What if I told you I could stop the war between sales and CS? You know the one. Sales is rolling in gold like Scrooge McDuck and CS is literally sitting in a dumpster fire. Sales thinks CS makes excuses. CS thinks sales doesn't care. Not my problem vibes all around. I've been on both sides of this. And I can tell you the tension is real, but it's also fixable. The problem isn't the people. It's the design. The Story That Changed How I Think About This I'll never forget one cu

I wish more founders and CEOs would remember that not all money is good money. Some revenue brings opportunity. Other revenue brings sacrifice. And if you’ve ever led Customer Success, you know exactly what I mean. For 14 years in CS leadership, I often had to live with business decisions that were made in the name of growth. My team and I were the ones who had to “make it work.” We were the ones told to “figure it out.” And when things went sideways, we were often the ones a

If you want to grow your customers, tell your sales team to stop giving everything away. That sentence usually makes people uncomfortable. Especially when growth targets are aggressive and deals feel hard-won. But it’s a conversation that needs to happen and it usually lands squarely on Customer Success to clean up the mess when it doesn’t. Where Customer Growth Quietly Breaks Down I talk to Customer Success leaders all the time who are being tasked with growing their custome

Here is a hard truth we do not talk about enough in Customer Success. Some of the customers we write off the fastest are the ones sitting on the biggest opportunities. I know. I know. It feels easier to focus on the shiny, well-funded, “textbook” expansion accounts. They show up to calls. They read your emails. They know what they want. But not every customer is that obvious. And honestly, thank goodness, because the obvious ones are only half the fun. The real magic lives in

Early in my Customer Success career, I made a huge mistake. I thought forecasting was just another way to “surprise and delight.” My...

Everyone in SaaS loves to talk about breaking down silos between Sales and Customer Success. You’ve heard the calls to “align GTM” and...

You want to know how I decide whether to take a CS leadership role? I start by evaluating the sales leader. After 13 years and 5 CS...

I’ll never forget one of my earliest wake-up calls in Customer Success. We were onboarding a string of new customers who were wildly...

Renewals aren’t the only way CS drives revenue. But they’ve become the default. And when something becomes the default, it becomes the...

Early in my Customer Success career, I had a bad habit. I blocked expansion conversations at the first sign of risk. If a customer wasn’t...

If you're working with mid-size to Enterprise customers, there’s one simple question that can significantly improve your renewal and...

I’ve been in Customer Success for over 13 years, and guess what? The Sales-to-CS handoff still sparks drama in way too many orgs. Even...

Too many Customer Success teams treat the Sales-to-CS handoff like some magical resource—one that holds all the secrets to a customer’s...

Kristi Faltorusso Chief Customer Officer from Client Success joins us on the Surf and Sales podcast to discuss how she failed herself...

"Customer Success Managers have NO sense of urgency." That was the response I got when I asked a seasoned sales executive and well-known...