Welcome! (#1)

“What’s this newsletter about?”

Well - I’ve started my journey as a Customer Success Manager at a startup whose product is used by thousands of top sales teams worldwide, including those at IBM, Shopify, Square, and Cisco, to generate more revenue. The startup announced a strategic growth investment from Vista Equity Partners achieving a $2.3 billion dollar valuation.

Anyways - being a customer success manager is awesome. I take care of the relationship after the sale. Every business has a different goal and a different way of selling to their customer. In my job, I have a lot of fun trying to figure out what my customers want to do and how I can advise them do it.

But as any Customer Success professional will tell you - there’s a ton of fluff out there.

It’s all generic advice about “putting the customer first” - whatever that means.

All I wanted was a place to turn that would humanize my struggles and my newfound understandings. I didn't want to be isolated while learning this new stuff.

And yet, all I kept seeing on LinkedIn, and blogs I found on Google to be shallow and superficial to the complex questions I was coming across in my role.

Even when I read good advice, it was usually in the past tense. We did X, and voila, we won.

For this longest time, this gave me a skewed version of hard work, and success.

Until one day I decided - ok, if I’ve experienced this problem, maybe others have too.

And then I came across this quote by David Perell -

The best way to learn faster is to have a stake in the outcome. Risk awakens our learning muscles like a splash of cold water. If you want to learn to cook invite friends over for dinner; if you want to learn about stocks, invest in the stock market; and if you want to learn about an idea, publish an article about it.

That fucking got me.

I thought about it for weeks, until the Sunday before Labor Day.

I told myself , “if it’s bad, no one will read it. But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it a bit differently…”

The ingredients that make up a great newsletter, or a podcast (for my personal taste) usually have 2 out 3:

1) I learn something from what’s said

2) I laugh at something that’s said

3) I can relate to something that’s said

My aim for New Laws of Customer Success is 2/3 every week.

I need to speak with depth, and nuance.

I respect you too much to TELL you how to do your job… but maybe I can SHOW you

A weekly newsletter showing the insights, and topics that I’m tackling around adoption, expansion, retention, people management, and anything else that’s stressing me out at the office.

So that’s the plan here @ New Laws of Customer Success where my aim is to keep my learnings real, relevant, and relatable.

- RK

P.S. Know any Customer Success professionals who could benefit from this level of transparency? I would love to bring them into our small circle of people who care about Customer Success. Please feel free to forward this article and others from the NLCS (New Laws of Customer Success) universe to grow our tight-knit community one person at a time.