Scaling Trust with Matt Tidwell Transistor (https://transistor.fm) https://feeds.transistor.fm/scaling-trust Scaling Trust is a show about what it actually takes to build durable relationships between companies and their customers — beyond the handoff, beyond onboarding, and into the kind of trust that drives expansion and advocacy. 2026 ThinkThru,Inc. d38edbe3-6c55-5d99-b991-4de751b9e2bd yes en Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:00:17 -0500 Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:01:53 -0500 https://www.thinkthru.co https://img.transistorcdn.com/DQ-oBppFaqU2wvTUJoOtkBNz2whHSfLoNSlD8BQcFdY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:1400/h:1400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kZWVh/ZGNkNWUyMTUzYTQz/OGYzZTllZDU0Yjg4/NjkyYi5wbmc.jpg Scaling Trust with Matt Tidwell https://www.thinkthru.co episodic Matt Tidwell Scaling Trust is a show about what it actually takes to build durable relationships between companies and their customers — beyond the handoff, beyond onboarding, and into the kind of trust that drives expansion and advocacy. Scaling Trust is a show about what it actually takes to build durable relationships between companies and their customers — beyond the handoff, beyond onboarding, and into the kind of trust that drives expansion and advocacy. Matt Tidwell hello@thinkthru.co No No Why Having Partners and Building a Partner Program Are Not the Same Thing— Stefano Sengos | Ep. 004 4 4 Why Having Partners and Building a Partner Program Are Not the Same Thing— Stefano Sengos | Ep. 004 full 0d435425-fa33-4a79-8b81-0b2f39724000 https://share.transistor.fm/s/d950daec Most companies stumble into partnerships. They get a referral, it works, and they start calling it a channel.

But there's a massive difference between having partners and actually building a partner program — especially one that generates high-trust, high-intent opportunities that scale your business.

Stefano Sengos is a Channel Partnerships Manager at Ramp, one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. He manages the full motion — finding the right partners, enabling them to represent Ramp to their clients, and making sure the first 30 to 60 days of the customer relationship is a success.

In this episode, we get into:
- Why partners are a completely different ICP than your direct customer
- What it actually takes to earn a partner's trust before they ever send you a client
- How Ramp structures the handoff between partnerships and CS
- The 30-60 day activation window and why it makes or breaks retention
- How live events fit into a modern partner channel strategy
- AI in the accounting space — who's excited and who's skeptical

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the partnership function — and what happens when you build it on trust instead of transactions.

Connect with us:
Connect with Stefano Sengos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefano-sengos-5160b5110/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Ramp: https://ramp.com/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Most companies stumble into partnerships. They get a referral, it works, and they start calling it a channel.

But there's a massive difference between having partners and actually building a partner program — especially one that generates high-trust, high-intent opportunities that scale your business.

Stefano Sengos is a Channel Partnerships Manager at Ramp, one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. He manages the full motion — finding the right partners, enabling them to represent Ramp to their clients, and making sure the first 30 to 60 days of the customer relationship is a success.

In this episode, we get into:
- Why partners are a completely different ICP than your direct customer
- What it actually takes to earn a partner's trust before they ever send you a client
- How Ramp structures the handoff between partnerships and CS
- The 30-60 day activation window and why it makes or breaks retention
- How live events fit into a modern partner channel strategy
- AI in the accounting space — who's excited and who's skeptical

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the partnership function — and what happens when you build it on trust instead of transactions.

Connect with us:
Connect with Stefano Sengos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefano-sengos-5160b5110/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Ramp: https://ramp.com/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0500 Matt Tidwell Watch on YouTube Matt Tidwell 2021 Most companies stumble into partnerships. They get a referral, it works, and they start calling it a channel.

But there's a massive difference between having partners and actually building a partner program — especially one that generates high-trust, high-intent opportunities that scale your business.

Stefano Sengos is a Channel Partnerships Manager at Ramp, one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. He manages the full motion — finding the right partners, enabling them to represent Ramp to their clients, and making sure the first 30 to 60 days of the customer relationship is a success.

In this episode, we get into:
- Why partners are a completely different ICP than your direct customer
- What it actually takes to earn a partner's trust before they ever send you a client
- How Ramp structures the handoff between partnerships and CS
- The 30-60 day activation window and why it makes or breaks retention
- How live events fit into a modern partner channel strategy
- AI in the accounting space — who's excited and who's skeptical

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the partnership function — and what happens when you build it on trust instead of transactions.

