Sturdy

Head of Growth & Business Development

Red Slacks

Customer Success and Customer Experience public speaking, and advising services. Keynote addresses, podcast appearances, written articles, and more. Fractional CCO, executive leadership consulting, and coaching.

Founder & CEO

The CX Lead

We’re on a mission to build better experiences.

We're a CX community creating and designing people first, services and experiences. Whether that’s customer experience, user experience, service design or design thinking, here’s your place to find tips, tricks, how-to guides, and tools to develop your CX strategy and team.

Founding Board Member

CS Angel

Selected by peers and top influencers to create the world’s first syndicate of Customer Success and Customer Experience experts ready to invest in and advise startups providing tech that improve Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

Founding Member

SuccessHACKER

SuccessHacker was founded to help companies that are working to grow, or accelerate their growth, through Customer Success. We recognize that each company's journey towards delivering Customer Success is complex, uncertain and individual. Yet some things are universal: You want to do right by your customers, you know that you have to make them successful because it is the only way you’ll succeed.

At SuccessHacker we're focused on bridging the gap between theory and execution. We offer consulting, talent management, industry training, and an open community for Customer Success professionals, teams and leaders. SuccessHacker teaches you how to do Success right so you don’t lose your most valuable resource, your customers.

Chief Revenue Officer

4-Tell (Acquired By Searchspring)

Head of Customer Success

Jive Software

Manager, Technical Account Management

Senior Technical Account Manager

Moda Health

Lead Business Systems Analyst

PacificSource Health Plans

IT Programmer/Analyst

The TriZetto Group

Facets Consultant & Trainer

I like people.  Which is good, since everywhere I go...there they are.  

A quintessential teammate, working together harkens the days of yesteryear playing college basketball and winning national championships.  I may have warmed more benches than I made baskets but I definitely learned one very important thing: together we all accomplish more.  The teams I was on had no business even being in, let alone winning, these tournaments and yet we did - because we played together.  The same concepts apply within business everyday.

Pushing 20 years in software, I've always worked directly with customers and have dedicated my career to helping my customer's achieve THEIR desired outcomes via THEIR chosen customer experience. Now I get to help numerous companies grow through various channels:

Portland Customer Success: Customer Success leadership as a service.
SuccessHACKER: The best in Customer Success training, education and talent placement.
RevDev.io: Overall B2B SaaS revenue development strategies, blueprints and playbooks.

As we look ahead to 2026, most Customer Success teams will face a familiar directive: do more with less.

With limited headcount and rising expectations, the year is shaping up to bring new challenges...and new opportunities to rethink how CS teams operate.

Join us to hear real-world strategies from seasoned Customer Success leaders on how they’re equipping their teams to be more efficient, more effective, and better prepared to thrive in the year ahead.

Thanks so much to our esteemed panel: Jeremy Donaldson, Ellie Hutton, and Olivier F. for sharing your real-world experience with us!

Sign up now, #CSFam and we'll see you on December 16th for what's bound to be a lively discussion. Let's all get ready to take on '26, and get ready to "Do more with less in '26."

#CustomerSuccess #AccountManagement #WebinarSeries

Aaron Thompson

AI || Customer Success || Customer Experience || Keynote Speaker || Advisor || Board Member

The future of how leaders interact with data isn’t dashboards — it’s dialogue.

For decades, account reviews have meant hours of digging through dashboards, filtering reports, and stitching together insights before a big meeting.

But dashboards can only answer the questions they were built for, not the ones you need in the moment.

That’s changing.

With Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) and generative AI, leaders can now run a full account review in seconds, simply by asking: "Give me a full review of Acme Corp. Key risks, biggest opportunities, performance trends, and what I should focus on next.”

And the answer appears instantly: Clear. Contextual. Actionable.

No navigating ten different dashboards.
No waiting on new reports.
No spending half the day prepping for one meeting.

This is dialogue over dashboards: a fundamental shift in how leaders interact with data, and make decisions. Instead of interpreting charts, leaders will talk to their data.

Instead of hoping dashboards capture what matters, they’ll explore insights dynamically.

Instead of static views, they’ll get real-time intelligence shaped by the questions they care about right now.

The leaders who adopt this shift will move faster, see around corners earlier, and operate with a level of clarity dashboards were never designed to deliver.

Hours of prep → seconds of dialogue. Dialogue > Dashboards.

That’s the new standard...and it’s already here. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gWTgSXSa

👋🏻 - Bye bye dashboards 📉

🙋🏼‍♂️ - HELLO dialogues 💬 

The new era of how we interact with data is here...and Sturdy is leading the charge relative to customer intelligence.

Founder | GTM | Board Member

How many times this week have you asked:
“What’s going on with this account ⁉️ ”
- Not in a formal review.
- Not on a quarterly cadence.
- Just in the flow of everyday work.

And how many times did the answer actually live in the dashboard you opened first?

We’ve spent 20+ years training ourselves to treat dashboards like truth. They were the best interface we had for the last era of work. But account reality doesn’t live in the dashboards. 

If you’ve ever opened your laptop on a Sunday night 🏉  to get a clean read on an account and realized you can’t… you know exactly what I mean.

The stuff that tells us about the relationships lives in the silos, unstructured, human stuff:
emails
calls
tickets
Slack threads
notes
survey comments

So every “account review” starts the same way:
Open CRM → scan dash → WTF 😶‍🌫️   → Then go hunting for narrative, the dashboard can’t hold. Start Slacking, Zooming, and badgering teammates for answers (often opinions 💩 ). 

That’s not a team problem.
It’s an interface problem.

👋🏼 We’re leaving the Dashboard Era.
🚪 The Dialogue Era is here.

I wrote a longer breakdown on why this shift is inevitable — and what it changes for operators, revenue leaders, and the people that care about accounts (customers and prospects). 

I’ll drop it in the comments. Love some feedback 🎧

taplio

Aaron Thompson's Linkedin Analytics

Aaron Thompson

Performance ScoreAaron Thompson's LinkedIn Performance

What is Aaron talking about?

Aaron Thompson's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Aaron Thompson's Linkedin Analytics

Aaron Thompson

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Aaron Thompson's LinkedIn Performance

What is Aaron talking about?

Aaron Thompson's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Aaron Thompson's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreAaron Thompson's LinkedIn Performance

Aaron Thompson's Best Posts (last 30 days)