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Ashvin Vaidyanathan
Chief Customer Officer, Board Member, Author, Angel Investor
Ashvin Vaidyanathan is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in leadership positions across various industries.
Currently serving as the VP of Customer Success and Insights at LinkedIn, Ashvin oversees delivering value to customers in Talent Solutions and Sales Solutions.
Author of the best-selling book 'CS Professional's Handbook', Ashvin is a renowned expert in Customer Success Management and Account Management fields.
Previously, as the Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, Ashvin led a global team across post-sales functions, ensuring key metrics like Gross Retention Rate and Renewals were met.
His educational background includes an MBA in Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai and a BE in Electronics from R.A.I.T.
Ashvin has been associated with various organizations including serving as a Board Member at New Door Ventures and holding roles at McKinsey & Company, Cypress Semiconductor, and Infosys Technologies.
Highlights
Leadership Offsites are an investment not just of money but also teammates' time away from their loved ones, their teams and their daily work. So it's important to put a lot of thought into the "why" and "what" of a great offsite. I had the opportunity to get the global Customer Success and Insights Leadership team together for an offsite in beautiful NYC last week. So I thought I'd share the elements of a great offsite in case leaders in my network are planning their future offsites.
- Building a high performing leadership team 👊 : This includes creating a sense of trust and safety on the team as well as hiring and retaining a diverse team. So it's important to create opportunities to get to know each other on a deeper level than what our daily work affords us. We chose to spend time on #enneagram and getting deeper into why we do what we do so we can make better collaborate with each other. We also spent time on how our backgrounds have shaped our thinking on diverse and inclusive teams.
- Voice of the Customer 🎤 : We had a panel of customers who shared their business objectives and their experiences working with LinkedIn. The focus is to learn what we do well today that we double down from a place of strength. And where can we improve for our customers.
- Connect with the Team 🏅: We have made the decision to host these "offsites" at various offices. This allows us to get local teams together and learn from them. The NYC Community Builders (thank you Sara Barton and team) had a great showing in the office and it always energizes me to spend time with individual teammates who I dont get to see daily/often.
- Fiscal Year Planning and Priorities 📊: The input from the customers and teammates help shape priorities for the next 12 months. A lot of offsites do this well but adding the customer and teammate voice makes the odds of success significantly higher. This also includes celebrating what we did well in the previous quarter/year that we should continue building on. We also focused energy on what we STOP 🛑 doing. (I'm generalizing but...) CS teams are notorious for adding priorities but not taking the time to stop doing things.
- Professional/Leadership Development 🧠: We are busy enough in our daily grind that its hard to carve out time for leadership development. So we took the opportunity to learn the fine art of storytelling both for our personal selves but also for our teams and the journey they are on. Huge thanks to Daniel Roth and Leah Smart for inspiring us.
- Giving Back 💙: We made the intentional decision to spend an hour one evening working with a local non-profit (shoutout to New Alternatives For Children) assembling puzzles and books for underpriviledged kids. Witnessing the impact we could make together reaffirmed our collective commitment to making a positive difference, both within our team and beyond.
- Having Fun 🍻: Most importantly, we had enough time to hang with each other and have some #childlikejoy
Big news for my team and our clients on Linkedin Recruiter: we’ve started to roll out a #generativeAI conversational feature that gives recruiters and hiring managers a huge head start in candidate search so they can hire qualified candidates even faster.
AI-Assisted Search and Projects in Linkedin Recruiter can understand your goal in your own words like “I want to hire a Customer Success leader in US or Canada metro areas with 10+ years of experience,” and quickly deliver search filters and results. Recruiters can also ask for recommendations to expand or narrow their search like “What are the top locations for this talent?”
This conversational AI should be available in English to all our Recruiter and Professional Services customers by May. As you start to see this new experience in Linkedin Recruiter, Conrad Contreras shared some tips and guidance on how teams can make the most of this new experience:
