Suggestions
Emmanuelle Skala
GTM & CS Leader with 5 successful exits including Toast IPO / Teach at MIT Sloan / Board Member & Investor
Emmanuelle Skala is a seasoned professional who champions the customer-centric approach in business dealings. She holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from NYU Stern School of Business and a BS in Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Emmanuelle has held various leadership roles in reputable organizations, such as Chief Emmanuelle Officer at Me, advisory and directorial positions at companies including Castiron, Electric, and Emerald, and teaching engagements at MIT Sloan School of Management. She has also contributed significantly to companies like Toast, Inc., DigitalOcean, Influitive, Sophos, Vertica Systems, and Endeca Technologies in sales, customer success, channel operations, and business development capacities.
Highlights
I'm so excited and honored to be speaking October 3 in NYC at Customer Success Week hosted by Customer Success Meetup. My keynote is titled "CCOs - are they the future CEOs?" and features interviews from CS leaders who have become CEOs and Board Directors.
This full-day gathering will bring together over 800 CCOs, VPs, and professionals from the global Customer Success community to learn, network and share. More info about the content here: https://csweeknyc.com/
See the link in comments to grab your ticket with my speaker discount. This is a not-to-be-missed event!
Last week I wrapped up the revised 8-week CCO School hosted by Pavilion. 261 executives participated in the program and we got outstanding feedback (100 NPS!). I agreed to be Dean of CCO school because Customer Success is going through the most significant transformation since its “founding” about 20 years ago. Companies need CS leaders that are up for the task and drive the required change. No longer just a ‘service’ function, CS is driving revenue, creating competitive differentiation and at the forefront of improving gross margins. Despite the chatter, CS is not dead and is also not shrinking. In fact, CS departments are expanding. Growth companies understand that retention, customer growth, customer outcomes and customer experience are critical to survival.
Here are a few of the learnings from CCO school:
💰 Figure out how to drive/influence revenue or find yourself quickly becoming irrelevant - there are so many sources for revenue: retention, upsell/cross-sell, CQLs, recurring premium services etc etc. Stop shying away from it and own it!
📈 Determine your impact on gross margin and have a plan to contribute to improving it. Typically support is considered COGs and with direct impact to gross margin. CSMs and Onboarding can be either part of COGs or CAC. Figure out how finance is accounting for your teams and how you can impact these metrics
⚒ Your work best friend is the head of product. So often I hear about alignment with sales as a CS leader's biggest concern - of course sales to CS handoffs are important but if you really want to drive transformational change, align with R&D and be the invaluable source of information about what customers need to be loyal to your brand
🔻 Think in funnels - CS has funnels for onboarding, adoption, retention, upsell, case management and more. Know your funnel metrics and what you are doing to remove bottlenecks
🏆 You are the champion for the customer experience even if you can’t single-handedly address it. You are the person in the company who needs to represent the customer with all important decisions. Speak up for the customer often. Show the rest of the company the importance of creating customer value and ensure incentives across the company are aligned to supporting that value creation
This is just a small sample of the rich conversations we had. Huge thank you to the team of instructors who made this happen: Mike Lemire, Sydney Strader, John Gleeson, Allison Tiscornia, Allison Pickens, Sean Ilenrey, Seth Wylie
If you are in CS and want to take your career to the next level or if you are in sales and want to better understand the post-sales world, we are running the program again in the fall. Become a Pavilion member today to get access to their community, learning programs like CCO School, and events:
