InnerVentures

  • Old IT versus new IT as enablers of business

    I am referring to Information Technology departments, in case you were wondering. And it’s not IT per se that is the blocker but their mindsets. IT has traditionally played a disproportionate role in the diffusion of technology in a company, since they were seen as technology adoption leaders and so determined how the rest of…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • What employee experience can learn from customer success

    I’ve been in the customer success profession for just over 10 years. For even more years, I’ve been focusing on enterprise collaboration and productivity software, at Microsoft (disclosure) and beyond, and a lot of that is now evolving naturally into employee experience software. I also wrote a trend report on the connection between employee and…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Suite or best of breed strategies for customer success when enterprise software budgets are squeezed

    It is in economic hardship that many offerings are put to the test and not least, the enterprise software offering. I’m reminded of this every day since I work supporting one of the most well-known suites out there, Microsoft 365 (disclosure). It was brought back to my attention by this post in The Information: Zoom…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The Business Impact of Employee Experience on Customer Experience

    I am working on a new trend report covering this topic in part and this is based on the work I do (disclosure) – more on the report here: Employee Customer Experience Connection. One of the primary assumptions I’m exploring for the report is that effectively driving a positive employee experience has interrelated benefits on…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Framing your customer success efforts for success

    In your customer success efforts, especially when you are going deep with several high touch engagements, you have to think about how to spread yourself for maximum effect. It may be exacerbated when you have several customers each with several engagements. How do you choose what will benefit the customer the most with scarce resources…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • A jobs to be done primer to transform your innovation thinking

    Tony Ulwick, Founder of Strategyn and leading proponent of Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory and innovation thinker extraordinaire, ran a webinar the other day. I could not attend due to the time it was being held but I did watch the recording that was sent out to registrants. Fascinating stuff and here are my…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Employee Experience platform offering grows with new Microsoft Viva modules

    I’m writing this post because I am working on a new trend report covering the subject: Employee Customer Experience Connection. So I have an interest in new developments in related fields and I also want to use these posts as a way to collate all these new developments so I can add them to the…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Starting out as a customer success manager – first 10 things to do

    I was asked by a new colleague who is just two months into his role, what advice I could provide. Here it is in a short, sharp list of 10 things to focus on. I’ve tried to make it generic since there are some things specific to the company I work for that I could…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Microsoft 365 customer questions – Sales Productivity

    I work in the business of dealing with customers questions on Microsoft 365 all the time (disclosure), either directly or indirectly. This is part of a series of posts where I share them if they can be of help to others. Where I can of course and naturally, not just the questions but the answers…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • SenseMaking – The Customer Success Superpower

    SenseMaking is not just for those in the Customer Success business. That post links to a report on skills of the future and SenseMaking is very much one of them, for all future workers. In an increasingly complex and noisy world you can see why. For Customer Success it makes even more sense.

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The employee customer experience connection – fundamentals

    Here is an infographic with some supporting source material and an industry overview for context if you want it. Here too is where my interest and expertise in this space lie. This post is intended to dig a little deeper on the subject. Check out the diagram which captures a little more detail than I’ve…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Customer success operations – some answers

    I was asked by Brook Perry from ’nuffsaid if I would be interested in contributing to an article she was working on with others to get feedback on a set of questions covering customer success operations. Being close to my heart I agreed. I’ll update this post with a link to the article once it…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The supremacy of business outcomes in a low code no code world

    You may know of the new low code / no code approach to developing technology solutions (good primer if not). Simply put, it offers a development platform to users that requires little to no coding capabilities to build applications. There are benefits to this but also challenges which is why its important to consider the…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • How to communicate and get what you need from decision makers

    I learned of a technique in a training session given to Yammer Sales and Customer Success Management (CSM) staff in 2012. The technique adopts an approach for emailing someone, typically for the first time, that you are keen to get something from – essentially you would be cold calling them. We called the technique “the Hoff mail” after…

    Stephen Danelutti