SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

To invest in you when there’s no logical reason to. But they are often just awful managers. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need. You have to convince people to join you. To drag the troops up the hill. To do the impossible. You probably haven’t done it before. Especially in SaaS.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 278

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

Feature value: a function of time investment of users and customers The set of problems that your SaaS solves won’t survive long in the digital age if all it does is cut prices. Think beyond the cloud about what other resources you need to invest in making customers successful with your platform.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

One is your churn. SaaS businesses have churn. Churn, think we’re all familiar with what churn is. Churn defines your average lifetime of your customer. We talked about churn. Five percent monthly churn gives you a 20 month average lifetime. MRR, obviously. Average Revenue per Customer.

SaaS Payments 230

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 230

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 11, 2023

The good news is gross retention (ie churn) stayed constant. The hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) are seeing some uptick, but this is largely from selling compute (ie cloud GPUs). Not quite… The earnings call gave us more detail, and painted a more positive picture than just the numbers may suggest.

Cloud 130

Cloud Trends Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 130

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

” “I hated Katie at that company meeting, it was awful.” So, for those of you thinking, “Hey, I’m going wait on the ROI of our culture, or I’m going to wait to invest in our employee experience,” wait no longer. But employee churn in the Bay area is epic. How do you measure it?

Part-Time CTO 259

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 259

Blulogix

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Reduced Churn Customers are more likely to stay with a service that provides them with the exact value they need, no more and no less. Reduced churn is a natural outcome of usage-based pricing. Investing in robust billing and invoicing systems. This approach has transformed the way companies manage their IT infrastructure.

Technology 52

Technology Pricing Payment Features Subscription 52

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

AWS and other infrastructure providers have been using UBP for nearly a decade. Fast growers retain and expand new customers, resulting in net negative churn. Low churn shows the product is sticky, hard to replace, and truly generating value for customers. Fast growers are much more likely to employ a usage-based model.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

OpenView Labs

MARCH 4, 2021

The company struggled with poor churn and anemic expansion revenue. They invest in a frictionless customer onboarding experience and high quality support so that new users get hooked on the platform. The name of the game is to invest in activities that are leading indicators of customer health. Churn has since decreased by 50%.

Pricing 55

Pricing Outsourced Development Marketplace as a Service AWS 55

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2023

Alon Waks , former VP Market @ Kustomer @ Bizzabo now fractional CMO They will likely need investments in a surrounding sales ecosystem – technical sales, services scoping, POC/pilot expectations are massively different at that deal size. Invest in the Right Team This is a big bet. So if you’re thinking about going alone, don’t.

Scale 67

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 67

ChurnZero

AUGUST 11, 2020

This is a guest blog post by Anita Toth, Chief Churn Crusher. . You and I both know how awful it feels to have someone disregard what we say and focus on their end goal instead. They saw a 60% drop in support tickets and prevented nearly 22% of their customers from churning. This is shocking.

Retention 97

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 97

ProfitWell

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

For subscription companies, it’s tempting to resort to questionable subscription renewal tactics like these to keep customers around for as long as possible, since churn can be so disastrous to your bottom line. Manual renewal processes quickly add up to a significant time investment for subscription companies.

Payment Features 49

Payment Features Subscription Payment Methods Merchant Services 49

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

This is a perfect time to invest in your user base & core product offering because playing to your strengths will pay off. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. This is one of the tactics SaaS companies use to shore up churn.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2020

Have the email subject line be so awesome folks would want to invest just off the subject line. Distill it so that someone might invest just based on that email. What’s your churn rate? How is your company at least vaguely similar to an investment they have to done? Make the body of the email incredible, incredible.

Software Review 172

Software Review Technical Review Sales Hiring Healthcare 172

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And we’re also pleased, now to have almost a hundred thousand different SaaS products listed there, and being backed by a hundred million dollars from LinkedIn and some great investors that do allow us to keep investing in this marketplace. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital.

Software Review 185

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 185

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Running your own server to handle your customer's valuable data requires a huge investment to match the same level of security and reliability that comes baked into services like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud. This, in turn, helps reduce churn. Churn rate is how many customers are leaving your service in a given period.

