Building Growth That Lasts: Alignment, Fractional Leadership, and Customer Success Execution with Chelsey Reynolds

Chelsey Reynolds joins Your Customer, Your Success for a practical conversation about what it really takes to build growth that lasts.

Drawing on her experience leading sales, marketing, and customer success teams through rapid scale, Chelsey breaks down why growth stalls when teams operate in silos, how fear-based leadership quietly undermines execution, and where sales handoffs most often go wrong. We talk candidly about fractional leadership, setting expectations that survive the sale, capturing why customers actually buy, and why alignment matters more than any single metric or tool.

This episode is for founders and leaders who want clarity instead of chaos and results that don’t come at the expense of their teams or their customers.

Episode Timestamps

01:11 — Intro and welcome to the show

03:07 — What it’s really like leaving a W2 role to go fractional

04:45 — Why sales, marketing, and customer success struggle to work together

05:54 — Growth targets, alignment, and what leaders overlook

07:17 — How Sales (unintentionally) can make Customer Success harder

08:50 — When customer success should be pulled into the sales process

12:38 — Setting expectations that survive the handoff

16:49 — Why teams struggle with basic handoff discipline

18:13 — Capturing why customers buy and why it gets lost post-sale

19:53 — CRM realities and why tools don’t solve misalignment

21:28 — The real danger of organizational silos

23:58 — Fear-based leadership and internal competition

29:15 — How leaders unintentionally spread fear during change

31:58 — Recognizing fear-based leadership in yourself and change management

33:15 — Burnout as the wake-up call

35:01 —Where do you look first when growth feels harder than it should?

38:17 — Does It Hold Water?

41:36 — Chip Shots

Book Recommendation:

The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Connect with Chelsey

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelsey-reynolds-growth-expert/

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/heychelseyhere/

TikTok:   https://www.tiktok.com/@heychelseyhere

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@heychelseyhere

Substack:  https://chelseyreynolds.substack.com/

Website:  https://growthdepartment.com

🔗 Connect with Gary Marra:

·       LinkedIn:                    https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marra/

·       Marra CX Hub:           https://marracxhub.com/

·       YouTube:                    YCYS YouTube Page

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#CX #CustomerSuccess #ClientExperience #Leadership #FractionalLeadership #GrowthStrategy #TeamAlignment #Podcast #BusinessLeadership #CustomerExperience