Connect with us:
Connect with Stefano Sengos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefano-sengos-5160b5110/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Ramp: https://ramp.com/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> b2b partnership, channel partnerships, SaaS growth, partner enablement, onboarding No Building Customer Success Before It Had a Name — Michael Su | Scaling Trust Ep. 003 3 3 Building Customer Success Before It Had a Name — Michael Su | Scaling Trust Ep. 003 full 5cc17cea-e698-4505-982b-4d58c4c1f0c1 https://share.transistor.fm/s/73117b21 Most early-stage companies have a land and expand strategy. Very few have anyone actually running the expand part.

Michael Su noticed that gap in 2008 as a sales engineer at a 40-person startup where nobody was calling anything customer success yet.
Instead of moving on to the next deal, he kept going back to his existing customers. Leadership told him to stop. He kept going. One quarter, the Midwest territory, and nearly half of revenue came from existing logos. They handed him a blank check.

What followed was a 15-year career built around one question: how do you align what your company needs to grow with what your customer actually needs to succeed?

In this episode, Michael and Matt talk about:
- How Michael built the case for CS inside an organization that thought there was no gap to fill
- What breaks first when you scale something you invented on the fly
- How to build a renewal conversation around a product that works best when nobody notices it
- Why the line between customer success and product is disappearing, and what CS teams need to do to be ready

Michael currently serves as Director of Customer Success at Astrix Security, where he leads customer strategy for enterprise security teams. He's built and scaled CS organizations across cybersecurity, fintech, martech, and edtech — from early-stage startups to global teams of 60-plus.

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the expansion function, and what happens when someone finally does.

Connect with us:
Connect with Michael Su: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-su-cs/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Astrix Security: https://astrix.security/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Most early-stage companies have a land and expand strategy. Very few have anyone actually running the expand part.

Michael Su noticed that gap in 2008 as a sales engineer at a 40-person startup where nobody was calling anything customer success yet.
Instead of moving on to the next deal, he kept going back to his existing customers. Leadership told him to stop. He kept going. One quarter, the Midwest territory, and nearly half of revenue came from existing logos. They handed him a blank check.

What followed was a 15-year career built around one question: how do you align what your company needs to grow with what your customer actually needs to succeed?

In this episode, Michael and Matt talk about:
- How Michael built the case for CS inside an organization that thought there was no gap to fill
- What breaks first when you scale something you invented on the fly
- How to build a renewal conversation around a product that works best when nobody notices it
- Why the line between customer success and product is disappearing, and what CS teams need to do to be ready

Michael currently serves as Director of Customer Success at Astrix Security, where he leads customer strategy for enterprise security teams. He's built and scaled CS organizations across cybersecurity, fintech, martech, and edtech — from early-stage startups to global teams of 60-plus.

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the expansion function, and what happens when someone finally does.

Connect with us:
Connect with Michael Su: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-su-cs/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Astrix Security: https://astrix.security/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0500 Matt Tidwell Watch on YouTube Matt Tidwell 3253 Most early-stage companies have a land and expand strategy. Very few have anyone actually running the expand part.

Michael Su noticed that gap in 2008 as a sales engineer at a 40-person startup where nobody was calling anything customer success yet.
Instead of moving on to the next deal, he kept going back to his existing customers. Leadership told him to stop. He kept going. One quarter, the Midwest territory, and nearly half of revenue came from existing logos. They handed him a blank check.

What followed was a 15-year career built around one question: how do you align what your company needs to grow with what your customer actually needs to succeed?

In this episode, Michael and Matt talk about:
- How Michael built the case for CS inside an organization that thought there was no gap to fill
- What breaks first when you scale something you invented on the fly
- How to build a renewal conversation around a product that works best when nobody notices it
- Why the line between customer success and product is disappearing, and what CS teams need to do to be ready

Michael currently serves as Director of Customer Success at Astrix Security, where he leads customer strategy for enterprise security teams. He's built and scaled CS organizations across cybersecurity, fintech, martech, and edtech — from early-stage startups to global teams of 60-plus.

This is a conversation about what it actually means to own the expansion function, and what happens when someone finally does.

