In this episode, Bill and Sarah take the audience to the Customer Success industry's premier conference, Gainsight Pulse Conference 2016. Guests interviewed include: MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson, Cloudera VP Customer Success Sarah Sproehnle, WalkMe VP Customer Engagement Emilia D'Anzica, and Glide Consulting founders Nils Vinje and Alex McClafferty. Hear insiders' perspectives on the future of customer success and helping customers love your software.

Terrific Is Way Better Than Awesome

Our first interview was with Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch. Bill and Sarah bumped into him in the main hall, so in the middle of all the action, Aaron chatted with us about his experience at Pulse and a bit about how MindTouch approaches customer success. And we love how Aaron describes the MindTouch helping sells approach:

"We are not trying to get people to buy. We help customers/prospects understand a new world of how to do something and provide them with a map of how to get there, whether they use MindTouch or not."

.@billcush thnx for swinging by to interview @Roebot for #HelpingSells Radio. pic.twitter.com/42QG6Xo0ic

— colincrook (@colincrook) May 10, 2016

Here is the link to the webinar that Aaron and ServiceRocket CEO, Rob Castaneda, did together called Ask Me Anything: CEOs Talk Enterprise Software Adoption.

Sarah Sproehnle, VP of Customer Success from Cloudera

In a slightly quieter part of the conference, we had the opportunity to talk to Sarah Sproehnle, VP of Customer Success at Cloudera. She talked about her first time at Gainsight Pulse in the United States, bringing her team, and how seriously Cloudera is taking customer success. After all, if big data lives up to its promise of helping organizations transform how they use data, Cloudera wants to help customers be successful at doing that. 

#HelpingSells Radio Podcast Ep. 15 | @GainsightHQ Pulse Conference 2016 Special Edition: http://ctt.ec/8675d+

Emilia D'Anzica, VP of Customer Advocacy from WalkMe

Bill was particularly interested in our chat with Emilia because she recently took on a new role at WalkMe, customer advocacy. It is a marketing role, but it is customer- and community- focused, and we wanted to find out how a helping sells approach will inform how she defines that role. Her role has a primary focus on collecting and sharing customers stories, in order to help customers learn from each other. Now that's what we call helping sells. 

 From left to right: Bill, Emilia, Sarah.

Turning the Interview Around On One Of Our Show Hosts

Sarah and Bill were just walking through the lunch area, minding our own business, when we got pulled into a conversation with Nils Vinje and Alex McClafferty, partners at Glide Consulting, and they turned around the interview on us. As we talked about how Nils and Alex help customers adopt customer success in their organizations, they chose to demonstrate one of their techniques, rather than tell us about it. And they demonstrated it on Bill. You will have to listen to the interview to find out how it went.

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