Anika Zubair

As a budding startup, how do you build confidence amongst your salespeople? Take a page out of our CRO Stevie Case's playbook and facilitate a little "confidence osmosis."👩‍🔬 In Vanta's early days, we had a few sellers who got really good at navigating competitive deals by listening to calls, talking to customers, and figuring out what worked. So we started adding them to other team members' calls. Soon, something interesting happened: Almost all other AEs started asking for them on their calls too. Why? Because when they joined, deals closed. 💸 Eventually, that confidence spread team-wide. No fancy enablement deck required. Listen to the full episode of Jack Altman's Uncapped Podcast with our CEO Christina Cacioppo: https://bit.ly/4m20pzx

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Every startup comparison page IYKYK 😅 Props Dan Hockenmaier for the great meme "Who needs butterfly doors or whatever..." Now... Here's what happens when your comparison page oversells: Your customer success team pays the price. AKA... When prospects convert based on incomplete or overhyped information, they arrive with expectations that don't match reality. Your CS team becomes the cleanup crew for messaging that marketing created. Which silently leads to frustrated customers and a burned out CS teams trying to manage the gap between what was promised and what was delivered. 👋 FRIENDLY REMINDER CS TEAMS You need to advocate cross functionally about this When customers express confusion or disappointment during onboarding, that's nota CS problem. That's a company opportunity with valuable market intel you need to flow back to your marketing, product marketing, and sales teams If you only do ONE thing Make it this... Document each customers disconnect. When customers say "I thought your product did X" or "This isn't what I expected," capture those exact phrases so you can help the GTM team reverse engineer that customer's journey to see what messaging broke or overpromised Even if you just do it in a google sheet every week. And then surface that to your GTM leadership. Try it ✌️ -- P.S. Do you trust feature comparison pages? Make sure you give Dan a follow btw!

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👋 "Hey, following up again" - Your CSM Every CSM with a Jan renewal knows this feeling right now December is brutal for customer engagement Your contacts are out of office, wrapping up projects, or buried in their own end of year priorities And you have renewals due in a few weeks Many teams find that close rates dip by 10 to 20% in December according to SHP data. The quiet period is all too real but it doesn't mean your renewal is lost So... What should you do? Try this 7 step process 1. Change the channel If email isn't working, stop sending more emails Try: - LinkedIn voice note - Text if you have that relationship - A short Loom video (stands out, shows effort) A 60s Loom video saying "Hey, I know you're slammed, wanted to make this easy" gets responses when emails don't 2. Make response effort near zero Instead of "Let's find time to discuss the renewal" Try: "I've attached the renewal for January. If nothing has changed, reply YES and we're done" Remove friction. People ghost when responding feels like work. 3. Go around (not over) If your main contact is dark, reach out to another stakeholder Not to escalate. To gather information. "Hey, I've been trying to connect with Sarah about the renewal. Is she out for the holidays or is there someone else I should loop in?" This often gets forwarded to Sarah with an implicit nudge 4. Use the calendar, not a question Stop asking "when works for you?" Send a calendar invite for a specific time with a note: "Grabbing 15 minutes to finalize renewal details. Decline if this doesn't work and I'll try another slot." The passive opt out often beats the active opt in during busy periods You can always send it as a placeholder btw. 5. Reference something real Generic check ins get ignored Reference specific usage, a recent support ticket, a product update they asked about, or a goal they mentioned earlier in the year "Saw your team's usage increased by 40% in Q3. Want to make sure your renewal on Jan 7, 2026 reflects that growth. Had two quick ideas to help you drive more engagement next year." 6. Set a deadline with a reason "I need to submit renewals by December 20 for January processing to make sure we can onboard your new hires into the platform. Can you confirm by then?" Give them a real constraint. Vague urgency gets ignored. Specific deadlines get action. Try putting this in the subject line. 7. Lock in January now The quiet holiday period is actually a good time to get January meetings on the calendar People plan ahead during downtime Send a scheduling link with "Let's get something on the books for when you're back. First week of January work?" Decision makers are often more responsive to future commitments than immediate asks P.S. What did we miss? --- 👋 Follow Customer Success Collective for more Get daily CS tips for leaders and operators Part of The Alliance

