suite and uplevel customer success teams to thrive in the outcomes economy. 

 Where do you go to manage and co-create value with your customers? No, we're not talking about an internal-only CRM system. We're talking about WITH your customers?  To date, there hasn’t been a place where both sides, the supplier and the customer, can go to manage a relationship across the life of the relationship.  It’s time we talk more about what this can and should look like. In this episode, Dave sits down with Harvey Dunham at SAMA (Strategic Account Management Association), to discuss the idea of creating a central ‘dashboard’ to collaborate and work collectively with customers to manage work, track progress, and deliver value.  The concept of a dashboard is more than graphs and charts in this context, it’s a surefire way to develop stronger and more focused relationships with your customers on a path to customer success. About Harvey Dunham After a remarkable 35-year career with Schneider Electric, Harvey Dunham serves as the Managing Director, Strategy and Marketing for the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA), a nonprofit professional association based in Chicago.During Harvey’s time at Schneider Electric, Harvey was a Strategic Account Manager (SAM), managed SAMs, and supported SAMs in developing solutions for their global strategic accounts, both inside and outside the United States.Harvey's last  position at Schneider was VP of Global Solutions, Buildings Business, where he led the global Life Sciences, Retail and Sales Transformation teams globally to help in achieving Schneider’s vision of becoming the global leader in energy management. While in this position he led a team which piloted and deployed a new solution and consultative selling methodology which trained over 100 people and developed $1.9 billion backlog in new opportunities.Harvey served as Schneider’s country president in Poland as well as South Africa, where he had responsibilities over sales, business development, project management and P&L management.Thanks to his impressive and long career at Schneider Electric, as well as military service, Harvey’s areas of expertise include negotiation, presentation skills, facilitation and training, coaching and collaboration as well as process improvement. ltlhuvEcwE9w2ssR915h 

There is a new intersection forming in the technology stack that is reshaping the future of the productivity and collaboration landscape.  Productivity applications are colliding with collaboration applications in what is being deemed deep collaboration - a new frontier of collaboration innovation that is bringing people closer to their teams, teams closer to other teams, and companies closer to their ecosystem (customers, partners, suppliers). In a recent VentureBeat article, Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital, speaks to a future where deep collaboration becomes central to the workplace.  In this episode, hear Jake define deep collaboration and explain why it is the next logical progression for the tech stack.  About Jake SaperJake still can’t believe he gets to do this for a living. Raised in Austin by parents who were serial co-founders, he got bit by the startup bug early. He thinks of serving entrepreneurs as his highest calling. His first venture focused on selling rocks door to door from his Radio Flyer wagon. Not one to shy away from a tough market, he moved on (20 years later) to help launch and grow a startup developing large solar power plants in India, Africa, and the Middle East. He’s developed a deep well of entrepreneurial empathy from being told no (and occasionally yes!) from investors and bureaucrats across the globe.Jake’s first job for which someone paid him was in management consulting, where he honed his deep, nerdy love of frameworks. He’s brought that passion for entrepreneurship and strategic thinking to venture. He got his start in venture at Kleiner Perkins, after which he joined Emergence, where he became a Kauffman Fellow.He’s passionate about using machine learning to help people do their jobs better and co-developed the firm’s Coaching Networks thesis. He serves on the boards of Textio, Guru, Ironclad, DroneDeploy, Vymo, Maze, and Assembled.Jake earned his B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale and his MBA from Stanford, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. Jake also earned an MS in Environment and Resources from Stanford. Jake is a singer and very mediocre guitar player, constantly in search of people to jam with.Jake’s wife Dannie Herzberg is the best go-to-market leader (and person) he knows. Jake’s north star is to help build enduring, values-driven companies that he and Dannie would be proud for their daughter Sadie to work at some day.

Collaboration. It’s a term and concept that has been used since the dawn of business but have you ever unpacked what it really means to collaborate effectively? It’s hard work and David Chapnick of Vantage Partners thinks a lot about the power of structured collaboration and the important role it plays in innovation and driving positive change in the buyer/supplier relationship.  In this episode of the  RevRev Shared Success Series, Dave sits down with David to talk about collaboration best practices from the perspective of the supplier and the role of the Strategic Account Manager (SAM) and from the perspective of the buyer side and the role of the Supplier Relationship Manager (SRM). About David Chapnick David Chapnick is a Partner and leader in Vantage Partners’ Sales and Account Management practice. David’s work and passion centers on building and implementing strategies that leverage the power of collaboration and innovation – between customers and suppliers, with alliance partners, and across internal business units. Since joining Vantage in 2004, David has worked globally on projects focused on business-to-business sales strategy, customer centricity, sales force effectiveness, alliance management, and strategic account management.Examples of David’s recent work include supporting the customer centricity transformation of a major pharmaceutical services company, implementing a commercial and go-to-market transformation of a SaaS company, leading a customer engagement and negotiation capability improvement effort for a medical device company’s sales force, launching numerous biopharma alliances focused on bringing novel therapies to market, developing the coaching skills of frontline sales leaders to drive revenue growth, and supporting the redesign of the business development and licensing model of a global pharmaceutical company.David is a frequent speaker and author.  His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, SAMA Velocity Magazine, and elsewhere; he is a co-author of the chapter on “Negotiation Systems and Strategies” in the 2020 International Contracts Manual, as well as Vantage’s studies on pricing, and on customer-supplier negotiations.David is also a veteran of the Vantage Volunteers team, which creates volunteering and team-building opportunities for the firm, partnering with Greater Boston nonprofit organizations such as the Jimmy Fund, Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, Chill, the Food Project, Cradles to Crayons, Room to Grow, and Massachusetts Audubon.  David is a graduate of Boston University.

