In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Juliette Marland, former Senior Customer Success Manager at Redis, a real-time data platform powering AI apps and agents, and a founding member of the Redis CS team.
Now, she’s a founding member of Cursor’s CS team. Before this, Juliette joined Redis when there was no CS function to inherit and watched it scale across EMEA and the Americas.
She shares what enterprise CS looks like when your product is on the critical path of a business, how she navigates four layers of stakeholders simultaneously, what she actually did first when building CS from scratch, how AI is now automating workflows that used to be entirely manual, and why never confusing activity for value is the one lesson she keeps coming back to.
What You’ll Learn
- What Redis does and what the CSM role looks like when your product powers mission-critical infrastructure
- What good onboarding looks like at enterprise scale, including alignment, orchestration, and value capture
- How to surface business value from customers who can’t always articulate it themselves
- How to navigate four layers of stakeholders without any of them feeling bypassed
Key Insights & Takeaways
Enterprise CS is a team sport. The CSM is the connective tissue, not the only player. Bringing the right person at the right time, internally and externally, is the core of the job.
Onboarding has three pillars: alignment, orchestration, and value capture. Understanding business drivers, coordinating the full team, and measuring outcomes from day one is what sets enterprise onboarding apart.
You need to go higher in the org chart to find the real business value. Champions can tell you about usage. Economic buyers can tell you about profitability and productivity, which is where the real value story lives.
Keep the economic buyer in the loop from the start. Even a 15-minute meeting every two weeks with a CTO in the first six months is enough to unlock situations, escalate roadblocks, and maintain strategic alignment.
There are four layers of stakeholders in a technical enterprise account. Economic buyer, champions, platform and ops people, and developers. All four need different things and different conversations.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:05 – 0:47)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Juliette Marland, Senior Customer Success Manager at Redis, a real-time data platform powering AI apps and agents. Juliette, I’m really happy to have you here, thanks for joining!
Before we dive in, you came into Redis as a founding member of the CS team and you are now running EMEA’s largest enterprise accounts. Paint us a picture of your day-to-day there, who are your customers, and what does the work actually look like?
Juliette (0:48 – 3:08)
My customers are some of the largest enterprise accounts we have here in EMEA, across a lot of different industries: financial services, telecoms, the public sector, gaming, consumer apps. These are really companies that are running Redis at a serious scale where the database is generally a critical path of something that matters to the business. Just to give you examples, it can be about processing millions of benefit payments reliably, keeping a streaming platform going during big events like the biggest football match of the year, or powering real-time matchmaking behind the social app for teenagers that millions of them use every day. That also means that when Redis has a problem, the business has a problem.
The day-to-day work coming from that is actually quite varied. A lot of it is strategic. We’re thinking about where the customer is headed in the next 12 to 18 months, what the roadmap looks like, where Redis fits into that roadmap. But for Redis specifically, because it’s a technical product, there is a lot of technical depth required. I’m not saying that I’m writing code, but I need to understand what’s really happening on the platform and on the architecture, just to be able to ask the right questions and bring the right people at the right time.
There is a lot of relationship work in customer success. It’s a lot about building trust with your economic buyer, building trust with the champions, the different engineers, even the developers sometimes that work on the application every day. The role is really about being a connective tissue between the customer and Redis, coordinating with the customer but also internally, bringing the right person at the right time. On our side, we have more technical people like solution architects, technical account managers, and it could even mean having a more in-depth conversation with professional services where you want them to come in and really work with the customer on the code. As a customer success manager, you’re just trying to show up at the right time for the customer.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like at Enterprise Scale
Irina (3:09 – 3:34)
What does good onboarding look like at Redis? What are you aiming for in the first few months and how do you know when you got there? Because I think based on what you just described, there are a lot of moving pieces and onboarding seems, based on your description, one of the critical milestones in the user journey, in the client journey with you guys.
Juliette (3:34 – 5:25)
You need to really set them up for success. I would say three things are critical here.
The first one will always be alignment, making sure that we understand the customer’s real priorities. It can sound basic, but it is literally the foundation stone of everything that you’re going to do with the customer: understanding their business drivers, maybe the internal politics that they have, because it has an impact on the timeline pressure. You can call it a success plan, you can call it a roadmap plan, whatever you call it, you just need to have an ongoing conversation on what good looks like down the line.
The second, once you know what your business outcomes are, is the orchestration. In enterprise accounts at this scale, it’s really a team sport, as I said before. It’s not only the customer success manager, it’s also the rest of the team: the account manager, the technical account manager, solution architects, everyone plays a different role. A big part of my job is making sure that everyone feels like a coherent team, everyone has a part to play, rather than having separate sets of people doing different things and navigating on their own. You need to have a frontline of: here’s your Redis team, and we’re going to help you achieve your full onboarding.
And then the last thing for me would be value capture. It stems from the first point: you need to scale the usage, remove all the blockers, focus on the outcomes, and really measure what value they’re getting for their business at the end of the day. It’s not about the technical elements you’re giving to the customer. It’s about: is it more productivity for the teams? Is it more profitability for the company? It’s often in one of those brackets.
