New Here....Let's give you a proper welcome

If you're new and want to introduce yourself, drop a quick comment on this thread.

Tell us about yourself and what you're hoping to get out of the community.

Thank you for being part of this growing community - we're thrilled to be on this journey with you!
#Career

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Comments

Tim Gilhooly

Hello Everyone,

I am excited to join this community and contributing. I come from an industry that is decimated right now, Events and Conventions.

My purpose for joining the community is to align myself with professionals in Customer Success, listen, learn, and grow. My goal is to land a role as CSM. Why would I want to take such a bold move? I find many similarities in my position as Sr. Event Services Manager that relates to a Customer Success Manager. Here are just a few examples:

An Event Services Manager is a "client facing role" working with clients such as Event Marketing Managers & Director of Meetings. Very Similar to a CSM engaging with many different customers.
An Event Services Manager engages with clients during the "post-sale" phase. Partners with meeting/convention planners, event marketing to transition to the planning process (project management or Success Plan in the CS world ). I find this very similar to a CSM delivering the onboarding and setting the expectations upfront
An ESM is responsible for managing an account, fostering client relationships, identifying upsell opportunities, cross-collaboration (Front Desk, Reservations, Catering, Culinary, AV, Production) wearing many hats. Very similar to a CSM working with Product Team, Engineering, Sales, Marketing.
An ESM Facilitates Planning Sessions and Site Visits at Hotels/Resorts. Also, facilitates Pre-Convention Meetings.....Acting as a "client advocate". Forsters strong relationships. Similar to a CSM as a "Voice of the Customer"

Overall, An Event Manager is responsible for planning/executing a successful conference for an organization, acting as a "trusted advisor" for clients/customers, and delivering successful outcomes resulting in repeat business (Retention)

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts or suggestions on the transition!

Thank you!

#Customer Success
#Trusted Advisor
#Outcomes
#Coachable

Yanira "Janita" Sesniak

Welcome to the community @Natalia Chaudhry!

Fabien OUARET

Hi guys, I'm Fabien! Glad to be on board

I'm head of Customer Success within a French Saas Company.

I'm here to share my own experience as CSM, Team lead and now Head of CS. We have plenty challenges to face especially in this period; so let's share our ideas, good vibes and experiences!

Best Regards

Heather Leventry

Hello Everyone! I'm here because I love communities and feel like we are only as powerful as our network. I am here to connect with new people and to help others. Check out my content on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherleventry/ or ask for a meeting to discuss ways I can help you. One fun fact about me is that I am obsessed with making impactful PowerPoint Decks.
#CustomerEducation
#learning
#training

Ratan Mehta

Hey GGR community!

I joined two days ago, super super excited to be here.

I'm hoping to connect with someone who's willing to share what their day-to-day is like as a CSM/manager.

I understand that the ideal CSM wears lots of hats and I def want to learn.

Thanks!

Christopher Simpson

Hey everyone, my name is Chris Simpson and I am Head of Customer Success for Direct Commerce in San Francisco. We are a small and growing Fintech organization and I joined this group to connect with other CS professionals.

I believe passionately that long-term, profitable relationships are forged by understanding customer's needs, goals and objectives and aligning to achieve them together. Having spent much of my career in Sales, with a Customer Success strategy, I am excited to focus on building a world class Customer Success team.

I'm look forward to meeting and collaborating with like-minded colleagues.

Best,

Chris

Lisa Walsh-Cooper

Hi there!

I've been a passive observer of GGR for a few months and only recently revisited to become more active.

I am currently working as Customer Programs and Training Manager for a company that is rapidly growing and trying to scale appropriately. I have been working in the CS space now for 8+ years - beginning in support, working my way into Training, Account Management, and CS Team management.
I started my current role 11 months ago and was definitely not prepared for the career change to be simultaneous with the world changes - it's been an adventure!
It is a completely different role for me as it's even more dynamic than most of my CS experience and involves having my hand in a number of the organizations pots, so to speak. I am still finding my footing and am looking forward to learning from the shared experience of GGR members!

Thrilled to be here and have the opportunity to connect and learn from everyone!

Markus Kjelsrud Pedersen

Hi everyone, I'm Markus!

I've been a member for some months now, and I've been looking forward to a post like this.

I'm working as a CSM for 24SevenOffice. We have just started to approach the CS way and are pretty new to this process of work. Right now we are just consuming and absorbing as much information as possible, but we are moving forward fast.

