From CS to Sales Growth: Turning Upsells into New Sales with Ejieme Eromosele

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Hello everyone, I'm your host Anika Zubay. Hi there and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I am a Customer Success Executive leader, award winning CS strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CS leaders and CSMs build and scale world class CS processes and teams. I'm a strong believer that customer Success is not a destination but a journey and it can be a tough journey. But don't worry, I'm here to help. This podcast was created to help make your CS journey a little bit easier to navigate. Join me every month on this podcast where we will dive into the hottest topics in cs, the newest strategies and the best practices in customer success so you can make your CS journey a little bit easier. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts so that you can continue to learn on this CS journey that we are on together.

Welcome back. Today I'm speaking with Ejume Aramisal. Ejume is an award winning customer success leader with over 15 years of experience in building high impact customer programs. As the General Manager for AMIA at quic, Ejamae leads the company's expansion across Europe overseeing all aspects of business growth including marketing, customer success and new business sales and partnerships. She has built out a full go to market team from scratch in EMEA and as a CS leader she has had to focus on marketing as well as new sales. In her GM role she has created some unique playbooks, strategies and best practices on how to take customer success growth and use that to drive new sales growth. Many times in customer success we are so focused on growing our existing customers that we Forget that helping our current customers can also potentially help future customers as well. Esme and her team have a solution to take your existing customers upsells and create new sales for new customers. So let's chat to her and find.

Out how she has done it.

So welcome Ejme to my podcast. I'm so, so very excited to have you as my next guest. And I know you've done a number of things across the customer success community, across customer success as a whole. But before we get into this topic today, can you please tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself, how you started in your current role, how you've transitioned into it. I'll just give us the snapshot of who you are.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Great opportunity to share my story and to talk more about the future of customer success. So for everyone listening, I'm Aja Mae Aramiselli, current role is General Manager of EMEA for a company called quic. So at quic we do AI for customer experience. That means we help some of the world's best businesses connect more directly, more efficiently and effectively with their end customers using AI. We like to think that AI and humans work better together. So it's not replacing humans, but it's helping us focus on the most value added things. So I've been with QWIK almost seven years now, joined them by way of acquisition. I was VP of Customer Success for a New York City based startup called Snaps. That was my first CS role and we can get into how I transitioned there. But yeah, QWIK acquired us about four years ago, stayed on as VP of Customer Success and Account Management. So I was also running some revenue motions as well. And then a little over two years ago my CEO asked me to move to London and help put some boots on the ground for our international expansion. So it's been two years in this role now and I'm actually transitioning back to the States so she can get into. But it's been a great journey.

Yeah, I love it. I love your story. I love that you started not traditionally in customer success, but by means of acquisition. You've now grown tremendously in the last seven years by the sounds of it. Lots of challenges I'm sure, as you've grown in scale. But now you've also, like you said, taken the team international and for the last two years building it out in emea. But you haven't just built out customer success, you've built out the full go to market function by the sounds of it, which is no easy feat. And I'm sure a lot of CS leaders are wondering, wow, that's a big role to take on. But before we get into the GM role, tell me more about the company and the team. You guys were acquired, you grew. I'm guessing the team here in London has grown as well. What is the full team that you manage look like right now?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, as general manager, I own all of our go to market for the region. So that means marketing, demand gen, new business, sales, partnerships and alliances, customer success, and also account management. When I first moved here, the first role that was required was a sales director. We need someone to help us get out in market, start having those conversations and start trying to see how we can grow from new business. The second fast follow hire, actually they started at the same time, was our solutions engineer. So you know, selling AI to enterprise is a quite technical undertaking and so we knew that we need, we needed a sales and solutions engineer to help us be able to articulate the technical value, the technological solution and design and then to help us of course be able to build out on that vision. Since then we've also gotten a marketing manager. You know, being a new company and a new brand in the quite diverse and varied markets of emea, we definitely needed to focus our marketing efforts. And so now we also have a marketing manager that's helping us with broad scale awareness, events and demand gen as well. We're likely going to. Well, we actually not likely. We have a JD for a senior program manager. So a lot of what we're seeing with deploying AI for enterprise, these are transformations. And so we need someone who can help us make sure that we're accountable and our customers are accountable for the transformation journey. So we just posted actually last week a senior program manager JD that's going to help with that. Also looking for a CSM as well. Haven't posted that JD yet, but that's to come.

