Sustainable growth in Customer Success

Times are tough and the “big hiring days” when scaling a SaaS business are long gone. In today’s economy, you have to think about sustainable growth rather than growth at all costs. So, how do you do that in Customer Success? How do you ensure your CSMs are strategic and not just support? And how do you measure sustainable growth?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Shannon Nishi, Director of Customer Success at Customer.io about sustainable growth in Customer Success.

Shannon Nishi has seven years of experience in SaaS and Customer Success, including implementation services and technical project management. Her experience working across e-commerce, data collection software, and marketing automation software has seeded a love for complex problems and an appreciation for simple solutions on distributed customer-facing teams. As a leader, Shannon is passionate about enabling personal development and collaboration amongst team members, using iterative processes and open communication to achieve customer-defined business outcomes.

As the Director of Customer Success at Customer.io, Shannon has been accountable for their sustainable growth and seen a lot of success so far. Up until recently, most businesses were growing at any costs and now it’s more about growing sustainably, but without losing speed. So, when should a SaaS company start thinking about scaling?

**“I don’t think it’s ever too early to start thinking about scaling. It’s just a matter of figuring out the biggest impacts to the customer journey and what we can reasonably accomplish with the team that we have today.” **

Shannon and her team recently decided to move to a Pooled Customer Success model, as most of their mid-market customers were only leveraging the CSM during the initial onboarding period.

“It was becoming more expensive and more taxing to continue hiring CSMs. And there was no longer the same need of strategic support after the onboarding. Instead, we now have a group of CSMs that are focused on opportunities and seeing what we can do to impact customers on a broader scale.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Shannon and Anika to learn more about sustainable growth in Customer Success.