Senior executives from the community shared insights and perspectives on the role of their customer success organization as a growth engine and growth accelerator. Hosts for the meeting were the Atlanta and Chicago chapters of the Sales Leadership Community. Special thanks to Georgia State University, DePaul University and SOAR Performance Group.

Featured panelists:

• Rachel Orston from Bettercloud (Chief Customer Officer)
• Tony Smart from Gainsight (Head of Services Sales and Strategic Advisory)
• Brandon Tubandt from Keyfactor (Senior Vice President, Operations and Customer Success)
• John Thackston from SOAR Performance Group (Vice President, Business Development)
• Charlie Thackston from SOAR Performance Group (President)

Questions discussed at the event:

• Customer success was a hot topic even before the Covid-19 pandemic and it seems like it is only growing in importance. From you perspective, why do you believe that this is occurring?
• Customer success is a term that often has different meanings in different organizations, what does it mean in your organization?
• In your view, where should customer success report in the organization?
• With everything that has happened in the past month, we see many of our clients analyzing roles and responsibilities across sales and customer success. What are you all seeing here, and what are some smart moves that you believe organizations can make to optimize coverage during a really fast shifting period?
• When you see organizations that really use the customer success function as a growth driver – what do you see that they do differently and better than those that don’t?
• What do you see as the critical skill sets for a customer success organization to have in order to really be a growth accelerator for their organization?
• What would be your advice for an organization that is trying to determine how to drive more customer growth with their customer success function?