Leah’s ProducTea: 82: Maranda Dziekonski - When selling never ends - CS in 2024 and beyond

☑ Transform Customers into Raving Fans
↳ CS isn’t just about service—it’s about empowering customers to succeed in their roles.
↳ When customers look like heroes within their own organisations, they’re not only loyal but become advocates.
↳ And when they’re seeing real value, they'll want to solve more problems with your solutions.

☑ Tie CS Directly to Revenue Goals
↳ Forget satisfaction scores alone—CS teams should own renewal and expansion targets.
↳ Tracking success with clear data helps CS justify its impact in the boardroom.
↳ By driving measurable revenue, CS teams show they’re not an expense—they’re a growth investment.

☑ Make CS a Strategic Partner with Sales
↳ CS extends Sales by identifying new opportunities for growth with existing customers.
↳ Proactive CS teams build value continuously, so customers naturally want to expand.
↳ Coordinated handoffs and shared goals ensure a seamless experience from sign-up to renewal.

☑ Focus on Adding Long-Term Value
↳ Real loyalty stems from demonstrated ROI, not just high satisfaction scores.
↳ CS can help customers see the true potential in their tools, giving them a reason to invest further.
↳ When customers see ongoing ROI, they’ll stay with you—and grow with you.

We're hopefully driving so much value that customers want to continue to invest in us and give us more of their wallet share, and hopefully we're making them such rock stars within their organization that the expansion is just another day

CS should be looking at this right: I'm going to drive so much value through your current investment while also looking for additional problem statements that we could solve

When customer success started, the focus was always heavily on driving NPS, driving satisfaction, keeping customers happy, and I was even on that bandwagon. I was bragging about the NPS that my team was driving in an organization—and that seems absolutely ludicrous now

Leaders have to find ways to tie themselves to revenue, and the easiest way to do that is to own revenue, own revenue outcomes

It's really important that leaders figure out how to get that number on their slide somehow. If you're not closing the deal, the sales leader gets to put that number on their slide, and they will, and they do, and they strike the gong

If a tool or an organization makes me wildly successful at my job, because it's enabled me or empowered me somehow, guess what? I'm going to buy it again at the next org I go to

There are tools out there where you do need to feed value to the stakeholders, because if it's not obvious, you need to be feeding that to them

I see customer success as a valuable partner in organizations where value is a continuous motion that always needs to be worked

Once you get to a certain level of customers where your CEO can't keep up with doing customer success and selling, that's when I think you look at bringing in your first customer success manager

If you're someone that is serving public transit in customer service, you're in a call center, taking calls from riders, trying to answer questions. That person, I would expect to be in that tool every working day for eight hours

I think that's where this whole tying product usage to health misses the mark. People don't go deep enough to understand the personas, the problem statements, and what the actual usage should look like to make them healthy

You've got to check that mission-critical bucket too. People could be logging in every day and still, when it comes to budgeting, be cut

If you're functioning at that SVP level and above, you're not just thinking in your silo—you're taking a look at the entire organization and understanding the trade-offs

The reality is, even if you did drive value, even if you did identify the CSQL, if you're not closing the deal, the sales leader gets to put that number on their slide