Our Judges

Alex Farmer is the founder and CEO of Customer Success Excellence. Alex is currently the Chief Customer Officer at Nezasa, a travel-tech start-up. Previously, he was the VP of Customer Success at Cognite, an Oslo-based DataOps scale-up, and was named a 2021 Top 25 Customer Success Influencer by SuccessCOACHING. Prior to this, Alex served as VP of European Sales and Customer Success at Incopro, a brand protection technology company, where he led the global customer success, partnerships, onboarding, training, and support functions and the EMEA sales team. Earlier in his career, Alex built the customer success function at HR tech scale-up Fairsail which was acquired by Sage in March 2017 to form Sage People. He is originally from San Francisco but is located in London.

Dave Blake is the Founder/CEO of ClientSuccess, a leading SaaS customer success management platform. An industry veteran and early leader for customer success management, Dave founded ClientSuccess to infuse his experience and thought leadership in a solution that empowers SaaS companies to deliver world-class customer success, retention, and growth. Before founding ClientSuccess, Dave ran Global Enterprise Customer Success for the Digital Marketing business at Adobe and was Vice President of Customer Success for Strategic & Enterprise Accounts at Omniture. Dave considers his greatest accomplishment being the father of 5 kids and married to an amazing wife. In his spare time, Dave loves to travel and is a big college football fan and BYU fanatic, having played a year of college football as a receiver at BYU.

After leading and building award-winning customer success and support teams globally, Emilia D'Anzica, MBA, PMP, is now a managing partner of Growth Molecules, a management consulting firm focused on helping companies protect and grow revenue. She serves on multiple boards, is an adjunct MBA professor at Saint Mary's College of California, and has been named a top global customer success influencer. She is the co-author of Pressing on as a Tech Mom and lives in Sonoma County with her three children, multiple animals, & partner.

Following a varied career David founded Clicktools, one of the UK’s first SaaS companies. As CEO from 2000 to 2015 he led the company through continuous growth and two liquidity transactions. David is CEO of TheCustomer.Co, which helps B2B SaaS companies grow through customer focus. In Sept 2020, he founded the Customer Success Leaders Institute to improve the contribution and effectiveness of this growing and important role. In 2021, David published Customer-Led Growth: A CEOs guide to building a B2B SaaS company. The book shows how measurable results for chosen customers are the basis of a successful B2B SaaS company. He has twice been voted one of the 25 most influential thinkers on customer. In his spare time he enjoys family, water colour painting, travel and food and wine.

Kristi Faltorusso is a Customer Success Executive with experience in building, scaling and transforming Customer Success organizations at hyper-growth B2B SaaS companies. Over the past decade she has helped many companies redefine Customer Success resulting in increased retention, long term revenue growth and strong customer advocacy. She is currently the VP of Customer Success at IntelliShift, and has served in an Executive CS Leadership capacity at companies like BetterCloud, Sisense and BrightEdge. She has been recognized as a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer by SuccessHACKER in 2020 and a Top 50 Customer Success Influencer by SmartKarrot in 2021.

Aaron Thompson is the Chief Revenue Officer at SuccessCOACHING, the world's first and only officially accredited Customer Success certification program. He has dedicated his career to helping companies improve retention rates, increase recurring revenue, and recoup customer acquisition costs. His background developing and executing training and implementation programs, managing technical support staff and then leading Customer Success for B2B SaaS companies, has uniquely positioned him to help people get into, and thrive within the Customer Success industry. He loves spending time outdoors with his friends and family, including golf, kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding.

Lauren Costella is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. She's currently serving as Vice President of Customer Success for GoodTime.io; immediately prior she was Vice President of CS for Medrio. She serves as an advisor for The Success League, an original founding and board member for the Customer Success Leadership Network, and an active participant in the larger CS community through speaking engagements, webinars, blogging opportunities, podcasts, and more. Prior to being in Tech, Lauren served as an advisor to the Undersecretary of Defense at the Pentagon for the Obama administration. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University, was a 2-time US National Champion in swimming, and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.

Matt has recently moved to Cision where he holds the role of Vice President, Customer Experience for EMEIA which incorporates Customer Success, Customer Support, Onboarding and Training. Matt joined Cision late in 2020 from SAP where he held the role of Vice President, Customer Success EMEA for just under three years. Prior to his time at SAP, Matt created the inaugural Customer Success function at UK SaaS “scale-up” Rant & Rave and spent over 5 years at Autodesk where he helped mature and scale their customer success organisation while responsible for a team across EMEA and APAC. Matt also has his own blog and podcast series at www.customersuccessmatters.com

Kellie is the author of the best-selling book, The Customer Success Pioneer, and coaches leaders and businesses through the pioneering challenges of maximising growth through partnering with their customers to achieve their desired outcomes. Her mantra is Their Success = Your Success and passionately believes in the power of people, connection and community. A founding member of the EMEA Customer Success community, she is a regular speaker at conferences, events and leadership coaching workshops. Kellie is passionate about the third-sector, is a Trustee for Move the World and truly believes that the principles of Customer Success will inspire better business for global good.