Oh my gosh. Sounds like you guys are growing and scaling quite rapidly and quite aggressively, which is really great to hear if anyone's listening, that's looking to get into a new role. It sounds like Eshme is hiring, so definitely give. Hit her up on LinkedIn and let her know that you're interested. But that's so amazing that you've had to really expand your remit like from CS leader into general manager. There's a lot more that you're hiring for, a lot more skills, a lot more team members, but a lot more you've got to cover and I would love to know, and I'm pretty sure people listening would love to know what inspired you to make that leap into a GM role. Because customer success, or as I like to call it, post sales, revenue leaders usually focus on what you were just saying you did at QUICK before you moved to London, which is, you know, customer success implementation, account management, renewals, churn, all that stuff. But now you're remit is so much wider, so much broader. What, what, what made you jump into such a broad role?

Yeah, I mean the, the fun fact is it was off of the back of a traumatic life event. So I was going through a divorce and I almost tried to quit and I said I can't try to save myself and my marriage and do this job at the same time. I had a CEO and a boss who was our SVP that both, you know, believed in me and believed that I could take on a role that oversaw our entire go to market. And I think that was for a few reasons. You know, one, I had been building my technical and revenue acumen as a CS leader and they saw that I could apply those learnings to figure out which types of accounts should we be going after and why. Right. And I'll get into this in a bit. We should be going after accounts that are already seeing success. I, being the CS leader, knew what those customers and accounts look like. So how do we actually use that to inform our go to market strategy and the types of businesses we're targeting, the types of events we're going to go to, where we're going to spend marketing spend in order to reach those audiences. So, you know, that's a little secret that, you know, people like, oh, how'd you get the GM role? Yeah, it was off of the back of a pretty, you know, sad and kind of traumatic time in my life. But, you know, I had done the work and I think I had proven and gained trust from my leadership team that I could help us do this next big thing. So it was, you know, the best, worst thing that's happened to me in terms of being able to move into this role. But I think the lesson, you know, for me and for anyone listening is, you know, we show up every day, we have to do the work, we have to do it consistently, and we have to excel at the things that we're really good at. Those things are usually transferable skills that can set us up for the next thing. And so I like to look at a lot of the foundation I was building and you know, just running customer success, being able to apply that to a GM role and we can get into that. But I think that that's the real learning for me.

Yeah, I love that and I'm sorry to hear that. It came off of the back of something that's pretty traumatic personally for you. But I think a lot of people listening could probably relate. I think a lot of people have recently either gone through layoffs or, you know, turmoil within the SaaS world right now. And I think a lot of people see it as a huge setback in life. And I'm sure you were probably feeling the same when you were, you know, considering all the changes happening in your personal life. But like you said, you showed up, you put in the work. Consistency always pays off. I'm a big believer that any sort of consistency pays off in life, whether it's going to the gym or showing up to work, those things all pay off in the long run. And you made it work for you. And you took a lot of your skills in a CS role, but expanded it. And I think a lot of people listening can probably take that away as a huge learning that whether you're between roles right now or considering a career change or something happening in your life, a lot of what all the work you've done for years or decades doesn't just disappear like you said. You took it and transferred into something new. Which is really, really great to hear. So thank you for, for opening up with us and being a bit more personal. I would also love to know what's maybe next for you. I think a lot of CS leaders dream of being a Chief Customer officer, but you've done a GM role now. You've done both. The start of the funnel all the way to the renewal of a customer. That's a, that's a lot of remit and maybe it's. Maybe it's relaxing on a beach somewhere. But I'm so curious, what's kind of your next CS or career dream ambition?