Over the last few years, Dave has been on the hunt for outcome-based models across industries. While outcome-based thinking and strategy started in B2B SaaS for him, he has  quickly learned that the healthcare, non-profit, manufacturing, and government sectors have also adopted outcome-based models in various ways.  It’s a true signal that the performance economy has arrived and it’s evolving quickly. The world of outsourcing has stepped into adopting an outcome-based mindset through the concept of vested outsourcing. Created by Kate Vitasek, Faculty, Graduate & Executive Education University of Tennessee, Haslam College of Business Administration, vested outsourcing and the vested model known as Vested® is a business model, methodology, mindset, and movement for creating highly collaborative business relationships that enable true win-win relationships in which both parties are equally committed to each other’s success.  When applied, a Vested approach fosters an environment that sparks innovation, resulting in improved service, reduced costs, and value that didn’t exist before — for both parties (source: https://www.vestedway.com/)  In this episode of the new RevRev Shared Success Series, Dave sits down with Kate to discuss vested outsourcing and how it is revolutionizing the world of outsourcing.  About Kate Vitasek Lauded by World Trade Magazine as one of the “Fabulous 50+1” most influential people impacting global commerce, author, educator and business consultant Kate Vitasek is an international authority for her award-winning research and Vested® business model for highly collaborative and strategic relationships.Kate’s practical and research-based advice ignited a movement on how to create healthy and sustainable business relationships.Her work has led to six books, including:Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform OutsourcingVested: How P&G, McDonald’s and Microsoft Are Redefining Winning in Business RelationshipsGetting to We: Negotiating Agreements for Highly Collaborative RelationshipsThe Vested Way: How a “What’s in it for We” Mindset Revolutionizes Business RelationshipsPassionate in her quest to help companies transform their business relationships, Kate inspires and motivates companies around the world through teaching, speaking and workshops on Vested’s five proven “rules” for achieving transformational results.Vested stems from award-winning research by the University of Tennessee funded by the United States Air Force to find a “better way to outsource.”The Vested business model allows organizations to focus on desired outcomes and shared value to create a business relationship mutually beneficial for each of the partners. Rather than the “What’s-in-it-for-Me” mentality of conventional agreements, Vested’s “What’s-in-it-for-We” mindset invests both parties in the success of each other’s overall business, which in turn strengthens the sense of partnership and encourages a more lasting relationship. By sharing expertise and aligning their goals, both parties can drive innovation, adapt to changing needs and mitigate risk while working towards mutual success.Learn more about the Vested business model here. 

Monique LaRue and Ja’Rod Morris have recently launched National Black Customer Success Professionals (NBCSP) to provide a new professional development resource for diverse cultures who are interested in Customer Success (CS) as a career path.  In our discussion, we aim to draw attention to some of today’s most pressing social issues when it comes to creating career opportunities for diverse groups.  About National Black Customer Success Professionals (NBCSP)The National Black Customer Success Professionals (NBCSP) group was created as a professional development resource for diverse cultures who are interested in Customer Success (CS) as a career path to leadership opportunities or are currently working in CS Manager function. We are here to offer a positive perspective on Customer Success roles and management. Though this is a public forum, we are a safe place for sharing authentic insights, information, and strategies so we can help each other find positive, effective, resolutions to solve the issues that are keeping us up at night.Learn more on Linkedin here.    

Ross Fulton founded Valuize with a vision to help define the future of customer success.  He’s well on his way as he and his team have been working with some of the biggest companies in technology to push the boundaries of what’s possible to deliver true customer success.    In this episode of the new RevRev Shared Success Series, Dave sits down with Ross to discuss the critical topic of success planning.   The backbone of effective customer management, success planning has evolved into a key driver for putting customers, and those that manage them, in a position to be successful.  Ross helps us understand what success planning is, why it’s important, and what the future of success planning will look like.  About Ross Fulton Prior to founding Valuize, Ross spent over 16 years scaling industry-leading software companies on both sides of the Atlantic. With a mission to empower today’s B2B software leaders to retain and expand their customers, Ross is passionate about fusing customer success strategy, technology, and operations to drive sustainable growth.  An Englishman by birth, if not one by nature, Ross will take espresso over tea every time!

