CS100 Speaker Preview: Whitney Hillyer – Make Your Customer Success Team a Key Revenue Driver
Whitney Hillyer, Vice President of Client Success at Collective[i], was recently announced as a speaker at the upcoming CS100 Summit, the premiere conference for customer success executives and leaders.
The CS100 Summit will take place September 13-15, 2016 at the St. Regis Hotel in Park City, Utah and will attract 100 customer success executives traveling in from across the world for an exclusive 3-day learning event. Customer success executives, leaders, and innovators will come together to focus on ideation, strategies, and real-world applications of customer success.
Whitney brings with her a wealth of first hand experience and incredible examples that will guide customer success leaders through a variety of hard hitting topics, like profitability of customer success. At the CS100 Summit, Whitney will share from her incredible experience, but in advance, we want to give our attendees a sneak peek into just a few things she’ll discuss:
How to Make Your Customer Success Team A Key Revenue Driver For Your Organization
During her session at the CS100 Summit, Whitney will share a new paradigm of customer success – one focused on profitability. Traditionally, CFO’s viewed customer success or client services as a sunk cost, which is why it was challenging to get budget for things like additional headcount, technology, travel, or training, line items often greenlit for sales.
Whitney will discuss and share her story of transforming a team from preventing revenue loss to driving profitable growth. She will also discuss how her success changed the conversations taking place in the boardroom.
Whitney explained that, “The fact is, the closer you can tie yourself to the revenue goals of your organization, the more executive leverage you will have.”
“During my presentation at The CS100 Summit, I will walk through how I personally made this shift at Bitly, and built a highly profitable (and very happy) team within a short period of time. I will also cover how I’m talking this transformation to the next level at Collective[i].”
Start Thinking About THIS Before the CS100 Summit
Whitney urges that attendees come to the CS100 Summit with some of the following questions in mind:
- Does my customer success organization take a backseat to the Sales organization?
- Do I have trouble getting budget for things I need like headcount or technology?
- Would I characterize my customer success organization as “adopters”, “retainers” or “expanders”?
Customer Success Matters to Whitney Because…
Whitney shared a well known quote that reads, “Initial purchase decisions are based on hope. Renewal (and upsell) decisions are based on experience”. Because of this, she believes that the customer success team is arguably most directly tied to the continued health of the business. “Getting people to buy into your vision is definitely the first step, but getting them to stay and grow with you is a totally different story. If you want to understand the health of a business, ask a CSM.”
“The thing I love most about client success is that it’s not one job. It’s actually more like 10. CSMs are like olympic decathletes: they have to be good at sales, consulting, product, technical support, education, marketing, contracts and legal, you name it. It is the department that has the best pulse on the overall health of the business because they have their hands in everything and aren’t as siloed as other departments.”
Bring on Executive Networking!
Whitney is most excited about networking with other CS executives so she can understand their challenges and successes. “Customer success as a discipline is still so young and we are all figuring it out together, so it’s nice to be able to come together and share experiences. I am also really excited to hear Stacy Bishop’s discussion on The Investor’s Perspective of Customer Success. Since customer success has only recently been elevated to an executive or even C-Suite position, it hasn’t always gotten the attention it deserves in the boardroom. I am excited to hear her point of view.”
Interested in attending the CS100 Summit and hearing from Whitney along with many others firsthand? Don’t miss out! Register to attend today: http://cs100.clientsuccess.com/