In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Silvana Prodan, Team Lead Customer Success at Bloomflow, a platform that helps large organizations deploy and manage their innovation programs. Silvana brings one of the most unusual backgrounds in CS: a PhD in communication, a career in conference interpreting, and experience working across German, French, English, and Romanian-speaking clients.
She shares what customer success looks like when your clients are global enterprises like Nestlé and Michelin, how she navigates the dynamic between champions and sponsors, what good adoption actually looks like in an innovation platform context, and what advice she would give to anyone considering entering the CS world.
What You’ll Learn
- What customer success looks like inside an innovation platform serving large global enterprises
- How Silvana’s background in languages, interpreting, and academic research shapes the way she works with clients
- How to manage the relationship between champions and sponsors without breaking trust with either
- What good adoption looks like beyond login metrics and how to track data quality
- How Silvana uses AI and automation to free up time for critical thinking
- What the hardest transition was when moving into CS from a project management mindset
- What advice Silvana would give to someone considering entering the CS world
Key Insights & Takeaways
Cultural fluency is a CS superpower. Understanding how a German client thinks about punctuality versus how a French client does is the kind of nuance that shapes every interaction. Stereotypes, used wisely, can actually help.
Set success KPIs at the start of the renewal, not the end. When both the champion and the sponsor agree on what success looks like from day one, proving value becomes straightforward.
CC the sponsor strategically, not intrusively. You don’t have to choose between the champion and the sponsor. Keeping the sponsor informed on big moments, without bypassing the champion, is how you maintain trust on both sides.
Adoption is about contributors, not visitors. If multiple teams from different regions are actively contributing on the platform, the tool is doing its job. Logins alone tell you very little.
AI handles the quantity, the human handles the insight. Meeting notes, action points, and reminders can be automated. But the 10% that requires judgment about how a champion is really feeling is still yours to own.
Block time to think. In a role full of back-to-back meetings, deliberately protecting time to review, reflect, and insert the qualitative layer into your notes is what separates good CSMs from busy ones.
Don’t wait for 100% certainty. Deliver when you’re 80% sure. The last 20% will come from actually doing it. Waiting for perfect is how you stall.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:30)
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 Silvana Prodan, Team Lead Customer Success at Bloomflow, a platform that helps large organizations deploy and manage their innovation programs. Silvana, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Silvana (0:30 – 0:33)
Thank you for the invitation, Irina! Nice to meet you!
What Bloomflow Does and What CS Looks Like There
Irina (0:34 – 0:48)
You are helping companies like Nestle and Michelin manage their innovation programs. For people who haven’t come across Bloomflow before, walk us through what that actually looks like in practice.
Silvana (0:48 – 2:43)
To be honest, it really depends on the client. There’s no easy answer to this one. Bloomflow is a platform allowing companies to innovate faster and better by leveraging the information they have and collaboration. That’s the baseline, and we start from there and adapt it to every client. Usually we work with companies that have teams needing to collaborate across different departments, different countries, different cultures, and so on.
In that setup, what do you spend most of your time on? Again, a tricky question, because we’re in 2026 and I already feel that my way of working this year has changed and is constantly changing.
In 2024 and 2025, we spent a lot of time in client meetings and then taking meeting notes, putting everything together, and thinking of next steps. Now we automate the meeting notes with Fathom, we have Gemini internally helping us gather insights, and whenever a customer asks how to onboard their teams quickly, you just insert the information into Claude and it gives you the slides.
So we have more time to think and do the critical thinking part that AI cannot fully do. It can help, but sometimes you need the human knowledge of how a person actually is. And it can be a trap, because sometimes you work faster and you become like a robot and forget to do the critical thinking part. So this year my focus is on working with AI, but also working with my own brain and not forgetting about my brain power.
A PhD, Conference Interpreting, and CS: What That Background Actually Gives You
Irina (2:44 – 3:47)
One of our previous guests told me that it’s very important to leverage the benefits of AI, but you should be the one leading the AI and not the other way around. When AI basically leads the conversation, the outcome is just in line with what it was given. Combining critical thinking with the experience you’ve accumulated over the years is something you should leverage, and you should be the one guiding the AI.
Speaking of background, yours is very interesting. You have a PhD, you’ve interpreted at conferences, you worked at the ECB, and that’s a very different background for a CSM. I’m curious, what does all of that actually give you when you are sitting in front of a client?
Silvana (3:49 – 5:39)
I studied German, English, and French. Romanian is my mother tongue and I was always interested in languages. I worked with languages as a freelancer, as a translator at the ECB, and then I did conference interpreting, working a lot in factories in Germany that had to outsource to Romania, but also at events.
Even when working with languages, when you’re a freelancer you need to be customer first because you sell yourself. With COVID, all my conferences disappeared, so I looked for a stable job and the IT sector was the one hiring. I moved from Bucharest to Paris and started doing renewals, project management, and now customer success.
