Sabbatical

Working on my doctoral dissertation and spending more time with my wife and kids

Sabbatical break to work on my doctoral dissertation

ShareBuilder 401k

•	Led Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Product, Finance, HR, Accounting, IT Infrastructure, & Facilities

•	Crafted a $200M acquisition of a competitor that has generated more than $25 million in profit

•	Drove M&A event from Capital One with an on-time closing, final price 50% under budget, & $3M in year 1 profit

•	Achieved more than 4X EBITDA/Net Income goal for fiscal 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023

•	Grew assets at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 35%

•	Piloted sales increases of more than 20% annually

•	Created a customer success organization that saw FinTech SaaS renewals at a 99% rate

•	Constructed handbooks, manuals, & plan documents in house saving over $2 million at startup

•	Vetted & contracted all vendors (Insurance, HRIS, Payroll, VPN, Security, Salesforce, Five9, Jira, Meraki, etc.)

•	Oversaw modernization of all technological systems savings of more than $3 million annually while leading to greater efficiency, risk mitigation, & business continuity

•	Distilled brand partnership efforts to concentrate on affinity, ISV, strategic, and influencer efforts to dive a 12% increase in partner leads and 12 new national partner agreements

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Capital One

•	Collaborated with 8 Director teams across 6 sites to create the rhythm of the business (ROB), resulting in improved execution alignment for 850+ associate stakeholders including Sales, Presales, Sales Operations, Partners, Marketing, Services, & Customer Success, 52% Y/Y pipeline growth, & an 11% reduction in account whitespace within 9 months

•	Directed cross-functional teams, bringing together small & mid-size (SMB) business customer data, expanding whitespace customer interaction opportunities by 30%, & driving an increase in SMB product penetration by 23%

•	Public relations media spokesperson for radio, TV, & events (SXSW, GROWCO, Dreamforce, etc.)

•	Grew revenue by 32% compounded annual growth rates (CAGR) over 8 consecutive years

•	Increased assets under management (AUM) by 35% CAGR over 8 consecutive years

•	Boosted customer acquisition by 18% CAGR over 8 consecutive years

Vice President, Business Strategy, Acquisition & Retention

•	Saved over $100M in annual spending by moving Capital One from 26 instances of Salesforce to 2 (Business & Consumer) while also increasing whitespace business customer opportunities by 47%

•	Mentored startup founders on business fundamentals, financial discipline, & the FinTech landscape as an advisor in Capital One Lab’s startup accelerator. Three advised companies generated $300 million in profit for COF

•	Delivered on aggressive sales growth of $500M & $750M Y/Y

Senior Director, Business Development & Retention

•	Led a cross-functional cohort to craft Capital One's first diversity, inclusion, & belonging mission (later DE&I)

•	Expanded external sales team to 6 regions capturing $1.5B in mid-market and enterprise accounts over 3 years resulting in $10M in new recurring annual revenue

•	Initiated business banking referral program including crafting all messaging, training, & program details to increase customer whitespace opportunities by 78%

Director, Sales & Customer Services

•	Pushed external sales team to 3 regions & captured $180M in new SMB & enterprise sales in the first 12 months
 
•	Began managing call center customer service teams, quickly solving customer issues & driving an increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) from +11 to +42 over 12 months

•	Created a Fee Fighters superhero campaign (piggybacking on the superhero movie craze) where employers & employees could receive social badges by uploading newly legislated fee disclosure documents increasing upmarket leads by 29

Senior Manager, Sales & Customer Service

•	Initiated & led a multi-year partnership with Costco resulting in a 57% annual increase in sales

•	Established external sales role to push "upmarket” resulting in the company's first $1M, $2M, $5M, & $10M sales

•	Segmented sales roles by customer type & associate experience creating 5 sales roles & 8 customer archetypes resulting in sales gains of 13% Y/Y & increased revenue of 26%

•	Led partnership acquisition strategy (affiliate, affinity, cross-marketing, distribution, influencer, ISV, strategic, referral, & white label) resulting in 47 agreements in the first 12 months and a 27% increase in qualified leads

