On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Tulasi Ryali, CSM of the Year by Customer Success Excellence about how to help your customer reach their business goals through value creation.
Tulasi Ryali is a Senior Customer Success Manager at Siemens and has 18+ years of experience in customer-facing roles, including technical architect and program management. For the past four years, she has focused on SaaS products, passionately helping customers achieve their business goals. Tulasi’s love for solving complex problems and understanding customer needs drives her meticulous approach to value creation.
Being a Customer Success Manager (CSM) requires great multitasking skills and adaptability. You need excellent communication skills, outstanding problem-solving abilities and a remarkable understanding of customers. So, who holds the title of the “Best CSM of the Year” and how can you join their league?
In our discussion, Tulasi helps answer some questions around how she won the award of being the best CSM of the year:
- How do you structure your time? Give us a snapshot into a day in the life of what it is you do.
- Data is critical to CS, how are you leveraging data in your role? What data points are important as a CSM?
- How do you handle renewals and upsells? Is there something you learned that would be the key to a successful renewal?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- I mainly focus on how I can meet the customer’s needs and make sure that the value is delivered.
- I also go beyond the value delivery, for example, identify different areas of how I can increase, scale, or identify the upsell and expansion opportunities. I believe some of these strategies helped me win the Best CSM of the Year award.
- Understand your customers. Every customer is unique and understanding their needs is very important. No single approach fits all situations. So, always adapt to the situation and communication is key. That’s what I believe.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!
