Recent Posts by Peter Armaly

In a talk I delivered last year about our new service model at the Customer Success Summit in Toronto, I referred to customer success as a function that should be seen in the age of the cloud as a company’s most vital instrument for transformative change. It’s a bold statement since that’s not how companies typically view the function. For sure, customer success is seen as important and as playing a pivotal role in helping customers survive business-impacting crises of one...

As a customer success leader, how many times have you been in a meeting where the VP of sales asks what you’re doing to get strategic customer, ACME123, out of the ditch so that her salespeople can more smoothly pursue and close a growth deal? Once? Twice? Dozens of times? From an industry perspective, product problems are often cited as a primary reason customers find themselves in that ditch. That’s followed closely by poor responsiveness of support and a perception that the...

There exists probably no more despised phrase in the Customer Success lexicon than “one throat to choke”. Ironically, it’s often used in a positive, inspirational way, as in, “This is critical. You’re our best and we need to prevent that customer from defecting. We’re going to give them one throat to choke. You.” As if what customers really desire is to commit an act of murder. They don’t. What they really want is for the products to work and that they live up to even half the...

Way back in the Mesozoic Period of IT (about 1989) I had a boss who, while clenching a lit cigar between his teeth (yes, there was that back then), uttered these immortal words, “Your job is to automate yourself out of a job.” That master of inspirational communications was on to something. He seemed to believe in motivating his people by obviating the eventual need for ever having to have us around. At first, it was confusing, I’ll admit that, but after a while it made sense....

At this time of year, we all have a tendency to look back and assess the past 12 months. So, I’d like to take the opportunity to touch on something my thoughts have increasingly been returning to in the latter half of 2019. Talent I’m referring to talent that runs towards the cerebral, analytical, and smoothly efficient. You know, the kind of talent not usually profiled in glossy online business magazines or ever considered eligible for company awards. Yet this kind of...

When a comedian is on stage and the punchline he’s practiced for a week is met with stony stares from the audience, what’s that sound he hears? Besides the random uncomfortable cough from an audience member, the sound he hears is probably his heart constricting and his cortisol levels rising. It’s at that time when a person fully understands the expression, “The silence was deafening”. For your business, silence can be a sign of trouble. Your community of customers should be a...

Special thanks to co-authors Bob Oppenheim and Jennifer Hinh. *** Do you remember the excitement you had when you were young and finally had a piggy bank full of coins? It was time to exchange the coins for paper money so you happily hummed a tune as you began separating the coins out to their denominations, counting them and stacking in piles across the floor, then finally stuffing the coins into the paper rolls. You admired your work and knew it was all worth it because now...

When someone knocks back a shot of mezcal, how its essence is harvested might be the furthest thing from that person’s mind. I read the lead article in the latest issue of Distilledmagazine and now have second thoughts about ordering a drink that contains Oaxaca’s (Mexico’s) ancient spirit. According to the writer, the allure of profit is too great for the mezcaleros (those who farm the agave plant from which the nectar is harvested) to resist. So much so that they harvest it...