Hyperengage: The Customer Success Podcast: Recent Episodes
Adil Saleh & Taylor Kenerson
The HyperEngage podcast is a weekly, interview-style podcast series uncovering bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the how’s, why’s, and what’s that drive the tech of today.Want to join in as a guest, drop an email at podcast@hyperengage.io
In this episode, we chat with Sarah Beatty, Manager of Customer Success at Post Beyond, an Influitive company, which is a leading Employee Advocacy, and Social Selling Platform that enables global enterprises and their employees to find and share relevant content with their social networks to reach, engage, and influence — driving measurable business results. Sarah walks us through the challenges faced by the startup initially and how they were able to develop a successful Customer Success strategy. She then also shares how cross-functionality is achieved between teams, the important aspects to consider when choosing a CS platform, and her advice to people wanting to join Customer Success.
In this episode, we sit down with Enzo Avigo, CEO of June, an innovative product analytics platform. Enzo takes us through his journey of building June, sharing key lessons and experiences gained along the way, including his time in Y Combinator. He also offers a glimpse into June's go-to-market strategies, providing valuable insights into the inner workings of a successful startup and the thought process of an entrepreneur.
Today on the show, we have Jonathan Corbin, Global VP of Customer Success at HubSpot, a Leading CRM Platform for Enterprise Companies. He started by sharing his journey from being an engineer to launching his own startup and then embarking on his career in customer success. He then walked us through how HubSpot has evolved over the years and the various strategies that the company has implemented to stay ahead of the competition. He also shared insights into their approach toward customer success and how they leverage their own platform to serve over 150,000 customers.
Today on the show, we have Lissy M Giacomán Colyer, CEO of Vinco. Vinco is a Mexican EdTech platform that helps companies empower their workforce via education opportunities. In this episode, Lissy shares her story of how she started Vinco and her motivation for wanting to create a positive impact through education. She also delves into her experience as a part of Y Combinator's startup school, discussing the valuable lessons she learned and how it helped her grow and develop her business.
From streamlining workflows to conversational intelligence, AI in customer success has become integral to a more comprehensive perspective on customer engagement. Regie.ai is one such example that blends the art of language & the science of delivery to create, test and analyze personalized prospecting sales campaigns so you don’t have to.
In this episode, LeeRon Yahalumi shares a handful of great insights on leading great customer success organizations. LeeRon recently joined Regie.ai as its head of customer success, after serving as VP of sales and CS at Textio for more than three years. Listen in as she walks us through the different ways regie.ai uses AI to deliver more engaging and effective communication.
This week on The Hyperengage Podcast, we speak to Natasha Evans, VP of Global Customer Success at Salesloft. Salesloft helps thousands of the world’s most successful selling teams drive more revenue with the only complete Sales Engagement platform available in the market.
In this episode, Natasha walks us through her background and how she started her customer success journey at Salesloft. She also shares how they measure customer success, what their onboarding process looks like, and the tools they leverage at Salesloft.
Have a listen as Natasha talks about the culture, training initiatives, and customer success best practices at Salesloft.
In today’s digital age of self-service and empowerment, customers expect to have the resources to efficiently find solutions on their own before reaching out to customer support. To understand the value of this aspect of customer success, we spoke to spoke to Martina O., Head of Customer Success at Layerise.com. Layerise provides customers with digital assistance for their products in order to make the post-sales experience more interactive and bridge the gap between the end customer and the brand.
Martina takes us through her journey in the startup world at Pleo and now Layerise, while diving into some valuable insights on managing customer success and beyond.
Today on the show we have John Henwood, VP of Customer Success at productboard. Productboard is a customer-driven product management system that empowers teams to get the right products to market, faster.
In this episode, John starts the conversation by talking about his background and why he joined customer success. He then gave us insights into their growth team that works closely with the CS team and increases their productivity. We also ran through an overview of their training initiatives, and how they empower their teams for change management. He then gave us insights into their tech stack and how their customer success team measures success. John also shared some advice on what it takes to become a world-class CSM!
Today on the show, we have Irina Vatafu, Head of Customer Success at Custify, a Customer Success platform for SaaS businesses. Irina started the conversation by outlining how she got into customer success. She then shared her insights on what it takes to be a successful customer success manager. We then ran through an overview of their customer success operations and their unique approach to serving their customers. She also shared how Custify enables customer success teams to deliver a best-in-class experience using automation, analytics, and custom health scores.
