Every Customer Success leader wants to talk about churn, forecasting, onboarding, product adoption… but there’s a quiet little monster living in the background that most teams aren’t paying enough attention to: Feature ideas. Not the ideas themselves, those are gold. The way we manage them, that’s the problem. Most companies have figured out how to collect requests: forms, spreadsheets, portals, Slack messages, emails with subject lines like “Quick thought”… even the occasion

There is a moment every Customer Success leader knows well. A moment that feels like your stomach drops through the floor. A CSM resigns. And the first thought that hits you is the one none of us says out loud: How the hell am I going to redistribute these accounts? Because let’s be honest with ourselves. Your team is already at capacity. You are already at capacity. And while you are trying to stay composed and strategic, everyone on your team is quietly thinking the exact s

I’ve coached hundreds of Customer Success Managers over the years. Different companies, different products, different regions, different markets. Yet the same pattern appears over and over again. CSMs do not feel empowered. They are not empowered to say no. They are not empowered to drive change. They are not empowered to raise red flags. They are not empowered to make tough decisions. They are not empowered to prioritize for their customers. They are not empowered to deviate

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

When I first started in SaaS, Sales Kickoff (SKO) was this mysterious, high-energy event I wasn’t invited to. It was the Super Bowl of Sales, strategy, targets, enablement, and a whole lot of celebration. At my first company (where I spent nearly six years), SKO was exclusively for Sales. No Customer Success, no Services, no Support. Just the folks with quotas and commissions. So imagine my shock when, at my next company, I learned Customer Success was included. I thought, “W

I perform my best when I have a clear goal and a plan. I’m an executor. A rule follower. A do-the-work-and-get-it-done kind of person. When I was in college, I chased A’s. I remember graduating with a 3.98 GPA because of one single A- in a journalism class, and I was furious. I missed my goal. Still Summa Cum Laude, still an incredible GPA, but in my head… not the goal. During my senior year, I landed my first job before graduation. My professors told me that if I completed a

I love when data validates what many of us in Customer Success have been saying for years: customer-led growth is the engine of modern business performance. The latest Public Market Pulse Report from Certinia analyzed more than 4,000 public company earnings reports and the findings are a massive win for Customer Success. The data shows a clear pattern: companies that talk about Customer Success are creating more value, and the market is rewarding them for it. Let’s unpack wha

Some of you may not know this, but my daughter Adriana is actually my stepdaughter. When Anthony and I got together, she was just three years old. She only knows life with me and Anthony… and then with her mother. In our house, we’ve never used the word step. She is my daughter, and I am a mother. Period. But in the beginning, it was hard. Really hard. I was trying to find my place, what was appropriate, what wasn’t, how to show up as a parent without overstepping. I wanted t

Early in my career, I didn’t know the differences between large corporate companies, small independent companies, and startups. My priority after college was simple: get a job. Ideally something that matched my major (or at least sounded like it did). Check. After a few years working for a large publishing company, I decided to take a chance and join a small marketing agency, private and profitable. Then, I moved to a large public company. Then back to publishing. Then back t

When I saw the 2025 SuccessCoaching Top 25 Customer Success Influencers list drop, I had to take a second to breathe it in ... six years in a row. Six. Years. That’s wild. And honestly, it’s not something I ever expected when I started sharing my thoughts on Customer Success all those years ago. I didn’t set out to be an “influencer.” I set out to make an impact, to share what I was learning, to help others avoid some of the same mistakes I made, and to build a community wher

Every week, I hear Customer Success leaders making the same case: “We need more headcount.” And sometimes, they’re absolutely right. The demands on Customer Success teams are higher than ever, more customers, more complexity, more responsibilities that bleed into Sales, Product, and Support. But before we make the case for more people, we have to ask an uncomfortable question: 👉 Do you actually know where your team’s time is going today? Most leaders don’t. They can tell you

One of the hardest parts of my job as a Customer Success leader is managing product ideas that come from customers. Every week, my team reviews dozens of requests, everything from new integrations to workflow enhancements to “nice-to-have” features that customers swear will change their lives. And while it’s incredible to have customers so engaged in shaping the product, managing these ideas strategically is one of the most complex parts of the job. Because every product requ

We can all agree that people matter. In fact, it’s the people who make or break the success of any partnership. So imagine walking into a high-stakes customer relationship… and realizing you don’t actually know who’s who in the zoo. That was me. My very first conversation as VP of CS with one of our largest, most strategic customers. I hop on a call with our main point of contact, a “Director.” Naturally, I assume that means middle management. Important, yes. But not the exec

In Customer Success, we obsess over churn. We dissect it from every angle, analyzing root causes, building churn reports, hosting post-mortems, and spinning up initiatives to fix what went wrong. But for all the time we spend understanding why customers leave, we rarely take the same care to understand why they stay. And that’s a miss. A big one. Most teams treat renewal as the ultimate validation that a customer is satisfied and getting value. The renewal happens, the contra

If you’re not equipping your team to win, their underperformance is a reflection of your leadership, not their potential. That may sting...

Let’s clear something up: Showing up to weekly or bi-weekly calls with your customers does NOT make you proactive. And it definitely does...

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

In 2009, I was a mid-20-something marketer just trying to figure it all out. I was using a software platform that helped manage my...

When I started in Customer Success, we were trained to say things like: “I’m your trusted advisor.” “I’ll be your main point of contact.”...

I didn’t grow up in a white-collar home. My parents owned and worked in a delicatessen for over 45 years. Together, they ran that...