Customer SuccessCon West 2016: Full Schedule

12:00pm PST

Registration & Check-in

Thursday January 14, 2016 12:00pm - 1:00pm PST
DoubleTree Suites by Hilton, Berkeley, CA 200 Marina Blvd Berkeley, CA 94710

1:00pm PST

The State of the Profession

Customer Success groups are proliferating across the business landscape faster than can be imagined. The numbers of open positions worldwide continue to skyrocket. But in all the increase and expansion, key questions remain to be answered. How is Customer Success as a role generally defined and perceived? How do companies typically deploy CS resources in their organizational structures? What are the relationships between CS and Sales? CS and Marketing? What technologies are in use by CS teams? The presentation is based on the ongoing research of The Customer Success Association. The findings will be discussed by a panel of senior Customer Success leaders.

Moderators

Mikael Blaisdell

Executive Director, The Customer Success Association

Mikael Blaisdell is a recognized leading voice on the strategy, process, people and technology of customer retention and increased per-customer profitability. His ongoing research and leadership of The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn provide a unique global view of the development... Read More →

Speakers

Catherine Blackmore

GVP Customer Success – Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle

Catherine is a thought leader and innovator in the area of Customer Success, with over 20 years of experience helping a diverse list of clients from small business to Fortune 100 customers. Catherine has published numerous blogs, ebooks and whitepapers on the structure, programs... Read More →

April Oman

Head of Customer Success, BetterWorks

April is a passionate customer success evangelist whose leadership consistently raises the level of client connection and intimacy, while also increasing team member engagement and productivity. She is a recognized thought leader in the emerging Customer Success arena. Currently... Read More →

Paul Piazza

Sr. Director of Customer Success, Reciprocity

Paul has a long track record of building customer-centric organizations. He believes it starts with understanding his internal and external customers ROI. By investing in people, process, and technology, he has been able to assist companies in the realization of success. Paul is the... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 1:00pm - 1:45pm PST
DoubleTree Suites by Hilton, Berkeley, CA 200 Marina Blvd Berkeley, CA 94710

Plenary Session

2:00pm PST

Case Study: A Tale of Five Companies

Limited Capacity seats available

There is a lot of variance in the structure and practice of Customer Success between different types of companies. In this session, we’ll look at:

a Healthcare company
a safety certification provider
a high growth analytics vendor
a mid-stage SaaS recruiting platform
an application management system

What do these companies have in common? Where do they differ in how they perceive the role of customer success and why? Join us and find out -- and apply the insights to your own team.

Speakers

Ari Klein

Head of Customer Success, DocSend

Ari is currently Head of Customer Success at DocSend. Prior to DocSend he was at CrowdFlower where he played a key role in building customer success, growth, and product strategy. He's spent time at Cisco Systems and as a mechanical engineer at Caterpillar. Ari volunteers with the... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 2:00pm - 2:45pm PST
Santa Barbara Room Building 5, 3rd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Case Studies

2:00pm PST

Case Study: Conviva - The First Year

Limited Capacity seats available

Get a glimpse into a real-time challenge of having to create a Customer Success team from near ground zero, in a fast growing SaaS video analytics business where customer expansion is paramount to company growth. In this session, learn about strategies that cover people, process and technology to enable a successful and scalable worldwide CS capability and ensure not only customer retention, but significant expansion beyond the initial sale.

Speakers

Mark Pecoraro

VP: Customer Success, Conviva

As Vice President of Customer Success at Conviva, Mark Pecoraro is responsible for Global Customer Success and Support and brings 27 years of leadership experience in building and managing world-class enterprise customer service operations. As a recognized thought-leader in Customer... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 2:00pm - 2:45pm PST
Berkeley Room Building 5, 2nd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Case Studies

2:00pm PST

Case Study: Demandbase - Mapping the Customer Journey

Limited Capacity seats available

As a company grows, it’s imperative to ensure that all customer facing teams are aligned and working as a team. All through the Customer Lifecycle, it’s critical to ensure that the customers sold today are set up properly right from the start so they’re successful with their investment in your solutions – by setting the right expectations, agreeing on what success looks like, and getting live and getting to value as quickly as possible. Proactive Customer Success means consistently delivering value all through the Lifecycle - delivering on the promises your company made and your customer expects and deserves. Sure to be a lively discussion, come hear how one company re-architected their entire Customer Lifecycle, and be ready to share your thoughts and experiences on what works and what doesn’t in the world of Customer Success.

Speakers

David Lieberman

VP: Customer Success, Demandbase

David Lieberman is a hands-on Customer Success executive with over 25 years experience developing strategic customer relationships, building winning, revenue producing partnerships and managing high performing sales teams. After more than five years creating and building Demandbase's... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 2:00pm - 2:45pm PST
Sacramento Room Building 5, 2nd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Case Studies

2:00pm PST

Case Study: Zuora - Implementation and Success

Limited Capacity seats available

Veteran Customer Success professionals know all too well that when the customer has a poor implementation experience, things can get ugly very quickly and have long-term consequences. A year ago, Zuora started what they call Z-GRAB, Zuora’s Go-Live Review Assessment Board, and have dramatically reduced the incidence of launch blow-ups which significantly improving the transition from Services to Customer Success.

