Grow & Tell

Nobody prepares you for the jump from CSM to CS leader. But Rachel Provan is trying to change that. Rachel is a customer success leadership coach, helping CS leaders and early-stage companies build customer success strategies and leadership habits that scale.Nobody prepares you for the jump from CSM to CS leader. But Rachel Provan is trying to change that.Rachel is a customer success leadership coach, helping CS leaders and early-stage companies build customer success strategies and leadership habits that scale.She joined Alex to discuss the psychology and strategy behind CS, including:When a founder should make their first CS hireThe best way for CS to handle product feedbackWhy live training sessions aren’t always the best way to onboard clientsHow to be more proactive about winning renewals

Most of our guests are builders, but Wynne Brown is a fixer. Learn how she's slashed churn, expanded renewals, and professionalized Sales and CS teams at Monster, GitHub, Seal Software/Docusign, Fable, RocketReach, and more.Wynne Brown spent the last two decades coming into scaling companies with leaky revenue — where she rights the ship, and then moves on to the next challenge.She’s revamped Sales and Customer Success at companies like Monster, GitHub, Fable, and RocketReach - mostly by focusing on the customer.This week, Wynne joins Alex to discuss her career journey, including:Introducing Customer Success to Monster’s military.com divisionLeading CS at GitHub, where she introduced enterprise CSMsTurning around a huge churn problem at Seal SoftwareLeading revenue at Fable and RocketReach through their Series A

Chris Michelmore, Head of Mid Market Acquisition at Zoom, tells the nine-year story of how he ascended from first-time SDR to senior sales leader.It's rare for a first-time SDR to stick around long enough to become a sales leader at that same company.But that's exactly how Chris Michelmore became the Head of Mid Market Acquisition at Zoom.This week, he's taking Alex through his journey up the company ladder, including:What made him so successful as a sellerWhy coaching sales reps is more like selling than you'd thinkThe big differences between leading sales directors vs. AEsWhat it’s like growing alongside a company in hypergrowth

Matt Green, Co-Founder and CRO of Sales Assembly, shares the company's founding story, the keys to a great sales training program, plus the biggest sales skills most teams are missing today.Some of today's best companies started over a cup of coffee.That's how Matt Green and his co-founder, Jeff Rosset, started Sales Assembly – the go-to sales resource for some of the world's best B2B tech companies.Matt joins Alex this week to share the growth story of Sales Assembly, including:why they pivoted from role-backed to skill-based trainingwhat today's most successful sales leaders are talking aboutthe 2 biggest skills that sales teams are missingthe most common struggles he sees with new sales leadershis advice for selling through champions

Monica Perez, Head of Customer Success at Notion, shares the four-year journey of building Notion's foundational CS team.Customer Success at a product-led company is a completely different animal.When Monica Perez was brought in to grow Notion's foundational customer success team, they were already at $40 million in revenue.Today, Monica joins Alex to discuss what it was like to build a CS program on top of a strong PLG engine — including:how their customer onboarding is structuredthe relationship between sales and CShow they mature customer accounts over timehow they measure the success of their CS programs

Devin Bramhall, former CEO of Animalz, discusses scaling the agency's revenue, advice for startups on content, and growing her marketing podcast. Topics include hurdles in content marketing, strategies for blog traffic, challenges for founders, structuring the content machine at Animalz, empowering content marketers, and success strategies for content marketing growth.

Eloise (Shuttleworth) Salisbury, newly named Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, recounts lessons from 5 years of building Iterable's customer success program from the ground up, how she's approaching her first 90 days in a new CS leadership role, and why she founded Women in SaaS.What does it take to build an enterprise-level customer success program?Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, joins us this week to break down what she learned scaling Iterable's customer success program.Eloise joined Iterable, a cross-channel marketing enablement platform, after their Series B. In her five years with the company, she scaled their CS to an international audience, introduced an enterprise CS and implementation track, which ultimately helped the company grow to a $2 billion valuation.In today’s episode, Alex and Eloise discuss:how to build mid-market and enterprise CS teamswhat makes an ideal CS/sales relationshiphow she's approaching the first 90 days at AutogenAIwhy she founded Women in Saas (and her advice for women in tech leadership)

Derek Osgood, Founder & CEO of Ignition, shares product marketing lessons from leading 9 major launches at PlayStation, reinventing a software category at Rippling, and founding Ignition—a product management platform.Derek Osgood is a career product marketer turned founder.He's made a career out of leading product launches at PlayStation and Rippling before founding Ignition, a go-to-market platform designed to help businesses launch products.In today’s show, Derek joins Alex to talk about:how his PlayStation game launch experience lends itself to SaaShow Rippling thought about reinventing a product categorytransitioning to the role of founder at his own companyhis best practices for a successful product launch

Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly, shares what she's learned in her 8 years of building a service-based business, plus tons of advice for RevOps teams.Jen Igartua, CEO of Go Nimbly, joins Alex on this week's episode to talk all things RevOps.First she uncovers what went into building her RevOps consultancy, including how they developed their service offerings, how they stay profitable, and how they recruit talent.Then, Jen and Alex dive deep into RevOps, where Jen shares tips on building a RevOps roadmap, structuring a RevOps team, and picking your tool stack.

Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, shares marketing lessons from his 5 years growing ShipBob to a $1b valuation. Casey Armstrong knows his way around ecommerce marketing – he's led both B2B and B2C marketing teams during his career.On this week's episode, Alex and Casey go deep on ShipBob’s startup marketing strategy, including:Why they started with only a few channelsCasey's advice for partnering with bigger brandsHow they built out their marketing teamHow their messaging has evolved with their ICP