According to a report from Gainsight, 52% of customer success (CS) organizations are using AI in some capacity to address job functions like retention, training, or churn. That number is only anticipated to grow, as more CS leads jump on the AI bandwagon.

AI can aid customer success leads in myriad ways, ranging from drafting emails to identifying at-risk clients. Revenue Brew spoke with four customer success leaders across various industries to see how AI is helping their processes and improving their outcomes.

Know thy prompt: Mary Migiano, head of customer success at employee stipends platform Compt.io, uses AI for documentation, email templates, and building out processes. She cited Confluence as one platform her team uses, and explained the key to getting the most out of AI tools is knowing how to interact with them.

“What I have learned about AI is it’s really about how you prompt it,” she said. “Once you get really effective at what prompts and questions you’re asking it, it makes such a difference. People that I talk to day to day, one of the biggest things is they’re like, ‘what are you prompting it with? Why did you even think about typing that into it?’ What I say is just talk to it like it’s a person. You’d be so incredibly surprised if you just interact with it like a person—how much valuable information you’ll get from it in that way.”

Automate this, automate that: David Graham, SVP of customer success at Intuit, explained that at the financial technology platform, AI is used to improve automation for its employees and customers through its proprietary operating system, GenOS. The system helps Intuit’s customer success team access to customer data faster, which he said has helped them serve two and a half times as many customers.

Keep reading here.—LI

The sales world often measures one by the stripes they’ve earned. This means to climb the ranks one must perfect smiling and dialing, becoming a closer, and eventually managing up-and-comers.

Revenue Brew asked three sales leaders about the most important lessons from their first sales roles and how they helped them climb to the top of the org chart.

Relationship > Sales: John Schoenstein, CRO at Customer.io, started his sales career at Oracle as a business development rep, a role he said that changed his view of sales relationships. He found that instead of trying to sell, focusing on the needs of potential customers led to successful deals.

“I realized that when you treat customers as partners rather than transactions, you earn trust, you uncover deeper needs that they might have, and you start to create more of a value-oriented conversation, which I found then leads to good outcomes,” Schoenstein said.

Today, Schoenstein encourages his employees to put in the time and work and to practice listening to clients.

Practicing proper prioritization: Early on in Elizabeth Temples’s career, she used to make extensive weekly to-do lists outlining everything she wanted to accomplish. That is until a mentor at an early role told her to drastically scale this practice back.

“She challenged me to identify the three things that would actually move the needle for my business that week and to ruthlessly prioritize them. That simple shift changed how I approached everything,” Temples wrote in an email to Revenue Brew. “To this day, I start each week by identifying my top priorities and end it by asking, ‘Did I move the needle?’ The rest, as she would say, is just noise.”

Keep reading here.—BS