Customer Success Leadership

The subscription business model is hot - from software to music to movies to diet programs, investors and public markets want businesses that create recurring payments from unlimited customers. The old sales and marketing methods can handle attracting new customers for growth; however, only in the last five years has a discipline emerged that views growth in relation to retention, not just sales.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.

Donald Miller's StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Negotiation is an essential element of almost all of our interactions - personally and professionally. It’s part of how we establish relationships, work together, and arrive at solutions for our clients, our organizations, and ourselves. Simply put, those who don’t negotiate well risk falling victim to those who do. Throughout his career, success expert Brian Tracy has negotiated millions of dollars worth of contracts. Now, with this concise guide, you too can become a master negotiator.

From services to products, online to in-person, small-scale to multinational, your customers' loyalty depends on how you interact with them. Transform Customer Experience is your ultimate guide to putting your customer first. Author and CX expert Isabella Villani shows how you can implement a customer strategy from planning to execution.

Stories That Stick provides a clear framework of ideals and a concise set of actions for you to take complete control of your own story, utilizing the principles behind the world’s most effective business storytelling strategies. Telling these stories well is a simple, accessible skill anyone can develop. With case studies, company profiles, and anecdotes backed with original research, Hall presents storytelling as the underutilized talent that separates the good from the best in business.

In The Storytelling Edge, the strategy minds behind Contently, the world renowned content marketing technology company, reveal their secrets that have helped award-winning brands to build relationships with millions of advocates and customers. Join as they dive into the neuroscience of storytelling, the elements of powerful stories, and methodologies to grow businesses through engaging and accountable content.

Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, author Mark Goulston combines his background with the latest scientific research to help listeners turn the "impossible" and "unreachable" people in their lives into allies, devoted customers, loyal colleagues, and lifetime friends. Just Listen provides simple but powerful techniques listeners can use to really get through to people.

What are companies like Uber, IKEA, Belgo, and Eurostar doing that makes them so profitable? They know how to scale relationships. But online gurus are lying to you about scaling to hundreds of clients without creating an exceptional customer experience. Ben and I created this book with that in mind. When you feel like there is much more to be done in how you serve your clients, we’ve got you. For a long time, marketers--specifically in the online space--have been making bolder and bolder promises.

The New Gold Standard takes you on an exclusive tour behind the scenes of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Granted unprecedented access to the company's executives, staff, and its award-winning Leadership Center training facilities, bestselling author Joseph Michelli explored every level of leadership within the organization.

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.

Exceeding expectations rather than simply satisfying them is the cornerstone of the Disney approach to customer service. Now, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Be Our Guest, the Disney Institute, which specializes in helping professionals see new possibilities through concepts not found in the typical workplace, is revealing even more of the business behind the magic of quality service.

Every year, managers at companies large and small are finding it harder to compete with the likes of Google and Amazon, who are stealing their customers and cornering every conceivable market and service. There is, however, a way for companies to survive - and win - in this era of digital behemoths. Choose Your Customer is a powerful customer-targeted guide that can help managers level the playing field against their biggest competitors.

Many companies have let their sales people devolve into an order-taking, customer “farming” team where the focus is following up on inbound leads or just trying to upsell current customers. Conversely, this is the critical time in the life of a business when organizations with a team trained to sell outbound successfully will rise above the rest. Outbound selling can be intimidating even to the most senior rep, yet that same intimidation around cold calling and outbound sales can be transformed into confident success with the right tools at your disposal.

When kindness becomes your primary goal, everything changes: how you look at life, what you get from it, and how others interact with and relate to you. The Profit of Kindness will help you master the art of building trusting, long-lasting relationships through open, nonadversarial interchanges that result in mutually beneficial outcomes.

In many workplaces today, workplace conflict is an escalating issue. The shift to remote work and hybrid teams has left many people longing for deeper human connection. On top of this, add a younger generation clamoring for more feedback and impatient for change, steady advances in technology that can feel threatening to job security, or people reexamining priorities and quietly quitting. Take the increase in anxiety, stress, and depression, mix in the loss of human relationships, and you get less tolerance and understanding leading, ultimately, to more unresolved workplace conflict.

In the old days, when we made physical products, setting project goals wasn’t that hard. But in today’s service - and software-driven world, “done” is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on? Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features - but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve.

Customer success is all about employing certain "soft" skills and techniques that are guaranteed to help you win over everyone's trust, respect and sponsorship. And anyone, at any level can master these skills.

Negotiation is the middle ground between capitulation and stonewalling, a back and forth between two parties trying to reach agreement. If a price or other term is nonnegotiable, there is no give and take, just "take it or leave it". You may think you are negotiating, but if the other side isn't playing, you aren't either. Regardless of the industry, situation, or product, the two most common mistakes negotiators make are: 1. They give ground too easily, and 2. They get nothing in return.

Workplaces are filled with all types of people, and some of them can be very difficult to get along with. By understanding difficult people and their behaviors, a savvy individual can resolve the awkward and problematic situations they create. Dealing with Difficult People looks at difficult behavior - what drives it and how to cope with it by managing aggression, avoiding awkward situations, and keeping calm. This third edition provides tools and techniques for dealing with difficult customers, difficult people in the digital sphere, and difficult bosses.