•	Launched a reseller program, collaborating with external firms as authorized resellers to increase product reach resulting in a sales boost of 19%

Senior Manager, Sales & Marketing

•	Refined sales process & technique to increase sales by 234% in 12 months

•	Crafted dynamic customer journeys resulting in a 94% conversion increase & a 56% gain in sales Y/Y

•	Reformed product marketing messaging & voice driving a 187% increase in leads, 119% increase in opportunity creation, & a 62% increase in sales Y/Y

Manager, Sales & Marketing

AutoNation

•	Built, optimized, & refined sales processes & engagement framework for internet sales departments across multiple regions & then nationwide, reducing engagement time from days to minutes, resulting in sales increases of 387%

•	Designed & deployed Microsoft Dynamics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), increasing revenue by 7% & earnings by 15%

•	Led product team that evaluated paper processes for digitization, eliminated $30M in annual spending, & increased on-time financial EOM close by 26%

•	Developed positioning, messaging, & campaign materials to propel AutoNation's $21 billion revenue, including messaging, pitch decks, creative, & datasheets.

Director, Sales Process & Operations

Younger Kitchens

Founder/Owner

People Leader | COO | CRO | CEO | Creating Efficiency | Accelerating Growth & Revenue | Satisfying Customers | Change Management | GTM Strategy | Fintech | Capital One | ING | AutoNation | Founder

An inclusive hands-on executive focused on finding talented people, optimizing processes, and disrupting markets with winning strategies. This is an approach that has equaled 20 years of explosive sales growth, brand-loving customers, and huge increases in revenue and earnings. Always examining challenges with a creative entrepreneurial approach while also applying business fundamentals through a rigorous financial lens. Utilizing Organizational Change and Leadership expertise acquired through doctoral studies at the University of Southern California to achieve impactful and lasting change!

Known for:

✓ Ability to Get Things Done
    • Always Meeting Deadlines & Quota
    • Providing Targeted Problem-Solving
    • Influencing Cross-Functionally Throughout Organizations

✓ Leading Initiatives that Spark Significant Gains in: 
    • Efficiency
    • Productivity
    • Operational Effectiveness

✓ Leveraging Interpersonal Acumen & Superior Communications Skills to Establish Relationships of Trust that Drive Growth & Exceed Objectives

✓ Bringing Extensive Enterprise SaaS sales, Go-To-Market, Product Marketing, Business Development, Customer Success, Finance, Accounting, & Partnering Expertise to Ignite Transformational Growth

✓ Being an Intellectually Curious Problem-Solver who is Successful in Identifying & Overcoming Business Obstacles

✓ Creating Diverse & Inclusive Cross-Functional Cultures that Empower and Instill a Shared Vision – Aligned with Aggressive Business Objectives & Goals

✓ Managing by the Numbers by Directing the Creation of Ambitions, Concrete, & Aligned OKRs/KPIs to Create Action-Oriented Achievement

✓ Being an Excited Father, Dedicated Husband, Early Adopting Technology Enthusiast, Sports Junkie, Whiskey Connoisseur, Indulgent Epicurean, & Flawed, but Ever-Evolving Man

Specialties: Revenue Growth | Strategy | Profit Optimization | Go-To-Market Leadership | Technology Solution Innovation | Account Management | Growth Strategy | Major Project Management | Sales and Marketing | B2B | B2C | Multichannel | Executive Vision | Organizational Development | Business Turnaround | Customer Acquisition | Customer Retention | Operations | Operational Excellence | P&L | Strategic Planning | Tactical Execution | Digital Transformation | Global Go-to-Market Planning | GTM Leadership | Continuous Improvement | Customer Success Management | Process Engineering | Digital Channels | Brand Strategy | Team Building | Analytics | Business Development | Client Relations

Robert Younger

Emma Lo

Customer Success & RevOps Leader | Podcast host of CS In Focus | Help businesses accelerate in customer-led growth

Results-driven Customer Success executive and SaaS startup founder with 13+ years of experience in tech and e-commerce. Passionate about leveraging data-driven strategies to boost customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth.

