Slack, Webflow, and OpenAI embed customer obsession across every team, not just sales. Slack assigns non-sales owners to major accounts and tracks both wins and losses in shared channels. OpenAI scaled its go-to-market team from 10 to 500 people in two years by making customer feedback visible to everyone.
Michael Lopp
From about 10 to 500 people in two years.
Customer obsession is everyone's job. Success isn't just on sales. Every team owns the health of the customer. You must build this mindset from day one. We actually did this really well at Slack. At Slack, we took our largest customers and we assigned non sales DRI's directly responsible individuals to be in charge of each customer. So our VP of engineering, Michael Lopp was in charge of the nware. Our CTO Alan was in charge of Nike and so on. And all of a sudden we started seeing the customer feedback start to come into our roadmap a heck of a lot faster. We Also at Slack, Webflow and OpenAI have built out customer wins and customer losses channels. If you don't have these, go build these immediately. The customer wins channel is awesome. It's a feel good channel. Everyone loves to see the new customers that are coming on board. But the customer losses channel is really where it's at. As soon as that thing lights up, everybody swarms in because they want to know why we lost the customer. I often see our COO Brad in there jumping in, offering support, asking questions, trying to learn from what we could have done better. Bait customer obsession into your DNA. So this picture that you see up here, that is OpenAI's go to market team about two months ago. In two years we have gone from 10 to to 500 people and we are going to keep on going. And the reason that this is working today, while it hasn't been easy, is we are built on transparency, trust and accountability. We invest in our leaders so they can grow with the company, not out of the company. And we embed customer obsession into every single function. Do these things well and your teams will thrive even in the toughest of moments.