Jason is an established leader in Customer Success and SaaS, with over 20 years of global experience working across customer success, service delivery, account management, customer support and professional services. He has held leadership roles with a number of major enterprise brands and with multiple technology startups, successfully building and leading global customer success programmes and operations. He is a commercial leader working at director and board level - as the voice of the customer at the leadership table, helping companies to become more customer centric.

Rebecca Nerad has spent 20 years advocating for customers in the supply chain industry, in Customer Success roles for companies such as i2 Technologies and JDA Software. As Head of Global Marketing for Bristlecone, she created an industry-leading supply chain event, curating content with MIT professors and thought leaders. Rebecca is currently the VP of Customer Success at E2open and was named a 2020 Top 100 Customer Success Strategist by SuccessCOACHING. In her spare time, you will find Rebecca with her family in Vermont, skiing, playing tennis, or drinking a glass of cabernet.

Sydney Strader is the VP of Customer Success at Catalyst.io. Over her 10 year career, Sydney started as a Support rep and most recently prior to Catalyst led a 45+ international customer success org as the VP of Customer Success at InVision. She is deeply passionate about building customer success teams that deliver memorable customer experiences while maximizing business impact through net revenue retention and advocacy.

David Ellin is a strategic Customer Success leader who understands the value of building deep customer relationships built on trust, transparency, and empathy. David’s background spans Sales, Operations, and Customer Success in start-ups and global companies. David is the Founder and Senior Consultant at Centric Leadership Strategies, a consultancy that helps SMBs with customer engagement strategy, retention, and revenue growth. Prior to starting Centric, David was Vice President of Customer Success for eBay Enterprise (now Radial), a large B2B division of eBay where he held responsibility for Customer Success, Voice of the Customer, retention, revenue growth, renewals, and the Customer Advisory Board. Prior to eBay, David was an Executive Coach and Consultant, and spent over 20 years growing a start-up and completing a successful IPO.

Maranda Dziekonski is the Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. Maranda has over 20 years of experience both working in and building world-class operations. She has extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies with successful exits (one unicorn). Her specialties are Customer Success (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), Renewals Management, Implementations, Customer Support (B2B, B2C), Tech Support, Contact Centers (Inbound/ Outbound), Sales, and various other teams in operations. Maranda has been honored as a Top 50 Customer Success Influencer for 2021, Top 25 Customer Success Influencer 2021, Top 100 Customer Success Strategist in 2017 & 2018. Maranda sits on numerous boards and is on the advisory board for the University of San Francisco's Customer Success and Insight's MBA Program.

Rav has held a number of executive positions in various Enterprise Software companies over the last 20 years, most recently at Slack where as the first UK employee he established the London office and founded the global Customer Success team. No stranger to hyper growth start-ups, Rav has also built and led customer focused business units at Zendesk (now valued at over $10 billion) as well as Yammer (which was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion). Rav has published several books on Enterprise Software Deployment, is a regular public speaker and now works as a Venture Capital investor, backing the next generation of ambitious intelligent computing companies in Europe and working closely with their founders to build the foundations for long term revenue growth and customer value.

Sasi Yajamanyam is building a first-in-kind customer value acceleration product at ServiceNow, which is an digital+human offering that helps customers get most out their ServiceNow investments. He has built customer success programs at small and large organizations over the last 10+ years including ‘at scale’ customer success programs at ServiceNow. Before ServiceNow, he built a global customer success team from ground up at CEB (now Gartner) and served as a CIO advisor. He believes customer success is ‘everyone’s’ job but leaders lack tools to make that happen. He published a book Reimagine Customer Success in which provides a guide to the c-suite leaders on how to align different functions to deliver customer value.

Brian has spent the last 15 years in customer success; including managing onboarding, professional services, support and digital scale teams. Brian also served as a coach for the Catalyst Software CS mentoring program, a mentor at Black Valley and was a founding member of Gain, Grow, Retain (one of the largest CS communities in the world). Brian was also recognized as a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer by SuccessHACKER in 2021 and was part of the inaugural CS cohort with OnDeck. 

Boaz Maor is a serial start-up executive with a passion for Customer Success. He currently acts as the Chief Customer Officer at talech, a U.S.Bank company where he brings over 25 years of experience in a wide range of organizations from software to logistics to services. Considered one of the early executives to help drive the development of the Customer Success function, Boaz is a frequent speaker, writer, and presenter at conferences and events. Most recently, he won the “Innovator of the Year” award at CS-100 for his innovative Customer Maturity Index (CMI) concept. Boaz holds an MBA with honors from Carnegie Mellon University and serves on the board of the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce (CICC) and the Customer Success Leadership Network (CSLN).