Connect with us:
Connect with Michael Su: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-su-cs/
Connect with Matt Tidwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsmatttidwell/
Substack: https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/

Resources:
More about Astrix Security: https://astrix.security/
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> customer success, customer retention, Saas, retention, customer success manager No We Are in the Business of Transformation — Akila Giridharan | Scaling Trust Ep. 002 2 2 We Are in the Business of Transformation — Akila Giridharan | Scaling Trust Ep. 002 full 787c6276-96a9-4fb2-b9b5-f8899bdb2584 https://share.transistor.fm/s/1e5507a5 Most customer success teams will tell you they lead with empathy. It's in the mission statement, it's in the job description, it might even be on a poster in the office. But empathy as a value and empathy as a practice are two completely different things — and the gap between them is exactly where customer relationships start to fall apart.

Akila Giridharan has spent 15 years building learning ecosystems across SaaS, manufacturing, media, and energy. In this conversation, she makes the case that great customer education isn't about checking boxes or moving completions through an LMS. It's about transformation — taking customers from where they are to where they want to be, faster and more confidently than they thought possible.

As a consultant and director of learning and development with 15 years of experience building learning ecosystems across SaaS companies, global manufacturers, media conglomerates, and energy companies including Warner Bros. and Sonnen Inc., Akila has done what most L&D leaders only talk about: she made a deliberate shift from internal talent development into customer education because she didn't want to be adjacent to growth. She wanted to be responsible for it.

We got into what changes when you stop building training from the office and start building it from the field — and why the program her leadership asked her to build looked nothing like the one her customers actually needed.

In this episode:

  • What Akila found when she left the office, went into the field with installers, and ran an actual performance gap analysis — and why it changed her entire strategy

  • Why empathy isn't something you feel about your customers — it's something you build into systems before a single piece of content gets created

  • The real difference between customer education and customer enablement, and why getting it wrong costs you product adoption

  • How to make the case for L&D in a boardroom full of people who only speak numbers

  • Why the next generation of customer success professionals need to lead with empathy and an eye on performance metrics — not one or the other

Connect with us:

Resources:
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Most customer success teams will tell you they lead with empathy. It's in the mission statement, it's in the job description, it might even be on a poster in the office. But empathy as a value and empathy as a practice are two completely different things — and the gap between them is exactly where customer relationships start to fall apart.

Akila Giridharan has spent 15 years building learning ecosystems across SaaS, manufacturing, media, and energy. In this conversation, she makes the case that great customer education isn't about checking boxes or moving completions through an LMS. It's about transformation — taking customers from where they are to where they want to be, faster and more confidently than they thought possible.

As a consultant and director of learning and development with 15 years of experience building learning ecosystems across SaaS companies, global manufacturers, media conglomerates, and energy companies including Warner Bros. and Sonnen Inc., Akila has done what most L&D leaders only talk about: she made a deliberate shift from internal talent development into customer education because she didn't want to be adjacent to growth. She wanted to be responsible for it.

We got into what changes when you stop building training from the office and start building it from the field — and why the program her leadership asked her to build looked nothing like the one her customers actually needed.

In this episode:

  • What Akila found when she left the office, went into the field with installers, and ran an actual performance gap analysis — and why it changed her entire strategy

  • Why empathy isn't something you feel about your customers — it's something you build into systems before a single piece of content gets created

  • The real difference between customer education and customer enablement, and why getting it wrong costs you product adoption

  • How to make the case for L&D in a boardroom full of people who only speak numbers

  • Why the next generation of customer success professionals need to lead with empathy and an eye on performance metrics — not one or the other

Connect with us:

Resources:
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:59:49 -0500 Matt Tidwell Watch on YouTube Matt Tidwell 3083 Most customer success teams will tell you they lead with empathy. It's in the mission statement, it's in the job description, it might even be on a poster in the office. But empathy as a value and empathy as a practice are two completely different things — and the gap between them is exactly where customer relationships start to fall apart.

Akila Giridharan has spent 15 years building learning ecosystems across SaaS, manufacturing, media, and energy. In this conversation, she makes the case that great customer education isn't about checking boxes or moving completions through an LMS. It's about transformation — taking customers from where they are to where they want to be, faster and more confidently than they thought possible.

As a consultant and director of learning and development with 15 years of experience building learning ecosystems across SaaS companies, global manufacturers, media conglomerates, and energy companies including Warner Bros. and Sonnen Inc., Akila has done what most L&D leaders only talk about: she made a deliberate shift from internal talent development into customer education because she didn't want to be adjacent to growth. She wanted to be responsible for it.

We got into what changes when you stop building training from the office and start building it from the field — and why the program her leadership asked her to build looked nothing like the one her customers actually needed.

