In this episode, we have Sarita Agrawal, the Founder and CEO of Sunburst Summit Consulting, where she focuses on developing frameworks that drive recurring revenue, retention, and expansion through trust and advocacy. With a strong background in leading customer experience initiatives, Sarita has demonstrated her expertise as a Customer Success leader at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM.
Let’s dive right in.
That project management skills are adequate to be a great CSM – project management and customer success are not the same.
The main difference between the two roles is the element of the trusted advisor and consulting. Customer Success involves business consulting, almost like being a business therapist. You talk to the C-suite, understand their goals, problems, and pain points, and help them chart a plan to achieve those goals or solve those problems.
Of course, you need control over budget and schedule, and strong organizational skills – much like a project manager. So time management, scope management, and relationship management are key skills – but you have to add consulting and the role of a business value advisor to be a good CSM.
I started as a developer, but my curiosity led me into the world of project management. After moving to the US, my first job was at Cisco in their marketing team. I could not understand the impact and business value of the current project we were driving towards. How are the marketing efforts impacting the bottom or top line of Cisco’s initiatives? My supportive VPs empowered me to figure out a solution..
Through this mindset - questioning the ROI, the value and impact, and zeroing in on the problem statement, I was able to create a program that saved Cisco team $160k quarterly in marketing operations and helped prioritize the program to drive top line revenue. There, I learned how to convert value driven programs from unknowns.
That experience led me to IBM, where I ran releases for a billion-dollar product with a 400-person team.
My deep release and program management experience led me to Saba where I took their first SaaS offering to market in a record 9 months in the LMS space.
Once product delivery was on autopilot, my curiosity got me a role to run professional services. I built the process and program from scratch – first customer document on onboarding to getting access to the customer environment, to being the voice of the framework. That was my first experience with customer-facing projects.
That experience led me to Salesforce, with my first official full-time CSM job.
Look for incremental changes and focus on solving larger problems in smaller chunks one step at a time.
Looking back at my journey, I should have started out in customer facing and sales roles much sooner, many colleague and classmates suggested I should be in sales, I should have listened 🙂
Every company is different – and I’ve been fortunate to see many flavors of customer success. In all my previous roles, customer success was always viewed as an investment in a land-and-expand world as you need to continually delight your customers to grow business.
Customer success is an investment to ensure customers continue to trust and get value from your offering, by achieving their business goals. It's critical for companies to continuously invest in customer success as customers have a lot of choices and tech has got really complex - CSMs are like a beacon of light who guide customers towards success.
There’s a lot of digitalization happening – what we call scale journeys – in customer success, where you push a lot of content to customers based on their interactions and questions. This means aspects like enablement, answering simple customer questions, and directing customers to webinars, might become more focused and enhanced.
It could mean that customer success managers might handle more accounts than they do today, as many CSMs already manage thousands of accounts.
CS will continue to be a critical function in any organization , and companies can monetize the role, which is not yet fully realized. We need to empower CSM with collaboration tools, right data to drive a 360 view of customers across product utilization, support, finance, marketing, and sales to operationalize the redundant work, and drive strategic focus.
I can see the tremendous value AI can bring to CS roles. Tools like Statisfy can improve perceptions of customer success.
AI can handle tactical tasks, allowing CSMs to be more strategic and focused on building relationships and driving business. For example, instead of spending five hours creating a QBR deck, a tool can generate it in thirty minutes, letting managers concentrate on meaningful conversations with customers. While AI can't replace the human aspect of understanding emotions or being a therapist for customers, it can streamline operations and reduce stress.
This is a positive development for the field.
Absolutely. The human element will never go away. Even with past industrial revolutions, like the rise of factories, there was concern that automation would replace human jobs, but that didn't happen. Human intelligence cannot be replaced.
AI is evolving, but it will never fully replace humans. As the industry progresses and companies invest in tools, we'll see clearer distinctions between tasks that can be automated and those requiring a human touch. This will highlight the true value of CSMs. Customers will still prefer human interaction over machines for making a business impact.
The human element will remain central to value delivery.
