Leaders of customer success convened at beautiful Carneros Resort in Napa Valley last week for Totango’s inaugural invite-only Global Executive Forum, the first event of its 2019 Customer Success Summit Conference.
With an amazing NPS score of 87.5, the event impressively delivered on the high bar of excellence with a world-class venue, high quality presentations, meaningful conversations and fun, social interactions.
“The event was top-notch (hats-off to all those involved with planning the details behind executing the event). The content shared by the great variety of speakers was all applicable and valuable, the size of the event and length of the sessions was great, the Carneros Resort and Spa was a treat.”
As one of the top ten destinations in Napa Valley, Carneros Resort is an amazingly beautiful location, a secluded getaway with a picturesque setting, ideal for inspiring creativity, energy and action.
Sixty executive attendees from enterprises including Salesforce, HPE, Autodesk, Cisco, Google, gathered in this exclusive destination, to learn best practices for amplifying customer success strategies, connect with like-minded industry leaders and hear from expert industry speakers including Edgar Papke, globally recognized award-winning author and expert on organizational leadership; Keith Strodtman, COO, Customer First, SAP; Dilip Kumar, COO, Group Services, Dimension Data; and Peter Storer, Chief Revenue Officer, Avero.
Guy Nirpaz, Totango’s Founder and CEO, kicked off the day highlighting the key challenges for customer-centric organizations brought on by the fourth industrial revolution, and how to avoid disruption through a system of speed and agility that distributes insights and actions throughout the organization. He ended with a challenge and a promise to customer success leaders – The Results are In! Spark enables you to dream big and achieve results in just a few weeks.
Edgar Papke followed with an interactive session that shared a framework for true alignment and building brand intention, customer-centric culture and innovation by design.
“Being a visionary leader Edgar clearly articulated how organizations, teams, and leaders improve their alignment and achieve greater levels of success and the true meaning of a customer centric organisation.”
Every speaker at the event spoke openly and transparently about their blueprint for implementing customer success in their organizations and detailed the tangible impact on their business outcomes including increase adoption, retention and reduced time to value.
Speakers included industry experts:
- Guy Nirpaz – Founder & CEO, Totango
- Deepak Sharma – Customer Success Leader, Deloitte
- Edgar Papke – Award-winning Author and Expert on Organizational Leadership
- Keith Strodtman – COO, Customer First, SAP
- Anne Ting – SVP Marketing, Totango
- Dilip Kumar – COO, Group Services, Dimension Data
- Peter Storer – Chief Revenue Officer, Avero
- Jamie Bertasi – COO and CCO, Totango
- Tami Barre – VP Client Experience, Randall Reilly
- Kevin O’Came – SVP Customer Success, Totango
- Katie Patel – Head of Client Success Management, Waystar
- Umur Kavlakoglu – VP Customer Success, Data Intensity
- Bob Crissman – SVP Channels, Totango
- Sujit Naik – Associate Partner, Deloitte
- Tony Colon – VP Customer Experience, Cisco
- Phil Nanus – VP of Research, Customer Success, TSIA
The intimate nature of the event provided attendees with more opportunities to interact, debate and engage in meaningful conversations with their executive peers about different use cases and the proven tactics that work from those leading CS strategies.
“The summit was well designed with high quality presentations. The opportunities to network were extremely valuable. You brought in the right audience”
Panel discussions dove into key challenges facing customer success leaders today including sales-CS alignment, elevating customer success conversations to the boardroom, and how to scale and deliver a measurable ROI. This last topic drilled to the heart of the challenge confronting all companies as they make customer success model and team funding decisions. Panelists Phil Nanus (TSIA), Keith Strodtman (SAP), Dilip Kumar (Dimension Data) and Tony Colon (Cisco) shared their guidance, based on their real-world experiences and research, on how to operationalize customer success, address organizational friction and move the industry forward. All four also emphatically agreed that the customer success organization must own revenue while sharing the unique ways in which their organization structured the model for maximum impact and attention at the C-level.
Totango also shared it’s latest research and benchmark data aggregated from our network of billions of data signals and transactions, answering key questions posed by customer success leaders on how to best manage and efficiently scale their teams including the portfolio value per CSM and account coverage per CSM.
After a day of learning and conversations, attendees relaxed with a fun “wine-blending Shark Tank” event where teams competed to create (and pitch) their very own “Customer Success” blend of red wine. Well deserved congratulations to team “Trust Me” and presenters Neil Miklusak (VP of Sales, Totango) and James Woloszyn (Vice President, Hewlett Packard Enterprise) for their entertaining and award-winning presentation that had the entire room laughing and cheering.
The day closed with the customer success visionary awards honoring enterprises who are spearheading transformative impact in the customer-centric economy.
Congratulations to our Customer Success Visionary Award winners:
- Best Customer Focus – SAP
- Greatest Clarity – Dimension Data
- Fastest Time to Impact – Data Intensity
- Optimum Agility – Zoom
- Strongest Impact – Avero
As the only forum exclusively for customer success business leaders who want transformative & actionable business insights and connections, Totango’s inaugural Global Executive Forum exceeded attendees’ expectations and we look forward to raising the bar at the next event.
“The event was world-class and everything it purported to be – educational, social and fun. I had a wonderful time and thank you for it!”
