153. Are CSMs the Next Generation of CEOs? ft. Omer Rabin (TLA Ventures) & Chad Horenfeldt (Siena AI)

A talented person who knows AI very well can outperform their manager. They can outperform the vp, even in terms of gathering insights and taking action.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. It’s 2014 in a restaurant in Toronto. A handful of people gathering to talk about something that barely has a name yet. Customer success. One of them, Omer Rabin, fresh from Stanford GSB, joining a startup called Gainsight as their chief evangelist. Another, Chad Horenfeld, a Canadian CS pioneer who’d been doing this work since 2005, before the category even existed. Today, Omir is a general partner at TLA Ventures, Chad’s VP of CS at Siena, and literally wrote the book on strategic customer success. They’re here to tell you what’s changing right now and why the next decade of CS will look nothing like the last.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m Josh Schachter, and this is Unchurned. Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter, and I’m here with two of my favorite people. We’re going to talk about the past, present, and future of customer success. First, I’d like to introduce everybody to Omer Rabin. Omer is a general partner at tla, a new investment fund, and he. He is one of the early folks at Gainsight. He was chief evangelist way back in the day.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So we’re going to hear some fun stories from Omer, and then we’re also introducing Chad Hornfeld. Actually, we’re not introducing you, Chad. You’ve been on the show before. Chad is vice president of CS Post sales at Siena, One of my favorite people, also based in New York in the world of customer success. So, Omer and Chad, welcome to the episode. Thank you so much for being on today.

Omer Rabin:
Thanks for having us.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, so you guys, we were talking pre show. You guys actually have met before, way back in the day, in the earlier days of Gainsight. So let’s start there, actually. Tell us a little bit about your past encounter.

Omer Rabin:
Well, I remember it, actually. I just remembered it was in a restaurant named Canopy or Something like that, which was like the top floor in Toronto. We basically started kind of like doing those Pulse locals event. And so back then, the whole idea of customer success was pretty early. Everybody kind of like flooded to the customer success mecca in San Francisco once a year for Pulse, and we started doing back when I was chief evangelist events locally in order to try and bring together those early customer success professionals. And so I was shipped to Toronto Airline. Our head of the territory there, Natasha and Orion, picked me up at the airport and we did three days of event. And Chad was one of the chapter leaders and kind of like one of the early customer success people.

Omer Rabin:
I literally remember being schlepped between Kitchener, Waterloo and Toronto to meet all the people who know what customer success is and actually started organizations. And Chad was one of those early people who really knew what he’s doing and kind of, I think, lectured everybody on the panel about how to establish the first customer success organization 10 years ago.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’ll be honest with you there. The biggest thing that I picked up on that Omer was great usage of the word schlepped. We’re all New Yorkers here, so. Yeah, that’s one of the favorites.

Omer Rabin:
I imagine myself holding a bagel with Lux while saying it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Chad, tell us a little bit about those days back in the early days of your career in customer success.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yeah, first of all, I don’t remember any of that. I just wanted to say I might.

Omer Rabin:
Have just, you know, made it up.

Chad Horenfeldt:
No, I remember a tiny, tiny little bit, but it’s a bit of a blur. So. I originally came from Canada and have always been a very big ambassador for customer success and have tried to just push it into, you know, different directions. And at that point it was, yes, like, very new. And, you know, Gainsight was. We were one of the actually original customers of Gainsight at Eloqua back in the early days. It was like jbera at the time. And, you know, since then and since I’ve started customer success, I’ve always been trying to push it.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And yeah, I mean, it’s. It’s. Obviously, it’s come so far. It’s been really amazing to see, and it’s been really good to just reconnect with Omera and obviously with you, Josh, now being part of Gainsight, you know, the circle’s complete.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, the circle’s complete. Okay, let’s talk about a little bit. What customer success was, was back in those days. We’re talking about, you know, over 10 years ago. Omar, you were just coming out of business School and the, the world was your oyster. And you had this guy named Nick Mehta who was like, hey, come join my company. Tell us a little bit about that. You had all these different options.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What, what attracted you to customer success? And I really want to, through that, understand what customer success was. What year was this again?