Karen Mangia has run the gamut of professional experiences to turn her passion for customer success into becoming a global customer experience and voice of customer leader, a 3x best-selling author, and a TEDx speaker.  In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Dave sits down with Karen to discuss her new book Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise.  Karen has spent years studying customer listening and feedback best practices and shares her perspective on what it takes to truly listen to customers in order to drive results and improve the customer experience.  Order Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise here.About Karen Mangia Karen Mangia is Vice President, Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce.  Her work focuses on strategies for personal and professional success, and she regularly works with executives, managers and future leaders at companies of all sizes globally.  She has two new books coming out in 2020:  Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise and Working From Home:  Making the New Normal Work For You - both from Wiley.  She has been featured in Forbes and regularly writes for Thrive Global and ZDNet.  Committed to diversity and inclusion, she serves on her company’s Racial Equality and Justice Task Force. She is a TEDx speaker and the author of Success With Less, a book that chronicles her own personal journey through a life-threatening health crisis. Her high-impact keynotes help organizations to access the future of work via innovative insights around the voice of the customer.

This is the second episode of a new RevRev series called 'Big Thinkers'.  In this series, Dave talks with some of today’s greatest business minds who are at the forefront of customer management and experience research and innovation.  In this episode, Dave chats with Dave Jackson, CEO of TheCustomer.Co.  Dave is a forward-thinking veteran of the customer management discipline and software industry who is constantly pushing the boundaries of customer management strategy.Tune in to hear Dave share his thoughts on what it really means to deliver value to customers, why thinking in silos is detrimental to every organization, and why we must build out organizations with an outside-in mindset. He also introduces the idea of ‘value elements’ and shares how he thinks about the importance of making progress with customers at every step of the customer journey.   About Dave JacksonDave Jackson is the founder and CEO of TheCustomer.Co, which helps B2B SaaS companies profitably win, satisfy, retain and grow their chosen customers better than the competition.Prior to founding TheCustomer.Co, he founded, led, and grew customer feedback specialists Clicktools, where he served as CEO for 15 years. Founded in 2000, Clicktools was one of the UK’s first true SaaS companies and one of the first to recognize the importance of customer success, appointing their first CSM in 2005. He led the company through two transactions, selling 49.9% to Survey Monkey in 2010 and 100% to Callidus Cloud in 2014.Dave has served in board, advisory, and interim roles in customer success for a number of SaaS companies. Much of David’s time is spent with senior managers advising them on how to design and build companies from the outside-in.  He has had many articles published and is an author and contributor to several books.  One of his books, Dynamic Organisations: The Challenge of Change published in 1997, was the first to describe a holistic approach to building successful, customer-focused organizations.In the free time, he is able to scrape together, David enjoys time with his family, good food and wine, and watercolor painting.  He is pretty good at two out of the three!

Innovation is the name of the game for Jo Mills. As Co-Founder/CXO at Fuel50, she sits at the unique intersection of employee experience and customer experience and with a front-row seat to the future of both disciplines.  In this episode of RevRev, Dave discusses her role in establishing an outcome-based mindset and strategy for Fuel50, the power of transparency in a remote-work world, and the importance of operating in an empathetic way to serve employees and customers.   Episode Key Takeaways1. Operate in an empathetic way - Jo explains how she thinks about using empathy to serve customers.  It’s necessary to fully understand what your customers are trying to build in the short term but we should also be working to understand how the work impacts the individual over the long term.  As we manage customers we should also be doing whatever we can to take the weight off of customers and create a path to outcome achievement.  We need to guide them to achieve their goals but it starts with taking the time to understand them first.  2. Hire with customer success in mind - The team you build will determine the level of service you give to customers - if you aren’t hiring people who understand the importance of serving customers, and are aligned from day one, it becomes very difficult to deliver customer success. The customer needs to know that your team has their best interests at heart. 3. Understand each team member’s definition of success - As a leader, Jo embraces her responsibility to devise and activate a plan to help her employees grow throughout their career.   She thinks about the best ways to craft roles that speak to an individual’s talents. In growing organizations, leaders have an opportunity to build the business around the employee’s talent and strengths to get the most out of their talent pool while also considering the aspirations of team members to grow and develop. 4. Over indexing on transparency builds trust - Transparency builds trust. Jo is a firm believer that one of the best ways to build trust, and in turn relationships, with your employees is for leaders to be transparent with the day to day dealings of a business. The pandemic and the new remote-work environment has created more uncertainty and questions about what is happening within an organization. With this, leaders must internalize the impact that this has on employees and take steps to over-index on becoming transparent to ensure information is being shared and employees are navigating the new environment with the leaders.  You can’t predict what is going to happen tomorrow but can you can prepare every day to put yourself and your team in the best position to respond.

