#179 Leveling Up Your Knowledge For Continuous Growth

Notes:

Many people I work with expect promotions or expect opportunities to just land in their lap. Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that the people who have opportunities simply fall in their lap, they have been preparing for them for years. This is what this show is all about. How our guest, Andy Ryan, started learning about a new industry before there was even a role in that industry. When a role opened, it fell in his lap. The question is, would it have fallen in his lap if he had not learned about it and prepared for it?

Andy Ryan is currently the Vice President of Customer Success at Relayr, a corporation that is on a mission to enable traditional industrial businesses to stay relevant through the combination of technology, insurance, and finance, leading to digital transformation. As the VP of Customer Success, he recognizes that it is so important for companies to be single-minded about making the customers the priority and really being able to identify and attend to their needs.

Key Takeaways:

The organization where sales engineers fit best
The soft skills that sales engineers and customer success share
Customer success skills and what they specifically do
How Andy Ryan handles customer success being too early on or too late on with their interaction with customers
The role of communication between the sales engineers and the sales team

How customer support and customer success work together as a team

The importance of having technical skills even as a part of customer success

Career paths available for customer success managers who want to grow and learn more

Why Andy Ryan personally decided to shift from pre-sales to customer success

Quotes:

“Putting something like customer success at the forefront allows you to stay competitive and keep those customers from going to your competitors by providing them additional value above and beyond the technology that you’re offering to them.” –– Andy Ryan

“Put the customer at the center, not the sale.” –– Andy Ryan

“The value that we bring as sales engineers and customer success people is we drive that value based upon the pain that that customer’s feeling.” –– Andy Ryan

“The customer is the most important thing, not the salesperson. The salesperson is just the intermediary.” –– Ramzi Marjaba

“When you’re so far removed, you don’t think about the customer, you’re just thinking about your job.” –– Ramzi Marjaba