I really like customer success because at Bloomflow I have international clients. I speak German, English, and French depending on the client, and I’ve also lived in Germany and Austria. I think I understand the culture in a different way. Sometimes stereotypes are true, and we can leverage them as CSMs. I’m never late with German clients, unless I have a car accident. But if a French client doesn’t show up at exactly the meeting time, you’re fine, just wait two more minutes. It’s the small things that sometimes help.
What also helps from my interpreting days is that I visited so many factories. I understand processes from the top level all the way down to people clicking a button on a machine, and I think that also helps in my job.
The Hardest Thing About Moving Into CS
Irina (5:40 – 5:54)
When you entered into the CS world, what did you find the hardest thing to do? What was, with all the backgrounds that you have, the most challenging part that you couldn’t easily adapt to?
Silvana (5:55 – 6:45)
I think it was getting the big picture and not getting lost in the detail. Coming from a project management background, you see the client, you have the small next steps, you have the next meeting, and so on. But when you’re a CSM, you always need to think in terms of the big picture. How do the small steps create something big? How do they create success? How can you do your upsell, your renewal? How can you increase adoption? So not getting lost in the detail.
And also, when you’re freelancing, you sell yourself and your services. It’s the same when you’re a customer success manager, but some clients view you as a customer support manager. That was something I had to learn too: how to say no and redirect them to support.
Managing Stakeholders Inside Large Enterprises
Irina (6:48 – 7:02)
I’m wondering when you are working inside a company like Michelin, you are not dealing with one stakeholder. You are aligning executives, operations, IT, compliance. Where does that usually break down?
Silvana (7:10 – 7:28)
Yeah, so it depends. We always have the sponsor and the champions. So most of the time we’re in touch with the champions, but the sponsor needs to know what’s happening because it’s their money and we need to prove our value.
So we always adapt, I think. Adapting, that’s the key word.
Champions vs. Sponsors: How to Provide Value to Both
Irina (7:28 – 7:49)
Do you try to provide value to champions or to sponsors? Because I think it’s in some cases, I wouldn’t say that they have different objectives, but it’s hard to please both of them. How is it in your case?
Silvana (7:49 – 8:44)
What works for me is setting success KPIs at the beginning of the renewal. Success KPIs should make both the champion and the sponsor happy. On a daily basis, we help the champion more, or they feel that we help them more, because they are the ones behind the platform. They are the ones in the trainings with us and the ones asking for product enhancements. But we also help the sponsor. It’s just that the sponsor sees us two or three times a year, and we really need to prove that we delivered in those moments. You also need to make the champion look good when you meet the sponsor. If you set up the KPIs well at the beginning, both of them like what you’re doing, both of them benefit, and you also benefit. If a client is happy, Bloomflow is happy.
Irina (8:45 – 9:31)
I think that’s true regardless of the company or the industry. I’m curious, how do you manage to talk to the sponsors? They are usually super busy and don’t have time to spend in meetings with you. Most of the time they ghost you. How do you capture their attention without putting the champion in a bad light? Because usually the champion prefers to be the point of contact, but you also need to stay connected with the sponsor. How do you navigate this situation?
Silvana (9:31 – 10:44)
We meet the sponsor at least once during the annual review. Sometimes the champion blocks access by saying, I will talk to the sponsor myself. I know it’s a frequent scenario. You don’t want to break trust.
So personally, I put the sponsor in CC whenever we deliver something big or when my email focuses on the big things, not the small ones. Sometimes sponsors don’t come to the roadmap meetings and I know we are doing something really exciting, so I always CC them or write to them directly when I can.
Sometimes our C-levels are also in touch with sponsors, so I ask them if they can call the sponsor and share some news. I don’t break trust, but I CC and enable the C-levels to help. CCing the sponsor is not breaking trust and it’s something easy to do, but you need to remember to do it because you don’t talk to the sponsor every day and you tend to forget. That’s where automation might help.
When a Renewal Gets Tough Despite a Great Champion Relationship
Irina (10:45 – 11:04)
Were you even in a situation where it was a tough conversation on a renewal, even if you had an awesome conversation, an awesome relationship with the champion, but the sponsor was not sold on your platform?
Silvana (11:04 – 11:48)
Yes, it happens. Budgets are getting tighter and renewals are becoming more difficult. I think it’s the reality the industry is facing, and a renewal can get difficult if our platform is a nice-to-have and not a must-have.
When it happens, I try to be transparent and honest on my end, but I also ask them to be honest. What is your budget and what are the key features you are using? What do you want to achieve as a company during this renewal? That way I can see where Bloomflow can match the company goals, the champion’s internal goals, and what the sponsor also needs to show.