In this episode:

  • What Akila found when she left the office, went into the field with installers, and ran an actual performance gap analysis — and why it changed her entire strategy

  • Why empathy isn't something you feel about your customers — it's something you build into systems before a single piece of content gets created

  • The real difference between customer education and customer enablement, and why getting it wrong costs you product adoption

  • How to make the case for L&D in a boardroom full of people who only speak numbers

  • Why the next generation of customer success professionals need to lead with empathy and an eye on performance metrics — not one or the other

Connect with us:

Resources:
More about ThinkThru: www.thinkthru.co

]]> product adoption, customer education, customer experience, instructional design No The Future of CS Is the Trusted Advisor — Aidan Murphy | Scaling Trust Ep. 001 1 1 The Future of CS Is the Trusted Advisor — Aidan Murphy | Scaling Trust Ep. 001 full 86a4fb1f-b290-4dd3-a955-3263affaa53d https://itsmatttidwell.substack.com/p/the-future-of-cs-is-the-trusted-advisor
In an era of AI agents, automated health scores, and tech-touch everything — the CS teams actually retaining customers are doing something that looks almost old-fashioned. They're calling people.


In the first episode of Scaling Trust, I sat down with Aidan Murphy, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Slope — an AI-native B2B lending platform backed by JP Morgan with partnerships at Amazon and Walmart. Before Slope, Aidan built customer relationships at Ramp, Zoe Financial, and Fidelity Investments. 

Every stop in his career has one thing in common: trust isn't optional. You're not selling software. 
You're asking someone to trust you with their money and their business.

We got into what that actually looks like in practice — the signals he tracks, the questions he asks, and why his direct cell number is in every client's email signature.

In this episode:

  • What Aidan learned about matching people to financial advisors entirely over the phone — and why that skill transferred everywhere. 

  • Why "tell me about your business" is the most important first question in any new customer relationship

  • How Slope is leveraging AI agents in their CS motion — and why they waited longer than they could have before releasing it.

  • What enterprise customer success actually looks like when it's working — and how you know which version you're building.

  • Why the next generation of CS professionals needs to be "comfortable being uncomfortable". 

Connect with us:


Resources:

]]>
In an era of AI agents, automated health scores, and tech-touch everything — the CS teams actually retaining customers are doing something that looks almost old-fashioned. They're calling people.


In the first episode of Scaling Trust, I sat down with Aidan Murphy, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Slope — an AI-native B2B lending platform backed by JP Morgan with partnerships at Amazon and Walmart. Before Slope, Aidan built customer relationships at Ramp, Zoe Financial, and Fidelity Investments. 

Every stop in his career has one thing in common: trust isn't optional. You're not selling software. 
You're asking someone to trust you with their money and their business.

We got into what that actually looks like in practice — the signals he tracks, the questions he asks, and why his direct cell number is in every client's email signature.

In this episode:

  • What Aidan learned about matching people to financial advisors entirely over the phone — and why that skill transferred everywhere. 

  • Why "tell me about your business" is the most important first question in any new customer relationship

  • How Slope is leveraging AI agents in their CS motion — and why they waited longer than they could have before releasing it.

  • What enterprise customer success actually looks like when it's working — and how you know which version you're building.

  • Why the next generation of CS professionals needs to be "comfortable being uncomfortable". 

Connect with us:


Resources:

]]> Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:40:09 -0500 Matt Tidwell Watch on YouTube Matt Tidwell 2783
In an era of AI agents, automated health scores, and tech-touch everything — the CS teams actually retaining customers are doing something that looks almost old-fashioned. They're calling people.


In the first episode of Scaling Trust, I sat down with Aidan Murphy, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Slope — an AI-native B2B lending platform backed by JP Morgan with partnerships at Amazon and Walmart. Before Slope, Aidan built customer relationships at Ramp, Zoe Financial, and Fidelity Investments. 

Every stop in his career has one thing in common: trust isn't optional. You're not selling software. 
You're asking someone to trust you with their money and their business.

We got into what that actually looks like in practice — the signals he tracks, the questions he asks, and why his direct cell number is in every client's email signature.

In this episode:

  • What Aidan learned about matching people to financial advisors entirely over the phone — and why that skill transferred everywhere. 

  • Why "tell me about your business" is the most important first question in any new customer relationship

  • How Slope is leveraging AI agents in their CS motion — and why they waited longer than they could have before releasing it.

  • What enterprise customer success actually looks like when it's working — and how you know which version you're building.

  • Why the next generation of CS professionals needs to be "comfortable being uncomfortable". 

Connect with us:


Resources:

]]> No