Ep. 5 | Nils Vinje - Glide Consulting and Outcomes in Customer Success

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Nils Vinje

Founder

Glide Consulting

This week Nils Vinje, founder of Glide Consulting, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss where customer success is headed and how he helps SaaS companies build high performing customer success organizations. 

The 4 P’s of Customer Success

Nils has developed a model for building great customer success organizations. He calls it the 4 P’s of Customer Success.
  1. People
  2. Purpose
  3. Process
  4. Platform
We talked through this model and one of the most interesting parts of that discussion might have been the most controversial part of the interview. When it comes to purpose, a customer success team can have a primary purpose of satisfying customers or driving revenues, but it cannot drive both. Nils tells us we have to choose what to focus on. It is not to say teams cannot have both, but you cannot focus on both. 
 
If you want to learn more about the 4 P’s of Customer Success, you can download the eBook that Glide Consulting has put together.

A Customer Success Bone to Pick

We had a bone to pick with the customer success industry and we took it out on Nils. We wanted to know when customer success would actually be about customer success (customer outcomes) and not about vendor success (renewals, upsells, etc). You will never guess what Nils had to say about that.  

Finally, we asked Nils one of the most important questions of the day. If customers success is truly about customers success and helping customers achieve outcomes, will there ever be a day when customers will only pay for software when they achieve the outcome that the software promises?

What until you hear that discussion.

Until Next Time

Well, that was just a short summary of what we talked about in episode five. We hope it makes you want to subscribe and listen.

Between episodes, we can continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #HelpingSells. So if you’d like to chat with Sarah and Bill, tweet us and use the Hashtag #HelpingSells.

Sarah E. Brown and Bill Cushard

Written by Sarah E. Brown and Bill Cushard

Helping Sells Radio co-hosts, Bill Cushard and Sarah E. Brown, are Rocketeers based in Palo Alto, CA. Reach out to them by emailing marketing@servicerocket.com or on Twitter using the hashtag #HelpingSells.