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Re: Please roast our Job Description
Hey, I came across your post and really like how you’re thinking about this, especially building the CX function before scale instead of reacting to it later. That’s a rare position to be in. A couple thoughts on the questions you shared:
On CS without upsell- I actually think this makes a ton of sense for your model. If pricing scales with usage, then growth isn’t really a sales problem, it’s an activation problem. If someone’s only running 1 vehicle when they could be running 5, that’s not because they need to be “sold”… it’s because they never fully got set up or saw enough value early on.So it becomes more of how do we get people fully using what they already signed up for.
On the “system you built” question I like it. It filters out people who just run playbooks vs people who can actually think. Only thing I’d watch for is making sure you’re getting to how they identified the real problem and whether what they built actually changed behavior not just process. A lot of people can document something… fewer can get people to actually follow it.
On the 169 one-seat customers This is the most interesting one to me. My first move wouldn’t be outreach, it’d be figuring out two things, what does a “fully set up” customer actually look like in your system? and how far off are these folks from that? Because usually they’re not staying small by choice… they just never got all the way through setup or didn’t hit a strong “this is working” moment early.
So I’d want to find where that breaks first before trying to push expansion.
Last thing, it feels like the real opportunity here is just making it stupid simple for these operators to get to value fast. They’re busy, they’re not technical, and if it takes too much effort upfront, they’ll just stop halfway even if the product is solid. If you nail that piece, a lot of the downstream stuff (support, churn, growth) probably takes care of itself.
I'd be curious to see what you’re seeing right now in terms of where people tend to drop off during setup.
Hope this helps and good luck in your search,
Kristen
Re: How are you combating churn in your organisation?
I’ve worked on churn / expansion systems in both enterprise and scale-up environments, and a few patterns show up consistently:
1️⃣ Most CS teams are reactive. “Churn risk” often becomes visible only once commercial damage is already happening.
2️⃣ Tooling is fragmented — CRM, product analytics, support tickets, billing data — but no single prioritized “what to do next” view.
3️⃣ Health scores are usually static and rules-based. They rarely evolve based on real retention outcomes.
What works better in practice:
- Behavior-based churn prediction (not just red/yellow/green health scoring)
- Explicit expansion propensity scoring alongside churn
- Clear next-best-action recommendations tied to commercial impact
- Tight feedback loop: model → action → outcome → model refinement
If I could redesign a CS tool from scratch, it would do one thing well:
Turn messy customer signals into a ranked weekly action list tied directly to revenue at risk or expansion upside.
We’re currently running a small design research program with CS leaders to rethink this layer from first principles — always happy to exchange notes if useful.
yuliya67
Re: Does your company have an "AI Council"?
Interesting perspective. One challenge I’m seeing right now is that AI literacy varies widely across organizations, regardless of role or seniority, which can make broad councils difficult to operationalize early on. In practice, we’ve found it more effective for a small group (or even just one person) with deeper AI familiarity to initially act as internal consultant(s), working directly with departments to identify workflow level opportunities and educate teams on what’s realistically possible before expanding governance more broadly. Over time, that foundation makes cross functional input much more productive. Curious how others are balancing expertise vs. representation at this stage. Thoughts?
ThomasM
How are you using to combat churn in your organisations?
I’m moving into a CS Ops role and starting to look at CS tools.
If you’re using Gainsight, ChurnZero, or something similar — how is it actually going?
What did you choose and why?
What do you like about it day to day?
What’s annoying, clunky, or way more complicated than it should be?
Anything the sales demo definitely didn’t prepare you for?
And honestly — if you could design the “perfect” CS tool, what would it do differently?
Would really appreciate real experiences from people who live in these tools, not sales takes.
BaAvl
Re: Now Open - Job Board Community
Re: Attending CS “The Customer Conference” London
Hi Bob- congrats on being part of the event! I’ll definitely check your session out and say hi. See you there!
Attending CS “The Customer Conference” London
I’m thinking about attending this conference in London for networking purposes and was wondering if anyone here will be attending or would like to?
There is a Rev Ops day 1/27 and a CS day 1/28 at half the price of US conferences. $480 one day, $650 for both)
Would love to meet up!
Details:
Re: CS Workflow Tech - suggestions?
@KatherineBentley It would be helpful to know what tech stack already exists at the business. Is the Marketing and Sales motions also being done out of spreadsheets? Or is there a CRM? If there's a CRM, your best bet is to get you and your CS team into the CRM and start building some functionality for yourselves there. Even if you all do not have a CRM, I'd argue a CRM is the place to start. Both sides of the funnel will benefit. What's the average deal size of your customer base? Are you looking for high-touch or more digital-led CS motions?
Specifically for onboarding, RocketLane can be a great option if you are doing direct engagement onboarding. . Especially if you are early stages and don't know what the rest of your tech stack will be. It allows you to create a shareable space with the customer that allows both parties to check off and update an onboarding tracker. Best of all, you only pay for internal user seats, and do not have to pay for customer seats. So it scales nicely.
If a CRM is out of the question from a cost perspective, you could run much of the customer journey from a Project Management tool such as Monday.com. It will get messy at times, and simplicity, not complexity or the covering of every detail will be your friend here.
Again, I'll stress that LOADS of CS can be accomplished with a CRM, especially if the comparison is to spreadsheets. Feel free to provide more context if I'm missing something that could make my recommendations more effecitve.
Customer Success commercial training
Hello!
I am interested in getting some commercial training for my team of CSMs. There's plenty of sales training out there but I'm wondering if there are any courses/resources for Customer Success sales training? There's of course different situations, nuances to selling as a CSM within an existing account and relationship and other operational factors to their role to consider!
Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you!
JessieA