Customer Valuecast

With the advancement of Customer Success as a key revenue driver, unifying your Pre-Sales and Post-Sales functions around a holistic customer lifecycle is now mission critical. Your Sales and Customer Success functions can no longer exist as two independent organizations; they must act as one cohesive team with integrated processes that deliver value from the first prospective conversation all the way through the delivery, renewal and expansion motions.

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Jon Benson, VP, Worldwide Solutions Engineering at HashiCorp, about the reality of Pre-Sales and Post-Sales today and together they share a compelling vision for the future to merge these functions around a united customer lifecycle.

In the last few years, Customer Success has secured its spot at the executive table, joining other legacy organizations in driving the company’s vision and direction forward. What was once seen as a cost center and customer service extension has now solidified itself as a revenue-generating powerhouse. While the possibilities for the future of Customer Success are endless, there’s a lot of foundational work that needs to be done before the industry can effectively and fully incorporate predictive analytics that generates greater customer value and higher retention and expansion. 

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight, for his insight into the Customer Success industry as it stands today and  the trends that CS leaders should seize to grow and prosper.

The economic lifeblood of shared value realization is shared accountability. Put simply, there's no escaping shared responsibility for value, because the vendor-customer relationship is a shared and interdependent engagement. In order for your company to successfully align on the expectations of value creation and delivery for customers, you need a clear strategy and enterprise-grade technology that can operationalize shared accountability and collaboration.

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Scott McCorkle, CEO at MetaCX, for his insights into how B2B leaders can successfully facilitate shared accountability between vendor and customer through technology to achieve optimal value realization.

Customer Success (CS) technology has emerged as a defined market and technology category in the past decade. Every B2B company seeking to operationalize an approach to Customer Success has asked or is asking the question of whether they need to invest in CS technology. Yet, Customer Success technology has not reached the ‘must-have’ status like CRM, ERP, HRIS, Marketing Automation and other enterprise tech solutions. What’s holding CS technology back from becoming that must-have category?

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Jean Nairon, Vice President, Customer Operations at PTC, for his insights on the state of the CS technology market today and how B2B enterprises can maximize their investments in CS technology. 

Transforming Go-To-Market strategy to support a recurring revenue business model is not something that can be achieved overnight by existing business leaders alone. To ensure success, you need a dedicated leader, team and function whose primary role and responsibility is leading this extensive transformation. But, employing a team is just the beginning. A successful GTM transformation needs to be a multi-function endeavor with constant engagement and contribution from all of your business functions. Only then will you be able to drive an impactful transformation that permeates your company as an organization-wide initiative.

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Biju Bhaskar, Global Head of GTM Transformation at Thomson Reuters, for his expertise on how to lead and execute a successful company-wide GTM transformation and showcase its business impact to garner enthusiastic buy-in from executive leaders.

In the vast majority of software enterprises today, there’s no debate about whether or not to invest in a Customer Success organization. Instead, the question has become: what size should our Customer Success organization be, and how many of which roles are needed to enable a successful execution of our company’s Customer Success strategy?

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Stephen Fulkerson, Vice President, Customer Success Research at TSIA, for his insights on the common challenges that business leaders face when sizing a Customer Success team and best practices for staffing and scaling a high-performance Customer Success organization that drives bottom-line growth. 

In the past few years, Customer Success has gained a lot of prominence and prestige in the business world. It may not yet have an equal seat at the table as other legacy departments, but it has definitely emerged in the spotlight. With SaaS and cloud-based becoming the de facto business models, executive leaders recognize the criticality of the customer experience and the necessity of improving their Customer Success and service model. Customer Success leaders are now being tasked to lead this charge, becoming the transformational leaders of this evolution. As such, the most successful CS leaders have learned how to be nimble in the way they think and continually optimize their skills and knowledge to reflect what’s happening in the market, with their customers and their teams in order to drive first-rate retention rates and expansion revenue. 

In this episode, host Ross Fulton chats with Peter Armaly, Senior Director, Customer Success Enablement at Oracle, for his insights on the transformation Customer Success has experienced in recent years and how CS leaders can develop a builder mentality to lead a Customer Success evolution. 

While Customer Success is a fairly recent phenomenon, the discipline is undergoing a drastic change to keep up with market and consumer demands. When your customers experience the ease and simplicity of dealing with B2C businesses, such as Apple and Amazon, they expect that same experience from their B2B business dealings. If your product can’t provide the Apple-like experience, or value in a timely way like Amazon, will your customers come back or will they look for another provider?

In our first episode, host Ross Fulton chats to Kevin Meeks, former CCO at Apptio and current Industry Principal at Valuize, for his insights on the emerging transformation of the Customer Success and Customer Experience landscape and how B2B leaders can seize this enormous growth opportunity. 

Introducing Customer Valuecast, a podcast dedicated to helping you put measurable value at the heart of your customer lifecycle and, as a result, acquire, retain and expand more customers in your recurring revenue business.

Join host Ross Fulton every fortnight as he talks to trailblazing C-Suite, Sales, Customer Success, Product and Operations leaders to share powerful insights and experiences that will help you create more value for your customers and, in turn, more success for your business.