The journey is what matters, do not be in a mad rush!

Karen Eisen, Senior Vice President of Alida, has a skillset combination that the rest of the world would die for - A career that started out in marketing and then pivoted to customer success.

According to Karen, marketing and customer success both require an understanding of human psychology to derive different results. And, she is a strong advocate of customer success being a value center and not taking their eyes of "Growth".

In this amazing, tell all podcast, Karen shared some key insights that are worth summarizing below and listening in full!

1) Marketing is the act of being curious about what drives people to buy and not stopping till you get the answer. Customer success has the exact same job too, but with different deliverables

2) Retention and churn prevention are long term strategies - and how she managed to reduce churn by a near 30% by tweaking and optimizing every step of the renewal process and mitigating risks with a Risk Specialist. 

3) Accuracy in forecasts and reviewing renewals consistently with the C-suite helps to meet revenue targets. Two main metrics - Net Revenue retention and Gross revenue retention and CS should never take their eyes off expansions and growth.

4) When meeting customer advocacy goals is a challenge, automation of feedback gathering mechanisms with creative ways of introducing polls and questions, actually keeps it going.

5) Curiosity, Emotional Quotient, Taking initiatives are three skills that aspiring candidates in CS need to build

6) And how her own X-Ray vision - the ability to see and hear beyond what is being said on the surface and have a clear sense of what is actually brewing, is a game changing skill that has helped her differentiate from others. 

And finally a cartoon character that mimics a good CSM would actually be a combination of Lisa Simpson for her work ethics, Road Runner for hard work and Bugs Bunny for the undying optimism!

This and a lot more, in this super charged podcast from a great leader in the CS practice. Do give it a listen!