Rachel Provan

I spent 15 years leading Customer Success teams, and I learned this the hard way: being great at CS doesn't prepare you to lead a revenue-generating department.

Most CS leaders are stuck proving their value to executives who expect them to generate revenue the way sales does, without understanding what post-sale revenue actually requires. You're told to drive expansion, reduce churn, and prove ROI - but no one taught you how to do that without morphing into Account Management or BDRs.

That's where I come in.

I HELP CS LEADERS DO THREE THINGS:

Build revenue-generating CS departments | Get promoted | Land their next role

🔹 CS LEADERSHIP ACADEMY (CSLA)
For anyone leading (or about to lead) a Customer Success team - from founding CSMs and team leads to managers, directors, and VPs.

✔ Build a revenue-generating CS department without turning your team into "Sales 2.0"
✔ Get promoted - over one-third of clients get promoted within 6-12 months
✔ Prove your value to executives who don't understand Customer Success
✔ Get out of reactive mode, build scalable processes, and strengthen your executive presence

Built on behavioral psychology and neuroscience, not corporate management theory.

🔹 DREAM JOB PROGRAM
For CS leaders who need to land their next role.

✔ Access the 80% of roles never posted online - optimize your LinkedIn so hiring managers reach out to YOU
✔ Executive resume makeover that shows revenue impact (even without exact numbers)
✔ Figure out exactly what's holding you back in interviews
✔ Master final presentations and salary negotiation - clients average $10k-15k above initial offers

🔥 WHY I'M DIFFERENT:
I don't teach theory. I teach what works in the messy, real world - the psychology that lets you influence cross-functional leaders and the executive suite, the strategy that drives retention and expansion, and the systems that let you scale without burning out.

👉 LET'S WORK TOGETHER:
📧 Apply to CSLA or Dream Job (links in Featured section)
💡 Grab my free CS Leader Onboarding Checklist
🎯 Subscribe to The CS Psycho for weekly CS leadership insights - backed by psychology

Founder and CEO

1-on-1 Customer Success Leadership coaching, Customer Success Job Hunting and Career Counseling

A lot of CS leaders won’t say it out loud.
But they’re worried.

About layoffs. About budgets. About getting cut.

Not because they don’t know how to lead... but because they’re stuck cleaning up after everyone else.

Sales overpromises. Product doesn’t listen to feedback.  And CS is expected to quietly clean it all up AND drive revenue.

(Because that works...)

If your team is stuck in reactive mode, buried in escalations, and constantly justifying your value... this is for you.

I’m running a free training that walks through the 4 stages every CS department goes through.

You’ll learn how to figure out:
 
- what stage you’re in 
- what’s holding you back; and 
- what to focus on if you want your org to start taking CS seriously.

Jan 14 @  1PM EST: https://lnkd.in/eECchnsD
Jan 15 @ 1pm EST: https://lnkd.in/eimJweBU

Two time slots. Zero fluff. 

Walk away with a plan you can use immediately.

Rachel Provan 🧠

I help CS Leaders kick ass at their job & get promoted - using Psychology | 15 years leading CS teams | Creator of The CS Leadership Academy & Psychology of Customer Success Podcast | Speaker

Ever tried looking up how to build a CS dept? 🤦‍♀️

Talk to your customers
Build a team
Use data (reminds me of recipes on The Great British Baking Show… “Make the cake”)
Create onboarding materials
Scale
Iterate

Ummm… thanks?

It’s explanations like this that make people think building a CS department should be relatively easy.

That should take what -- six months?

Sure, you can get a CS department STARTED in that time. But if you think you’re going to create the results of a mature, revenue-generating CS department in six months…

Honey. You’re in for a rude awakening.

🏆 What you need are the REAL steps. In the right order.

Not just a mish-mash of CS initiatives you’ve read about.

✅ Yes you need a customer journey.
✅ Yes you need segmentation.
✅ Yes you need a CS tool.
✅ Yes you want a Customer Advisory Board.

But do you know WHEN to do those things so you don’t make a huge mess?

That’s exactly what I’ll teach inside my FREE masterclass: The CS Leadership Formula.

📅 Wednesday, January 14th or Thursday, January 15th

Register here: https://lnkd.in/eXPevgD6

🚧 The exact steps — in the right order — to build and scale a durable growth engine.

Moving up means saying “No” ❌

A lot. Even to your boss.😬

Scary, right? It doesn’t have to be.  It's actually part of your job now!

Here’s how to say no to your boss without burning bridge:

When you’re feeling overloaded, make a list with three columns:

⭐️   Project    |   Outcome   |  Priority   ⭐️

Put a 1 next to everything you think is a top priority right now. (Note - guess how many things can be priority #1...)

Then schedule a meeting with your boss to confirm some priorities. Show them the list you’ve made, and then say:

“As you can see I’ve got a lot on my plate. I want to make sure I’m effective and focusing on the right things. As I understand it, my top priorities are these outcomes (e.g. driving Adoption/GRR/NRR) - here's what I think will move the needle the most."

They will either highlight something you may be missing or (most likely) agree with your assessment. 

