Catherine Blackmore is a Customer Success thought leader and innovator, with over 20 years of experience helping a diverse list of companies from small businesses to the Fortune 100. Catherine is also a Glide Consulting client and friend, so we asked her to contribute a foreword for this playbook. Take it away, Catherine!

In 2015, I joined Oracle Marketing Cloud as GVP, Customer Success. I took on the great challenge of bringing together five acquired companies with the goal of building a cohesive Customer Success organization. Each acquired company was at a different stage in their evolution and was governed by a different culture, identity and values. Aligning these five companies was going to be tough, but achieving Customer Success at scale was going to be even harder.

We had to transform. Our customers would not achieve ultimate value and success without an integrated team in place to serve them. Being organized by products meant that our customers needed to talk with 4 or even 5 CSMs to get their problems solved. For a company focused on helping our customers improve customer experience, we needed to drink our own champagne and make changes.

Hundreds of changes could be made, but instead of diving in headfirst, I took a step back. I worked closely with Nils and Alex from Glide Consulting to formulate a strategy and execute an action plan to drive this change across our entire organization. We followed the 4 P's framework they share in this comprehensive playbook.

Here's what we've achieved together so far:

Purpose Summit

Nils facilitated a one-day workshop for fifteen of our Global Customer Success leadership team members. During this workshop, we defined the purpose, core values and identity of Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Our brand: Members of the Customer Success organization at OMC are called Agents of Customer Excellence or A.C.E.
Our purpose statement: The purpose of Customer Success at OMC is to earn lifelong customers by orchestrating their marketing transformation.
Our core values: Guidevocate, Exemplary and Resullts Oriented Partner.

We brought our customers into the Purpose Summit, by testing each idea against whether or not our charter and promise would help us serve them. The Purpose Summit also helped us test our decisions around People. One burning question came to mind: have we identified all the roles needed to help us achieve and live our purpose? This question helped us change our operating model and think differently about the roles in the Customer Success team.

After the summit, the leadership team was reinvigorated. They relished the opportunity to create their own identity and define exactly what it means to be part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud Customer Success team. We used our A.C.E. brand to create an awards program to recognize the employees who model our purpose and values. A few of the leaders noted that the workshop was the most enjoyable day at work, ever!

Here's a picture at the end of the full-day workshop - notice the smiles all round:

Global Leadership Summit

We carried our energy and momentum through to the next engagement with Glide Consulting. Nils and Alex helped 96 Oracle Marketing Cloud leaders build their coaching and leadership toolkits in a one and a half day workshop. Nils condensed 400+ hours of coaching expertise into an action-only workshop. We learned how to identify and work to our Strengths, ask powerful questions and apply the 3 levels of listening.

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This workshop had no powerpoint presentations - the entire experience was hands-on, including role-plays, practical examples and hot-seats. Nils and Alex also worked closely with all of the leaders in smaller groups, providing practical guidance for real-world issues. The team's feedback was overwhelmingly positive and the event served to strengthen our identity, connect the worldwide team and align everyone to our new, best practice approach. Here's a picture at the end of the workshop - again, notice the smiles all round:

Today, we're starting to roll out this program of change and improvement. Even though it's early, we are getting very positive feedback around our Purpose, our customer promise and how we have aligned our roles and services to achieve it.

Thanks to the partnership and guidance of Nils and Alex, I've made remarkable progress towards the goal of making Oracle Marketing Cloud the destination for driven Customer Success professionals. The 4 P's framework has helped me transform the Oracle Marketing Cloud Global Customer Success team in record time. The investment I've made by working with Glide Consulting has already paid for itself many times over and in this guide, they give you their entire framework.

This playbook is a must-read for any SaaS leader who wants to build a world-class Customer Success organization.

Catherine Blackmore, GVP Customer Success - Oracle Marketing Cloud.