Yeah, good question. You know, I am transitioning into a new role at Quick As We Speak, so we are reimagining what the post acquisition teams look like. We just got our first Chief Experience Officer and he's great. He's going to own Customer Success and Professional Services and our solutions consulting organization. And I'm going to go back to partner with him on what I'm calling a customer growth function. TBD on the details but you know, the goal is to help utilize again. Customers are seeing success, making sure they continue to see that value, making sure they're retaining and to try to expand them as well. So the customer growth comes from, you know, how do we grow our business? By growing our customers. And then I like to add the last piece and you know, we can talk about the flywheel effect, but taking their success, their growth and using that again to acquire and to at least get the attention of other customers that might look like them. So, yeah, it's exciting still figuring out what the actual role will look like, but at least I know what I'm focused on driving, which is renewals, expansions and advocacy.

Love it, love it. I love that you are also so honest and open with us about your career, about what's happened. But also, even this next step, it sounds like it's still being defined. And I think a huge lesson or a huge learning that anyone listening could probably take away from this episode is like, we just don't know where life is going to lead and what role. You didn't think you were going to be living in London a few years ago and you've now lived here and you're going back and everything in life is ever evolving. And I think it's really cool that your role is ever evolving as well. And we're going to jump into what customer growth looks like at quick and what you're going to be doing based on your learnings that you've had in emea. So let's talk a little bit more about that. What has been your focus in shaping post acquisition strategies into new sales? Because you've now had to do new sales as well. And you've taken, like you said, a lot of the customer advocacy work that you've done, a lot of the upsells, the renewals, and you've taken all those playbooks and applied it to new sales. So how did you even start in that? What did you start to get into when you realized, yeah, I have to bring in new sales as much as I have to do renewals?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be honest, you know, I had to figure it out as we were doing it. Right. So, you know, when we first got to emea, you know, we needed to focus on which markets first. Right. EMEA is a broad scope in terms of just how much of the world it covers. And then we also needed to try to look at where we were already successful. So we already had a few accounts and a few customers here. So I said, okay, we talk a lot about customer led growth and what we usually mean by that is that your existing customers help maintain growth in terms of your existing base But I said, well, I know that those existing customers can also help us refine and focus in on customers that or prospects, let's say, because they're not customers yet. Right. Prospects that could eventually be customers. And how do we leverage the success that they're seeing to drive that? So that's really where I started. And I said, okay, of our customers here that are growing, that are seeing success, what are the characteristics of what they look like? Right. How large are they? How many markets do they cover? What verticals are they in? Who is the actual buyer? What use cases are they deploying? What conferences do they go to? What industry journals are they listening to? What other technology platforms are they integrated in that we've integrated with? So taking some of those parameters, started to say, okay, we definitely need to refine our tan. So that's like our target market of, you know, potential people that we would sell into. And we started to refine from there. It was scary to start because I think when you're entering new markets, you kind of want to have a bride or you think it's, it's better to have a broad approach because you can hit more accounts. But we actually saw that refining and actually tightening who we're talking to and why made us sell better, made us more confident. And then we can actually say, oh, hello, X, Y and Z company. You actually look a lot similar to a company that we're already helping and that we're already happy. And by the way, they're going to be sharing their story at a conference that we know you and your colleagues are likely to attend in a few months. Why don't you come and check out their story? So it just made us a lot more confident in the sales process as well, which I think goes a long way when you're entering new markets and there are a lot of unknowns.

Definitely. I love that you've basically redefined your ideal customer profile based on successful customers, because I think a lot of companies out there build what they say is a target addressable market, like you said, and then they go in to find an ideal customer they're going to try to chase. But it's a lot based on theory. It's based on what they think they know about the market. It's based on what sales leaders maybe have had initial conversations with prospects, which is all great, but it's not a proven fly. It's not proven, it's not customers that are actually successful. So you've taken what you know about your most successful customers and then brought it Back to yourself in this case, but to the sales part of the organization and said, hey, listen, we have these 10 killer customers that are doing the utmost perfect use of our product. They're using all the features, they are talking about us conference. They're doing all these right things that show that they're truly an advocate of our product. And then you've gone in, back out to the market and said, let's go find a hundred more of these 10 types of customers because we know they're going to be successful. And I love doing that. I love sharing client success stories with other clients because they don't really know what other people are doing.

So how did you start to, I.

Guess bring this all together? How did you make that successful customer playbook and then go and target those accounts to really start chasing those new logo sales?