💼 Career Highlights:

- Founded and scaled customer success teams, increasing NPS from 79% to 89%
- Drove $35M+ in revenue, achieving 40% increase in retention
- Built and led high-performing remote teams across customer success, marketing, and operations
- Developed strategies resulting in $7MM ARR from enterprise B2B accounts
- Maintained 119% Net Revenue Retention with zero logo churn

🚀 Expertise:

- Customer Success Strategy & Operations
- Revenue Growth & Retention Optimization
- SaaS Startup Leadership & Scaling
- Cross-functional Team Management
- Data-Driven Decision Making


🔧 Tech Stack:

ChurnZero, Gong, Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Atlassian, and more

Combining a unique background in healthcare research with tech leadership, I bring an analytical approach to solving complex business challenges. 

--------------

🤝 Let's connect if you're interested in:

- Customer-centric growth strategies
- SaaS scaling and operations
- Revenue optimization in tech startups

Always open to discussing new opportunities and sharing insights on customer success and revenue growth in the tech industry.

#CustomerSuccess #SaaS #RevenueGrowth #StartupLeadership

Manager, Customer Success

- Organize Quarterly Customer Advisory Board
- Implement digital customer success strategies to provide scalable support.
- Utilize data analytics to understand customer behaviour and needs.
- Ensure effective onboarding and adoption of Noibu's platform by customers.
- Proactively identify risks and reduce churn.
- Enhance customer satisfaction and retention through targeted digital interactions.

Emma Lo 🧩

My first Thanksgiving memory is not the turkey. 🦃

It is a teacher.



I was 5.
New to New Jersey.
New to English.

Mrs. Johnson asked us to cut out paper turkeys.
She talked about harvest and pilgrims.


A local newspaper came that day.

They took a picture of me dressed as a pilgrim,
sitting at a tiny table, eating pumpkin pie.

I do not remember how the pie tasted.
I remember her kindness.


After school, she would sit with me one on one.

Point to an apple.
Say “Apple.” 🍎
Wait for me to repeat it back.

Day after day, she gave me something my grades could not show yet.

Belonging.

——————————-


Life moved on.

I grew up, built a career, moved countries.

But I never forgot her.


Years later, as an adult, I wrote a letter to thank her.

The school forwarded it to her family. 

A few weeks later, a reply arrived from her retirement home in Florida. 

She still remembered me.
Almost 40 years later.

——————————-

When people talk about opportunity, this is who I think of.

Yes, my parents worked hard.
Yes, I worked hard.


But before all of that, there was a teacher who made room for a quiet five-year-old immigrant at the table.

Who slowed down.

Who showed me, in a new country, that I was not an outsider.



This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for the Mrs. Johnsons of the world.

The people who:

→ Explain the simple things without making you feel small

→ Notice who is struggling and stay a little longer

→ Remember you, even decades later



If someone did that for you, this is your reminder.

Write the letter.

Send the message.

Say thank you while you still can.


#thankful #gratitude 

P.S. do you still remember the cords  📞

Emma Lo🧋

CS & RevOps Leader | Driving Scalable Customer-Led Growth Across GTM | Top 100 CS Strategist 2025 & CS In Focus Podcast and Owner

No alternative text description for this image

Meet James Alarcon 


We first met at the ChurnZero event 

Since then, he has been the friend who checks in, calls when you are in town, and makes time to connect.

I watched him move from team lead to director. 

He built with what he had.

Tested, iterated, and defended his team when it mattered.


Everyone can talk strategy.

Few can influence a vision and get people aligned.

Even fewer roll up their sleeves and do the hard work. 💪


Now he is in a new role, with his playbook tested and the land mapped.

He is hiring for CSMs🔥


If you want to work for a leader who grows both people and revenue, talk to James Alarcon. 

#hiring #gta #customersuccess

Took my kids to see Wicked 2 this weekend.

I walked out thinking about all the themes

Living in a bubble.
No place like home.
Finding something worth fighting for.


My kids? 