With a thirst for helping companies discover opportunities for improvement, Helen Calvin has been on a mission to help organizations thrive throughout her career.   As the CRO at Jellyvision, her love for interviewing and hiring has shaped her employee development strategies and influences the way she empowers the Jellyvision customer and revenue teams to pursue greatness.  Tune in to hear Helen offer up some great advice on this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries. Episode Key Takeaways1. Being insatiably curious is the best way to understand and serve customers - Helen shares her perspective on the importance of using curiosity to understand and serve customers.  She stresses this by giving a couple of examples of questions you can ask to understand the customer’s mindset while keeping a pulse on the problems that are impacting the customer the most. 2. Think about the needs of your employees in order to effectively serve and retain customers - Helen believes the best path to retaining and growing customers is to think about customers through the lens of employees. The starting point for delivering value to customers and partners is through protecting employees.  If employees are in go standing with the company organization they will serve customers well. 3. There is both safety and risk in the CRO role - The CRO role is pretty black and white for Helen as she clearly knows if she’s doing her job or not through the revenue metrics (the safety) that are used to run the business.  She also knows that there is nowhere to hide (the risk) as the numbers speak for themselves.  She predicts that CROs will start to take on more responsibility within organizations in the coming years.  Aligning teams across the organization relative to revenue will become more important to ensure the functional areas and leaders are in lockstep and understand their role in the revenue equation.   4. If you’re not voting for yourself, the vote is unanimous - As Helen reflects on her relationship with her mom she encourages us to place bets on ourselves.  “You’re in control of your future” she explains.  It’s important that we all have faith that there will be brighter days in 2021 and to make that happen we need to take care of ourselves and each other to ensure that happens. 5. ‘Great’ likes to work with ‘great’ - Helen has made a point to focus on people development throughout her career to get the most out of her teams. This has been a key strategy for her to ensure that she builds the strongest team and culture.  She believes in setting high expectations while creating an environment for autonomy to allow for people’s talents to shine through.  Leaders must provide their teams with the right tools alongside high expectations to give them a chance to be great and work with others who have similar ambitions. 

This is the first episode of a new RevRev series called 'Big Thinkers'.  In this series, Dave talks to some of today’s greatest business minds who are at the forefront of customer management and experience research and innovation.  To kick off the series Dave sat down with Salesforce Director of Market Strategy, Mathew Sweezey.  Dave collaborated with Mat recently for an ebook project titled The New North Star: Experience is the Method, Outcomes are the Goal.  In this episode, they teardown the ebook and discuss how the most innovative customer and revenue leaders are embracing a new outcome-based mindset alongside their customer experience strategies.   About Mathew SweezeyMathew Sweezey is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce, and author of The Context Marketing Revolution (HBR 2020). He is regarded as one of the leading minds on the future of marketing and his visionary insights into consumer behavior, technology, and new business strategies have changed the way startups, Fortune 500, and nonprofit organizations alike find customers, break through, and build modern brands. In addition to his work with brands, Mathew is the host of the award-winning podcast The Electronic Propaganda Society and an accomplished writer having written for The Economist, Forbes, HBR The Observer, and Adage. 

From GM of EMEA at BounceX (now Wunderkind) to his current role as the CRO at Forecast, Rob Massa has turned a unique international business experience into his second CRO role.  In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Dave talks with Rob about how to reduce churn through leading indicator metrics via Sales, CS, and Marketing alignment, the power of strongly communicating the relationship between vision and tactics to employees, and the importance of over-indexing on hiring, onboarding, and training processes.  Episode Key Takeaways1. Get Sales and Customer Success teams as close as possible - Rob stresses the importance of keeping Sales and Customer Success teams as close as possible.  When there is true alignment, Sales should be proud to handoff a new customer to the Customer Success team.  He also thinks it’s important to ensure everyone across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success understands that selling to the right companies and customers is the best way to achieve individual and company goals. 2. Think two years out about retention risk and create retention leading indicator metrics - Rob oversees Sales and Customer and as he works to achieve his goals he knows it’s paramount that he drive down churn as much as possible. He has taken steps to identify the top ‘components’ contributing to churn and has developed leading indicator metrics to monitor behavior.  He then aligns the company to these leading indicator metrics to ensure the company is driving the right behavior in the first 90 days of the relationship.  He knows that this time period is crucial for setting a customer up for success beyond year one. Internal alignment to the leading indicator metrics has produced the higher retention rates he has been pursuing.  3. Remember the small things that matter to customers - Leaders can become disconnected from customers if a direct dialogue is not maintained. Rob cites an example of how a customer conversation led him to understand an issue that he wasn’t aware of and it ultimately resulted in a renewal that might not have happened without his outreach.  Rob believes that CROs should have a disciplined communication cadence with customers in order to stay aware of issues customers are dealing with so the business can fix them.  Oftentimes, there are communication breakdowns through the layers of management and it can prevent the business from serving customers to the best of its abilities.  4. Over Index on your hiring process and new employee onboarding and training - During the pandemic, Rob has gained a new perspective on the importance of a strong hiring process and employee onboarding and training.  He has created a rigorous hiring process that ensures the candidates are truly getting something out of the interview process. He strives to be transparent and upfront so the discussions are a two-way street and the candidate fully understands the role and the company before they join.  This has been a key reason for Rob being able to attract high-quality talent. 5. Strongly communicate how vision aligns to tactics - We all know that leaders are tasked with casting a strong vision for the organization. Rob believes leaders must help all employees understand how the vision for the organization aligns directly to the tactics.  Help employees align their work to the goals of the company.  Answer the question, “what happens if we hit our goals?”.  Transparency and communication on this front put the company and employees in a better position to be successful. There is power in sharing high-level corporate strategy with employees.   