I mean, I think the fortunate thing is, you know, one to your point that you know, you start with an ICP and you have a few hypothesis but you know, at I'm not going to call this a late stage, later stages when you already have customers, that should be your starting point. Right. And so we were fortunate that we had customers in the region that we wanted more of. So that was a starting point. You also mentioned that yes, it's a little bit easier because I own the entire go to market. So I could very quickly and very easily say, okay, this is what I know, this is how we're going to apply it. But I think in general for you know, let's say CS leaders that don't have that remit, just like you shared, you know, being able to frequently and periodically highlight, here are the characteristics of what we know success looks like and why. And this takes a little bit of commercial, I would say acumen as well. Right. So not only like how are they using the product but like who are they in the organization, what are their roles, you know, what scope of responsibility do they have? What are their typical job titles? What is the industry? Right. Like what are the use cases specific to that industry that you could replicate? So I think it's up to us to really come up with those attributes so then we can pattern match and give our marketing leaders and give our sales leaders those inputs to help drive what they're building as well. The other thing that I think really helped us is that we had customers that were willing to advocate. And so that made it easy when we said, okay, we were going to invest in events and conferences or executive briefing dinners or breakfast to say like, hey, we're going to have these two. I'm not going to say their names, but, you know, some of Europe's largest companies are our customers. We're actually going to have them in attendance. That goes such a long way to helping with our marketing and our outbound strategies. Because you can reference that customer, someone that is already seeing value. Customer FOMO and prospect. FOMO is such a big thing customers want to see in professionals. I mean, just look, look at yourself. You want to see what your peers are doing. You want to understand, oh, if someone's really like achieving success here and they're like killer metrics. Like, I want to know more, I want to learn more. Right? So being part of that story for your customer was. Was a big thing for us. And so, you know, when I got here and we already had customers that were advocating, but every new customer that we acquired, I'm piloting this concept and I piloted it here called assumptive advocacy. So most salespeople understand an assumptive sale. So that's the idea that you go into a sales process already, assuming that someone has bought into the deal. And this is usually in the later stage of a sales. Sales process. But it's. For example, you know, we haven't been the selected vendor yet. However, you start to say, you know what we should target when the kickoff is around March, because it'll be a great time to get together in person. So you already start to plant the seed. Seed that you've already hit that milestone and that the customer's already said yes. So I took that concept to advocacy. So when we kicked off a customer, kicked off a new customer, I said, you know, I can't wait for us to actually be hitting these KPIs that we've set on our scorecard, because I'd love for you to tell your story to another prospective customer. I have so many prospects that I'm talking to now that have the same challenge. It'd be great for you to share your success with them. So I started to plant that ahead of time, even before we launched anything, even before they started to see value just as a seed to say when you are seeing success, which I'm confident you are, I can't wait for you to share your story. So those are some of the more kind of like tactical things that, you know, I did to, to kind of prime the pump in terms of advocacy.

Hey, CS pros. I wanted to quickly jump in and let you know if you. If you're enjoying this episode, but wondering how you too can become a revenue focused CS Pro, then I might have the answer for you. Some of you might not know this, but I run a cohort based coaching program that walks you through step by step on how to align customer success strategies with revenue. CSM RevUp Academy is my complete step by step coaching program that helps you elevate your skills and mindset to focus on driving revenue for both your customers customers and your company. And this is a live coaching program that we only open the doors for enrollment a few times a year. And the next time we'll be opening the doors is in just a few weeks. Doors will open on January 29th. So if you're wondering how to apply the strategies discussed in this podcast in real life, then sign up for the wait list in the show notes or go to thecustomersuccesspro.com CSM RevUp Academy I guess I know it's you were doing it boots on the ground first, but you do have a team now in place. Did you encourage the CSMs or even the salespeople or even the market people to start capturing those attributes as you said? Because I think that that's what's super critical is you have to get the whole team around replicating processes to build that flywheel effect that I know you and I talked about before because you're one person and you can build this beautiful playbook. By the sounds of it. It sounds really awesome that you've taken again customer advocacy and built certain attributes for new salespeople to go and try to target these customers and have those conversations. But how did you get the whole team working around these and to build again that repeatable customer success process into sales as well?