The CS team were under the sales department and we worked more with sales and administrative upsales. Now we got our own portefolio and we are moving towards working with our customer so they can reach their goals. As for now we using spreadsheet to keep up with our portefolio, but we want to move towards a CSM tool at some point.

Looking forward to connect with you guys.

Brian Crumby

Good morning.

My name is Brian Crumby. Highly excited to use the momentum from my previous job as a CSM for small startup company to a larger organization with more established playbooks/frameworks. Landed a new role as CSM, Strategic Accounts for ServiceTitan. My previous experience has been an IT professional for several industries such as EDI/ERP, energy, and railroad logistics.

Looking forward to great conversations to grow and learn!

Have a fantastic day!

Cornelia Trifu

Hello everyone,

I'm Cony, currently CSM for Chef Software based in London. I am a tenacious Customer Success professional, constantly striving for better ways to reduce churn, build stronger executive relationship and leverage that to achieve on business outcomes stated and make IT operators lives better through continuous automation.

Due to recent acquisition of Chef, I find myself in search of another role, so reach out if you know of any openings in Customer Success in EMEA.

I joined this group because I want to continue building skills in CSMing and learn best practices and share examples of what works and what doesn't work from my experience so far.

Happy to connect with like-minded folks here and on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/corneliatrifu/

Have a great day ahead.

Best regards,
Cony

Cornelia Trifu
Customer Success Manager EMEA
Chef Software Inc

Jeremie Halimi

Hi there,
I'm Jeremie, CSM Team Lead in Cloudinary.

I'm here a while already, mostly reading and following discussions, and I decided this week to take a bit more active part in that wonderful community.
As a fresh Team lead, challenges are raising and it's always helping and insightful to check & see what others do...

Best Regards

Matt Kwan

Hi everyone! My name is Matt and I oversee the Customer Success team at Riipen, an early-stage EdTech marketplace. I joined 3 years ago and have since helped to scale the team and our operations. Prior to that I worked in media production for Higher Ed institutions.

I would love to learn more about:

Transitioning and scaling tech-touch models.
How to grow a marketplace.
Creating memorable SaaS "unboxing" moments.

Looking forward to connecting with you all!

Craig Jackson

Hi Everyone, Im Craig.

Im brand new GGG and I think the platform is awesome! Great to see a place dedicated to our skill set.

A little about me, I've spent my entire career in a sales/ account management function with the last 5 years as a senior leader in Customer Success in a SaaS Fintech environment. I have recently joined The Accountancy Cloud, tasked with building out a Customer Success team. We are pre seed and getting ourselves in a position for series a.

My goal for joining is a simple one, i'm looking to share as much of my experience a possible to help anyone along the CS journey and learn as much as I can from everyone else.

Looking forward to catching up with you all.

Craig

Jordan Silverman

Hello everyone! My name is Jordan and I currently oversee the post sales team at a SaaS startup called MarketMan.

I joined the company a little over 4 years ago and have been part of the exciting journey of building up a team and playbook.

Prior to MarketMan I ran my own startup and oversaw a sales team at another SaaS company.

I am excited to learn from some great people here on best practices around scaling up. This includes building out first iterations of customer service, improving tech touch/one to many outreach, and overall how to improve customer happiness.

Excited to be joining and looking forward to getting more involved!

Bob London

Hi...I'm very excited to join this vibrant community. Kudos to Jay, Jeff, et al. I specialize in customer discovery, brand, positioning and value prop strategy for B2B tech / SaaS companies. I've interviewed more than 2,200 B2B decisions makers for my clients.

So, why am I in a CS community?

It turns out that some of the work I do (and write and speak about) resonates with the CS world, particularly how to have more strategic customer conversations, asking disruptive questions and listening between the lines. Here's my recent webinar (courtesy of ChurnZero) on How to Have More Strategic Customer Convo's:

Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/xCTNfVGeMC0
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/londonink1/bob-london-of-chief-listening-officers-on-how-to-have-more-strategic-customer-conversations-presented-by-churnzero

Very appreciative of feedback and engagement so far. And looking to learning, connecting and adding value!

Please reach out if you have questions or need guidance regarding learning your customers' truth so you can move up the value chain.

BTW, although some consider me an expert listener professionally, my family would beg to differ :-)

Bob London
Chief Listening Officer
+1 240-994-7644
bob@chieflisteningofficers.com

Elliot Hullverson

Hi everyone, my name is Elliot and I am currently a Client Outcomes Manager at Gainsight (almost 3 yrs). I am looking forward to learning from everyone and expanding my network. Before Gainsight I was a CSM at Allbound and Integrate.