Omer Rabin:
So when I joined the company, it was 2014, I believe. So I finished business school. I spent a year and a half in management consulting, as one does when they want to stay in the country and pay back their debt to Stanford. And then after, you know, Bain Capital actually became part of the cap table, one of the investors in, in Gainsight, and through a classmate of mine, Ellison Pickens, I’ve met Nick. And Nick at the time said, you know, a lot of what I’m going to do is evangelism. I kind of need to sell not just a software solution, but the idea that you ought to manage your customer relationships outside of the CRM. There needs to be another layer about managing the value and the entire process around value realization and the upsell and the cross sell and the renewals. I remember meeting him in the office, the first office of Gainsight in the Silicon Valley, and really thinking, like, is this a lot of words about, like standing with Pon Pons and say customer, customer.

Omer Rabin:
Because customer success sounded a little bit like customer encouragement or like, you know, customer cheerleader. And I really try to understand what it stands for. I think the one thing that really striked me when Nick said then is his father, who was again, I think of Indian descent and an immigrant, told him there are only two things in technological companies. You either build a software or you sell the software. I might be butchering it. And Nick will call me after, angry, but it’s something along these lines. And he said, if you’re not coding the product, you really need to sell the product. And what we are trying is to basically say that selling now is a very different motion.

Omer Rabin:
It’s not just the land, it’s also the expand. It’s not just the hunter, it’s also the farmer. And those people really deserve to have their own function, their own tech stack. And if it’s easier to sell another dollar to an existing customer than to a new customer, we ought to look into that. We ought to kind of like, you know, kind of like take over the curtain and see what’s underneath and create a software solution for that. And for me, there was like an aha moment of wow, there’s an industry here. There’s something that makes sense. Business Wise, you don’t need to understand technology very deeply to understand why this is something that is needed in the world.

Omer Rabin:
I want to be a part of that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so it was close to the revenue trail. Cs, that’s what you were sold on.

Omer Rabin:
That idea that this was another way? Yeah, for me the idea was basically like selling today cannot be taking somebody out to dinner and say, please sign the contract. This whole notion of 90s style Wall street making a deal does not actually Translate to Silicon Valley 20, 20, 13, 14, 15. It needs to be based on value. It means that the people need to understand the product and they also need to understand relationships. There is a function here, there’s a new craft within the tech industry and there is a need for a company that helps shaping that. I actually remember really being sold about the industry more than I was for the actual software solution at the beginning. It took me another quarter inside the company to understand the actual product. The idea of, you know, customer success is a function that deserves to have a name and a VP and the budget was the first thing that really bought me and made me, you know, as a, as a fresh off, you know, Stanford MBA to say this is a company I’m going to bet my career on.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yeah. And I think that this is where it’s changed a lot because when I had first joined it was all about product and product adoption and being that, you know, that Sherpa that was going to guide the customer and where it’s transitioned. And when you came in, the idea was that customer success would push value and revenue. And I think it’s taken years to get there. And it’s one of the reasons, like what I’m now really evangelizing is this idea of this strategic customer success manager that is pushing for understanding not only the product, but really understanding their customer’s business and maximizing those opportunities that they have. Where there could be, you know, technology like AI that’s helping to facilitate gathering insights and gathering data. But when you’re in that situation speaking to that customer and you are needing an opportunity to influence them in a certain direction or just to sell them on the value that they’re getting, this is where the CSM needs to have more of an understanding of not just, oh well, you know, your automation rate, you know, is X amount or if you consumed, you know, Y amount of credits, it’s like, no, your outcome was to save X amount of revenue. Here’s where we are right now, here’s what we’ve achieved.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And if you do this, this and this, here’s what we’ll get to. And it’s just taking a much different approach than customer success. You know, even a few years ago, it’s, it’s just hyper relevant and it’s where CS needs to transition to. So.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So Chad, actually take us back then. It sounds like you, your time in CS predates fairly substantially, even Omar’s, you’re, you know, he was going back 11, 12 years. How long back are you going? And yeah, deep dive a little bit into that whole philosophy around just helping the user use the product. Like what were the core tenets of, of CS back in that time?

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yeah, well, the microchip was just being created at that time and so, yeah, you know, it was just, it was very manual and so just getting data.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
When is this? What, what time is. When is this?