Yeah. So I mean, let's start with marketing because that's like the top of the spear there is really like getting them closer to our customers. So we hired a new marketing manager. You know, I told her like join some of our initial initial calls. Right. Like they should know who you are, you should know them.

And I love that by the way. Love it that you're getting everyone involved. It shouldn't just be the CS or the salesperson or the customer facing teams. It should be everyone.

That's right. And we introduced her as like, you know, here's our new marketing manager. She's new to the team, but she needs to understand how you're using the product, how you're seeing success in the product. Because her job is to go try to help find customers, prospective customers that look like you. Right. So we really try to make marketing embedded in what we do because they're not just, you know, not, not just like they are actually the first touch point for so many of the conversations that we have. And so if they don't understand what it actually takes, if they don't understand like what success actually looks like, it's harder for them to refine and to tailor their conversations to match that. So that was just one tactical thing. Right. So like, you know, I know as CS we like to be protective of our customers, but the more that we can say let's share the wealth here, the more we can benefit ourselves downstream. I think the same thing goes with sales, right? Like it's easy for us. Kind of like toss over a case study, like, here you go, read it on your own time. But again, meeting the customers, you know, when we have on sites like our sellers are there, right. Why not? Like they should be part of the conversation. They're part of our team. Especially when you have a much smaller team like we did here. It was just the way that we did things. But I think opening up the customer success and the individual customers directly tightens the team, tightens that strategy and gets to a level of detail that we typically don't get to. When again, you just hand over a case study that's already done.

I love it. Your whole company is serving the customer, which is what we're all here to do. And I think a lot of times you just said it and you hit the nail on the head where we're all so protective of our accounts, like, oh no, it's mine. I have to do it. I have to be the hero. I have to do everything for this account, which is only going to lead to people's downfall if I'm honest. You're. You're one woman or you're one man, you can, can only do so much and you definitely need the help of marketing and sales and best way to get them involved is to actually have them sitting on those calls or at a sit down event where all the customers are there. Whatever it is, it's like they need to hear it from all the people that, that are saying it. I think we're really good in customer success to involve product whenever we get product feedback. But we forget about the top of the funnel or the start of the flywheel. Like you just said, we forget about sales and marketing and we kind of just toss things to them rather than getting them involved. And I think a big role in CS or post sales is all about getting all the teams involved to expand the revenue from the customer. So I love that you've got the whole team working like that. But I think a lot of CSMs today hold upsell targets and they are really nervous about expansion and about, you know, holding that revenue target, which I know you've held as part of your roles before, even the GM role. What's kind of like the strategy or best practice you would recommend for CS teams to really excel at this new ish dual role? I won't say it's new. I think it's being more pushed on more CSMs these days than not.

Yeah, I try to use, I'm still, I'm still workshopping this, but let's workshop together. Kind of like a three point framework when it comes to working with our customers. So the first is using data to drive urgency. So you know, what are the things that we can use data to? And you know, I'm going to talk about our platform specifically. You know, we again are the interaction point between a large business and their customers. So we charge by conversations because that's the unit of value there. But how do you use data to identify those moments of change and to signal that there's a readiness to expand? So for us it's, you know, you buy a certain number of conversations, if things are going well, that's going to trigger an expansion. Right. Pretty straightforward, but using other types of data that are not just, maybe even hard data to initiate a conversation. So let's say, you know, there's a company earnings call, right, every quarter. Large, you know, publicly traded companies have quarterly results. Are you reading, Are you understanding how at the company level the work that you're doing might be good or might be negatively impacted when there's new hires on the cup, on your customer team, do you kind of investigate like, oh, I saw you hire two new people, what's the driving force there? So using hard or softer data points to kind of like drive a conversation at a more strategic level is one. The second is once you have that, let's say trigger point using a discovery focused mindset and by what I mean by that is like every conversation we have with our customer, we should be trying to learn something new about them or their business or their goals. Right? So asking questions like what more can we help you achieve? Or what other parts of the business do you think have similar challenges that perhaps our solution can solve? And I know sometimes we think that it comes off as salesy, but again, if a customer is happy and they're seeing success, you know, why wouldn't they want to share the wealth, especially internally with other parts of the business. And why wouldn't they want to broadcast that story like, hey, business, I'm saving you X amount of dollars or I'm generating X amount of revenue with this cool thing that we've done together. Right. I think we tend to shy away from that because we feel that, you know, maybe it's something that might be uncomfortable, but you know, people love to share their success stories. And then the last one is more value based storytelling and selling. So, you know, when we think of again, commercial acumen, I think it can be daunting for a lot of people. But you know, why don't we frame things like an upsell as a value unlock as opposed to a sale? Right. So I'm selling you more of something because you're going to achieve more value with it. So, you know, I think that there's a lot of to be said about just like reframing. So yeah, to recap, there's three things. So using data to drive urgency, using a discovery first mindset, and then also value based storytelling. And so the third part of this framework is a value based storytelling. So how do we reframe upsells and expansions as value unlocks and not sales? So I think we get a little apprehensive usually, especially as CS leaders when it's time to talk about that expansion opportunity. But if someone is seeing success from our product, that should be a good thing and it should be an easier conversation because you can help them grow even more value by getting even more of your product. So I think, you know, those three things, for me, it's really around a mindset shift. So the first again is, you know, using data, whether it's hard data or changes anecdote, to help drive a meaningful conversation and signal a readiness to expand. The second was taking more of a discovery first mindset and always trying to learn more about what you can offer and how you can drive value to your customers. And then the third is value based storytelling. So reframing upsells is more as value unlocks.