The company website has become an essential asset for companies in the post-pandemic world. Until now, companies have had no way of knowing who’s on their site, and no way of meeting with their best buyers, instantly. To discuss this essential element of the customer success journey we speak to Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.com. Qualified enables companies to have valuable conversations with the right people using the website as the digital store frame.
Dan walks us through their customer success operations and the lessons he has learned throughout his journey at Salesforce and Qualified.com and shares some great advice for early-stage startups.
Alex Ames, Customer Success Manager at Garblecloud, is the newest guest on The Hyperengage Podcast. Garblecloud is a modern security company offering solutions for easy data encryption and powerful ransomware protection. It allows enterprises and individuals to protect their documents and files stored in Google Drive, Dropbox, and Google Workspace applications such as Google Docs, and soon Gmail and Slack.
We start the episode by exploring how Alex started his customer success journey at Garblecloud and what motivated him to do so. We then ran through an overview of how Garblecloud is simplifying data encryption for the modern workforce. Alex then takes us through some of the challenges that they faced while building customer success from scratch. Overall, an extremely insightful conversation that uncovers immense knowledge for SaaS startups.
Today on the show, we have Wilton Rogers, CEO, and Rob Howze, Director of Production at Simply Automate Inc., a Digital Transformation Consulting & Development Firm.
They spoke about how Simply Automate Inc. helps businesses with RPA and digital transformation and scale through automation. They also talked about how they are leveraging platforms like Uipath, Automation Anywhere, and Electroneek for building bots for process automation. Tune in to know more about RPA and business process automation from the experts!
In this episode, we were joined by Sarah (Wong) Collins, Head of Customer Success at Fellow.app, a disruptive meeting management software that helps teams to have productive meetings and meaningful 1:1s.
Sarah started the conversation by talking about her background and outlining how she got into CS. We then ran through an overview of how Fellow.app helps teams stay productive and organized. She then talked about their customized customer success dashboard and how it helps them track user journeys and make smarter decisions. She also gave us insights into their research-driven culture and how it enables them to provide the best service to their customers.
Alexandra Carmen Buză, Head of Customer Success at Cartloop, is the newest guest on The Hyperengage Podcast. Cartloop is a conversational text marketing platform that helps brands drive revenue, build relationships with customers, grow subscribers and engage them with highly targeted campaigns through 1:1 text conversations. We start the episode by exploring how Alexandra transitioned from the corporate world into the start-up world and started her customer success journey at Cartloop. She then takes listeners through the challenges they faced as a start-up and how they overcame them. She also shares how they measure customer success, what their onboarding process looks like, and the tools they leverage at Cartloop. Have a listen as Alexandra talks us through this amazing platform and how they are humanizing the customers’ shopping experience.
Today on the show we have Iram Cook-Monie, Head of Customer Success at Mosaic Smart Data - An emerging data analytics platform in the big-data management space. Iram discussed her background and how she settled into the customer success world. She then dove into how Mosaic Smart Data is using machine learning and artificial intelligence to spot potential opportunities in capital markets as well as providing real-time data analytics on trades. She also shared how the team ensures value delivery by measuring data and learning from feedback. Working mostly with banks, Mosaic has a hybrid process of account management that goes hands-on with customer support but they are working to build a self-serve model for scalability and seeking to integrate more technology into the customer-facing operations.
Today on the show, we have Saahil Karkera, Chief Customer Officer at Optiply, a bootstrapped scaleup making webshops supply chain resilient. In this episode, Saahil shared how Optiply is streamlining the inventory management process for webshops. We then ran through an overview of the challenges they faced as a startup and how their customer success team strived to overcome them. We then dove into the tools and technologies that they have employed and how they are planning to have a dedicated CS tool for their freemium model. Saahil concluded by talking about how important it is to hire people with the right mindset and how he empowers his team to be better CSMs. Overall, an incredibly insightful session for early-stage SaaS startups!
Remote work is supposed to be liberating, not exhausting. Video chat and other tools leave us out of touch and craving social interaction. Virbela is the first virtual world platform built specifically to solve the challenges of remote collaboration.
