Lead2Scale Spotlight: Building Customer Success From Scratch at a Startup

In this special episode, we spotlight one of the participants of my signature program: Lead2Scale [L2S]: The CS Architecture Program.

You’ll hear directly from Ellen Kuhn, Head of Customer Success at a cybersecurity startup, as she shares what it was really like to be a team of one, build CS from scratch, and work through the L2S frameworks in real time.

We talk about why she joined the program, the mindset shifts she needed to move from “doing all the things” to designing an operating model, and how tools like journey mapping and staged maturity planning helped her decide what to build first instead of trying to do everything at once.

If you are a founding CSM or an early-stage CS leader carrying a lot on your shoulders, this conversation will give you a grounded view of how Lead2Scale works in practice and what can change when you have a clear CS architecture to build from.

Ways I Can Help You Level Up Customer Success:

1. Value Realization Framework Online Course:  Install a repeatable system your team can run: deliver value, prove outcomes, and drive retention and expansion. Self-paced with ready-to-use templates. Learn more.
2. Newsletter: Practical, revenue-driven CS strategies in your inbox. No fluff. Subscribe here.
3. 1:1 Coaching: Hands-on guidance to roll out value realization in your org. Book a free consult call.

For more information, visit my website: Explore more resources and insights. CS RevSpeak

Let's Connect on Linkedin:  Get weekly insights, templates and real talk on CS leadership. Follow Angeline on LinkedIn.

Until next time, keep driving success and speaking the language of revenue!

Transcript

Angeline Gavino 0:00

Hey everybody, Angeline here. This episode is part of our Lead to Scale spotlight where we share real stories from the cohort. And today I'm joined by Ellen Kuhn, head of customer success at a cybersecurity company. We'll talk about why she joined Lead to Scale, the piece that helped most, and some wins or shift to change how she leads or how she thinks about customer success strategy and operations. So without further ado, welcome Ellen. It's so nice to have you here.

Ellen Kuhn 0:30

Hi, yeah, I'm so happy I can help you. And I'm here today to talk about the amazing Lead to Scale program that I just completed with you.

Angeline Gavino 0:38

Oh, that's awesome. Well, okay, for context for the people who are listening in, um, let's start with a quick introduction of yourself. Um, who are you? How does your team look like? Um, why did you join Lead2Scale?

Ellen Kuhn 0:51

Yeah, yeah. So I've been in customer success now for about 10 years, mostly at SaaS startups. Um, so I was hired into my role now to build out our customer success program. I was the first hire and I'm still the only one in the department. Um, so I joined this program because I needed help knowing where to go with the with my team, what I should be building, where I should be putting my energy and focus on. Um, instead of just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticked, I wanted to be wanted to be a little bit more strategic. So I found you and yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Angeline Gavino 1:24

How did he actually find me? I'm very curious about that.

Ellen Kuhn 1:28

Yeah, I'm fairly certain it was on LinkedIn. I saw something, a post or someone shared a post. Um, you know, I've been plugged into a couple of customer success influencer types. So I think that's how I found you. And I joined, I had joined a webinar, I think, or you had a free session. So I joined that and I was very impressed. And I felt like your content resonated a lot more with what I'm trying to do. Um, so I thought it was a good opportunity.

Angeline Gavino 1:56

I'm glad to hear that. I mean, early stage startup and being the founding CSM is really, really super tough. Number one, you're the only person probably right now who really understands customer success in your organization. So you're also kind of building and not just the process, the strategy, but your reputation, like the reputation of customer success and educating everybody like what you're supposed to do. I'm curious, was there a specific challenge that were you were trying to solve when you decided to sign up for the program?

Ellen Kuhn 2:28

There were there are still many. Um, I think for me, it's also being in cybersecurity, a lot of my coworkers come from that space and not necessarily a startup space. So I come from the startup side of things and I see things a certain way. And I know the, you know, I don't want to say the bad thing, but the um the learning moments, you know, the things that are a little bit different in a startup. Um and I wanted to kind of bridge that gap and build things that I think made sense for a startup, but also made sense for our industry. Um, and so having more of the building blocks of an overarching customer success strategy and plan in place kind of made sense to me. And like, let me build something that I can explain to everyone on a that no matter what your industry is or what your history is, you can understand it because it's pretty um, you know, even though I think maybe this your program does fit very well for the more tech side of things. I think anyone in this space, account management, customer success, client relations, whatever you want to call it, um, could benefit from the building block, so to speak.

Angeline Gavino 3:38

Right. Yeah. And and the thing is, customer success is industry agnostic, right? You can uh my hope when building this program is that whatever you learn from here, from here, you move to another industry. And I've done that personally myself, like across my personal customer success journey. I've never really stayed in one space or like different industries, like you said, you you are as well, right? Like SaaS, different um SAS, and that's across really any industry. It's it's supposed to apply, right? There's there are generic um foundational elements of customer success. Although um, this is something that I teach a lot that there your context is so important, right? And um you being a team of one, it's definitely like a different ball game when you have to build customer success from scratch. So let me ask you a little bit. Um, let's dive into the program and your program experience. What I would love to know, like what did you like about the program format?

Ellen Kuhn 4:37

Yeah, I really enjoyed the group sessions every week. Um, you know, we had a couple of people in our cohort that were, you know, it's people for for me to aspire to in my career, you know, that are leading teams and C levels, etc. Um, so it's really cool to hear their perspective and to um get, you know, they come from different industries. Um, so to hear how they're doing things. And even though for me I'm smaller and a lot of it is, you know, kind of more theoretical, it was really cool to hear from everyone in the group on what I could do in the future, and as well as, you know, from your teachings. I think a lot of it um for me, I know now what I should be focusing on right now and what I should be focusing on or what I can hope to focus on in the future.