Many have predicted that the CEOs of the future will have a CCO background and George Bilbrey is a shining example of that career evolution.  In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Dave sits down with George to discuss his path to becoming the CEO of Signpost.  George shares how a leap into entrepreneurship set the tone for his career path, why aligning the company to the customer journey is critical to managing a business, and the importance of understanding why customers need to achieve their outcomes.  Episode Key Takeaways1. The purpose of a business is to do the job the customer hired your product to do - George gets back to basics and highlights that the purpose of a business is to do the job that the customer hired your company and product to do.  The customer must achieve their desired outcomes in order for the customer relationship to stay intact. It is paramount that the team understands what your customers are actually buying. The outcomes are what they are buying and they are buying them for a reason. Good CCOs and CEOs understand this critical point.2. Customers are people too and this needs to be understood to drive internal alignment - CEOs are responsible for helping the organization understand that customers are people too and they have needs.  George thinks a lot about how to ensure his organization understands the customer journey and how functional areas impact customers at each stage of the journey. Align with the customer journey to put customers in the best position to be successful. 3. Fix things before they break - Things break in business, it comes with the territory. George works with his customer success team to proactively identify issues before they turn into organizational detriments. He takes a quantitative approach to discover what key customer behaviors and variables correlate with retention. He organizes new efforts to create new workflows and communication strategies to drive positive change to reduce churn. 4. Get good at dealing with weird and awkward situations - As Geroge explains the importance of having a growth mindset when being a manager of managers, he highlights the need for a leader of managers to get good and dealing with weird and awkward situations. It’s one of those insights that often goes unsaid but I think it’s a great call out because of the rollercoaster ride leaders go through when managing people.  How do you do this? Having a growth mindset is key. Use every weird and awkward situation to get to know the needs and wants of your people better so you can coach and guide them in those situations.     5. Monitor the customer journey quantitatively and qualitatively - Building on takeaway #3, George works to show the organization how metrics align with the customer journey. He thinks about how best to show his team how the day to day work directly impacts the key KPIs that are being used to manage the business. This strategy puts the team in a position to understand the business better and shows how the customer experience and the team’s understanding of the customer’s desired outcomes determine the trajectory of the business.

A hedge fund trader turned SaaS tech leader turned next-generation insurance company COO, Jamie Ahern has taken an unlikely path to becoming one of Chicago’s rising executives.  Dave sat down with Jamie to hear his story and learn about how he turned a passion for math and data science into leading marketing, growth, and product teams on his journey to landing a place in the c-suite a Kin Insurance. Episode Key Takeaways1. Maintain long-term foresight to get in front of issues -  Jamie believes it is essential to always be thinking about the problems that the business could encounter in the next year.  Think about the things you can be doing now to get in front of the issues today to minimize negative consequences.  This can apply to all who are looking to improve a business in any role. Anticipating future issues and proactively taking action can pay off big in the long run. 2. Talking to customers constantly is essential to gaining deep understanding - Jamie makes a point to talk to 5-10 customers a week to ensure he is staying close to customers. He highlights the importance of committing to getting a deep understanding of the needs of the customers to ensure the right products and services are being made by the company.  He also points out that it is very important to understand why a potential customer didn’t buy.  What happened that turned them off?  Having these discussions is key to figuring out how you can improve and service the market better and/or in new ways.  3. Doing too much ‘mission-critical’ work is a sign of poor planning and execution - Jamie has a well-crafted perspective on how executives should think about their day to day role in a company.  He asks powerful questions of himself to ensure he is putting the business in the best position to succeed. His three questions: 1 - How much mission-critical work am I doing? 2 - How can I make myself replaceable? 3 - How often am I surprised?  He asks these questions to ensure he is delegating correctly, he has created the right level of trust with his team, and he is forecasting properly.  4. Simplicity is the key to unlocking a great customer experience - There are some tremendous customer experience lessons to be learned in the insurance industry and Jamie notes that making things simple is absolutely necessary to create a great customer experience.  Sometimes there are products that aren’t the sexiest, i.e. insurance, so it’s important to consider how the customer thinks about the exercise of solving the problem that your company and products solve.  Customers don’t want to exert a lot of effort or brainpower to solve problems so suppliers must make it easy and painless.  It’s the path to creating a loyal customer base. 5. Leadership isn’t given, it is earned - For those that aspire to hold c-suite roles in their career, Jamie stresses the importance of understanding that leadership is influence in the end.  Think about how you can flex leadership muscles in your current role to show you are capable of bigger and better things. Manage your time to create space for new projects that will create opportunities for acquiring new experiences and learning.  The titles will come but only after you earn them. 