Flying monkeys.
A green girl finally learning to use her powers.
And a lot of very loud singing. 🙉

P.S. Have you seen the movie?

Sales enablement fails when it stops at training.


Thanks to Stephanie White 🩵, I went to my first Sales Enablement Collective summit this week.

All the Customer Success, Sales Enablement, Product Marketing, and Product summits were on the same floor.

It felt like a reminder that we are working on one shared problem:

👉  Design a customer journey that drives customer value at scale.
 = Recurring revenue is just recurring impact.

---------------------------

Aleta C. Bond asked a question that stayed with me:
When does sales enablement become GTM enablement?

Here is what clicked for me, as someone who sits in CS Ops.

1️⃣ Manager enablement is the hidden bottleneck

Few managers coach well, even though coaching is one of the only levers that reliably moves win rates.

If managers do not have time, tools, or a framework, every program hits a ceiling.

You can ship great training. 

If managers are not reinforcing it in daily conversations, it will not show up in revenue.


2️⃣ Enablement should act like an internal consulting team

When a leader asks for “negotiation training,” the first step should be curiosity, not a slide deck.

Questions like:
⋅ What outcome are you trying to change
⋅ How did you decide this skill is the main gap

Often, the issue is coaching quality, process, or focus.

The strongest enablement teams in the room were advising on growth, not just taking training orders.


3️⃣ The best programs are built with Finance, RevOps, and People

⋅ Finance wants a clear return, not a feeling.
⋅ RevOps holds the data that explains what is really happening.
⋅ People sees culture and sentiment before they show up in churn or quota.

The programs that stood out tied work to metrics like ramp time, hiring efficiency, win rates, and product attach.

They agreed on targets upfront, then used enablement to move those numbers.


4️⃣ AI should give humans time back

The most practical AI examples were simple.

Managers used bots to:
⋅ Practice objection handling
⋅ Test product knowledge
⋅ Prepare for executive calls

AI handled repetition.
Humans focused on judgment, relationships, and coaching.


5️⃣ A simple outcomes model beats a noisy dashboard

One framework I am taking home:

→ Reach: Who we touched.
→ Reaction: How they felt.
→ Readiness: What skills they gained.
→ Results: What changed in the business.

If you cannot answer those four, it is hard to defend spend in a QBR or a board meeting.

-----------------------

Leaving the summit, my takeaway was clear:

Sales enablement, revenue enablement, and CS enablement are all working on the same job.

Turn learning into behavior, and behavior into revenue.

💁‍♀️  Are you training reps on a question bank, or on the curiosity to ask better questions?

Thank you for the sharing your insights! 
Ashton W.
Aleta C. Bond
Stephanie White 🩵
Ross Rich
David Seugling
Sriharsha Guduguntla
Danny Wasserman
(and many more)

AI in CS is stuck in the messy middle. 


At NY Success Week, I asked Brent Grimes from Reef.ai a simple question:
Where are GTM teams really with AI adoption?

His answer: 
Plenty of AI projects.
Very few signals strong enough to change a forecast, renewal plan, or board slide.

For GTM orgs, that is the real execution gap
→ Fewer signals, higher conviction.


What we should look into with AI: 

1️⃣  Revenue signal

Churn, down sell, and expansion probabilities 6 to 12 months out 
that influence your commit, not just a health score.


2️⃣ Value signal

Proof that customers are achieving outcomes 
that tie directly to renewal and expansion, not just logins or activity.

3️⃣ Coverage signal

Clear visibility into which champions, buyers, and users are engaged with those outcomes, and how recently.


If AI cannot help you see risk and expansion early enough to change the number, it stays in the experiment bucket.

Are you growning in dashboards and still guessing on renewals?

#reef #ai #GTM #renewals #cs

What happens when Tamagotchi grows wheels and runs on GPT?



As a kid, my “robot” was a Tamagotchi. 🐣

A few pixels on a keychain, and you had to remember to feed it.


Now we have Loona. 🐶 

A robot pet that follows your kid, remembers their face, reacts to emotions, chats with GPT, and helps with homework.


Cool, yes.

