RevRev Ep. 2 – Jennifer Dearman

Jennifer Dearman, former Chief Customer Officer at Pendo, visited with me to discuss the importance of creating a world-class customer experience and the three things that are necessary to building a strong customer success organization. Listen to the full episode below.

Episode Key Takeaways

1. It’s always about the outcomes – throughout her career, Jennifer has always been focused on helping customers achieve their business outcomes and she explains that customer management strategy needs to be grounded in helping customers achieve their outcomes through the best possible experience.

2. Put your money where your mouth is – Jennifer explains the three keys to building a successful customer success organiation. 

• Building a customer organization must be a strategic initiative for the business.
• Executive sponsorship of a customer success initiative is critical to its success.
• Dedicated funding is necessary to ensure a customer success team is put in a position to succeed.

When any of the three are missing it stunts the growth of the customer organization and impacts the chances of making customers successful.

3. Customer success isn’t a single department’s responsibility – In order for a customer success team to be successful the entire organization needs to embrace a customer mindset because customer success is ultimately a company-wide responsibility. CCOs must partner with the sales organizaton to ensure the right products are being sold and they must partner with their product and engineering peers to ensure the data is being shared effectively and in a way that customer dynamics are understood. 

4. A variety of career experiences is key to becoming a CCO – Accumulating a variety of role experiences throughout a career can be the best path to becoming a CCO. Jennifer points out that in order to fully understand the opportunity to support customers is to attain perspective from various roles throughout an organization. Sales experience, for example, is very helpful in understanding the market and the problems new customers are trying to solve. 

5. In tough times, it’s so important to stay focused on your team’s well-being – Jennifer opens up about a leadership lesson she has learned while managing her team at Pendo in the early stages of the 2020 pandemic. She talks about the importance of staying focused on a team’s well-being above all else. It’s important to to find a true balance between the needs of a business and the team members personal needs in these tough times. 

Check out additional episodes of Revenue Revolutionaries here.