AMA: Apollo.io Director of Customer Success, Nina Wilkinson on Scaling a Customer Success Team

For me, without a doubt, it's Logo Retention (LRR), especially in the SMB/MM space. While everyone's chasing that shiny Net Revenue Retention number, many leaders are usi...

I like to think of CS teams as 3 distinct phases (rowboat, sailboat, cruise ship). Each phase is going to be different to navigate and progressively harder to quickly cha...

In PLG, CS is an adoption & activation engine, not a renewal ops team, the volume is just too high and the juice isn't worth the squeeze here. You need to focus on ac...

I've actually seen founders make two costly mistakes when building their CS team. Hiring: Too early (burning cash on overhead you don't need)Too late (watching churn rate...

It's not really series dependent, but if you're just starting out and have less than 100 renewals my go to tools in the tech stack are the following:Front- love them for ...

I've lived this one and it was PAINFUL. The biggest mistake for me as I've grown teams is not hiring my first line manager fast enough. At one point I was doing 18 1:1s p...

For me culture is paramount. If you have a bad or toxic culture on your team, you won't be successful. Especially at an early stage company/team, your culture is the sing...

I look at 3 metrics in addition to the standard GRR, NRR, and CSAT; LRR, Speed to Adoption, and multi-product line adoption. LRR (logo retention): especially in the SMB s...

I say this a lot when we're building out capacity planning and hiring budgets, is the juice worth the squeeze? You only have a limited number of dollars to spend on your ...

It's absolutely a balancing act. I broke down the specifics of how we use AI on our CS teams to improve efficiency and enable us to hire more strategically and we discuss...