Account Management Secrets

Most account managers can quote the theory on building relationships with executives, but the real test starts after the deal closes. That's when the senior sponsor hands you off to someone three levels down. Jamal Reimer has lived that handoff from both sides. He spent 26 years in enterprise software sales, including a $53 million deal while at Oracle, and he learned exactly how to build executive relationships in account manageme...

Private equity firms don't care about your health scores or QBRs. They care about one question: what makes this business worth more tomorrow than it is today.

Carlos Granda spent 30 years running post-sales at Google Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle before he started advising the private equity firms buying up software companies. That vantage point gave him a name for a problem most executives never see coming: the GRR time bomb...

Account manager vs project manager isn't just a title swap. Smash the two roles together, and you get the worst of both worlds, with no time to do either job well.

On Account Management Secrets, Alex Raymond talks with Stephan Schroeder, Vice President of Global Sales and Client Services for the Automotive and Mobility Practice at Escalent. Escalent works with almost all major global automotive manufacturers, from Ford and GM to T...

Most account managers can’t clearly explain what their job is, and that gap costs them money, energy, and career momentum. This episode of Account Management Secrets delivers the account management career advice Alex Raymond has collected across 100 episodes and two years of conversations with account managers and customer success leaders around the world.

Alex breaks down the five lessons that mattered most. He explains why...

Keeping customers happy no longer protects your job. Buyers want measurable business outcomes, and the customer success competencies you leaned on in the last decade will not carry you forward.

Host Alex Raymond sits down with Bradley Lawrence, former Global Head of Customer Experience at Coursera, who has led customer teams for more than fifteen years. Bradley names the five customer success competencies every CSM needs now, from...

Private equity due diligence rarely accounts for the customer base itself, even though it may be the asset most likely to drive an acquisition’s success.

On this episode of Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond sits down with James Lawson, a veteran of PE-backed software companies, to unpack why so many deals underperform after the ink dries. James has spent over two decades cleaning up the aftermath of buyouts where...

Running one global enterprise account is nothing like running 120 small ones, and the enterprise customer success manager career path proves it.

Josh Chapman is a Principal Customer Success Manager for Global Strategic Enterprise at Adobe, where he runs one of the company’s largest accounts. On this episode of Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond traces Josh's career from Ticketmaster to Salesforce to Adobe, and wha...

Most QBRs are slow, forgettable, and quietly kill your client relationships.

That's the uncomfortable truth Jason Scott sat with after watching a major enterprise account stagnate for over 12 months. As a seasoned account manager with experience managing portfolios worth more than $100 million across healthcare, insurance, and technology, Jason realized the problem wasn't the account. It was the meeting.

On this episode of Accoun...

Most account managers at PE-backed companies are playing by the wrong rules and don't even know it.

Alex Raymond and guest Alan Gonsenhauser, an 11-time CMO and private equity advisor who calls himself a "customer capitalist," reframe what account management in private equity means and why the way most post-sale leaders talk about their work is costing them credibility in the boardroom.

Alan breaks down how PE sponsors think abou...

Customer success credibility is in trouble, and the profession earned much of the blame.

On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond sits down with Jenny Anderson, VP of Customer Experience at Sovra, to unpack why so many CS teams struggle to prove their value in revenue terms. Jenny recently gave a talk on customer success credibility at the Customer Success Collective's Denver Summit, and this conversation expands her argum...

10,000 customers. One small team. A retention strategy strong enough to make sales rethink account coverage.

Andrew Carothers has built digital customer success at enterprise scale, first at Cisco across hundreds of thousands of accounts, and now at Proofpoint as Global Head of Digital Customer Success. On Account Management Secrets with host Alex Raymond, he makes the case that the way teams think about coverage, touch, and reten...

The QBR you think went fine might be the clearest sign your account is at risk.

On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond makes a case that the quarterly business review for account managers is the single most important strategic meeting in your toolkit. More important than health scores, dashboards, or AI tools. And yet, most account managers are running through QBRs like a checklist and missing the one signal that tells t...

The problem is not that account management leaders lack strategy. The problem is getting that strategy out of the document and into the rhythm of the team.

On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond is joined by Jennifer Pinter to recap Building the Growth Department, a program inside Amplify. Together, they get honest about why so many account management leaders know what they should be doing and still struggle to get tract...

When the team is the product, AI-powered customer success stops being a support function and starts being the entire business.

That's the reality Melissa McMillan stepped into when she joined Virio as Head of Customer Success in January. Three months later, she was General Manager. On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond sits down with Melissa to unpack what that shift means for how post-sales teams operate, hire, and mea...

The sales to account management handoff is where client relationships are won or lost before the real work even begins.

On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond sits down with Karen Loiterstein, a revenue leadership veteran with experience at TierPoint, Equifax, and Express Scripts, to dig into one of the most costly and overlooked problems in B2B. A deal closes, everyone celebrates, and then the account manager walks into...

The CFO is not who you think they are, and that misunderstanding is costing account managers deals.

On Account Management Secrets, host Alex Raymond sits down with Jacques Sciammas, a former CFO at Charles Schwab, McGraw-Hill, and Standard & Poor's, to break down how to sell to a CFO and what it takes to build a lasting executive relationship. Jacques is now the President at Selling to Executives, where he coaches B2B sales te...

Customer churn usually starts long before renewal, and strong account managers know how to spot the risk before the customer walks.

On this episode of Account Management Secrets, customer churn prevention takes center stage with Alex Raymond and Chris Rauch, an experienced Chief Customer Officer who has led post-sales teams at Salesforce, Sage, and Supermetrics. Chris calls out a common problem in post-sales work. Too many teams r...

Revenue stalls when companies treat growth like a handoff instead of a system, and this conversation shows why expansion revenue strategy lives or dies in the customer journey.

On Account Management Secrets, Alex Raymond talks with Nate Skinner, Chief Revenue Officer at 8am about what separates random wins from repeatable growth. The heart of the discussion is expansion revenue strategy and the idea that post sale revenue gets str...

Why do “healthy” accounts still churn? Because sentiment is not the same as quantifying customer value.

On Account Management Secrets, Alex Raymond speaks with Nakul Kadaba, Manager, Technical Account Management and Head of Retention at ServiceNow, about a problem many account teams know too well. A customer seems happy, the dashboard looks strong, and the business still slips away. This conversation explains why quant...