Chad Horenfeldt:
So I mean I started customer success in, in 2005. Like we were, I was part of Eloquo was a very early SaaS company and so getting insights was like not a joke, but it was kind of like what some companies, you’re, you’re logging in and looking at what your customer’s doing and you know that, that, that’s what you did. It was very, very manual. Everything was very manual. It was very much focused on adoption. It was very much focused on service and support. There was like a very, like almost a, the line between service and support and CSM was nondescript. I mean my title was like solutions manager when I joined.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And then we started a support group and we started a services group. So everything was being really defined. So everything, everything was very, very manual. A lot more in person, a lot more expensive, I’d say. And so customer success was a higher line item, so a lot more focus on people. And so then this is where it’s shifted where the similar technology and operational approach that you see in sales, let’s say, has now shifted, you know, into customer success. But it’s also the mindset and I think this is where a lot of friction I’d say exists today because there’s definitely a power struggle over revenue, who should own revenue, who should be managing it. And this is like the post sales and part of it is just the maturity of customer success, both from a leader perspective and just from a function perspective.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And then also just where the time we’re in right now, there’s less revenue in new deals and there’s more of a focus on the customer and the revenue can be generated from the customer. So this is kind of where things have shifted. The opportunities the maturity and the technology.

Omer Rabin:
I think it’s fascinating what you’re saying John, because it’s kind of, you know, when I, when I joined Gainsight, we really try to basically move the entire industry from a reactive motion. The customer is doing something using and then we’re moving to a more informed, we’re doing something based on the data we see and, and later we will get into proactive and automated. Today it’s predictive and agentic. You’re talking about an age that it was not even reactive. It was just like a process that happened 90 days before renewal. Hello, would you like to renew? So it’s like I would say even manual, finger in the middle. Exactly. And so the move that happened there is kind of like from manual to even reactive.

Omer Rabin:
So reactive was novel. Back in like, you know, the 2015.

Chad Horenfeldt:
There was also a shift like when what I realized this and again it’s like one of the reasons why I was like, okay, I have to start to write this down and map it out is that we didn’t necessarily focus on outcomes. It wasn’t about value realization. The idea was that if you work really hard and you were nice to the customer and you did what they said and helped them, then you know that renewal would be guaranteed. Um, and you know, as SaaS became more mature, easier to build out products. Now with AI, it’s even easier to build out products. That’s all down the tube and it’s all now and even pricing, you know, pricing used to be based on users and now and then consumption then outcome based. So that’s shifted as well. And I think the other thing too is that you know, yes, there are differentiation in roles and there’s going, that’s what you need as you have a more mature organization.

Chad Horenfeldt:
But I also feel, and I wrote about this recently where I feel that a lot of things that were more centralized are being downloaded to the person that’s working with the customer directly today. That’s a csm. It might be other roles in the future, but what I mean by that is that there’s more technology in the hands of people working with the customer that they can make better decisions and they’re not necessarily as reliant on, on data that’s like trapped over here or automations or things that are trapped over there that some specialized person needs to know that a lot more information has been unlocked. And so whether that’s preparing for your call, whether that’s doing analysis across your client base, there’s so much more that a customer facing person can do. And something I’ve said is that a talented person who knows, you know, AI very well can outperform their manager, they can outperform the VP even in terms of gathering insights and taking action.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Are we entering a place now, Chad, where the CS role is going to become more generalized?

Chad Horenfeldt:
I don’t know. That’s a hard one. I don’t know if it’s going to become more generalized. I think that there’s just going to be new roles that will emerge. So as an example, you know, I wrote a post and I got a lot of flack over it and it was, it was a eulogy to csops and I wasn’t saying that csops was going to die. And that was never the full intention, although that’s how it came out. It was more of like the idea of CSOPs today is going to die out because there’s going to be different roles, there’s going to be different approaches. Like for example on the go to market there’s like a go to market automation engineer or something like that.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And that that’s a specific type of OPS type role that are building out agents and whether that person will automate themselves out of a job in a year, I don’t know. I think it’s, it’s hard to answer that question. It’s just, I do think there’s going to be different types of roles and different types of opportunities. I was talking with John Gleason and he was basically saying the same things, just new opportunities, new, new things will emerge now that certain things will be more automated.