I love it. I love, love, love it. I think a lot of the things you've just said are actually commercial things that salespeople naturally know. And some CS professionals are a little bit hesitant to know or just they haven't been trained on it, if I'm completely honest. And it's really hard to sometimes figure out how to do discovery or how to even do value based storytelling. As you said, the data piece, I think maybe more people are in tune with because we have the data to hand, we know usage data, but then tying all of that into a value driven conversation that your customers see ROI of your product, that's all a little mucky and sometimes scary for CS professionals to jump into. And I think you've done a really good job about partnering with sales or with marketing to drive these, you know, retention and expansion metrics forward. For people listening, how would you recommend they start partnering with sales or marketing or anyone else in the business to really drive retention and expansion and try to hone in on those commercial skills?

Yeah, I mean, I think CS is well positioned to do that again, right. If we connect the upsell or the expansion to a customer driven goal, I mean, that's it, right? It's all about helping the customer win. And by helping the customer win, we're going to see some value from it as a business. I think really it's about alignment, right. And it's a continuous process, not just like a quarterly meeting. But I think if you align on data, going back to data, right? So you know, if you as a CSM are working with an account manager, an ae, are you looking at the same data? Right. Are you helping them understand what's happening on the account level? Whether it's hard data like usage metrics or software data, like changes on the account or you know, team changes, are you aligned on the customer context? Which I think data can help, right. So, you know, really if sales knows what success looks like for the customer, they can sell better and they can sell smarter. And then if CS knows what was promised on the back end of that, we can deliver better. So I think it's this kind of like symbiotic relationship that we need to get back to realizing that CS makes sales better, sales make CS better, because then we really know like what we can help drive.

Definitely.

And I think some of this too is like a good example is like, you know, is CS present at key sales moments? So whether it's even before, and I know we're starting to see more and more of this, right. As CS is, you know, we oftentimes are positioned as the experts, but you know, we should be part of as it makes sense to help build trust and build confidence in a deal. You know, bring a CSM along, have them tell a few customer stories directly, right? Like of course sales can tell the customer stories, but if you can highlight this CSM works with, you know, three of our top customers and they have some best practices or some learnings that, you know, they want to Share with you like that can go a really long way and vice versa. If CS can bring sales into the conversation, sales can better hear directly from the customers where they're seeing value, where there might be opportunity to unlock.

Definitely it's a two way partnership. You've just highlighted it and I think that that's what if you're a CS professional, sales leader, marketing, whoever you are listening to this podcast, it is always a two way road. It's not just okay, sales hands off to customer success and then CS kind of deals with it, but customer success can help close a deal. I have plenty of CSMs on my team that help close deal new sales deals and vice versa. Like sales leaders should be helping or AES should be helping CSMs feel more commercially enabled to have those value driven conversations or using the data to tell a better story, et cetera. So I think it's all a partnership and at the end of the day I do think we're all serving the customer. So I love how you've built so many successful partnerships at QUIC between a number of different teams. So that, that's really great to hear. Listen Ajame, we could keep talking about everything under the sun, I'm sure, but I kind of want to wrap up what some of your biggest learnings at this point. As someone who's worked in setting up and scaling CS functions in different markets now, what are kind of the biggest lessons or challenges you've encountered and how have you like used those to shape the strategies you're building now?