Understanding your organization’s purpose, seeking to understand the career goals of your team members, and taking leaps of faith to advance your career.  In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, I sit down with G2 CRO, Mike Weir to discuss all of these topics and more.  I walked away with a set of incredibly valuable insights and perspectives that will help every leader grow and improve.  Episode Key Takeaways1. Bring in outside talent to create learning opportunities for your team - During his time at Linkedin Mike learned the importance of helping create the right career trajectory for team members.  He uses the strategy of bringing outside talent (i.e. industry thought leaders) into team development to create space for team members to engage outside of their day job.  He believes in the power of learning from others and believes it’s key to personal and career development.  He encourages the idea of thinking differently and taking intelligent risks.2. The CRO role can be a lot more than building and closing pipeline - For Mike, his role as the G2 CRO goes beyond managing pipeline and closing deals.   Mike stresses the importance of keeping a finger on the pulse of the market by staying close to customers, reading, participating in events, and seeking discussions.  Mike proactively puts himself in situations to consistently be a part of the conversations taking place in the market to learn and understand what people are talking about and doing. This approach has put him in a strong position to cast a vision for the organization to ensure the team understands the task at hand. 3. Understand your purpose to bring your customers into a ‘value exchange’  - According to Mike, you have to know your place in the market and aim to understand why your buyers are using your products and services to deliver business impact.    Ask the question, “how can you help buyers understand the value you deliver to the market?” Mike describes the idea of a ‘value exchange’ as a way to keep perspective on the power of positioning your products and services in a way that considers the true needs of a customer.  This should be an ongoing exercise at the individual customer level.4. Develop team members through their career goals and ambitions - Mike explains the importance of leaders understanding the career goals of their team members.  It is only after having an understanding can a leader ensure the team member is having the right experience with an organization to prepare them for the future.  Create a career journey for your team members to ensure they get the most out of their experience with your organization. Think about ‘stretch projects and experiences’ that can help shape an individual and prepare them for future roles. 5. Chief Growth Officers (CGOs) will become more common in the future - Mike and I talk about the future of the CRO role and Mike predicts we will see more Chief Growth Officers (CGOs).  This evolution will happen as organizations strive to create a more unified go-to-market strategy to ensure CRO, CMO, and CPO alignment.  Building a shared cross-functional ‘roadmap’ will become more necessary to put the business in the best position to pay off the vision of the company. 6. Cross-functional career shifts can take you to new heights - One of the most revolutionary moves that Mike made in his career was to shift from Marketing leadership to Sales leadership.  Jumping over the fence to Sales created an opportunity for Mike to help the Sales team to understand how Marketing thinks and works.  He believes this transition is a big reason for being able to drive stronger relationships early in the lifecycle with customers. 

It started with a moose.  I’m not talking about Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation, I’m talking about Zeotap, CRO, Jim Thoeni’s path to becoming a revolutionary sales leader.  Born with a desire to help people, Jim Theoni has been serving others since grade school.  Jim provides a truckload of inspiration and wisdom in this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries.  Episode Key Takeaways 1. Be open to learning from anyone at any time - Open yourself up to being more vulnerable to learning.  It’s the most important lesson for Jim throughout his career. You can learn anything from anyone if you’re open to it but you have to be open to it.  Jim challenges his teams to always be curious, always be inquisitive, and always be learning.2. You need to want to make other people successful - You become more successful when you fully invest in understanding the needs of the individual on the other side of the table.  If you’re not investing in learning more about the people you are serving you are not putting yourself in the best position to provide the correct solutions.  3. To be an effective leader it’s imperative that you define the north star for your team -  Jim uses an exercise called WAR (weely activity report) to create a north star for his team. Within the framework, he crafts a purpose statement, the ‘WHY’, to set the tone for managing and effectively executing work.  It’s absolutely necessary to use something to prevent distraction and stay focused on why you are building what you are building.  4. CROs are responsible for creating ‘growth energy’ within the business - Jim shares that one of his key responsibilities is to create and facilitate a growth mindset environment within the business. He helps the organization understand what it’s going to take to grow the company.  The output can’t be what you want if you’re not focused on the right inputs. 5. CROs will need to unify the organization more in the future - With the responsibility of generating and managing revenue, it will become more necessary for CROs to unite the organization.  CROs need to proactively bring leaders in Sales, Services, Customer Success, and Product together to better understand how cross-functional collaboration can produce results across the revenue cycle. 6. Stick to the science of the buyer’s journey across the lifecycle - The science of selling must exist in your organization and it should align to a buyer’s journey that works.  Once the buyer’s journey is established, Jim says to stay true to the journey because it’s a ‘science’ that has been determined to work.  This needs to be a mindset across the lifecycle, encompassing growth, and expansion. 7. Always bring new ideas and value to customers - Jim explains the importance of always thinking about how to help customers improve.  In managing customer relationships, you need to create an expectation internally that  customers always need to be presented with new ideas and opportunities to receive value.  These are the seeds for growth and expansion.