Today on the show, we have Craig Kaplan, Chief Customer Officer at Virbela. In this episode, Craig shared how Virbela brings teams together, unifying communications, video conferencing, file-sharing and cloud applications, all in a secure campus that replicates a real-world experience. He also talked about their new platform, Framevr.io, the most instant and frictionless virtual collaboration experience possible that brings people together in immersive, highly customizable spaces for meetings, events, and learning.
Today on the show, we have Estelle McCartney, Chief Customer Officer at Arctic Shores, a disruptive HR Tech platform redefining how companies hire. In this episode, Estelle shared how Arctic Shores is creating a next-gen talent strategy by capturing a candidate's true personality and cognitive abilities. We then ran through an overview of their onboarding process and how their customer success teams strive to help their customers scale their talent discovery process. We then dove into the data analytics tools that they have employed and how it helps them track user journeys and make smarter decisions. Estelle concluded by sharing some advice for people starting new jobs or joining new organizations. Overall, an incredibly insightful session for CS leaders and people aspiring to become one!
Abheesh Dinavahi, VP of Customer Success at Signeasy, a modern eSignature solution for teams, joined us on this episode to speak about their customer success operations and best practices. Abheesh started the conversation by outlining how he got into CS and his motivation to join Signeasy. He also talked about their core values and how they gauge people during the interview process. He then gave insights into their tools and strategies for different customer success stages. He went on to discuss the advantages of having a dedicated customer success platform and how Churnzero has improved the efficiency of its CS teams.
Today on the show, we had the pleasure of speaking to Ashley Stamps, VP of Customer Success at Celtx, an online scriptwriting and media production planning software that aims to ignite the creative potential of the next generation of storytellers through transformative technology.
In this episode, Ashley talked about her prior work experiences and how she settled into the customer success world. She also talked about how CS has evolved over the years and shared some tips on how to be successful in CS. The conversation then moved towards how she begins her day at Celtx as a Global CS leader during which she also outlined the company’s Northstar for driving business success. We were also lucky enough to get a glimpse into what she looks for in new hires.
Today on the show, we have Stefan Trbojevic, Head of Client Success at Tokeet, a cloud-based solution that streamlines vacation rental management from inquiry to checkout. In this episode, we talked about Stefan’s background and his decision to leave the corporate world and join a start-up. Stefan also gave us insights into their CS operations, the CS technologies they employ, and how they handle account management differently. He then discussed how they aim to get as much feedback as possible from their users while providing value to them.
Today on the show, we have Ricardo Urrea Ayala, Chief Customer Officer at Pulpo, a fast-growing software startup, focused on changing the way companies manage their vehicles and fleet operations. In this episode, Ricardo talks about his customer success journey, the challenges he faced in customer success, and how he overcame them. He also outlined his core values, which he believes are essential to being a CS leader. The conversation then moved towards the company’s CS operations, the CS metrics and tools that they use, and how they segment their customers. He also imparted some great wisdom that he garnered from his time working at Hubspot. Tune in for insights on customer success best practices, and more from Ricardo!
Modern businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their learning processes and LMS365 has emerged as a leading player in the cloud-based learning platform market. Head of Customer Success, Amie Weizer joins us on the show to discuss how LMS365 is giving organizations the ability to quickly shift from outdated top-down learning to inclusive democratized learning. We talked about Amie’s background and what motivated her to join LMS365 and settle in the customer success world. Tune in for insights on the secret recipe to high-performing customer success teams and more from Amie!
Today on the show, we have Dewald Muller, Head of Customer Success at Stitch, Africa's first one-click payments API, enabling secure Instant EFT payments and easy access to customer financial data. In this episode, Dewald talked about how Stitch is transforming the future of Fintech across Africa. He also gave insights into their culture and how they approach problems around scaling and expansion. The conversation then moved towards the CS operations at Stitch, their onboarding challenges, and how they streamline the customer journey by using various reactive and proactive measures. He further discussed how important it is to give autonomy to the people in order to foster creativity and individual brilliance within an organization. Overall, it was a great conversation with lots of insights into the world of Fintech!