Angeline Gavino 5:22

Right. I think what I love about this cohort is the diversity of the group. I actually didn't expect that people will come from different stages of customer success, right? And I think that plays a lot into the group dynamics and everybody kind of learning from each other as well. Um how do you find the sessions and like the homework?

Ellen Kuhn 5:42

Yeah, you know, I am enjoyed doing the homework, which is weird. I feel like I never really enjoyed homework growing up. Um, but I really appreciate how um straightforward the homework is, and it doesn't take too much time every week. You know, I kind of set aside 30 minutes to an hour um to go through and plug my information in and do the homework. Um, you know, I there are some of the sessions, the homework I was made me realize just how not necessarily behind, but there's work to be done. Um and then there are some sessions where the homework I'm like, oh, I feel pretty great about where I'm at. Um so that was encouraging. But yeah, I think overall it was it was good content. Um, they're all things that I think I can take to my exec team and say, hey, here, here's what I worked on. This these are things that I think we should uh you know adopt into our to our team and I can share with the rest of the company and make sure everyone's on the same page.

Angeline Gavino 6:36

Right. So this uh the sessions is across 12 weeks. And honestly, the 12 week weeks flew by so fast personally for me. Um which which framework, or maybe session or maybe even homework, was most useful for you and kind of like really got stuck to you and why?

Ellen Kuhn 6:54

Yeah, I think that the customer journey mapping was probably the most, uh it really stuck with me. Um I in my head, I see the customer journey as, you know, it's once they are sold into the company, then it's my job and I kind of handle everything. Um, but to break it down and to really have an exit strategy or exit criteria for that customer to move forward really helped me realize that I hadn't been seeing a journey like that. Um, it made me realize that I need to maybe ask some different questions with my customers throughout the different stages. I think being in customer success for 10 years, I've maybe gotten a little bit comfortable with just going through the motions of things that I've been doing forever. And um that a lot of those things are you're, you know, they don't matter what industry company you work for, you're gonna do those. But this helped me see, oh no, like there's things that I think my customers need to know that I I actually need to teach them and help them get to this place, as opposed to just kind of letting it happen and me just checking a box and moving them along. Um, so yeah, I think that was definitely very helpful. And also realize there's still a lot of work to be done on that, but that's you know, that's part of the job. It's never ending.

Angeline Gavino 8:09

Yeah, for sure. I love, I love that. I love that realization. And you see, right, like even the um cohort members that are more in advance growth stages, there's always work to be done. Like the work never stops. There's always a new challenge to solve for, a new way to like rebuild and scale up your team, right? And there's always things to redesign um and reiterate on. What is what is one mindset shift that you're thinking thinking or taking into 2026? Like, what's one thing that really helped you shift the way that you look at customer success and how you lead customer success in your organization?

Ellen Kuhn 8:45

Yeah, I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about your program too is how you broke up the different stages of companies. Um I came from a company that was a little bit more advanced than my current company. And I had, I've been at this company now nine months. And I feel like the first, you know, six months, I was just putting processes into place and making playbooks for things that we weren't quite ready for, we don't need yet. Um, and seeing the way you break every week down by, you know, this is the growth stage and this is found like as you grow go up in the in company size. Um, so that really made me realize I need to be more strategic on what I'm actually working on. Like I don't need to just have a upsell playbook made because that was what I thought I needed. Um, if we're not ready for that as a company, I shouldn't be focusing my time on that. Um, I need to put my energy into engaging with customers more and making sure that our product, that we're building our product in the right way. Um, so I think refocusing, knowing that I don't have to do everything right now and being able to literally scale is the best way to go about it. Because otherwise, I'm just gonna have to change everything in six more months and six months after that.

Angeline Gavino 9:57

That's true. Um, I'm I'm happy that that's one of the realizations because yeah, you build customer success in stages. And it's so easy to get overwhelmed in the beginning when you're like the team of one and you feel like, okay, there is no process. There are no processes in place. I need to build all of this gazillion processes in place, and you don't know where to start. And I'm glad that um, like a lot of the things that we spoke about during the sessions kind of help you reset that and think about what makes sense to prioritize at this point of your uh company growth and stage. Um, all right. Well, I appreciate this, you know, sharing like your experience. I guess um to kind of help wrap up the conversation, uh who what would you tell somebody who is evaluating whether Lead to Scale is a program that they should join? Like who do you feel like L2S is a fit for and and why?

Ellen Kuhn 10:50

Yeah, yeah, I think anyone, um, you know, I'll speak just from my experience, mostly working at startups. I think anyone in those early stage startups that maybe only have a couple of CSMs, and it's a smaller team like myself, but maybe a little bit bigger. Um, I because I've been that, I've been the first CSM hired at a couple companies and grew to, you know, four or five different CSMs. Um and I've seen companies that do not have a good framework and we just build on the fly and we don't really have a clear vision. Um so if you're in that space, especially if you're in a startup space, I think that you would benefit from this because you need to have some form of a program or plan or structure instead of just being reactive. Um so that would be my suggestion. But I I think you know, we had some of our bigger like people in the cohort who are bigger companies, and I know they got a lot out of it too. Um, I just haven't been in that size, in that situation. But um, so yeah, speaking from my experience, definitely, definitely smaller startups.

Angeline Gavino 11:51

All right. I appreciate that, Ellen. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and you know, some of the great words. I think it really um helps me understand how I can improve the uh lead to scale for future cohorts um and really take it to heart, like a lot of the good stuff that you've learned from the program.

Ellen Kuhn 12:10

Yeah, thank you. Happy to help.