Helen Baptist, COO at PathFactory, joins Dave for this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries.  Recently recognized as a Top 50 female leader in SaaS, Helen is a strong leader that shared too many insights to count. Helen and Dave discuss a wide range of topics including the importance of creating a workplace environment for authentic relationships, lifting up others who don’t look like you and embracing value-based selling to create the right customer relationships. Helen also shares some great ideas for how to stay engaged with your team during the pandemic. Episode Key Takeaways 1. Move at ‘intelligent speed’ - People need to be able to make their own decisions at low risk for the company and themselves, Helen calls this ‘intelligent speed’.  Authentic and transparent communication without ego makes it easier to move fast and produce results. 2. Customers put food on the table -  Customers make the world go around and it is so important to keep this top of mind ongoing.  The company owns the customer and the company gets paid by the customer so that it can provide for its employees.  A key question to ask: How is the customer receiving the team and company and how are we making it easy for them? Helen encourages leaders to ‘act like a customer’ when you joining a new team to fully understand the current state of the customer experience. 3. Lift up others that are like you AND not like you - Helen is an empathetic leader that stresses the importance of getting to know team members at a personal level. You don’t know a person from the outside, it so important to connect with people on a personal level so that you’re in a stronger position to lead and develop.   4. Give team members room to be authentic - Helen runs an exercise with her team to create an environment that encourages team members to open up and be authentic with other team members. The goal is to break down the walls between team members so people can get to know each other at a level that creates more trust and understanding.  5. Try new things to help team members feel connected -  The pandemic requires leaders to be creative.  It has created a new level of distance between teams and team members and leaders need to find new ways to stay engaged with team members.  She provides examples in the episode but the overarching message is that the new dynamics require leaders to invest more in finding creative ways to help the organization stay connected with each other to maintain relationships and culture. 

Joe Kuntz, CRO at Jobvite, joins Dave for this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries to discuss how he thinks about coaching team members and customers, what it takes to sustain a great culture over time, the key to finding balance as a CRO, and the power of embracing servant leadership.  Episode Key Takeaways 1. Leadership is a state of mind - In order to lead successfully, it’s imperative that leaders understand the importance of helping other people be successful. The only way to accomplish this is to have a mindset that puts others first.  This has surfaced in new ways for Joe during the pandemic. Hear him talk about how it’s more important than ever to bring empathy and perspective to the workplace. 2. The power is not in the statement, the power is in the question - Joe’s advice is to keep the other person’s perspective in mind when coaching a team member.  There is immense power in leveraging questions to effectively help individuals improve professionally and grow personally. Be mindful of the questions you are using to drive constructive conversations and create opportunities for growth and development. 3. A great culture is results-oriented - Companies with great cultures embrace the value of producing results. The ‘fun’ part of great cultures does not happen if results aren’t achieved over time.  Joe explains how ‘grit’ is a key ingredient in creating a results-driven culture and aggressive goal setting is necessary to sustain a high growth business.  4. Balance is key to being a great CRO - Alignment with the executive team and board of directors is an important aspect of being an effective CRO. Joe believes that in order to effectively drive alignment with the c-suite and board one must be direct and transparent. Call out what’s going well and where the business is being challenged. It sets the right tone for creating a high functioning relationship with peers. 5. Process needs to facilitate the buying process - Joe reflects on the evolution of selling and points out that buyers are not typically well versed in what they are buying.  Sales leaders should create processes to make the buying process a strong facilitator of knowledge sharing in order to build trust and earn the right to win a new relationship.

This week on Revenue Revolutionaries, Michelle Curlees, CCO at Cheetah Digital, joined me to talk about how she thinks about the ‘art and science’ of customer management, the power of a ‘red-bow’ customer experience, and the keys to building strong customer relationships in order to achieve retention and growth goals. Episode Key Takeaways 1. Customer management is a combination of art and science - Michelle shares how she thinks about customer management as a combination of art and science.  Science is required to run the operations of a business really well  while ‘art’ is necessary to determine the best way to achieve the operational goals.  Leaders must find a balance between the two in order to create meaningful relationships with customers. 2. Leaders must review customer experience improvement opportunities  by using both ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ strategies  - In order to move the proverbial customer experience needle, it’s imperative that leaders take both an ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ approach to customer experience work. It is crucial that organizations understand the customer experience through the customer’s perspective while also driving change internally by being aware of an organization’s own capabilities and limitations. 3. Simplicity can be the key to success - Michelle explains how organizations often over-engineer processes and experiences for customers. Sometimes it’s necessary to simplify in order to produce the best results for a customer. 4. Customers want a ‘red-bow’ experience - Michelle details how her work experiences across various industries and categories have been a catalyst for learning. Getting experience in various industries can widen your perspective and make you a stronger customer leader.  She cites a ‘red-bow’ experience example in the B2C space and shares how it has inspired how she thinks about crafting B2B customer experiences. 5. Define and design around what customers want, need, and value in order to protect and grow revenue  - Creating customer trust through transparency and honest conversations are key to leading customers. Michelle shares how she thinks about developing customer relationships to create a path for achieving retention and growth goals. 6. Employee experience and customer experience are directly connected - Michelle has oversight of HR in her CCO at Cheetah Digital. This unique dynamic has given her a front-row seat to better understanding the relationship between the Cheetah Digital employee and customer experiences.  This organizational structure has provided a venue for aligning all employees better in delivering customer value.

