Ep. 79 – Turning Customer Success into a Revenue Engine with Jack Zimnavoda

In this episode, co-host Mark Petruzzi welcomes Jack Zimnavoda, Head of Customer Success at Insightful. Jack shares how modern B2B SaaS organizations can turn customer success from a support function into a true driver of revenue and retention.

Together, they explore what it takes to align CS with sales, marketing, and product—without creating channel conflict. Jack reveals how predictive AI, smart segmentation, and aligned incentives can turn expansion into a scalable and proactive motion.

What You’ll Learn

• Customer Success as a Revenue Driver: Jack explains how to reframe CS from a cost center to a growth engine—through structure, ownership, and incentives.
• Avoiding Channel Conflict: Learn how clearly defined swim lanes, compensation clarity, and collaboration between CS and Sales create harmony and momentum.
• Building a Scalable CS Model: From white-glove enterprise accounts to hybrid-touch models, Jack outlines how to maintain personalized value delivery at scale.
• Metrics That Matter: Understand the importance of net retention, lifetime value, and how CS teams can build pipelines and forecast revenue just like Sales.
• AI + Customer Health: Hear how Jack uses predictive AI to monitor product usage, signal risk, and surface expansion opportunities at scale.

Key Topics

• Structuring CS to own post-sale revenue
• Aligning CS, Sales, Marketing, and Product
• Channel conflict: where it happens and how to prevent it
• Using AI in CS forecasting and health scoring
• Segmenting your customer base to drive upsell plays
• Scaling without losing the human touch
• How to hire for commercial CSMs (hint: curiosity and creativity)

Guest Spotlight: Jack Zimnavoda

Jack is Head of Customer Success at Insightful, where he leads a global team focused on retention, adoption, and expansion. With over a decade of experience in B2B SaaS, Jack has helped transform CS into a proactive, commercial function that partners across the go-to-market org to drive real business outcomes.

Resources & Mentions:

• Book: The Seven Pillars of Customer Success by Wayne McCulloch
• Podcast Mention: This is Growth by Daphne Costa Lopes
• Tool: Vitally – CS platform used by Insightful

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more expert insights on scaling GTM teams. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.