Omer Rabin:
I think you’re bringing something very interesting though, Chad, that is kind of like feeling like a true circle that is being closed. You said 10 or 15 years ago it was all about the relationship. Then all the signals came in. In a way I kind of feel like today we’re back a little bit at the relationship because all this data about the customer is a little bit of like a table stakes, like understanding patterns of usage that’s in my dashboard since 2015. And so actually now the moat is once again the ability to be agile within the relationship. Having the good relationship, that is not just about being nice, it’s also about understanding the business context of my customer. What are they ought to achieve, how their market is looking at what’s the new competitive situation they’re facing that has been changed since the last renewal and then morph their relationship accordingly. And so in a way a more proactive, informed relationship is once again the moat of customer success.

Omer Rabin:
And that’s fascinating to me.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yes. It’s why I’m very bullish still on the CSM role. It’s why I wrote the book. I think my book, the strategic CSM has gotten a lot of people reading it, reaching out and it’s resonating with people because to your point, it’s just terms of how you manage that relationship, just doing it better and being more impactful and delivering value for customers. And I think that at many levels, especially at the enterprise level, that won’t go away, it’ll be more important and I think it’ll be more at a premium. So it’s like you have the automation component which people might be paying for as part of their consumption, whatever they’re paying for their technology, but they’ll be paying more for a premium on having that strategic consultant that’s going to help them get more out of the technology and just be kind of like that person in the gym that’s guiding them and really pushing them to do more. Because I don’t think that goes away.

Omer Rabin:
From what I’m seeing with a lot of conversations with leaders. Actually the problem that CSMs have today and CS leaders, I feel the internal reporting is becoming a lot more hard than the value creation for the customers. A lot of them understand their customers. Amazing. But in the new organization where the org chart is changing all the time, when the organization trying to understand what’s being automated or moved to an AI agent, they’re failing actually in, in explaining internally how their job is right in the new world, how they are supporting customers and how that translates into, you know, monetization and actual value per their KPI in the company. And so, so I kind of wonder what you guys think about that because I feel like that is a very hard point today.

Chad Horenfeldt:
I’m on the cusp of this right now because at Ciena, we’re this agentic intelligence leader for commerce. And so what that means is that we’ve built this empathic AI agent for CX teams and specifically in E commerce. And it’s all very new and we’re driving a lot of value for our customers so that they can reduce their costs. But these are new metrics. Like, you know, CX teams are used to looking at first response time in csat and here we’re looking at like real ROI numbers. Like we’ve been able to handle this amount of volume for you, we’ve saved you this amount of time. Here are the cost savings and so translating that into metrics that they can actually leverage and also Just transforming their organization on how to be more, more adept at prompt engineering so they can continue to further optimize and be more effective and leverage AI. So yeah, it’s a very sort of different approach but to your point we have to help customers around showing that value and showing them those new types.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Of metrics to both of what you guys are saying. I’ve heard leaders talk about creating roles now or relabeling CS roles into success architects, outcome architects. I think it’s this whole idea of, you know, it’s just a new title on it but putting first and foremost the. That they’re driving outcomes actually have in front of me here photos of, of a report that Bain is actually.

Omer Rabin:
It’s always about Bain eventually. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I was going to say shout out Omer. Right? Yep, yep. But they, they’ve got a new report coming out and they, they shared it to some of us last week and it has the evolution of the CS model and to what you guys are saying Omer, I think you were saying it goes from it started out they say as reactive support responding to your customer problems when they arise. And then the next step was proactive engagement, anticipating customer needs to improve retention. Then it was and this is probably where we’re just coming out of sales supportive CS integration with sales for upselling and expansion. And there’s that been that debate for years now. Should CS own revenue? Should it sit adjacent to revenue? I’d like your opinions on that as well. And now we’re entering this phase of outcome based cs.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think that we’re all and I think through the outcome base then or the validation, the showcasing of the outcomes, then will come the revenues. Right. Then you can obviously be able to retain people and sell based on what the outcomes were. But the first piece about it is making sure that you’re driving the outcomes.

Omer Rabin:
Hot take. Our industry of customer success has been in that area for a few years. It’s the others in the organization that had to catch up the idea of outcomes, the idea of value based customer success. We as an industry introduced that pre Covid at around 2018 19. Gainsight’s internal offsite since 2015 is named Outcomes. Outcomes have been kind of like a pillar of what customer success has been doing for. For almost a decade. It’s the fact that others had to understand that the metrics they look through which is just like you know, revenue on one hand and pipeline are not enough to actually encompass where the industry is.

Omer Rabin:
And so it’s the world catching up with us. We’re there for a while now.

