Bhavik Vashi for Customer Success Festival APAC: Reloaded

Speaker: Bhavik Vashi, Area Vice President, Asia at Anaplan

Bhavik Vashi: Hi everyone, my name is Bhavik Vashi. I serve as Area Vice President for Asia here in Anaplan. I've been with the company for 8 years and spent the majority of my tenure working across both customer success, as well as sales.

Bhavik Vashi: So at this year's Customer Success Festival, I look forward to talking really about aligning sales and customer success. I think a topic that's very near and dear to my heart, and I'm sure is very relevant for all customers success practitioners. And really talking about when you do align these two functions, you can really accelerate growth and your organization's ability to capture the opportunity.

Bhavik Vashi: A nugget of wisdom, I guess, is that I hope people can take away from my session is really around the importance of account segmentation. I think it's something that every company does, but it's such a foundational and critical element about how you allocate resources in order to maximize the outcomes from your addressable market. And many times I think customer success and sales might do this in very different ways. And so how do you, kind of, balance the need for, you know, driving adoption and retention, which is usually the customer success focus vs. maximizing revenue potential, which is generally the focus of the go-to-market and sales teams.

Bhavik Vashi: Well as someone who, you know, is accountable for the overall go-to-market in the sales organization now, but started their career in customer success, I obviously think it's hugely important that we shine a light on customer success. And specifically, I think if you think about the modern business context and specifically, software as a service and the subscription-based model that many companies are moving to driving customer loyalty and really driving a long term, mutually-beneficial relationship with your customer is the fundamental investment thesis behind the entire business model. And customer success is, very squarely in the middle of that strategy. So I think it's hugely important and I'm really glad that we're able to shine a light on it through this festival.

Bhavik Vashi: Well, I think the entire agenda looks fantastic and I'm sure every session will be hugely valuable and insightful, but I had to pick one. I think it might be the panel discussion, which is really about customer success in the context of product-led growth, which I think is kind of a new motion which I do believe is the future of software. And so I look forward to hearing the panelists talked about how that new kind of go-to-market motion influences customer success strategy, operations, and resourcing.