Speakers

Marlene Summers

Sr. Director: Global Support, Zuora

Silver Award winner of the 2015 Stevie Award Female Executive of the Year in Computer Software, Marlene is a brilliant technical leader with over 15 years experience in enterprise software and application development at key Silicon Valley companies. With a degree in Customer Science... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 2:00pm - 2:45pm PST
La Jolla Room Building 5, 3rd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Case Studies

3:00pm PST

The Future of Customer Success

What could/should the profession become in the next few years? How might that future be accomplished? The sea-change in the technology industry’s profits-realization strategy, from selling perpetual licenses to on-premised software, ushered in Customer Success as a necessary role. But the evolution of the industry and of the business sector overall hasn’t stopped. It’s not about the software anymore. The next big transformation, from product to authentic customer centricity, is beginning. What will it mean to your company? What will it mean to you as a customer success professional?

A panel of senior Customer Success leaders will give you their perspective on these issues as well.

Moderators

Mikael Blaisdell

Executive Director, The Customer Success Association

Speakers

Catherine Blackmore

GVP Customer Success – Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle

Guy Nirpaz

CEO & Co-founder, Totango

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Totango, the #1 innovator at Customer Success. I've also wrote the book "Farm Don't Hunt - The Definitive Guide for Customer Success"

Paul Piazza

Sr. Director of Customer Success, Reciprocity

Thursday January 14, 2016 3:00pm - 3:45pm PST
DoubleTree Suites by Hilton, Berkeley, CA 200 Marina Blvd Berkeley, CA 94710

Plenary Session

4:00pm PST

Best Practices: Aligning Success and Support

Limited Capacity seats available

In this workshop we'll compare the roles of a SaaS support agent, and a typical CSM, side by side in a systematic way by looking at purpose, goals and KPIs, skills and competencies of these roles. We'll discuss how to align the two so they provide a natural career path for a capable performer. At the end of the session, a participant should have a basic, but useful tool that can be used to educate Leadership as well as staff on the differences, similarities and synergies of these important roles.

Speakers

Paul Reeves

VP: Customer Success, TokBox

Paul Reeves is Vice President of Customer Success for TokBox, the leading Communications Platform as a Service. His teams ensure customers rapidly launch and smoothly scale their TokBox powered solutions. Customer Success engages in technical presales and leads the customer journey... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 4:00pm - 4:45pm PST
Sacramento Room Building 5, 2nd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Best Practices

4:00pm PST

Best Practices: Balancing Success and Sales

Limited Capacity seats available

A Customer Success team inevitably acquires a lot of data about the customer in the course of their work together. Effectively applying that data, however, is often another matter, especially in balancing the relationship with Sales. How should the Customer Success team build the credibility with Sales to where inappropriate prospective deals can be stopped before they become a retention problem? Why should an individual Success Plan be done for every customer as a part of the selling process? Who should do renewals and up-sells, and how should that process be handled.

Speakers

Dan Steinman

CCO, Gainsight

Dan is Gainsight’s Chief Customer Officer and, in that role, has ultimate responsibility for Gainsight’s customer’s satisfaction and success. Customers are his passion going all the way back to his days as an SE at IBM. Dan’s career includes being a very early employee at... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 4:00pm - 4:45pm PST
Berkeley Room Building 5, 2nd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Best Practices

4:00pm PST

Best Practices: Before Buying a Customer Success System

Limited Capacity seats available

The market for Customer Success platforms is packed with powerful solutions. Some are great for high volume, low-touch accounts while others provide in-depth analytics to help you really understand the behavior of your customers. Which would be best for your company? Before you begin making the rounds of product demos and vendor visits, save yourselves a lot of time and money by doing three key steps in advance.

Establish clear definition around your People, Purpose and Process
Shine a light on your bad data (yes, it’s bad.)
Build the business case for justifying the investment

Speakers

Nils Vinje

President, Glide Consulting

Nils Vinje is a Customer Success expert and runs Glide Consulting, a Customer Success consulting firm. Nils was a front-line CSM and rapidly rose through the ranks from Team Lead, to Director and then VP before becoming a consultant to fast-growing SaaS companies. He offers practical... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 4:00pm - 4:45pm PST
La Jolla Room Building 5, 3rd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Best Practices

4:00pm PST

Best Practices: Scaling Customer Success

Limited Capacity seats available

The traditional concept of customer success is embodied in the ever friendly customer success manager who gets customers set up and comfortable with the tool and checks that all is well on a regular basis, bringing interesting suggestions to improve the customer experience. Unfortunately, that approach to customer success is expensive, it does not scale well, and it may not be all that effective either.

Instead, we propose field-tested alternatives to the high-touch, high cost, traditional model of customer success, both for on boarding customers and for ongoing retention efforts. The breakout will focus on four sets of approaches, leveraging self-service, group actions, big data, and finally structured processes to deliver high-impact results that do not require the high-touch, high cost, traditional approach of customer success organizations.

Speakers

Francoise Tourniare

President, FT Works

Francoise Tourniare is the founder of FT Works and co-founder of ChurnSquad. Both companies provide consulting, training, and coaching to create and improve customer success initiatives.Prior to founding FT Works in 1998, she was the Vice President of Worldwide Service at Scopus... Read More →

Thursday January 14, 2016 4:00pm - 4:45pm PST
Santa Barbara Room Building 5, 3rd Floor: DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina

Best Practices

5:00pm PST

Customer Success Technology Showcase and Reception

Thursday January 14, 2016 5:00pm - 7:00pm PST
DoubleTree Suites by Hilton, Berkeley, CA 200 Marina Blvd Berkeley, CA 94710

Plenary Session