👉 Then you can confirm that you will be putting the other projects on the back burner to focus on these.

As a leader, you are trusted to prioritize.

You know what you need to achieve, and it’s up to you to manage your time.

No one is monitoring how much is on your plate.🍛

And you can’t achieve big goals by saying yes to everything.

PS - Still too much to do?

Get the cheat sheet hundreds of CS leaders have used to make insane progress every quarter here:  https://lnkd.in/eECchnsD

Persado

Director, Customer Success

Biteline, LLC

- Manage 3-person Customer Success team responsible for customer experience
- Developed documentation to support scaling of customer support, including FAQs, "Getting Started" guides, and best practice resources
- Leading projects and creating content focused on refining user acquisition and adoption, including notifications, website content, and sign up workflows to support business initiatives

Customer Success & Operations Director (interim)

- Headed team supporting marketing initiatives with Fortune 500 global retailer using Persado's Motivational AI to motivate customers to act, increase order lift and accelerate revenue growth
- Part of RIF January 2023

Performio

Director of Customer Success

Cobalt.io

- Lead SMB and Corporate teams, including 2 managers and 9 CSMs 
- Built out value delivery toolkit (EBRs, success plans, quarterly updates) to support value driven customer engagement
- Developed 18-month strategy for SMB and Corporate segments and OKR framework for CSM teams

Senior Manager, Customer Success

- Managed and grew team from 5 to 9 Growth, SMB and Corporate customer success managers
- Revamped CSM onboarding program, Sales/CS handover process, CS playbooks and customer newsletter
- Developed internal team peer-to-peer training program

Manager of Customer Success

Contentful

Customer Success Team Manager

Captricity

- Manage and oversee all aspects customer health and continued success for 5 of the Top 10 Life and Health Insurance enterprise, as well as several dozen SMB customers
- Team responsible for successfully identifying, executing and transitioning of first customers onto a new product offering
- Created and implemented services to customer success handoff checklist to ensure thorough knowledge transfer and seamless transition to post-production for Enterprise customers
- Provide all renewal related customer metrics, including utilization and customer specific SLAs

- Lead a team of 4 SMB customer success managers
- Develop standard processes and procedures for customer success lifecycle, including onboarding, account maintenance and renewal
- Established framework between SDR, sales and customer success to ensure seamless movement from lead to customer renewal
- Educate and train CSMs on best practices
- Responsible for managing and tracking SMB revenue, churn and opportunities

Head of Customer Success Management

- Provided project management and customer success support for several pilots with Top 10 life insurance and biotech companies, leading to several multi-year deals
- Served as a trusted advisor and advocate for enterprise customers in several verticals to ensure success utilizing and leveraging Captricity to achieve business goals
- Mentored customer success managers on all aspects of customer management throughout the customer lifecycle
- Developed Salesforce dashboards/reports and standardized data entry to measure and track customer health
- Analyzed and report on data to provide insights to company on how best to serve our customers, including monthly recurring revenue, product usage and customer health

Customer Success Manager

Constellation Brands

- Managed luxury wine allocation program (over 100 wines) for S&OP team, collaborating with sales, marketing and customer service, and warehouses to ensure program success
- Worked with Canadian sales team to manage and track luxury holds and allocations to ensure order fulfillment
- Provided reporting and analysis for all luxury allocations and holds

Planning Analyst

- Worked closely with Canadian sales team to manage holds and allocations for Canada portfolio
- Collaborated with with brand managers, sales and warehouse to manage, track, and communicate inventory holds
- Provided allocation analysis to brand managers and sales to inform next steps for allocated luxury items

Sales & Operations Coordinator (contractor)

Linden Lab

- Collected, tracked and provided analysis on revenue related activity of top 50 key accounts to better understand purchase and pricing patterns of, as well as the impact of policies and programs on Linden Lab's top customers
- Developed and implemented processes to increase efficiency and sales revenue for Linden Lab, including a customer retention initiative for education users
- Worked closely with departments across the company to gather, integrate, document and deliver best practices.

Manager, Sales & Partner Operations

- Managed all aspects of 400-member third-party developer program (Second Life Solution Provider Program), including membership review, account management, overhaul of public facing database, and program participant communication
- Developed, implemented, and managed all aspects of elite partner program (Gold Solution Provider Program) as part of the company's enterprise strategy
- Constant and consistent collaboration with departments ranging from legal and finance to customer support and web services to address customer issues and execute on program initiatives and activites

Developer Program Manager

Customer Success and People Leader looking for next opportunity

My career and work ethos are built on 3 pillars:

People: Guide, motivate and support team members to reach their potential. Understanding customers needs and motivations to help them to unlock the full value of a product/service.
Process: Building, iterating and supporting frameworks enabling customer, team and company success
Product: Customer<>company conduit to strengthen and elevate products that continue to drive value
---------------
- 10+ years in customer success/account management at SaaS startups
- 7+ years building and leading customer success teams, with focus on value-driven customer - engagement
- Develop and implement scalable, repeatable processes to increase retention and expansion
- Effective cross-department collaboration to deliver on team and company goals and KPIs

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