Accelerate Your Path to Client Success
Strategic coaching and advising for early stage startup leaders adapts to your unique needs and maturity levels. I’ll help you build from the ground up to quickly delight, retain, and grow your customer base, all while supporting executives’ individual growth.
EARLY DAYS ARE HARD
You’re building every part of the airplane while flying it. Where to focus for delighted clients?
It’s the most exhilarating and high-pressure part of a company’s lifecycle – You’ve landed new logos and revenue. Now you need to scale sales (and every other part of the business), while expanding existing ARR, growing key clients into strategic promoters, and building out a team to do all this at scale. Where do you start?
Whether you’re a founder laying the groundwork for customer success, an early CS leader finding your footing as you build and execute at breakneck speed, or a seasoned leader who knows that something’s just not quite working – I’m here to help. I put over 15 years of early stage startup experience to work for you, breaking through the chaos to unlock successful, expanding, delighted customers.
I help you and your organization
get successful, delighted clients...Faster.
SOLUTIONS OFFERED
Cultivating a new generation of customer-centric leaders and startups
For Founders, CEOs, COOs
- Triaging what’s working and not for immediate impact
- Prioritizing client-facing retention + expansion efforts
- Structuring post-sale teams
- Defining and scoping client-facing roles
- Evaluating and hiring CS leaders
- Creating a cross-team customer-obsessed culture
For CS Leaders
- Scaling CS best practices to where you are
- Motivating and improving performance of early CSMs
- Prioritizing, segmenting and managing early clients
- Developing executive presence and communication
- Managing up, down, and laterally in a high-stakes environment
For Everyone
- Building strategic partnerships with key promoters
- Setting goals, strategic priorities, KPIs, OKRs for growth
- Designing a value-centered customer journey (from scratch)
- Trouble-shooting when things don’t go to plan (or you don’t have a plan)
- Managing transitions with ease
Some of the questions I can help with...
What team do you need?
Where do you focus?
What really matters in the early days of CS?
How do you get the results you need with a scrappy team and limited resources?
How do you split up responsibilities that were once held by everyone and no one?
FOUNDER
Andrea Spillmann-Gajek
Social enterprise heart and execution-oriented instincts
When I started in customer success, I wished someone could help me see around the corner, tease out priorities from the noise, and apply their real-world learnings to the challenges I was seeing. I also wanted an authentic model of leadership that valued the human experience of my team and clients.
After 16 years building startups and customer-facing teams from pre-seed through Series C, it’s a privilege to be that person for folks on the ground now.
I started my tech journey in San Francisco in 2008, at the depth of the financial crisis. I’ve steered companies and teams through 4x annual growth as well as layoffs. Failure is the best teacher, and I’ve had my share, but I’ve also led through multiple stages of success – publicly launching from stealth mode, writing and pitching the first business plan to investors, securing a collective $120M in funding, running the acquisition process.
I’ve worn all the hats, leading operations and GTM at both large and small companies, which helps me view the customer journey and customer-facing teams holistically within a company. I’ve also gone deep in building out customer success, customer support, and professional services functions. I built my first CS team when customer success was still in its infancy, and eventually trained folks from underrepresented backgrounds to be the best CSMs out there.
More importantly, perhaps, I’m a mother to two young kids, first generation American, half Argentine and half Swiss, a Harvard grad who made it through on financial aid. I landed in tech while pursuing a Master of Public Health at UC Berkeley, and continue to focus on decreasing inequality where I can. I’m used to being the only one in a room filled with people who aren’t like me. I love finding connection regardless, and have worked hard to define my own version of leadership and partnership. I’m still growing and evolving, and would love to help you do the same.
Affiliations
"Andrea has been instrumental in helping us build an enterprise sales / customer success motion. In a very short amount of time, she helped improve our materials, guide our onboarding workflows and even helped us in the hiring process for our Head of CS role. She is able to help both strategically and tactically and is incredibly responsive. Highly recommend for any early stage startup building a B2B customer success motion."
Amit Bhatia
CEO Datapeople
“We brought in Andrea when we needed both strategic direction and hands on help with jump starting an initiative. We got more than we bargained for with a broader view of what we really needed for long term success. She can cover so much ground: customer success, product management and leadership in general.”
Michael Chae
COO at Playworks
“Andrea is our go-to when we’re trying to unlock something on the CS side. In a shockingly short time, she’s able to tease out exactly what’s going on and give us actionable recommendations to get there quickly. We don’t get generic templates or molds from her, just exactly the tips we need to unlock our very specific needs.”
Kuang Chen
Co-Founder at Antara Health
