Last updated: Oct 14, 2025
I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Lara Barnes, Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Renewals at Sitecore.
With a wealth of experience spanning roles at Oracle, Facebook, and Sitecore, Lara offers massive insights into building and leading successful customer success teams.
Thank you, Lara, for sharing your story with us at The CS Café!
The stage is yours!
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Why this interview matters: Lara built Customer Success at Sitecore from the ground up, scaling to a 75-person global org across APJ, AMER, and EMEA while owning ~€180M in annual renewals.
She led a perpetual→SaaS transition, installed telemetry for value realization, and aligned 12 departments around one lifecycle. That’s real leadership under real pressure.
What you’ll walk away with today: concrete ways to operationalize outcomes with telemetry, balance renewals with growth, and use AI as leverage—plus links to playbooks and templates you can deploy this week.
If you need execution-grade runbooks, start with the CS Playbook Library to ship proven motions fast. You’ll find practical save plays, onboarding cadences, and escalation patterns inside the library at The CS Playbook Library and the broader Playbooks hub.
My Field Notes (use while you read)
Value proof, not promises. If you’re formalizing success planning, anchor outcomes and product signals directly in your plan. A simple first step is to grab the Free Customer Success Plan Template and then deepen it with the advanced patterns in Master Customer Success Plans.
Lifecycle beats heroics. When CS, Product, and Sales share one lifecycle spine, renewals get boring (the good kind). If your handoffs are ad hoc, the Customer Success Lifecycle Automation Playbook shows how to wire moments-that-matter without adding bureaucracy.
AI is leverage, not a replacement. Start with risk triage, pattern detection, and rapid answer retrieval. For a pragmatic rollout, use the AI Customer Success Implementation Guide and the predictive system in AI Won’t Replace CSMs.
Renewals thrive on proof. When you need an exec-safe metrics spine, align your narrative with the essentials in Top SaaS Metrics & KPIs and the leadership-level view in Success Metrics for Business & CS Leaders.
Kill tiers; route by need. If “tiering theater” is slowing growth, redesign coverage with Appropriate Experience (AX)—it replaces ARR-based tiers with context-based recipes.
PART 1/2 — Career Journey and Evolution of Customer Success
Your Professional Journey
Q: Can you tell us about your career leading up to your role as Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Renewals at Sitecore?
I started at Sitecore 7 years ago and built the organization from scratch, I was the first Customer Success Manager (CSM).
I needed to set the strategy along with the budget and work out who we would service first as we scaled.
We built the CS team and the entire Operations team globally to 75 people across 3 regions, APJ, AMER, and EMEA.
I also was given the remit to build a Renewals team globally managing €180M in renewals a year—so significant volumes quarterly.
I took the team through a perpetual to SaaS transition and built a Value Realization Framework to drive outcomes with Telemetry tracking.
I carried out a Customer Lifecycle Project across 12 departments to align our Customer Journey, the moments that matter to enhance our Customer Experience.
We built an incredible ethos and culture.
Editor’s note: If you’re standing up success plans from scratch, start lightweight with the Free Customer Success Plan Template and upgrade it as your telemetry matures via Master Customer Success Plans.
Early Career Foundations and Adaptability
Q: Throughout your career, from your roles at Oracle and Facebook to your latest position at Sitecore, how have the core principles of customer success evolved, and what consistent approaches have you relied on despite rapid changes in the digital landscape?
Customer Success is all about the customer.
As a leader, you represent the Customer in the organization.
So it is important to ensure the experience they have enables success planning, achievement of their goals, and value realization, so that they feel gaining outcomes for their business and the renewal is a non-event.
It’s changed not in what we do but how we do it. It’s become more refined in driving outcomes, which is the right direction.
However, Customer Success as a department is continuously under scrutiny for not being a cost base but driving additional revenue streams for cross-sell upsell.
This is easy when you have a product that is easy to implement and user experience is fluid.
As we move into product-led growth with Product teams becoming more accountable for the renewal, the ability to cross-sell and upsell - the whole customer lifecycle and accountability for the customer comes to life.
It always needs to be end-to-end management.
“Customer Success is all about the customer. As a leader, you represent the Customer in the organization.”
Strategic Vision and Leadership
Q: As a leader in customer success and renewals, how do you balance having a long-term strategic vision with meeting the immediate needs of your clients?
It’s about setting goals at the beginning of the year and sticking to these goals, despite the roadblocks and the incoming fire drills.