Yeah, you know the first for me going back to the top of the conversation is focus. So you know, we can't, we don't have unlimited resources. You can't boil the ocean. But how do we take lessons and learnings from our happy and successful customers to help drive our strategy? So focusing in on a smaller set of ICPs to start I think is a big learning for me. The second is that, you know, CS has a great opportunity to help drive overall go to market. We talk about customer LED growth again, it's not just for post acquisition. It can also help inform and drive efficiency for our new business go to market strategies as well. And I think the last one is just around people. How do we help CS leaders, our teams and our customers shine? Professional credibility is important now more than ever and helping tell the stories of successful customers. But thinking of them as individuals, professionals, you know, I think is a huge opportunity for us and same goes for our team. How do we elevate our team as part of that Success journey as well.

I love all of that. I'm really resonating with the fact that you have really just taken customer success and driven new business from it. I think a lot of people are missing that little key link. And you've said it multiple times before about the flywheel being customer success, marketing, sales, it all works together. But sometimes we get so into our own little ways of working that we forget that there's just so much there that we can learn and we can take our teams along with us. As you just said, it's a big experience to experience together. But it sounds like you guys have really at least figured out the first step of it. So I'm sure you're iterating and you're making changes, but it sounds like you're off to a really good start. So thanks for sharing all of that with us. So ejmee, as we wrap up this episode, I love asking all of my guests quick fire questions. Meaning I want to challenge you to answer all of these next questions in a sentence or less.

Are you ready? Let's do it.

Awesome. My first question is if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?

So it's interesting you mentioned focus. I think customer success is going to get more specialized. Our roles are either going to be more focused on driving revenue, driving technical ability, or driving industry specification with our customers.

Love it. Great. I totally agree. Next question is, which app or software do you use every single day either on your phone or your laptop? And why can be CS or can be just anything? Doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be CS.

These days it's ChatGPT. I use it to help manage personal and professional projects. It's definitely now become a co pilot for me.

Agreed. I have it open on my second window all the time. It's literally my AI assistant to everything. Like from planning personal things to actually summarizing customer calls. You name it, I'm using AI for it. Love, love, love that answer. Next question is if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be?

Back to our earlier conversations. CS should be less insular and consider ourselves part of the go to market and consider it actually a responsibility. You know, Driving sustainable growth is now the name of the game in SaaS and that is CS. So we're actually responsible for helping our customers or helping our companies achieve success and driving sustainable growth. Oh, I love that.

If I could underline one word out of this cause conversation. Customer success. Driving sustainable growth. Ooh that is such a juicy takeaway. I love it, love it, love it, love it. Amazing. Last question is who should be my next podcast guest?

So I don't know everyone you've had on the podcast, but I think Ralphie White would be great. She's a season she's a seasoned customer success leader. She's doing amazing things at Deep Grammar. She's like one of these hot AI companies and she's just so lovely every time I speak with her. So she'd be a great guest.

Amazing. I haven't talked to Ralphie yet, so I'll have to reach out to her. Thank you so much ajmeh, for your insights, all your strategies, playbooks, best practices that you shared with my listeners. If anyone has any more questions or wants to reach out or connect with you, what is the best way?

Find me on LinkedIn. It's just the LinkedIn URL and Ajamay and I'll be easy to find.

Amazing and I'll make sure to link it down in the show notes of this episode. Thanks so much ajumae for coming on.

Thank you for having me. This has been great.

Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Pro podcast today. I hope you learned something new to take back to your team and your company. If you enjoyed today's episode, please can you take one minute to give me a positive review on Apple Podcasts. It takes a lot of time and energy to create an episode and I want to continue to create more for you, but it would be great to know that you are enjoying these episodes. Also, do not forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast as I release a new podcast every month. And if you have any topics that.

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