Short video/transcript of a conversation about customer engagement and validation. Speakers recount a concrete example where a newly onboarded Notion customer’s CEO posted praise on LinkedIn describing company-wide adoption and high engagement; speakers treat this as powerful external validation and a memorable ‘magic’ moment for CSMs and the team. Themes include customer validation, organic advocacy, CSM recognition, and team/leadership roles.
Chapters
I think externally when you see magic happening, I had a very great example. I don't see Monica anymore here, but about a month ago we had like a magic experience from an external perspective where a customer of Notion that was recently onboarded to using the product wall to wall at their company, the CEO of the company went on LinkedIn and just posted. This has nothing to do with Notion. I just want to share how amazing this journey has been to get on this product and the adoption at the company has been so amazing to see and wall to wall and people are so highly engaged. And that will probably be a memory that never leaves me that like externally we made magic happen because there was no conversation that happened with us at all. Someone, a CEO took the time to write that up and to recognize the company and the team. So that to me is magic from an external perspective.
There's no validation like customer validation when it comes to these things. And definitely that little screenshot from LinkedIn goes into that CSM's brag document for a review season, right? It's like definitely remember this, erica, for like 20 years. That's right.
If I was a CSM, I'd use that.
That definitely shows up every time you have an interview question or wrong those things. But there's lots of elements, right? You talked about the clarity of roles, accountability for the team, the joint recognition that the team show up together. I think a little bit of this is also about the mutual respect of everyone. Kind of like knowing that you trust each other in the game. One analogy I use, like we don't always talk about customer obsession. Like that's a big part of every organization that is really focused on delivering value. But sometimes customer obsession can turn creepy is how I think about it. Right? Imagine your entire revenue organization. You're always in everything in front of the customer at the same time. It's like one of them and four of you in every meeting. That is kind of creepy, right? Like that is the wrong side of obsession on the customer side. So having those lines set up where you know what you're all doing and then you have a common language by which you talk about different stages of customer life cycle. There's no sales framework that's like pre and post sale. If you decide qualification is medpic. Everyone speaks the language of metric. Whatever you pick, it's common. And then the thing that I've always loved is this idea of leadership interchangeability. Sort of like can you walk in the shoes of your revenue peers? Right? So as a CS leader, can you actually drive a sales forecast call. If you're a sales leader, can you run a risk review meeting as well as your peers? If you do, that sends an incredible signal for magic happening within the organization itself. So those are some of the things that I look at.