Chad Horenfeldt:
The reason is that it’s not easy to do and you know, what it comes down to is a lot of times is that we do things that are easier. It’s easier to look in your own product and look at your dashboard and, and see your vanity metrics and say, okay, well their open rate is like, you know, 80%. That’s great. You know, they’re doing great. But the reality is that that’s not going to necessarily retain and grow your customer. And so the solutions, and I think now it’s easier to pull information that will actually indicate that they are achieving those outcomes. And I think this is where like AI has been playing a ridiculously amazing role because it’s able to go through your support tickets, your calls, like all of your interactions and help you define what those outcomes are and then like implicitly tell you, like, hey, this has been achieved. And if it hasn’t, then that’s where you insert additional motions.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Can be, you know, automated communications. It could be people reaching out, you know, meetings, et cetera. But I think that this has been the big difference. It’s just making it easier and also keeping people accountable because it’s just one of those like nebulous things. It’s not like leads and sales and opportunities. Outcomes is like, how do you track that? And I think that’s where we’ve finally been able to get a better grasp on and why we’re seeing more adoption of that.

Omer Rabin:
That’s so true. I remember when I joined Gainsight, I inherited the chief evangelist role from a guy named Dan Steinman, really one of the first people to be part of this industry and of Gainsight, I led the enterprise sales in the Bay Area and then took from then the chief evangelist. And he told me we still haven’t solved the problem. The biggest problem in customer success, which is that for every company there’s a different definition for customer and for success. And until we’ll get the entire industry to agree what’s customer and what’s success, we will never actually be able to streamline the onboarding of a customer success platform or make the work of a VP customer success easier. I think in a way AI is helping us to get much closer to the definition of success. It can listen to the calls, it can understand what’s in the relationship, it can really clarify the KPI and keep us accountable, as Chad said. And so part of this fundamental problem of customer success is about to be solved or at least become a lot smaller because we can actually get to the bottom of who is a customer and what is success for each one of them.

Omer Rabin:
And I think that’s a huge milestone for the industry.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. And you guys are right as well that it’s puts a lot more accountability on CS to make sure that we’re defining what the successful outcomes are upfront, that we’re preparing for the conversations with our customers and making sure that we’re capturing the most information, most valuable information from those conversations. There’s so many amazing things that AI can do as far as synthesizing the voice of the customer. But if you’re not. But we’re not yet at a place where we’re all talking to AI avatars now, maybe we do this podcast again in 18 months and we are in a place where we’re talking to AI avatars. But right now it’s the customer talking to the human, at least for. For larger accounts. And if the human on our side, the CSM is not asking the right questions, picking up on the right cues, getting the right information extracted from the customer, the AI can’t do anything with it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So in that sense, like, AI becomes such an advantage, but if you don’t have any of that information that it also becomes, then you’re at a disadvantage. So I think this is my segue over to you, Chad. Like, when I think of the strategic csm, that’s what I think. And that’s a lot of what I heard, I’ve heard recently at conferences and speaking with other leaders is you guys said it before. It’s like kind of stepping back to where we were in the past, which is like just CSMs do the best job at building the relationships and getting the right information strategically out of those customers.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yes. And I’d say that, you know, we’re at, again, like such an advantage. I’ll give you an example of a customer that I was working with this week. And so in my role as a vp, I come into situations and I don’t fully understand the situation. And I. I’m just trying to come in and, you know, direct the relationship in some way. And so in this example, I’d already inputted their recent survey results. So we actually did have like a real survey.