Today on the show, we have Patrice Boffa, Chief Customer Officer at Arkose Labs, a platform that delivers long-term fraud prevention and account security to leading companies like Microsoft, PayPal, and Dropbox. In this episode, we talked about Patrice’s unique background and how he transitioned from a career in software to consultancy and finally settled in the customer success world. Patrice also gave us insight into their high-touch model, and how they stand out from their competitors by getting ahead of their customer needs through a proactive approach. We then discussed the cultural adjustments they had to make in the last two years and how important it is to spend time hiring and onboarding the right people in your team.
Today on the show, we have Mick Weijers , Head of Customer Success at Vormats , a platform that helps organizations transition towards more video communication in a mobile-first world. In this episode, Mick talked about how Vormats empowers effective communication and changes the way people work by adding value to different touchpoints. We also discussed the importance of personalization and culture, how Vormats understands the pain points of different cultures and builds personalized relationships with its customers, their growth metrics, and the tools they use for their daily CS operations.
Adil Saleh chats with Daniel Goldfeld, VP of Customer Success at Cnvrg.io, a platform built by data scientists for data scientists to streamline the machine learning process, so they can focus less on grunt work and more on the real magic – algorithms.
The conversation starts with how Daniel transitioned from a career in engineering and finally settled in the customer success world.
He also gave us insights into how Cnvrg provides value to its customers by simplifying ML Ops with one click and making AI more accessible.
He further shared how he manages and empowers his team by conducting daily and weekly meetings to understand their strengths and weaknesses and fit them into the right teams.
Lastly, Daniel talks about the growth plans and target market of Cnvrg and how they aspire to grow the data scientist world by getting as many data scientists on the platform as they can.
In this episode, our host Adil Saleh chats with Jeremy Donaldson, Customer Success Leader at Totango, a Composable Customer Success Platform that provides teams with the flexibility, speed, and agility to create and deliver optimal customer outcomes.The conversation revolves around the processes incorporated at Totango and how various dedicated teams work together to ensure customer success. Jeremy discusses how Totango integrates with all the tools that businesses use to securely connect all their customer data for a single, unified view of their customers. He also covers the tools that are being used by different teams at Totango. While discussing the culture of Totango, he touched on how vital it is to have a good relationship with both the product and the people, as well as to be the change agent when necessary.To conclude the episode, Jeremy talked about Totango's goal of becoming $100 million in sales in three years and how he believes that their customer centric approach would help them achieve this goal.
In this episode, we are joined by Eran Aloni CCO at Gong.io, a revenue intelligence platform that enables high-performing teams to unlock insights from conversations to improve their deal win rates, size, and employee onboarding, Gong is currently trusted by teams such as LinkedIn, Hubspot, Slack, and Zillow, is currently the largest sales intelligence platform in the space having valued around 7.25B with 120M in revenue.We started off with how Eran set forward his vision with Gong back in the early days and how they have transformed into a really big and successful company during his presence, today they have impacted millions of people with their product.
He also touched that it's very important for early-stage companies to figure out what value means to their customers, and keep on measuring the indicators to build the best product, every customer can perceive value from your product differently, that’s why you need to invest in data since day 1.
Eran also mentioned how Gong is the system of truth for all of their teams, their own product keeps their teams on top of customer journeys and data, which enables them to shape the solution in the best ways possible. More discussion points like:- How Gong builds companywide cultural DNA- How to leverage data, third-party sources, external signals- Operating Principles at Gong
So tune in and listen to Eran talk about his journey at Gong and what the future holds!
In this episode with Mary Poppen - CCO at Involve.ai, a Customer Intelligence platform, we get to know how Involve.ai covers all areas of their customers' business whether it's revenue, communication or support. She shares how their team of tech geniuses gets integrated into their customer’s data sources to provide a personalised experience to each and every one of them and get them up and running. Here are some of the key areas of discussion that you don't want to miss:
- What Involve.ai needs from its customers to generate powerful insights
- What an average CSM sees every day when he logs into Involve.ai
- How Involve.ai uses its own platform
In this episode, Adil Saleh chats with Maranda Dziekoński, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly, Inc. a big data SaaS platform helping cities with public transit. and a Podcast Host from There To Here.
Maranda shares her journey of how she ended up being one of the Top 25 Customer Success Influencers. The conversation revolves around Maranda’s process and CS teams at Swiftly. The podcast uncovers Maranda’s perspective on CS operations in general.
