My Favorite Takeaway :
The customer success program is vastly different between a startup and a full-blown enterprise company that’s public or sells in the billions of dollars. It's important as a startup to ensure every customer is hugely successful, so you want to have that function established right off the bat. You want to make sure that the team is doing everything they can for the first 50 or maybe 70 clients, going well above and beyond everything that the customer needs to be successful.

My Favorite Takeaway :
The eight core areas and tools that you need:

1. Adoption management
2. Co-browsing
3. Calendar
4. Surveys
5. Metrics
6. Help center
7. Screen recording
8. App uptime.

My Favorite Takeaway :
Customer Success is no longer a nice-to-have; it is vital for every one of our companies. The earlier you invest in customer success, the more dividends it will pay off in the long run. Imagine having a higher renewal rate, higher adoption rate, and higher engagement rate on day one. Consider the compounding returns on that in year one, year two, year five—this is incredible.

My Favorite Takeaway :
When your customer comes on board, it is very clear why they're here and what they're trying to achieve.

My Favorite Takeaway :
There is literally no statistical relationship between satisfaction and loyalty.

Think about what a customer is signaling when they call to complain—they're engaged. It's like being married versus dating; suddenly, the flaws matter a lot more. If I'm dating, I can just walk away, and I might still say it was a great experience, but I wasn’t very engaged, was I? That's the point—when a customer is frustrated about something, it's probably because it matters.

My Favorite Takeaway :
One common mistake, especially in an out-of-the-box setup that may require technical support, is trying to scale too soon. It's trying to build a non-body process where everyone follows the exact same playbook from the moment it's finished, or you build an email onboarding journey or an engagement journey and then leave it untouched for the next two or three months.

In my experience, self-serve should definitely be the end goal, particularly in-product self-serve, but it shouldn't be your priority from day one. Your priority from day one should be the startup mantra: do things that don't scale. Jump on as many customer calls as you can for user research, to onboard customers, and when there's a change in the product roadmap, ask customers for feedback. For example, "We're thinking about going in this direction—what would this solve for you?"

My Favorite Takeaway :
Sales should contribute to every onboarding piece because they understand why the buyer purchased the product and the specific use case they want to solve. If you look at the sales or pre-sale cycle, what we're actually doing is making a value promise. The post-sale phase is about delivering on that promise—it's value promised to value delivered. Whatever was promised needs to be communicated to the person responsible for delivering the value. This includes understanding and sharing the use case, and also passing along the trust that the sales rep has built with the buyer by making a warm introduction.

My Favorite Takeaway :
CSMs have a tendency to overshare and create risk in the deal. I see it all the time. We are not trained in the art of ambiguity; we tend to overshare because we want everything to be clear, communicating the good, the bad, and the ugly. But guess what? In the sales process, that's not always great. We have to find a fine line—sharing enough to set clear expectations, but not so much that we're oversharing.