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🚨 The Hard Truth About Customer Success (aka as what I learned from looking in the mirror this past week) Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most Customer Success Managers today aren’t really "doing" Customer Success. They’re often running renewals. They’re starting to chase expansions. They’re still solving tickets/customer issues. That’s Account Management in disguise, versus a healthy blend of the two disciplines (CSM+AM). And now comes the bigger challenge: AI is coming for those motions. 🩺 Health scores to help predict renewals? Automated. 📬 “How are things going?” emails to source for risk and growth opportunities? Automated. 📈 Data gathering and reporting to determine how well we're engaging and solving problems? Automated. If your CSM team is built around defensive renewals and low-value tasks, the future is clear: AI will do it faster, cheaper, and better. And as I looked in the mirror, I had to wonder: ⁉��� Is this what I've asked my CSM team to do this year? ⚡ So what should great CS leaders do next (aka get real with yourself, David)? To thrive in the AI era, Customer Success has to evolve: 1️⃣ Redesign roles around outcomes, not tasks. Make your CSMs strategic advisors who link product use to business value. Have I teed up our CSMs to speak to the core business impact of our product and solutions? 2️⃣ Build change management muscle. Train teams to drive adoption across complex organizations, not just manage accounts. Our customers need to think differently to make the most of our unique insights, and our teams need tools, playbooks, and space to help enable and drive that change. 3️⃣ Automate the “busy work.” Embrace AI to handle reporting, nudges, and playbook triggers so your people can focus where machines can’t. We've started that process, and now is the time to double down. 4️⃣ Elevate your metrics. Track ROI delivered, time-to-value, and advocacy, not just NPS or renewal risk. Again, we've started this process but need to ensure it gets priority against all the other competing pressures that pull on our amazing CSMs time. 5️⃣ Develop future-ready skills. Upskill your team in storytelling, financial fluency, and consultative leadership. These are the differentiators AI can’t replace. 🏁 The challenge for all of us. Stop rebranding Account Management as Customer Success, and vice versa. I'm more convinced than ever these two disciplines converge (QUICKLY) when it's the right fit for your GTM. It's the journey we are on at DISQO. And when your GTM doesn't call for it, stop pretending. Start building teams that engineer outcomes into the customer journey. Because here’s the reality: AI won’t kill Customer Success. Complacency will. #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #AI #FutureOfWork #CreateTheFuture #GrowthMindset #DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience #Innovation #BusinessOutcomes

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Hiring your Founding AE might be the most important hire in your SaaS journey — and one of the easiest to get wrong. The AE who crushed it at $50M ARR might crumble at $1M ARR. Early-stage SaaS needs a different kind of seller: 💡 Adaptable – thrives without a playbook. 💡 Curious – great at discovery, not just pitching. 💡 Builder – helps create the sales motion. 💡 Resilient – handles rejection and iteration. Your Founding AE doesn’t just sell — they help you build the machine. Full breakdown here 👇 👉 https://lnkd.in/d5SPdbGg #scalewithstrive #accountexecutive #gtmhiring

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𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭. 𝐉𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐲𝐧𝐞 In this ‘Fractional Leaders’ blog, we chat with Jon Payne, Founder of RevOps Mentor and a seasoned expert in lead generation, sales, and automation for B2B and D2C businesses. Jon shares his practical advice for scaling businesses with smarter systems and fewer bottlenecks. Read blog: https://lnkd.in/e4QidSWs #ADLIB #FractionalLeaders #B2B #D2C

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Churn isn’t a Customer Success problem. It’s a Sales problem. 70%+ of churn happens because the wrong people were sold the product in the first place. Sales gets the commission. CS gets the blame. Let’s be honest—bad-fit buyers cost more than they bring: - They drain your support team - They rarely adopt - They leave quickly And worst of all? They damage your brand Sales teams are trained to be persuasive. But buyers often don’t have the tools or insight to verify if a product is actually right for them. Until it’s too late. So what can sales do to prevent churn before it starts? Here are 5 red flags you can catch during the sales process: 1. Misaligned Pain Points vs Product Strengths → If the buyer’s pain isn’t something your product is great at solving, it’s already a misfit. → Compare discovery notes to churn data. You’ll find patterns fast. 2. Overemphasis on Price over Value → If their main concern is discounts, not ROI, you’re likely not solving a real business pain. → These buyers churn when “cheaper” shows up. 3. Chaos During the Sales Process → Last-minute changes. Unclear requirements. Conflicting stakeholders. → Don’t expect post-sale clarity if pre-sale is a mess. 4. No Champion, No Executive Buy-In → If no one inside the company is excited to implement, usage will be low. → Low usage = fast churn. 5. No Success Metrics, Just FOMO → If they’re buying because “others are,” not because of a defined outcome… it’s a ticking time bomb. → Trend chasers don’t stick around. Final thought: 🚫 Not all revenue is good revenue. ✅ The best salespeople don’t close the most deals. They close the right ones. If you're saying yes to every buyer... You're not building a company—you're building a churn machine. Curious—what's your red flag during the sales process? Drop it in the comments 👇 #SalesLeadership #CustomerSuccess #Churn #SaaS #SalesStrategy #B2Bsales #OutboundSales #RevenueGrowth