How to Surface Business Value from Customers Who Can’t Always Articulate It
Irina (5:27 – 5:44)
I want to ask you about value realization. It is something that most CS teams find hard to articulate. How do you take it out from the customer? How do you make him articulate what’s the value is and where he sees the impact?
And in what moment?
Juliette (5:45 – 6:27)
It starts from the beginning. This is something that you need to plan at the onboarding stage. And you’re right, often we cannot get to the business value immediately, and I think that’s because we’re not talking to the right person. You need to go up a level and go higher in the org chart to really understand what the business objectives are of someone higher up. It could be a mid-level director or it could be up to the CTO in the case of Redis. And often the CTO has priorities related to the profitability of the company, or which also ties to profitability, the productivity of the employees.
Navigating the Stakeholder Network Without Bypassing Anyone
Irina (6:28 – 7:08)
And how do you navigate this stakeholder network? Because on a day-to-day business, you are talking with your internal champion. But as you mentioned earlier, in order to find out the value and the business impact and to understand that, you need to go higher up.
How do you do this part without the champion feeling that he was escalated or not or skipped? I think that’s an art to navigate the stakeholder mapping part. And I’m curious how you do it.
How do you manage to talk to the right person?
Juliette (7:09 – 8:14)
Going back to your first question on onboarding, during the onboarding you need to set clear expectations. You need to always have the economic buyer in the loop. Ultimately, the economic buyer is going to weigh what your product is bringing to the table against the price of your product, versus what your product is bringing to their company. And thanks to this, you’re really going to be able to balance and measure the value that you’re bringing to the business.
When it comes to the economic buyer, how often you see them depends on the size of the company. I’m thinking of a customer where I met with the economic buyer, who was the CTO, every two weeks for the first six months. It was just a 15-minute meeting, but thanks to this you can, as I said, unlock any situation, escalate anything that’s going wrong, ask for more resources if you feel like some things are slipping, because you don’t want them to be slowed down from the results they’re expecting.
The Four Layers of Stakeholders in a Technical Enterprise Account
Irina (8:16 – 8:39)
So basically, you are nurturing two types of relationships. One is with your internal champion, and the other one is with the economic buyer. And you are always keeping the economic buyer back on your mind.
Whenever you are communicating, you make sure that the right things are reaching him or her as well, right?
Juliette (8:39 – 9:30)
Exactly. In the case of Redis, it’s a very specific product compared to other companies that I worked on. The situation with Redis is really, you could take it top down or bottom up, you need to do both at the same time.
So you would need to speak to your economic buyer, you would need to speak to your champion, but you also need to validate and orchestrate the implementation of Redis in the platform layer. So you need to speak with the platform people. And also the end users, ultimately, because they’re building the applications on top of Redis.
So you need to also speak with the developers, which is more an ASCII thing about them adapting on the product, really understanding the product and the different product features that we have. But I would say there’s really four layers of it. Your economic buyer, the champions, the platform, meaning the ops people operating your product.
And then on the last layer, the developers that are building on Redis.
How to Reach Internal Alignment Across a Complex CS Organization
Irina (9:31 – 10:37)
How do you manage to gain internal alignment? You mentioned that it’s a team sport, not a one-man show. How do you make sure you are internally aligned? Because this is something I see as hard. We say we are aligned, but in reality it happens less often than we would want. How do you manage to reach alignment with your sales team, support, product team, and technical account managers? You mentioned that you have access to a lot of internal resources to make your client successful, so you bring multiple people on board from your side as well. How do you manage to reach that alignment and make the other teams work for the customer you are serving?
Juliette (10:38 – 11:54)
I feel like it’s just working with your colleagues at this point. It’s just making sure that you have the right touch points with your colleagues as well, making sure that you have the right strategy in place. If I want to be more operational in my answer, I would say very operationally, having a touch point with the account team weekly and having a strategic call every three months on, hey, what would be brainstorming all together in a room?
What would be our roadmap for the next three months with this customer and reviewing everything that the customer launched or is doing or more information on the roadmap? So I would say this, but the tooling is also a very important part, like linking AI into your tooling as well, having more information. We’re leveraging a lot of AI internally at Redis right now.
So I would say like making sure that your CRM is up to date, that you have the right health signals, that you have the right support systems in place to see if everything is, anything is coming up red on your dashboard. And I think CS upstakes the huge part into making that possible for us. So I would say it’s a people thing, just aligning with your people internally, but also tooling and implementing AI into all of this to make sure that you’re very successful with the customer and you have the right signals.
Irina (11:55 – 12:21)
Speaking of this, what’s the operational infrastructure behind all of this, behind the CS team? What platforms and tools are central to how CS actually runs day-to-day at Redis? And then we also expand on the AI use cases, how do you leverage it?
But first, what are critical? What are the critical systems that you guys need in order to be operational?
Juliette (12:22 – 13:41)
Yeah, I think it’s pretty basic, right? We have a CRM, we have our ticketing system, we have our internal communication platforms like Slack and Zoom. It’s, I think it’s pretty general in here, but the most important is how AI is coming on all of it and connecting everything together.