What Good Adoption Actually Looks Like
Irina (11:49 – 12:07)
Let’s stay on that. You’ve trained 300-plus users across 20-plus platforms. What does good adoption actually look like in that environment?
How do you know it’s actually real and not just people logging in and testing things in the platform?
Silvana (12:08 – 13:03)
We have our internal KPIs for adoption, and on the platform we have a difference between visitors and contributors. Visitors only have a look every now and then, and if it’s a C-level having a look, that’s fine because a C-level won’t have the time to click around. But we want to have many contributors with many contributions, and we also look at data quality. We need to have companies with contacts attached to them and so on.
So basically we track three things: data quality, the quantity of contributions, and whether several teams from different regions are using the platform. If I have a team from Bucharest, one from France, and one from Germany all using it, it means they are collaborating and the platform is doing its job.
Data Quality: Who Owns It and How to Keep It
Irina (13:05 – 13:19)
You mentioned something important, data quality, and it’s one of the pains of the CS industry. How do you guys manage to keep that data quality? What does it take?
Who needs to be involved in order to make sure that this happens?
Silvana (13:20 – 13:51)
There’s the data quality of the client data that the client places on the platform. We have a data quality tab on the platform with three things they can track. As a CSM, during the monthly meetings, that’s the first thing I check with the champions. I won’t fix it, but I will tell them, listen, here’s where you’re at, have a look.
And then there’s the data quality of the data the CSM gathers.
Irina (13:51 – 13:52)
Tell me about this part.
Silvana (13:53 – 14:54)
When I started at Bloomflow in 2024, I was writing meeting minutes by hand, and now I copy-paste from Fathom. I realized the dynamics changed a bit because we have a lot more quantity, but we don’t have the same insight, the human touch, meaning my feeling about the champion being a bit uneasy about something, for example. What I do now is double-check the Fathom meeting notes and adjust them a bit, because it takes me five minutes in the short term but helps a lot in the long term.
We also automate some actions, so the action points from Fathom are automated, and it helps me keep track of what is happening. It also helps with data quality, because when you check your action list and something doesn’t sound right, you catch it. So I think it’s always 90% AI and 10% Silvana.
The Tools and Processes That Free Up Time for Critical Thinking
Irina (14:55 – 15:42)
That 10% is actually what makes the difference. It’s the tip of the iceberg, but it’s the most important part. You mentioned automating meeting notes and keeping track of everything. What other tools and processes do you rely on to keep everything visible and free up time so you can spend it analyzing, overviewing, and connecting the dots between what the client needs and what your platform can provide?
Silvana (15:43 – 17:03)
Internally, we share information within the customer success team and with the entire company via Slack. We also have red carpet presentations where we present the client, and I think preparing for those helps because that’s where you look at the big picture.
Personally, I block one hour every day just to look at the meetings, think about what happened, and insert the qualitative part into my notes. We also have no meetings on Friday afternoons. Blocking time helps, and it might sound silly but it’s not, because as a CSM you have so many meeting requests. If you do five meetings without reflecting on them at the end of the day while the information is still fresh, you forget half of what happened. My personal method is finalizing my meeting minutes at the end of the day.
And automation is really powerful. We receive reminders 120 days before a renewal, for example, because if you have a very busy period you might forget. It’s easy to miss.
Irina (17:04 – 17:17)
You work through a lot of different worlds, from interpreting to research to project management, and now you are in the CS. Is there something from one of those phases that still shapes how you show up today?
Silvana (17:18 – 18:01)
I have a PhD in communication and I teach part-time at a French university. I think it’s the part where you really show up and are 100% present that shapes how I am at work. I still have a sweet spot for university and for teaching. As a CSM, I like to think it’s the same. When you’re a teacher, you need to be 100% there for your students and you need to bring something valuable. Students shouldn’t lose their time with you. I think it’s the same work ethic I try to apply at Bloomflow.
Advice for Anyone Considering Entering CS
Irina (18:03 – 18:31)
One last question. If someone was considering entering the CS world, what would be your advice for them? What would they take into account?
What are the goods and the bads? And when should they reconsider the CS overall?
Silvana (18:32 – 19:25)
As a CSM, the first mantra needs to be client first. The second mantra should be: deliver and advance when you’re 80% sure. Never wait for 100% because that last 20% will happen if you push. Know when to say no, but also know when to say yes.
I think people should reconsider if they’re uncomfortable with change. You can be a good CSM if you’re very analytical, but if you’re uncomfortable with the unknown, with change, with dynamics, with clients changing priorities and product teams shifting focus, maybe you should focus more on project management. I think a CSM is a project manager who can sell and is a bit more creative.
Irina (19:25 – 19:31)
Silvana, this was an interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining!
Silvana (19:32 – 19:34)
Thank you, Irina, for the invitation.
Irina (19:35 – 19:42)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