The podcast starts with a discussion around Swiftly as an organization and Maranda’s experience in building Customer Success teams for diverse start-ups.
Moving forward, Maranda shares what kind of tools and resources CSMs at Swiftly leverage to manage the influx of transport and databases in the busy cities while managing millions of data points.
Swiftly has a standalone team for Onboarding and implementation. Besides that, the role of the Customer Success team is to focus on ROI and share progress with key stakeholders. Moreover, they have peeled off Renewals and tech support and have added the last layer of CS ops Umbrella. The final layer is to help manage it and help CSMs operate strategically.
She further shared, that CSM to account ratio is an art, not science, for Swiftly’s Customer Success team as customers are Segmented at Swiftly based on revenue and account complexity. Moreover, another angle to Customer Segmentation at Swiftly is the region-wise segmentation plan which has impacted significantly.
The Customer Success department at Swiftly leverages data analytics to make efficient decisions. They leverage resources and tools, including GainSight, Segment, Intercom, and Google data studio. CSMs leverage various metrics at Swiftly to measure and track their health score.
As the conversation progresses, we learned how working with government entities differs and how insignificant external signals or data sources can become while achieving customer success goals.
Maranda shared some powerful nuggets on how Swiftly is taking steps to make data-driven public transit an easy to execute job in various cities and expanding its operations worldwide.
In this episode, our host Adil Saleh chats with Asim Mohammad , former VP of Customer Success at StreamsSets Inc., about his unique experience of being an informal advisor for StreamSets Inc. due to its unique deployment— an on-prem software deployed as a software solution. He shares how to map the customer journeys and build standardised playbooks once you have customer data. According to Asim’s experience with StreamSets Inc., skipping to post-sales and adoption is not a scalable solution. It is of primary importance to establish a proper journey. Doing so will aid in the identification of opportunities to upsell and build relationships with customers.
Moreover, the significance of communication during the production stage is vital. Making Customer Success a company-wide mantra is important because CS departments can not operate in silos. Furthermore, he extended upon the great value of mapping customer journeys and the use of customised playbooks. When asked whether the CS team should focus on communication, usage data, or both? Asim broke down the narrative into the following: a) achieving that product-market-fit b) the synergy between product-market-fit and use cases: identifying those gaps. These gaps are where communication and CS come into play. StreamSets Inc. uses various kinds of data to bridge this gap. Initially, as a series A startup, they used the Rinse-and-repeat strategy and avoided vertical niching. Asim recommended not going for vertical niching until you earn 20-50 million. Besides that, Product-market-fit can be thought of as a changing goal post and needs to be altered accordingly. The second half of the podcast focused on day-to-day operations at StreamSets Inc., building a tiered Customer Success department and 2x2matrix used for customer segmentation. The podcast concluded with the need for dedicated software for a mid-sized business and providing CS individuals with a streamlined framework.
In a deep conversion with Niclas, who recently exited Hive Streaming, a SaaS platform helping enterprise segment with video experiences, we talked about how Niclas set up the GTM frameworks and aligned it with customer success ops working initially as an Adviser, then VP of Customer Success and lastly the CCO. Discuss points that need your attention:
- Customer Led marketing and story building on annual reviews.
- RPS, relationship perception score powered with data.
- Customer Segmentation lands smartly with smart tasks
- CFTs to work together in critical scenarios.
- Enterprise accounts at Hive
In conversation with Bradley Liou, Head of Customer Success at the Acquire App, who accidentally started his Customer Success journey and never settled. As per his proven and actionable knowledge, Bradley expressed what he believes makes Customer Success teams successful and product scalable. A product that provides value to the customer is integral;
a)a product roadmap,
b)well-integrated processes,
c) people that make the process, and
d) the right technologies to be incorporated and measured. All these are in place to achieve the goal of frictionless onboarding and value realization.