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Are spreadsheets silently holding your sales team back? Every SaaS company starts with spreadsheets, but at some point, they stop being simple and start becoming a liability. What begins as a quick way to manage commissions often turns into hours lost fixing formulas, reconciling versions, and questioning accuracy. Finance, RevOps, and Sales all feel it differently, but the frustration is shared. In this carousel, we’ve rounded up real spreadsheet horror stories (no jump scares, just painful truths) and how automation changed everything. If your comp plans still live in Excel tabs, it’s time to see what your team could do with that time back. 👉 Swipe through, or close the spreadsheet tab for good. #SalesCompensation #SaaS #RevOps #FinanceOps #Automation #SalesPerformance #CompDesign #Visdum

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There is no “perfect” CSM anymore — and hiring like one exists is a losing strategy. In this clip, Guy Galon, CCO at Obrela, breaks down how he stopped recruiting for unicorns and started building Customer Success teams around capabilities, not titles. Project management. Data analysis. Account leadership. Domain expertise. And now, AI proficiency woven through all of it. The shift is simple but uncomfortable: CS leaders don’t need generalists who do everything or specialists who do one thing. They need teams designed for coverage, adaptability, and change. AI didn’t add another skill to the job. It changed the bar. If your hiring model hasn’t evolved yet, it will — or it will break. Watch the full episode here 👉 https://bit.ly/4r9xxbi

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67% of RevOps pros told us that they can’t do the jobs they were hired for because they’re too busy fighting fires. Does one survey of a few dozen RevOps leaders count as statistically significant? Maybe not, but it definitely tracks with what we hear on calls with prospects every day. At Common Room, we believe RevOps is best positioned to help realize the full potential of AI for go-to-market. They sit at the center of GTM and they’re expert at turning scrappy pilots into scalable systems. So we made sure we held a special RevOps session at our company SKO a couple weeks ago. Part of that session included going over responses to a survey of RevOps professionals (shoutout to the amazing Lauren Craigie for breaking it down for our team). There were tons of valuable takeaways, but the one above stood out to me in particular. What is RevOps busy firefighting? Inaccurate data. Brittle systems that break. Sales teams that can’t easily access the insights they need. Most respondents cited data quality/data management as their top challenge—one that’s preventing them from doing the high-impact work they want to do. Plus, many teams are still missing a way to help reps contextualize and action on the leads that matter most. We believe high-quality data and enrichment are table stakes. We believe data you can immediately take action on is, too. It’s why Common Room offers: - Comprehensive data and signal capture across 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-party data sources - Identity resolution that unifies, matches, and merges prospects into a single, reliable record - Waterfall enrichment that continuously refreshes free of charge so data never goes stale All of the above comes right out of the box with transparent, per-person pricing. No credits or GTM engineering necessary. And all of the above is funneled right to reps in a purpose-built UI where they can easily gather context and rapidly take action. Because if the data foundation is strong, built to last, and designed for how GTM teams actually operate, RevOps leaders can focus less on data issues and more on what they were hired to do. We’re building Common Room to help RevOps orchestrate pipeline on easy mode, from end to end. More 🔥, less firefighting. Much more to come soon 😉

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Everyone talks about scaling outbound. At Sculpt, Harris Kenny shared how OutboundSync was born from one simple truth...people want to work in HubSpot. OutboundSync was built to solve a real gap: getting outbound data into HubSpot so teams can actually use it for workflows, reporting, and automation. The product was born out of agency life, where his team kept hearing the same thing, that everyone wanted outbound data flowing home. Now, with new integrations rolling out, teams can finally run true allbound campaigns across every channel while keeping HubSpot as the source of truth. The future of GTM isn’t one platform, it’s connecting the right ones. Props to Harris and the OutboundSync crew for building the pipes that make modern GTM actually work.

