customer-led-growth
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Ben Lipschitz and the art of changing the order
A pair of shoes that could fit inside a clutch started his business career. At FoodByUs, Ben Lipschitz found a bigger problem by paying attention to customers who were never part of the original plan.
Stephanie Buscemi Put Marketing Where the Product Meets the Ledger
She took the long way into technology, then spent a quarter-century turning difficult software into a story customers, developers and finance chiefs could share. Her method is unusually plain: get close to the product, count what matters and listen before speaking.
Lisa Matherly Keeps the Customer in the Room
After two decades in cybersecurity marketing, Lisa Matherly still begins with the same deceptively simple move: listen closely, teach clearly, and let the customer shape what comes next.
Chris Brasher Makes Boring Software Easier to Want
After years of marketing software for apartments, audits, care providers and field-service teams, Chris Brasher has returned to property technology with a habit that travels well: listen closely, make the complicated legible and give the credit away.
Lisa Lausten Counts What Marketing Owes Its Customers
She began with audit sheets, learned brand craft in consumer goods and found her digital education at AOL. Now the Lone Wolf CMO is applying one durable idea to proptech: listen closely, simplify the work and make the numbers answer to people.
Kristi Flores Built a C-Suite Career by Taking the Jobs No One Wanted
The Accruent executive began in sales support, learned her way across product and marketing, and discovered that the assignments other people sidestepped were often the ones with the longest runway.
Leslie Olsen Learned Leadership Before She Learned the Language
Before the C-suite came a mountain, a self-made semester in Paris, and a ski-town promotion she did not expect. Those early choices still explain how Ontra's chief marketing officer thinks about customers, teams, and the discipline of staying focused.
Shannon Karl Learned to Sell the Internet. Now She Markets the Invisible Machinery Behind Modern Commerce.
Before enterprise SaaS, Shannon Karl wrote books that taught people how to use the early web. Three decades later, the Tecsys CMO is still doing the same essential job: turning complicated systems into practical stories people can trust.
The Customer Is Already Talking: Meg Swanson’s Job Is to Make Software Listen
After two decades translating technical products into human choices, Eptura’s Chief Market Officer now runs product, marketing, and user experience together. Her thesis is disarmingly practical: listen closely, connect the data, and remove the friction people have learned to tolerate.
Tara Robertson Is Making Every Click Earn Its Keep
Bitly's CMO built her career where customer empathy meets hard evidence. Now she is arguing that in an AI-shaped, zero-click world, the interactions people still choose to make matter more than ever.
Jack Singh Put His Career in a Spreadsheet. The Answer Was Avahi
The Avahi founder learned business from the packaging bench to the partner channel. Now his operating system is a curious mix of spreadsheets, candid feedback and a bias for shipping AI that earns its keep.
Keith Frankel
Keith Frankel is CEO of Totango, the customer success platform, where he is fusing AI churn prediction with customer-led growth. A designer-turned-founder, he ran creative and design at HubSpot through its 2014 IPO, built adaptive-learning product at Firecracker (acquired by Wolters Kluwer), then founded Parative, an AI customer-intelligence startup backed by Bain Capital Ventures that forecast churn with greater than 99% accuracy. Totango acquired Parative in 2024 and folded its tech into the Unison growth-intelligence engine. Before any of it, he produced reality television at MTV.