Sandra is a Customer Success (CS) leader with a track record of delivering customer-led growth. As the Founding LP at Success Venture Partners, Principal at Accelerate CLG consultancy and Head of Customer Success and Services at Dusty Robotics, she empowers companies to unlock customer revenue by focusing on outcomes and creating experiences that drive loyalty. Sandra has held leadership roles at Airkit, Autodesk, and Talkdesk in customer-focused roles and builds teams adept at facilitating executive engagement.
Here’s Sandra sharing her secrets to being an effective CS leader, her vision for the future, and debunking a common CS myth that seems obviously flawed but remains pervasive.
That it's dangerous or ill-informed for CS to have a commercial role.
There is a concern that if CSMs take on commercial responsibilities, their role as neutral and trusted advisors might be compromised.
In my experience, customers would much rather negotiate with somebody they trust and partner with regularly. As a CSM, if you've been driving adoption initiatives and getting to know the customer's business, you've earned the right. There's a role for a CS leader—at the director or VP level—to act like a sales manager when their team is running renewals.
It also depends on the maturity, size, and stage of the company—whether it's an early-stage startup, a larger, late-stage enterprise, or a public company.
I started in environmental consulting. My early work involved managing customer contracts and what would essentially be renewal contracts in consulting.
Being in the Bay Area, I transitioned into tech when roles like relationship manager and client consultant were still a thing.
Customer Success as we know it didn't quite exist or wasn't called that yet.
I fell in love with the field. Even today, no matter how frustrated I might get with an internal process or a product issue, I rarely get upset with customers. I have a lot of empathy for them and get a lot of energy from interacting with them.
Become financially literate about the business. Understanding how your business operates financially—not just focusing on customer experience—is crucial.
It's something I was compelled to learn, and I'm grateful for it because it's made me a much more valuable contributor to the business overall.
Don’t worry too much about prior Customer Success experience.
Having enough experience in the customer experience realm is a good foundation. If you have that instinct for constructing and operationalizing customer journeys, even without prior roles like Head of Support, PS, or CS, you are a strong contender for post-Sales leadership.
As a hardware company, our primary focus is to ensure that our customers quickly start using our robots and find value. When I joined, that was our main measure of success—getting customers to turn on their robots. CS was very much seen as a cost center at the time.
Since then, our main goal has shifted to delivering a great customer experience while still hitting our time-to-value targets but doing it at sustainable costs.
Secondly, in the business models we support, we're seeing more and more customers switch from short-term leases to annual leases. The CS team plays a key role here in making sure that the transition is smooth and we keep customers happy and, ideally, renewing.
That's where the leadership team is starting to connect the dots between the overall post-sales function and its impact on the business
From a Customer Success standpoint, I'm focusing on transitioning customers from initial activation to full adoption. We're refining how we identify customers who might be struggling in this phase versus those who are thriving. Once a team demonstrates strong adoption, our goal is to scale it across divisions or even company-wide. This shift will involve both our Professional Services and CS teams.
I'm also exploring the integration of AI into various initiatives to enhance our team's capabilities and efficiency.
I see the future of Customer Success evolving into something leaders can pitch to executive teams right from the start. Imagine saying, "I'll assess what your company needs now and in the next eighteen months….."
It's about moving away from one-size-fits-all approaches. While the core principles remain, the specialization will vary. Some may lean towards technical expertise, especially in tech industries, while others might focus more on strategic business consulting.
I hope that we ditch the cookie-cutter frameworks and instead train executives to see CS as a consultancy—tailoring teams and strategies to fit unique company needs. This keeps things exciting for CS leaders like me, as each role demands a fresh approach, not just recycling an existing playbook.
On the AI front, it’s going to be focused on customization and specialization.
As a company, we are interested in how we can service more customers, from an enablement perspective.
One area we are looking at is how AI can help us reach more customers, especially in different languages. For instance, quick translations of our academy content using AI.
Another area we’re exploring is how AI can help us gain deeper insights into our business. As you know, data tends to live in these scattered silos across companies. AI's big play here is bringing all that data together into one place. This means even someone who’s not a coder or SQL expert, can make sense of what's happening across the board.
Absolutely.
As a consumer myself, I've had my fair share of frustrating AI or chatbot experiences. The companies that truly get it right are the ones that offer self-service options powered by AI but know exactly when to connect me with a human.
The same principle applies to value delivery and CS. You can automate the majority of interactions effectively, but having highly specialized, curated conversations for that crucial 10% of engagements can make a significant impact.
That’s the space we should get to.
