The Chief Customer Officer Playbook: 8 Strategies that Will Accelerate Your Career and Win You a Seat at the Executive Table

by Rod Cherkas

The Chief Customer Officer Playbook is essential for CCOs and any leader who aspires to be a CCO.

Develop and master the skills you need to be a successful CCO. You will be able to accelerate your career growth, build your confidence, and deliver stronger, repeatable results by reading this playbook.

This book will enable you

Understand the scope and expectations of a CCOIdentify the skills you need to acquire along your career pathDeliver repeatable, predictable results with confidenceGain advocates within your company and across your networkImprove alignment between you and your executive leaders
Praise for The Chief Customer Officer Playbook

“By far the best book of the year.”

Chris Hicken, CEO of ‘nuffsaid and former President and COO of UserTesting

“Rod’s playbook is going to be the future North Star for how CCOs operate.”

Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer of Gainsight

“Rod has written a powerful playbook not only for CCOs, but for the entire executive team.”

Michael Gospe, Customer Advisory Board Strategist and Co-Founder, Kickstart Alliance

“Rod’s book provides a framework for the key attributes of a great CCO and a tactical path on how to get to this level. I felt myself nodding my head as I read through each page.”

Star Hofer, CCO of PartnerStack

“I love the specific, actionable recommendations and the many real-life examples.”

Laurence Leong, VP of Customer Success of Jamf


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROD CHERKAS is one of the most respected consultants to CEOs, CCOs, and their customer-facing leaders. He has been a post-sale executive at several of the world’s most customer-centric companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo and Gainsight. He is currently the Founder and CEO of HelloCCO, a strategy consulting firm that partners with innovative companies across diverse industries to develop, execute and scale strategies for their customer-facing functions.

Genres: Business

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 17, 2023

Reviews

[Chad Horenfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for Customer Success leaders

Rod has provided a much needed addition to the list of Customer Success books by focusing on the CCO role.

This book is a quick read that is jammed with nuggets of gold from various CS leaders as well as Rod’s own experiences. For example, Rod suggests focusing on building a few cross-functional relationships such as Sales. He even described how he handed out donuts to reps on the last day of the quarter. Those small acts of kindness help melt the ice between those teams.

His Post-Scale SCALING Model Framework helps bring together the most important actions that CCOs need to take for fast growing startups. For example, a CCO may determine that they need to build out a partner services team.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more detail in some areas such as how he recommends budgeting as a CCO. That said, Rod provides a number of resources that you can download to help aspiring CCOs.

This is definitely worth the read - well done!

[Brandon Blahnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book a lot! I’ve set out a personal goal to become a CCO by the end of 2027 and Rod did an incredible job mapping out the specific skills and strategies to make this a reality. It is clear that Rod know’s his stuff and pulls from a ton of different real life examples to hammer home his points. I loved the action items listed out at the end of each chapter and probably highlighted more actionable details in this book then any other book in a long time. Highly recommend for anyone in the customer leadership space.

Thanks!

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a comprehensive playbook with real world insights, examples and practical steps for those aspiring to be CCOs. A lot of this applies to and is useful for any CS leadership role though. Great job distilling his personal experience and those of other CS leaders into this well structured and highly useful book. The complementary resources on the HelloCCO website are also very useful in implementing the strategies Rod has listed in the book. It’s also easy to read and gets straight to the point in every chapter — no fluff!

[Temple Dog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rod Cherkas' The Chief Customer Officer Playbook is one of those books that is a must read for anyone aspiring to the CCO role.

Cherkas takes basic Customer Success concepts and provides a strategic playbook to elevate aspirants from management to the C-suite.

Each chapter provides a play with noted testimonials, a chapter recap and action items.

Most importantly, it is clear, concise and insightful.

TD recommends.

[Ed Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads more as entertainment than education. Very simple book to plan on how to get promoted into an executive role, rather than a robust book on customer success. Could be good if you have no concept for customer success and are thinking about the role, but not a good book for implementing a customer success department in an organization.

[Matt Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good baseline for anyone not spending a lot of time in the field. Good resources available external from the book

[tevita mau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Read and Insightful

Provides great insight for anyone dealing with customer in their space of engagement. Highly recommend book to anyone with a learning appetite.

[Daniel M20 Blackburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Whilst I am a few levels away from being a CCO, I feel closer having read this playbook. Some great tips that I will be using immediately and some great advantages that I will store for days to come. Thank you for this book Rod, I will definitely be making this required reading to those in my team and I will highly recommend 👌