This article has been transcribed from a presentation given at the Virtual Customer Success Festival in March 2022. At the time of recording, Ralph worked at Tableau; as of April 2022, Ralph joined Procore Technologies as an Enterprise Customer Success Manager.


My name is Ralph Meyer, and I'm a Principal Customer Success Manager at Tableau, a Salesforce company. My remit is Europe-wide, and one of the key things that may be different about my role is that I focus largely on strategic customers. On my journey so far as a CSM, I’ve focused on small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) clients, then enterprise clients, through to the strategic clients I work with today.

In this article, I'm going to be talking about ‘going deep to go wide’. It’s about value and scale and trying to get those two things to work together. I have to admit it's a tricky balance. I prefer the value piece, and I tend to avoid scale as much as I can, but I recognize that scale pays the bills so we can’t ignore it.

With that in mind, I'm going to open with a quote from Jeff Weiner, the previous CEO at LinkedIn. I'm not really into quotes, but this one sits well with me:

“Trust equals consistency over time.”

Every time I reflect on relationships or client engagements I've had, this quote always rings true. Delivering on time, being consistent, and being predictable are the keys to building a strong partnership with a client.

That partnership is going to be a common theme across the case studies that we'll cover today. There are two case studies, each with a very slant, and both of them are about going deep but with different results. I'll also cover some of the methodologies that shaped how I was thinking about those clients.