I think it’s really important that we get a lot of content from the customer and a lot of content online from news about the customer. And AI has really completely changed the way that we operate. We can automate a lot of the workflows now that pulls from a lot of those data sources that I just mentioned.
So like CRMs, we have our own system for customer health, and it can really help you produce, for example, structuring briefings to prep for a meeting. It can help you record a conversation and help you create those after the call, the discussions that you can have with the customer. And you can leverage AI as well.
We’re leveraging it in our Slack channels to tell us health signals about the customers, about art changes, about news that are happening in the newsroom, and really leveraging all of this to link it to what business value Redis could bring for this specific piece of news on their business.
How AI Has Changed the Way the Team Operates
Irina (13:41 – 14:06)
So basically in this moment, AI is the glue that connects the different systems where customer data might sit. And it connects, it extracts the information, and basically it sends you on the channels that you guys are frequently on Slack, on email, basically the summary. That would be in a nutshell, right?
The way you are functioning as a team.
Juliette (14:07 – 14:50)
And you can build your own agent to automate some of the tasks that you’re doing regularly as well. If you’re working on Excel or doing some type of work on the consumption tracking, then you can leverage some of the agents to help you build a narrative, help you build the slides. If you have a specific conversation with a customer and you have your AI transcript, you can automatically, as I said, create notes, action items, but also link some of the pieces that were mentioned to what your product is doing.
So we’re linking our latest product releases to what we heard from the customer. And before we used to do this manually, and now it’s fully automated into our processes.
Irina (14:51 – 15:04)
And you mentioned health signals. I’m curious, what are those signals? What are you monitoring in order to make sure that a customer is healthy and is not at risk?
Juliette (15:06 – 16:04)
I think monitoring the health signals, it can be anything. It’s very multifactorial into it. It could be an org change.
It could be a risk signal, having less usage into the product. For Redis specifically, we have a very special way of consuming. We have a consumption that’s cloud-based as well as a consumption on software.
And this consumption of software, it forces you to think about it differently, I would say. Because in a traditional license model, you can easily see, oh, hey, I see the growth. I see that the growth is slowing down.
But for the software, for example, you could pretty much not see that you have a risk on adoption issues. So healthy for us, it’s not only about what the customer is spending, it’s a lot of different factors.
Building CS from Scratch: What Juliette Did First
Irina (16:05 – 16:49)
I’m going to take you back for a second. You were a founding member of the CS team. You watched the team scale from EMEA, Outlook, and the Americas.
When you are building CS from scratch, as you did, where do you actually start from? What was the first thing that you did?
How did you build the team?
In order to basically support it, where the foundation, what did you do? Because you were being a founding team, basically, you were one of the persons who put the foundation. And you created a strong foundation, taking into account that the team scaled.
What did you do?
Juliette (16:49 – 18:56)
So as the first customer success, I feel like before building dashboards, before building the playbooks, you just need an understanding of what a customer success is actually responsible for, because we had a lot of other roles within Redis in the early days. So the first thing was really defining the role.
And as I said, we have a lot of actors here. So what the customer success owns versus the technical manager, that was the first step that we had. And how do you differentiate this for the customer as well, for their understanding from what support does, what professional services does, and how do we all show up with the customer for a coherent experience?
A lot of the kind of early stage building was really, and process matters, right? But we also need to understand what success looks like for each customers when we started. And when you start, and there is nothing, process doesn’t really help much at that stage.
So I spent a lot of time with the team back then on the fundamentals. So why the customer, what does success look like? How can we measure business value?
What type of adoption signals that we were talking about earlier matter? What do customer get stuck in that is preventing from their adoption? And once you understand that over time patterns, and thanks to those patterns, playbooks become much more easier to build, and they become much more easier to get used as well by the rest of the team, because they do make sense.
And I would say another thing would be also feedback loops. So I feel like a great customer success organization just also becomes naturally a source of customer intelligence for the rest of the organization. I feel like the faster you can get insights back to the product, back to the product team, the engineering team, your leadership, and the faster the company improves, the happier your customers are basically.
So I feel like getting this channel established is one of the key point of success for customer success organizations.
The Lesson That Still Shows Up in How Juliette Runs Accounts Today
Irina (18:57 – 19:08)
And the last question, is there a habit, a way of thinking, or something you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you run accounts today?
Juliette (19:09 – 19:57)
Yeah, I think one important lesson that we could mention here is to never confuse activity for value. I feel like in a lot of customer facing roles, it’s easy to think that being the most responsive, running all the meetings, and solving the problem that’s right in front of you at the time when there is a fire burning, it’s enough and you’re doing most, but I feel like it’s not sufficient.
What I learned is that you need to explicitly really understand the customer strategy, risk, internal success criteria, and make sure that everything fits into why the economic buyer bought Redis at the end of the day, and focus on things that would bring most to the customer, because sometimes we just get in too much into the nitty-gritty details of the day-to-day activity of a customer success.
Irina (19:58 – 20:15)
Juliette, this was a really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for joining me today!
Have a good day. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