It’s about consistently providing overviews to the team on how you are doing against the goals quarterly to track your progress.
So that everyone can see what’s possible, and how they are contributing is making a difference to the overall goal.
It’s amazing what you can achieve when everyone is pointing in the right direction.
Building and Sustaining Customer Relationships
Q: Can you share a specific example where using a creative approach to customer success significantly impacted renewals or customer loyalty in your previous roles?
Creating a Value Realization Framework with Telemetry tracking helped us identify what success looked like with the product and how we can guide our customers to achieving those goals.
It was a tangible output to show outcome-based customer success activity which made it easier for the renewal discussion as value was seen.
Data-Driven Customer Success
Q: Given your experience with data-focused products at Oracle Marketing Cloud, how do you use data analytics and insights to drive customer success strategies at Sitecore?
Data is key to your success.
Not just to show how your customers are performing or not and predicting renewal outcomes, but also to identify where things need attention and fixing in the customer journey to make that experience a better one.
It helped me justify headcount too.
When we could show investment in CSMs was more cost-effective than adding more Account Executives (AEs) to the business.
To learn more about leveraging data in customer success, check out my quick guide on Top SaaS Metrics And KPIs”.
Editor’s note: For a concise metrics spine you can defend in the boardroom, keep Top SaaS Metrics & KPIs handy, and use the exec-level perspective in Success Metrics for Business & CS Leaders to align on definitions.
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Career Development
Q: How do you encourage collaboration between the customer success team and other departments, such as sales and product development, to ensure a cohesive customer experience?
Understanding the whole picture for the customer and running the customer lifecycle project created such momentum as multiple departments were bringing their expertise.
The customer journey became such a focus that we even had Customer workshops run by the People & Culture team to see how we could enhance our focus and goals culturally.
Ensuring that there is a clear RACI* and end-to-end tracking to understand who has responsibility for the customer at any point in the customer cycle gives clarity.
*RACI stands for “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed”. It’s a responsibility assignment matrix used in project management to clarify roles and responsibilities)
Discover more strategies for effective collaboration in my guide on CS Product Teamwork Tips.
Editor’s note: If your handoffs live in spreadsheets, the Customer Success Lifecycle Automation Playbook shows how to replace heroics with predictable, instrumented moments.
Challenges and Future of Customer Success
Q: Reflecting on your career, what has been the most challenging aspect of leading customer success teams, and how have you innovated to address this challenge?
One of the most challenging times was after Covid when new business started to dry up and costs started to escalate.
We needed to let some of the team go. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.
I had brought these people in and they were part of our culture and what we had built.
As a leader, there are difficult situations that need to be managed and I also then needed to take the remaining team through to achieve our targets.
It’s not that you agree with what’s happening but you are there to lead under all circumstances and do the right thing by the people you manage.
The Future of Customer Success
Q: With the evolution of digital experience platforms and the growing importance of personalized customer interactions, what do you see as the future of customer success, and how should CS pros prepare?
The future is “more efficiency” with AI.
It’s not going to replace relationships and setting outcomes but it will allow you to track your customers’ activity and predict risk quicker.
AI will:
know your product well.
allow you to understand your customers better than you.
answer questions faster than you and will recognize patterns more accurately than you.
help you be more effective in managing relationships
allow you to do less and achieve more.
The success of a CSM is tied to the value they bring.
So AI will be a game changer in how we understand, interact with customers, and predict needs.
CSMs should be embracing it and using Gemini, ChatGPT, and other platforms to help them understand their customers better.
However, Outcomes over Outputs.
It will shift the perspective of outcomes—customers will be able to achieve more value.
“The future is more efficiency with AI. It’s not going to replace relationships and setting outcomes, but it will allow you to track your customers’ activity and predict risk quicker.”
Explore more about the role of AI in my article on AI-Powered Customer Success.
Editor’s note: If you’re starting from zero, implement one high-signal risk model first using the AI Customer Success Implementation Guide, then layer proactive plays from AI Won’t Replace CSMs.
Access More Exclusive Insights from Lara
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PART 2/2 — Global Expansion, Leadership, and Career Philosophy (Premium)
Global Expansion and Leadership Philosophy
Lessons from Global Expansion
Q: Sitecore’s strategic path to international expansion has been a key part of its success. What lessons have you learned about adapting customer success strategies to different markets and cultures?