The Game Changers

While some people learn to simply work around problems, some other people set out to solve them.

Whether they’re challenging the status quo or making relationships smarter, they’re never going to settle for “good enough”.

They are the Game Changers. They usually represent a minority and it’s very challenging to find them.

It was the end of January when I got a message from a friend, turned into an unexpected angel: “I think I found the right job for you”, she said. Just a few moments to learn the details and my CV ended up on a referral system.

I got a phone call a few days after - introductions were swiftly done. It was the first conversation of many to follow, with a crescendo of excitement from both sides: what an amazing bunch of great leaders I had the privilege to be interviewed by, and what hearty and energetic conversations we had!

Fast forward a couple of months and exactly the moment I was embarking for an unforgettable trip to Vietnam, in between “open gates” and “last calls” I got an eventful and joyous phone call: “we have chosen you”. I had officially been empowered to lead and grow one of the most critical teams that contribute to the best ever Multi-cloud Cloud Vision around.

There is always an element of uncertainty when changing jobs: the interview ballet can often lead to false expectations, wrong judgment and artificial excitement from either sides. Not this time: it was all confirmed.

And so exactly six months ago on 3rd June 2019 I started my new undertaking as a Director of the EMEA Cloud Customer Success team in VMware.

An unbelievable mix of people, fully entitled to shape the evolution of VMware’s cloud adoption journey and focusing on the company’s Cloud flagship product VMware on AWS. We have been growing since then and we are still, relentlessly selecting the best cherries for our delicious cake.

We do customer success.

The truth is, businesses, especially subscription businesses, are obsessed with customer success to the point that nearly every software organization is building a team to drive that. Customer success is in fact an emerging discipline that has its roots in the Silicon Valley. However, today Europe is the frontrunner for growth of customer success, with a year over year growth of Customer Success roles by more than 234% [1]

SaaS is when you provide customers access to software, rather than requiring them to own the software, thus requiring installing, managing and upgrading it. Unlike software licenses where you pay a fixed fee for unlimited use of software forever, in the SaaS model customers can cancel anytime – and that is exactly what the entire company must avoid, by ensuring that the customers are happy and fully engaged in using the subscriptions that they're paying for.

Our customer success team of Game Changers is the front line for customer interaction, working with customers to optimize their experience, orchestrating the onboarding phase, showing customers how to implement new products and services. Ultimately, we ensure that product adoption and usage are healthy and expand across the customer's organization, by realizing customer business goals.

By combining elements of account management, relationship expertise, business acumen, customer support and technical guidance we share best practices. We inform customers of new products and features that might enhance their experience. We advocate for them, decoding the complexity of our operational and organizational setup. We leverage product usage data, which helps us to understand problems the customer might be experiencing before they experience them or signs of customer un-engagement.

Interestingly enough, there is no ready recipe to realize all of the above seamlessly but we are passionate Game Changers, and therefore beyond all clouds the sky is the limit.

Passionate. Diverse. Creative. A team where every voice is heard, inclusion is the singing tune to show and expect respect, mistakes are encouraged as a way to explore new ways and only the relentless discipline of execution sets us up for success.

It is so healthy and rewarding to make all of us in the team as well as our customers happy and more competent at every step.

In a Cloud world – disruption is the new order, adoption is the new power and consumption is the new currency... but customer success is all that matters.

The stars have aligned so that the Game Changers can now change the game.

Ready?

[1] https://www.gainsight.com/resource/the-state-of-the-customer-success-profession-2019/