This isn't about me. This is about you.
Your business results, your career growth, your decisions. Here is what you need to know if you are considering working together.
What motivates me is the potential you have to be a great CCO. Leaders benefit from a partner who enables you to feel confident, stay current, and see around corners.
YOU can develop the skills to be a Chief Customer Officer.
You don’t need a fancy degree or a history of working at name-brand companies to be on a career path to become a CCO. However, you do need to enjoy working with customers, solving challenging problems, and continuously improving. There are specific skills you can develop and strategies you can learn to accelerate your career trajectory.
The CCO role can be the most impactful executive position at your company.
When a company puts its customers at the center of everything it does, the customer-facing executive has a tremendous responsibility. You bring their voice into your company decision making. You deliver experiences that drive value. You contribute financial results that directly impact shareholders. No other leader is as mutually dependent on so many functional teams.
YOU can contribute measurably to revenue growth and profitability.
CEOs and Board Members entrust post-sale executives with their company’s most valuable asset – their relationship with its customers. Customer-facing leaders are now in a position to deliver impactful results for your company. You lead important functional teams, contribute to critical strategic decisions, and oversee the execution of your customer-facing experiences. The ability to grow revenue from your existing customers and to do it in an increasingly scalable, efficient way has never been more important.
Delivering great customer experiences is motivating, inspiring and innovative.
I often hear stories of exceptional activities that leave me in awe. While those stories are moving, what I really appreciate are scalable experiences that can be delivered every day. Post-sale teams that listen closely to their customer needs. That design creative solutions. That delight their customers consistently. These are leaders that drive innovation and inspire me.
Here is a bit
about me
I started HelloCCO to help companies and leaders scale their operations and achieve better results from their customer-facing functions. I partner with Chief Customer Officers, aspiring Chief Customer Officers and their post-sale leaders to improve their business outcomes and grow their professional impact. I have worked with executives and clients in industries including technology, financial services, restaurants and hospitality, business services and healthcare.
I am a strategic thought leader. I am a customer success pioneer, experience design innovator, and now a published author.
I am an experienced operating executive. I have been a post-sale executive at industry-leading companies known for their customer-centric experiences, including Intuit, Gainsight, Marketo, and RingCentral. The last three completed $1 billion+ IPOs or acquisitions.
My career path included stops in various functional organizations. I am one of the few executives in Silicon Valley who has hands-on experience directly managing teams across the full range of post-sale functions like Professional Services, Customer Education, Support, and Success Management.
My first book, The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, describes the evolving role of a CCO and the skills it takes to get there. It introduces the CCO Maturity Model™, an easy-to-follow framework of skills that every current and aspiring CCO needs to master to successfully navigate their career.
My second book, REACH: A Framework for Driving Revenue Growth From Your Existing Customers, provides a structured approach to help Customer Success and Account Management teams systematically identify expansion opportunities and execute scalable growth strategies. I also lead the REACH™ Workshop, an interactive program designed to help teams apply this framework in real-world scenarios, enabling them to drive predictable revenue growth and maximize customer lifetime value.
Finally, my latest book, The Chief Customer Officer Playbook for the AI Era, gives CCOs and post-sale leaders nine practical strategies to move from AI experimentation to measurable business results. It shows leaders how to set the right AI agenda, redesign work and customer experiences, lead their teams through change, and connect AI initiatives to retention, growth, productivity, and customer value.
The scariest thing I have ever done is that I stopped doing many of those things above that brought me past success, and started doing things that make me feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. I launched HelloCCO, unsure if clients would hire me. I wrote a book, hoping that people would read it. I started a podcast series, not knowing if an audience would engage. I took this risk for you. So far, things are going better than I ever imagined.
I grew up outside Philadelphia and maintain my gritty work ethic, a taste for cheesesteaks (Pat’s, not Gino’s), and my love of going down the shore. I earned my MBA from Stanford Business School and graduated with honors from Duke University. I live in San Mateo, California and have three children with my wife Corey.
HelloCCO is a strategy consulting firm that partners with companies to scale their post-sale functions, improve customer-facing processes, and optimize financial results. Founder Rod Cherkas oversees every client project.
Clients generally come to me when they need to:
Increase Retention Rates and Expand Revenue from your Customers
Develop a Segmentation Strategy that Scales and Delights
Evolve your Organization Structure to Support Scale
Find Ways to Improve Productivity and Results with ChatGPT and AI
Improve your Team’s Impact on Revenue Growth and Profitability
Create Fee-Based Professional Services or Implementation Offerings
Implement a Partner Consulting Delivery Channel
Expand your Customer or Partner Education Program
Uplevel the Skills and Impact of your Functional Leaders
Integrate Post-Sale teams after an Acquisition or Merger