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How does a high-performance seller really work? We’ve looked at our coaching and app data from Skwill. The answer is actually pretty simple. There are three things that consistently set them apart: 1️⃣𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 Every customer conversation matters. It’s not autopilot. They plan. They prepare. They execute—like it’s the first time, every time. 2️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐠𝐨 𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 The lone-wolf idea? It’s a myth. Top sellers work with others. They ask for help. And they’re coached—weekly. Not once in a blue moon. 3️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 They’re not waiting around. They look for patterns, spot what matters, and do something about it. No overthinking. No perfect conditions. Just action. #b2bsales #skwillai #salescoaching

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Anrok generated $300K in pipeline in 3 months by unifying marketing and sales outbound in Unify. Here's the playbook growth marketing lead Kathleen Kong, and founding SDR Rydian Searles used to make it happen:   Anrok was growing fast. But before Unify, their outbound was fragmented. Kathleen was running marketing campaigns in HubSpot, but every new campaign took forever to build, and segmentation was painfully slow. Rydian's SDR team was worse off, switching between 3 different tools to execute every sequence.   "We had the growth and the signals," Rydian said. "What we needed was a system that helped us act on them."   There was only one answer.... Unify. Kathleen started by building automated plays targeting new hires, website visitors, and accounts showing sales tax exposure via AI signals. Once marketing proved the model worked, they expanded Unify to the SDR team.   Suddenly, both teams were operating on the same page. Campaigns could be built 20% faster, SDRs could work 4X faster, and cold calls converted better with out-of-the-box AI insights.   This made it easy for Kathleen & Rydian to support Anrok's growth and expansion into new markets; easily spinning up new sequences without rebuilding a single workflow.   Kathleen summed up their experience best: "Unify gave us the flexibility to run everything in one ecosystem. We could move fast, measure impact, and stay aligned."   Ready to follow Anrok's lead and unify your teams? Use the link below to learn more.

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As post-sales teams scale, the cracks start to show. Roles blur. Handoffs get messy. Accountability around retention and expansion becomes fuzzy. And before long, no one's quite sure who actually owns what, which makes predictable revenue nearly impossible. It's a pattern that plays out in nearly every growing CS function. And it's exactly what we tackled in January's episode of The Monthly Sync ☕ : the perfect way to start the year with clarity. Host Natasha Evans sat down with serial CRO Joe Marcin to break down one of the most critical foundations of high-performing post-sales teams: role clarity. Not the fluffy kind that lives in job descriptions no one reads, the kind that actually drives behaviour, aligns incentives, and creates accountability. But the conversation went well beyond role definitions. They dug into when to separate roles (and when forcing separation too early can backfire), how to introduce post-sales into conversations before deals even close, so customers experience continuity instead of jarring handoffs, and how to design comp structures that create a "golden thread"—where CSMs, AMs, and RMs are all pulling in the same direction instead of competing for credit. If you're building a post-sales function from scratch or untangling one that's grown messy, this is 30 minutes well spent. Watch the full episode 👇 🎥 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eas5X9RX 🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ee3sFTtT

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Most SDR teams start their morning with a "messy middle", a mix of intent signals, Salesforce reports, and LinkedIn tabs. It’s a recipe for burnout and flat pipeline. What if your team started every day with a prioritized Playbook instead? We’ve taken the exact motion that helped Demandbase scale and embedded it directly into our platform. Sales Playbooks are here to help your team: ▸ AI-powered account summaries explain the "why" instantly ▸ Automatically surface the right personas, not just the first one you find ▸ An AI agent that mimics your best rep’s tone and logic The results? One top-performing SDR reports getting 70% of their opportunities from these specific plays. Make this the centerpiece of your 2026 sales strategy. Read the full breakdown by Demandbase Chief Sales Evangelist, Jay Tuel: https://okt.to/qg8EM0

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"There's no such thing as post-sales just running itself." That's Alison Silver, Head of Client Sales at Brex, and she's absolutely right. Here's the uncomfortable truth: the form of winning has changed.  In this market, NRR matters just as much as new logo acquisition. Preventing churn has become just as critical as expansion. And if you think your existing customer motion is handling that, you're probably wrong. Alison built the client sales motion at Brex from the ground up and she’s sharing what it takes to run this function. How to setup, who to hire, and what pitfalls to avoid. If you want a masterclass on driving revenue from your existing customers don’t miss this live AMA. Join us next Weds 1/21 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET Register: https://lnkd.in/g-6_3b8z

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