Jason Hardisty

Hi Stephanie

We have the same history, started in hospitality and then ended up on the software side.
I wish you good luck and success!

Cheers Jason

Dave Howard

Hello everyone - pleased to be starting my learning journey with this community.

With 40+ years in the learning and development world I am working to gain a deep understanding of the Customer Success/Customer Education world so I can apply my skills to helping develop great Customer Educators. I've worked in L&D for large and small organizations, taught at educational institutions and founded successful video production and e-learning companies. If any of that experience sounds helpful in answering your questions or addressing your goals, please connect. I'm always happy to share ideas.

My ultimate goal is to ensure that CE folks don't just understand their role, but also have real strategies for personal and professional success. For themselves and the customers they serve. To that end I plant trees in whose shade I may never sit.

I look forward to learning from all of you regardless of where you are on your career journey.

Greg Khaikin

Hi Everyone!

My name is Greg and I'm in Implementation for a SaaS company with an email and community product. I've been lurking in the community for a little while and this is my first post. Implementation is a big part of the customer journey and I'm here to learn as much as I can about how others are approaching common issues in the Customer Success and how I can apply that experience to my own work.

Great to be here!

Nick Mehta

So excited to be here! I'm the CEO of Gainsight. Thanks to Jeff and team for all you do to create this community.

Obviously I'm a little bit crazy passionate about CS...

I'm always learning. One of our values at Gainsight is Shoshin (Beginner's Mind). We are all beginners.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few"

So I'm excited to learn from all of you. In particular:
* How can CS evolve to the next level of strategic impact
* How to solve hard problems (e.g., customer communication engagement, per my last question)
* What we can all do to help the careers in CS
* How we can unite to focus on important issues like D&I
* How tech should evolve to meet the needs of CS in 2020

Thanks for having me here!
Nick

Phil Martino

Hi All,

My name is Phil Martino, and I was first introduced to CS earlier this year when my company gave me the opportunity to manage our first ever CS team. It was such an exciting opportunity, but also a huge challenge moving from an individual contributor to a leadership role! My background was mainly in Operations Management, Sales, and Analytics so I am very excited to wrap all of those into one throughout my CS journey.

I'm hoping to absorb as much knowledge from GGR as possible. All of the advice, strategies, and best practices that is being shared in this community has already helped in my efforts of growing my team and implementing new procedures! The podcasts are great!

Best,
Phil
https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-martino

Stefanie Wood

Good morning everyone, my name is Stefanie Wood, so glad to be a member!

My personal journey has taken me from being a leader in hospitality management to customer success with a hospitality software platform and now on to...???

I have enjoyed reading posts and comments over the last few months and look forward to being able to be more involved with weekly calls and networking with the members of the group, everyone here is such a great resource!

Hope everyone has a productive rest of the week.

Stefanie

Kelly McGillis

Hi everyone!

I joined GGR earlier this fall, but have mostly been observing so far.

I taught high school English for 4 years before making the switch to CS back in February at Riipen, which is an ed tech platform. We had a crazy summer, and I learned a lot about our company! Luckily, there were a lot of overlapping skills that translated over, as the school that I worked for was part of an international organization, and I taught most courses over Zoom.

Now that I've settled in to my new role, my goal is to expand my focus and learn more about CS as a practice so that I can proactively use effective strategies rather than relying on instinct and reaction in order to problem-solve.

I'm really looking forward to learning more through this group!

[Deleted User]

@Thanusan Chelvarajah - glad to have you here with us. Love the pivot from an accountant over to customer success - and especially staying in the FinTech world, I bet that can become useful when speaking with customers.

[Deleted User]

Awesome to have you @Christian Vijn - exciting times around the CS Technology space and we've got a number of folks who're looking to share.

[Deleted User]

@Mike True Glad to have you on CSM Office Hours yesterday - really excited to see what we can do in this community.

[Deleted User]

Awesome to have you @Shakira Morgan - I too made the transition from an Agency Account Manager over to the B2B SaaS customer success world. Can't wait to see you active and learning with us.

[Deleted User]

@Devon Turner glad to see you in here old friend! So exciting to hear about your progress and looking forward to helping you get acclimated to customer success!

[Deleted User]

Glad to hear about your pivot to start the customer success function at your organization @Jessica Carroll - lots of similar stories inside of Gain Grow Retain!

[Deleted User]

Such a great accomplishment! Glad to have you and can't wait to watch your journey!