Emily Garza
Emily started her career in customer facing roles (sales, business development and account management), before joining a startup to launch the Sales Enablement and then Customer Success functions. This background allows her to bring a holistic view of the customer journey to Customer Success. She scaled the CS team from initial player/coach to 30+ global team members, CS support functions (Ops, Advocacy) and both high touch and digital touch models. When she’s not geeking out on CS, she love to cheer on Villanova basketball and the US Women’s Soccer team, window shop for real estate and enjoy time with her husband and new baby boy.
“As a company grows, the CS organization becomes responsible for the majority of revenue (or company relationships) that drive a SaaS model. The CS team should use this to ensure the customer voice is represented internally as well as get credit for all the hard work the CS team is doing”
Maranda Ann Dziekonski
Maranda Dziekonski is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success and People Ops at Swiftly. Maranda has over 20 years of experience both working in and building world-class operations. She has extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies with successful exits (one unicorn). Her specialties are in Customer Success (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), Renewals Management, Customer Support (B2B, B2C), Tech Support, Contact Centers (Inbound/Outbound), Sales, and various other teams in operations.
“For those that are hungry and want to grow, the sky is really the limit. I see CS professionals not only move around their company into departments like marketing and product, but I am also seeing new opportunities pop up within the CS organization. Opportunities like Customer Success Ops, Customer Success Marketing, Customer Success Enablement, and CS roles with more strategic customer bases.”
Abbas Haider Ali
Abbas Haider Ali is currently VP Customer Success & Value Engineering at Twilio Segment. He has held leadership roles in field engineering, sales engineering, customer success, professional services, product management & strategy, product marketing, and business development. His experience includes working at startups from Series-B stage through late stage and public companies. He enjoys the opportunity to bring his expertise to other enterprise startups both as a strategy consultant as well as an advisor and investor. He is passionate about mentorship for women and underrepresented groups as they take on leadership roles in tech.
“Value Engineering can be a powerful force multiplier for a SaaS company because it creates alignment to measurable customer outcomes across every part of the organization. It becomes part of the product and GTM teams’ DNA.”
Graham Gill
20 years of experience developing and leading high performing teams (Pre & Post Sales). I am passionate about driving client adoption and customer loyalty. Skilled at building customer experience strategies and services resulting in increased revenue and retention.
“I am excited by the network and community that has developed in CS. The willingness to help a peer, to jump in and offer advice/guidance, is unrivaled in any other discipline. I love the information sharing that takes place in this community. I love that young professionals who are entering the workforce are now looking to CS as a first role and asking what they need to do to prepare themselves. I am encouraged that we are seeing more folks like myself from product, sales, marketing, and all walks of life be drawn into CS.”
Paul Mathewson
10 years of experience working with companies, across numerous verticals, on strategies to plan, develop, implement and maintain successful data-driven solutions. From SMBs to the Fortune 10, I pride myself on connecting with customers immediately, understanding their needs and, ultimately, being a part of shaping their businesses.
“...you need to make a great first impression with each new contact. I do this by creating ownership. Own a task or response and be accountable for it. When you follow through, you will immediately begin to build trust with that connection, leading to an expanded footprint with the account.”
Linda Lin
Advisor, Mentor, and EA to 15 month old CEO. I've spent 10+ years in post sales leadership and my superpowers are building and scaling world class CS teams and programs from $50M to $750M and building methodology for moving upmarket into the enterprise. I lead by holding myself and my teams to high bars of results, continuous improvement, and collaboration and believe that customer success is a cross-functional mission across the whole company and not the name of a team.
“I love the change management aspects of CS particularly in the enterprise and am drawn to the strategic nature of helping customers achieve their business objectives with a given product. At its core, CS is a value-driven function where the team’s directive is to help customers achieve success and realize value.”