A CS team must be well-integrated and must not work in silos to achieve these goals. Also, it is the need of the hour to transform our Customer Success operations and not wait until it’s indispensable to have a dedicated Customer Success team. Bradley also shared his experience building CS teams and playbooks. He also talked about his attempts to have suitable tools, pitch-perfect segmentation, and mistakes he made along the way. Then there was a discussion about the progress of the Acquire App, the technologies incorporated by Bradley for the Acquire App, and steps he has taken to make the app Scalable. As the conversation progressed, the discussion revolved around Bradley’s journey as a lone CS warrior, his tools, decision-making process, segmentation, general approach toward CS ops, and challenges in engagement. The podcast concluded with how according to his experience efficient and actionable data benefits the product teams.
Today we had the pleasure to talk with Stephanie Roulic - Head of Customer success & support at Goldcast, a SaaS platform helping enterprise businesses with event marketing.
We came to know that Stephanie’s team is working hands-on with customers acting a high-touch operation by helping them with onboarding, integration, and event setup. We absolutely loved the amount of time they are investing to receive their customers in the most efficient manner.
Serving a fair number of enterprise customers, Goldcast is the go-to tool for event managers taking all their pain off the shoulder with the help of a highly trained success team.
One thing that caught our interest is the way they are following up with customers on different online forums for expansion opportunities and taking a charge of building deep relationships with customers, which ultimately leads back to more customer retention.
Today we are joined with Ziv Peled, Chief Customer Officer at Appsflyer which is a SaaS mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform. In the episode, Ziv discusses the evolution of their customer success programme scaling from a customer-facing team of 10 to 380 people.
Key takeaways:
- Building a three-pillar customer data infrastructure to gain more visibility into customer relations.
- Early-stage B2B startups should just focus on their onboarding for the first 1-2 years.
- Adapting customer engagement models across Enterprise, SMB and small businesses.
- How Appsflyer built a custom object in Salesforce to measure the relationship capital.
- How to build better customer forecasting.
- Better relationship with customers always leads to a better NPS score.
Tune in to the episode to get more insights into a unicorn journey of customer success where there is a whole training university for customer-facing talents, that builds the right mindset of putting customers at the centre of everything.
Today’s episode features Ena Mandic Head of Customer Success at Lemlist , the #1 sales automation platform for cold outreach that helps businesses scale their outbound prospecting, in just three years they have grown from 0 - $10M in ARR.
In this episode, She dives deep into how she is inducing top talent into her team at Lemlist by applying unique experiences like asking them questions to get to know the team members more and inviting them to live with her for the first 15 days of operations. We also discussed, how important it is to hire people for work ethics and grinding mindset rather than just talent or skillset and getting a longer-term view on people before making a decision.
Join our email list to get notified of weekly CS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right into your inbox: https://hyperengage.io
Today on the show we have Erika Villarreal , Senior Customer Success Manager at Condeco , a b2b SaaS helping customers like Nestle, Comcast, and Cricket Australia with workspace scheduling.
In this episode, Erika talks about how she transitioned from the financial industry and shared her passion for living and breathing with customers which led her to step into a customer success role. We also discussed what are the key roadblocks CSMs face while taking information from the sales and product team to stay on top of customer data in order to build meaningful engagements to drive potential results.
Join our email list to get notified of weekly CS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right into your inbox: https://hyperengage.io
Customer success is a term that has been gaining momentum in recent years, and for a good reason. In this episode, Adil Saleh talks to Giovanni Lepori about his experience working as head of Customer Success at Hunter.io.
Please tune in to the podcast to know Giovanni’s views regarding the importance of customer success in companies worldwide and what tools allow managers like himself to run operations more effectively or efficiently. He talks about his journey of transforming customer support into customer success at Hunter in the past six years and about the customer success model being used at the company.
He enlightened us with many valuable insights regarding the topic; a major thing that was discussed was the proactive nature of customer success and how it should always be prioritized. He talked about using modern analytic tools to pull out data and maintain databases to facilitate the customers in the best way possible as their goal is to use simple and intuitive tools that increase efficiency.Join our email list to get notified of weekly CS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right into your inbox: https://hyperengage.io/
Emily Garza is the VP of Customer Success at proton.ai, a sales enablement and CRM platform for the wholesale distributor market. In this episode, we will dive deep into what motivates customer success individuals to build meaningful relationships with their customers, which enables higher revenue retention, and why having greater visibility into customer goals is essential for CS ops. Join our email list to get notified of weekly CS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right into your inbox: https://hyperengage.io/