Tim Satterwhite, Chief Revenue Officer at Terminus, joins Dave to talk about his first time experience as a CRO and how he embraces ‘human-first’ leadership strategies to build his teams and future leaders.  He also elaborates on how he thinks about the importance of educating and advocating in the sales process and earning the right to partner with new customers.  Episode Key Takeaways1. ‘Human-first’ leadership is the key to building trust and confidence - Tim’s experience has taught him the importance of building trust and confidence within his teams through understanding the impact of work, success and failure, on team members.  If the people piece is out of order you greatly reduce your chances for success. Communication and empathy are critical and the pandemic has shined a spotlight on this in recent months. 2. The right environment must be created for leadership development - Tim shares his perspective on the importance of developing future leaders.  He believes that the right environment must be created to empower team members to share new ideas and take ownership of initiatives.  Without the right environment, it’s very difficult to develop leadership talent. 3. Traditional selling is dead - Sales strategies and tactics have evolved and now more than sales teams must embrace the role of educating and advocating future customers in the sales process. It’s critical to help a prospect do the proper diligence to help them create a path to partnership. 4. Ruthless prioritization creates a path making progress as the leader of a team - A CRO must embrace the responsibility of prioritizing work relative to the decision-making process to ensure he/she is producing the best results for employees and the business as a whole.5. The lines between CRO and CMO roles are blurring - Tim sees the lines between sales, customer success, and marketing fading. Revenue management and marketing span the entire lifecycle and it is necessary for organizations to think about the full spectrum cross-functionally and leverage customer success roles and talent pre-sales. He calls this PX2CX - the prospect experience (PX) to customer experience (CX). The Revenue Revolutionaries podcast is a MetaCX, Inc. production. You can learn more about MetaCX at www.MetaCX.com or by following on Twitter @metacx.

Ziv and Dave sit down to discuss how Ziv’s career evolved from a first job that sparked a passion for technology and customers to now sitting in a CCO role at AppsFlyer. Ziv explains how in his role he drives conversations across the organization to represent the customer inside and outside of the company. He specifically highlights how he drives conversations with his engineering team to ensure the needs of the customer are well understood and how he thinks about value delivery across a product suite.Episode Key Takeaways1. Customer experience is everything – The product experience, the marketing experience, the buying experience, the customer management experience, etc… all influence the trajectory of a customer relationship. Companies must embrace the importance of a great CX and commit to creating a memorable cross-functional experience across the lifecycle.2. CCOs must push the engineering/product team to understand the customer – Ziv shares his take on the role a CCO and his/her organization plays in ensuring the organization understands the jobs the customers are trying to do with the product.3. Technology can help communicate customer needs internally – Ziv highlights how he leverages technology to record and share customer conversations to improve internal communication to make sure internal stakeholders, product and engineering specifically, understand the customer perspective.4. Understanding your product suite is key to value delivery – A large product suite is ‘heaven’ for a customer success team according to Ziv.  He explains that a large product suite provides an opportunity to correctly align the product to a customer’s desired outcomes.  Customer Success Managers need to be able to clearly articulate why a specific product offering needs to be used to help the customer achieve their goals.5. The ‘honeymoon’ stage is a critical period of time in the lifecycle – Ziv outlines how he thinks about the onboarding stage of the lifecycle as the ‘honeymoon’ stage. The customer will always remember the onboarding stage. It’s a critical stage after a new partnership is formed.  In the honeymoon stage, you must ‘wow’ the customer and this can come in various forms but organizations should always be looking for opportunities to make a positive impression with the customer and build trust.6. Ask the question, “does the customer want to speak to you again?”  – When creating your customer experience Ziv suggests putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and asking the question, “do I want to speak to my supplier again?”. This is a great lens for thinking about the importance of every customer interaction and the experience that is being delivered. The Revenue Revolutionaries podcast is a MetaCX, Inc. production. You can learn more about MetaCX at www.MetaCX.com or by following on Twitter @metacx.

Jennifer talks with Dave about her consulting turned customer management career trajectory and how she has spent her entire career helping customers achieve their goals through world-class experiences.  She also highlights the three things she believes are necessary when a company is thinking about building a customer success organization and the responsibility a CCO has within an organization to establish the proper customer mindset.  The Revenue Revolutionaries podcast is a MetaCX, Inc. production. You can learn more about MetaCX at www.MetaCX.com or by following on Twitter @metacx.