💥 Kristi Faltorusso: ClientSuccess, Chief Customer Officer

Market-to-Revenue

Achieving your customer's business outcomes. Develop advocates. If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Solving for in-person events again. Design your customer maturation model. Onboarding 2.0. Introducing automation. Confirmation bias. Inversion. 80/20 principal. Figure out your balance between capturing wallet share of your customer base and new logo acquisition.

Here’s what Sean MacPherson said about Kristi:

Kristi Faltorusso. Someone I don't know personally, but I feel like I know her personally because she gives so much back to the CS community through sharing her playbooks, is Kristi Faltorusso over at ClientSuccess. Her focus on showcasing how customer success is a revenue driver and how CS leaders can get to the level of other leaders in an organization is spot on. She's given back so much to the CS community and leveled up so many leaders in the last several years. And honestly, she's one of the top CS leaders in revenue operators out there!
—Sean MacPherson, VP, Customer Success & Experience at Alyce → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

I oversee the customer experience teams. I run customer success, support and services. Three main ways that we're converting that into revenue:

1) Achieving our customer's business outcomes. So, for our organization, keeping our customers satisfied with a value prop of what they came into the business with, helping them achieve that. That helps drive retention and net revenue retention as well. So keeping them, and growing them.

2) Developing advocates. It also helps facilitate developing advocates. Our customer success team really fosters the relationships. Again, going back to the value prop of helping our customers achieve their goals, allows us to develop advocates who are, hopefully, out there in the wild selling our product behind our backs. Telling their peers, their organization, why they need to have us, the value they're getting from us. That's a huge proponent of how we're thinking about that.

3) Industry thought leadership. Our team spends a lot of time really honing in best practices, understanding the shifts, the market landscape. And we do believe by selfless giving, by just sharing those thoughts and insights, that we help elevate the community as a whole, hopefully that education and enablement will bring folks back when they're ready to purchase. We think about that as a full lifecycle in terms of how we're driving revenue for the business overall.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

I wish I only had three hard problems, but three that we've recently solved for is:

1) Solving for in-person events again, at scale, in the community. I think everyone is generally very excited to get back in person and spend time together. Especially in the customer success community, where folks are generally pretty close. But, getting in person is really important for a lot of individuals. Now, we're still navigating some of the changes in the landscape. We still have COVID issues and concerns, people with compromised immune systems, who are still hesitant to get out there. But, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the best methodology for us to do that and how we should be approaching it. For us, it's been a lot of these little in-city location events, and we've found that folks feel safer, they feel more comfortable coming together in these smaller cohorts, in their areas, as opposed to flying somewhere, going to larger events where they just don't feel as safe. So, we've seen tremendous success with really focusing in on these smaller, intimate setting events in the locations where folks are.

2) Empowering our technical support team with better access to customer data to help them prioritize their efforts. In customer experience, we know how critical the customer support experience can be, how impactful positively, how impactful negatively, it can be if it's not executed well. We've spent a lot of time making sure our team in the customer support organization, not only has access to really smart, intelligent customer data, but understands what that data is telling them and how to use it to prioritize their efforts. This ensures that our larger customers, customers who are at a point where maybe there are some challenges they’re overcoming, they're getting the time and attention that's necessary to help keep the momentum going. To get things back into a good place. Also, with customers who are extremely satisfied, how do we continue to build on that momentum? But, that prioritization based on data has helped us deliver a better experience overall.

3) Education and enablement for both the community on customer success thought leadership, as well as ClientSuccess as a technology. For us, we believe that rising tide lifts all boats. How do we make sure that we're educating the community around customer success best practices? How to go into an organization and execute? How to get buy-in? Things of that nature. Not super intuitive for everybody. For a lot of leaders, they're a bit newer. So, we've really focused on helping them understand: how do you do this? How do you do it well? How do you execute flawlessly? And then, obviously for our customers, how do they maximize the value of ClientSuccess and figuring out, again, how do we train and enable at scale? Education and enablement has been a big focus of ours and we've had some really great success with some core programs.

What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?

I also wish I only had three roadblocks, but, three things that we're really doubling down our efforts on:

1) Designing a customer maturation model that translates against people, process and technology, to guide our companies through their own journeys. I think a lot of technology providers would assume that the customer journey happens with you. It doesn’t. It's happening with, or without you. Technology is one component of a customer's journey. So, we talk about it, you know, our partnership through a customer life-cycle lens. Customer maturation is really critical because we want to help customers identify where they are, but more importantly, what do they need to do to get to that next level? So really designing something that we feel like is helpful, it's engaging, and designs a map for our customers to help them advance their program in their organization.

2) Onboarding 2.0. Any company, especially in the SaaS space, understands the impact and the value, of a very strong, well-executed onboarding program. We're really focused on designing this 2.0 model, which is designed through a customer lens and highly flexible. So instead of us creating a checklist and saying, “here's everything our customers need to do in onboarding,” because, who are we to determine? We now take their consideration of what they're focused on. It's all built around their goals and then helping them design programs and parts of the products that help support the execution of that. Helping them get faster time to value.

3) Introducing automation into our customer lifecycle. We like to think about this as augmentation. Now, we're not trying to move to a fully digital landscape where we're only supporting our customers through technology from a push motion. We want to find out...