Chad Horenfeldt:
We captured them. And what was cool is that I created a prompt around this. Cause we have this information that’s in Claude. I said, I’m meeting with this customer, you know, please tell me a little bit more about their business. This person who I’m meeting with, specifically the challenges that they’re having. And it went through and it knew that feedback from the survey and it not only told me like who this person was, but it told me that this person is feeling a little unsure about the software right now. And what they need from you is to be reassured and they need confidence. They need to be, you know, infused confidence into them.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And so here are some approaches on how to do that. And I was like, holy crap. It’s like not only telling you like how to prepare from a like, information perspective, but it’s actually telling you and inferring how they’re feeling so you can go in prepared on what you really need to hone in on. I mean, that is incredible. And so like as like a strategic CSM as a CSM today, I’m like, oh my gosh, these are tools are outstanding because a lot of times we get into calls and we have no idea what we’re doing, we have no idea what we’re going to say. We have a little bit of an inclination of what we want to achieve, but this just hones it down and it just makes it so much easier both for the customer and, you know, for the CSM to make an impact and drive that relationship forward. So it’s a really exciting time. And I think the other thing that we haven’t talked about is that the time savings, like a lot of the reasons why we haven’t gotten to this point on outcomes is because CSMs are doing such ridiculous things.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And they are, they are still. There’s things that are on their plate they really shouldn’t be doing. But I’ll give you an example of where we’re going and I think specifically with agents, and this is what I’m trying to achieve, and I’m assuming we’re almost there or already there, I want to sift through what the product updates that our company is releasing and only send specific updates to specific people based on their Persona so that they only get notified of the important things that are going to drive their outcomes. So it knows everything about them, knows about the person, and just delivers the right thing at the right time. Rather than like these just generic product updates that nobody tends to read very much. You have to kind of send in 20 different ways and then finally they actually understand, oh, wow, this is going to help me in this way. And part of a CSM is like you’re like amalgamating that information and almost like you’re this funnel that’s just funneling the right information. Like, what a waste of time.

Chad Horenfeldt:
And so I feel like those are these are the things that are going to really help customer success because then again they can focus on more revenue generating opportunities, more value based opportunities instead of this, I’d say grunt work that we do today.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Chad, I want to leave us on this here. For folks that haven’t yet read your book, the Strategic csm, the Strategic Customer Success Manager to fully spell it out, what is one piece of tactical advice that you’d like for them to take out of your book?

Chad Horenfeldt:
Yeah, I’d say that the number one thing beyond like coming into a meeting when you’re actually meeting with your customer with an idea of like what is it that you want to get out of that meeting but is to come in with very specific questions and questions that are not boring, questions that are really going to hone in on what the opportunity is or what the challenge is and that’s it. Those are, I’d say the key things. And the last thing is, is that it’s not just about you and your team and your customer, but thinking about it from a business perspective. If you want to move up in the company, thinking about, okay, that feature request that I want, that my customer wants, well, what other customers want that, how is that going to drive revenue for our business? How is that going to help our business out as a whole? And if it’s not, then maybe I shouldn’t be really be pushing this and be okay with that. Not an easy thing as a csm, but those are things that can level yourself up and think more at a strategic level.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Omar, you’ve had a very illustrious career. You’re still, you’re still a young. You are too, Chad.

Omer Rabin:
Ish. Young. Ish.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We’re all ish. We’re all ish.

Chad Horenfeldt:
Too late.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But you’ve been a gm, you’ve been a founder, the chief evangelist for Gainsight Consulting and now investing in growth stage companies. What’s one piece of advice that you would give to CSMs for the future?

Omer Rabin:
I think really aligning yourself with where the company is and what’s critical for them for the next step. I think part of being a strategic CSM is being a strategic leader in a company. And in a way I believe, and I always believe that the next generation of CEOs is actually customer success managers. They’re only two functions I feel in the organization that really need to bring both expertise in the product and expertise that is commercial. It’s CSM and solution engineer. Two functions I think are very hard to recruit to. And I think part of, you know, the benefit of being a person that has both sides of the brain in the company is that you have the ability from knowing the product inside out and the customer relationship to ask what the company needs the most in order to get to the next milestone as a company. Be it ipo, the next funding round, a big acquisition, a new line of product, understanding where the company is, what it needs to achieve in order to get to the next milestone and align yourself to that.

Omer Rabin:
Make sure that whatever is the number one KPI of the CEO is aligned to your day in, day out thing, I think is the most strategic way to become a strategic asset for the company and really make sure that you set yourself for success and for leadership in this company and beyond. And, and so I think waking up in the morning and ask, what is my KPI? And how does that directly tie to the most important thing for the company in order to get to the next milestone is the best way to actually make yourself very strategic as a CS leader.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Great advice. And that’s not sure. I’m not sure that’s how I’d want to wake up every morning.

Omer Rabin:
But you know, I can call you every day at 6:30 and ask you, what’s your KPI? Josh, I’m sure your wife would appreciate that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m sure there’s some accountability groups that do that. I know in sales there are. All right, guys, this was fun. Chad Omer, thank you so much for being on the program and hope we can have you back soon.

Omer Rabin:
Sure thing. Thank you, Josh.