However, it subtly changes the meanings of “friend,” “play,” and “help.”


I’m excited about robots like Loona in kids’ lives. 

I’m just not sure I want them replacing relationships and learning. 

P.S. Would you let your kid have a GPT robot best friend?

The truth behind “healthy” accounts that still churn


Your post-sales pipeline is not a calendar.
It is proof that you are solving real business problems.

On CS in Focus Live, Roland Griesmayer and Anthony DeShazor said the quiet part out loud about forecasting:


Money follows problems.
Predictability follows clarity.


Roland’s bar for a real deal was simple:

If a rep cannot clearly explain the business issue the customer is paying to fix, the deal is not predictable.

“Making someone’s job easier” is not a business issue.
“More intuitive” is not a business issue.

You need answers like:

This fixes X.
This prevents Y.
This unlocks Z in revenue or removes Z in cost.


Anthony pushed the harder truth. 

Most teams don’t fail at delivering value.
They fail at telling the story of that value in a way a CFO will repeat in a budget meeting.

With just over five weeks left in Q4, post-sales pipeline reviews need to tighten up:

1/ Start with the business problem

For every renewal and expansion, ask:
What problem did we solve and how does the customer describe it?


2/ Tie the forecast to a real sponsor

Has the person with budget and authority engaged on that problem in the last 90 days?


3/ Require a written value story

One short paragraph per account: problem, impact, and why it matters now.

If your CSM cannot write it, you cannot forecast it.


4/ Use signals, not sentiment

Swap “they love us” for proof: outcomes achieved, milestones completed, risk removed, executive alignment.

5/ End every review with ownership

Each renewal and expansion needs an owner, a next action, and a date.
No “we will keep an eye on it.”

-------------------
That was the through line from the live:

Real problems make deals real.
Clear stories make revenue predictable.

P.S. What's your non-negotiable when reviewing a deal? 

#gtm #pipeline review

Forecast this in 30 seconds. 


DAUs are up 18%.
Your champion just left.
Procurement took control.
A second product POC is live.

What’s your renewal probability now...and why?


Most teams default to pipeline. 

However, operators weigh three things first: 
relationship health, user outcomes, buyer control. 

Which one would change your forecast today?

-------------------------

This Friday Eleanor (Ella) Eng and I will interview Anthony DeShazor and Roland Griesmayer on how they build forecasts that survive board inspection. 

We’ll dig into signals, weights, and the inspection cadence that keeps accuracy high.

Join us on CS in Focus LinkedIn Live

📆 Friday, Nov 21 · 12:00–12:45 ET

🔗 https://lnkd.in/gthvhXX5

P.S. What’s your non-negotiable metric in a 2026 forecast, and why?

#gtm #forecast #linkedinlive #cs

Feeling overwhelmed by Black Friday deals?

Same.


Yesterday, I was browsing the Apple website like a lost child in a corn maze.

So many models. So many chips. So many display options.

And then I met Cierra over the phone.

The best Apple Sales Rep a confused customer could ask for.



I told her all my fears:

What if I pick the wrong chip?
What if I regret the memory?
What if I’m stuck with a machine that hates me by January?

She didn’t rush me.
She didn’t push a promo.

She listened.
She broke down the decision.
She made sense of my chaos.

With the kind of calm only seasoned retail heroes have during BFCM.

But the part that stayed with me?

She shared my excitement.

I told her I’m starting a new chapter. A new season of life. 

She lit up and cheered me on like I was Dorothy stepping onto the yellow brick road, with a brand-new MacBook and ready to click my red heels. 👠 

Somewhere in that call, I realized something simple:

You don’t need the most expensive laptop to get the best outcome.
You need the one that actually fits your work, your life, and your next chapter.


It reminded me that good customer service isn’t about the product.

It’s about the person who helps you believe you’re making the right choice.


Cheers to you, Cierra. 🎩 

You turned Black Friday chaos into a little moment of courage.
And I’m grateful for it.

#blackfriday #apple 

P.S. The best email I got from BFCM.

taplio

The Battle

Robert Younger

Emma Lo 🧩

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