SaaS Payments 66

SaaS Payments Trends Merchant Services Payments 66

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. This required no additional addressable market and also helped to drive down Buildium’s churn rate. How the hell does that happen?

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. It is staggering.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 156

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

It just is, and then when you get them, they churn at a higher rate, and so it’s like the math just doesn’t work. You guys are much more thoughtful around the metrics that you track and knowing that churn and retention is important. Jason : How do you find that pre churn? You’re really talking about pre churn.

Part-Time VPE 219

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 219

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

When you’re constantly churning salespeople, it’s like a painful boomerang that creates a bad reputation in the marketplace. Perfect example from a startup I’ve been keeping in touch with: As a founder, that’s an awful lot of work for 1 hire, especially when you need to hire more!

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2020

The second is really the how to think about your crew, really, how to take care of your crew, how to up-level your crew, how to invest in them, how to listen and engage them, and then also how to think about your extended crew. ” And invest your team’s time and energy to say, “Hey, if this, then that. Look at Shopify.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Pricing Sales Recruiting 189

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

As a founder, you can use this 84 cents to pay salaries, office rent, dividends, or invest in R&D. For example, when coming to a cloud vendor, deciding to be vendor agnostic at the time of product design ensures you aren’t tied down to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Look at spoilage as a loan from the customer.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Systems Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 210

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2020

Tackle can give you access to the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms and your end customer can purchase your solution through those marketplaces, which can streamline the entire process and help you skip a bunch of steps. It’s an investment in a function. Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs.

Sales Hiring 73

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing AWS 73

OpenView Labs

JUNE 25, 2019

Keep in mind, the MRR figure used in this calculation should include net new MRR which in a given period is equal to MRR from new customers plus expansion MRR from existing customers less churn MRR from lost or downgraded customers. For example, perhaps your CAC payback is worse than peer benchmarks but your retention is best-in-class.

Scale 40

Scale Development Team Review Software Review Benchmarks 40

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

They’re buying a platform and as a result, what they’re going to be doing is probably saying we’re not going to be doing some other investment decisions because we know this company is likely to be able to solve this, and that’s what they’re basically talking about, number one. Prevent churn or add ARR.

Technical Advisors 153

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 153

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

.: When you start selling to companies who are spending $100,000 or a million a year on you, you can’t just ignore their suggestions because if someone who’s paying you a hundred grand, churns going to hurt a lot more than someone who pays you $1,000 if they churn. Lauren A.: They gave a presentation to their boss.

Underperforming Technical Team 156

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 156

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

And that was probably one of the things you invested your time in earliest. If you look back over the years, we’ve developed around pulling in feedback from customers, pulling in feedback from prospective customers, things like surveys, NPS, churn, “What happened there? For like a 13 to, say, 30-person, Series A start-up.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

And that was probably one of the things you invested your time in earliest. If you look back over the years, we’ve developed around pulling in feedback from customers, pulling in feedback from prospective customers, things like surveys, NPS, churn, “What happened there? For like a 13 to, say, 30-person, Series A start-up.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2020

And so, you’ve got this tendency to evaluate scenarios in your head, and some of those scenarios are pretty awful. ” And I kind of think you will find out most how your business is impacted when it comes to renewals, when it comes to churn and discounting that comes with those renewals. Our CEO, of course, was there.

Scale 218

Scale Leadership Strategy Technology 218

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

One of the most famous lines from Citizen Kane is, “It's no trick to make an awful lot of money, if that's all you want is to do is make a lot of money.” Or are you planning to make an investment in a cutting-edge revenue performance-management solution? If only that statement were as true as it seemed.

Payments 40

Payments Revenue Payment Methods SaaS Payments 40

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Their ongoing customer investment uniquely positions them to make withdrawal requests while still driving meaningful and profitable performance. Why would we replicate that awful and uncomfortable experience we have in the B2C world with our B2B buyers? United we retain, divided we churn. Enter the Sales Manager.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success SaaS Payments Sales 98

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 12, 2021

And with a greater impact on your customer satisfaction – and ultimately your company’s bottom line – it’s increasingly important to invest in your human support team as a real strategic lever in your business. You’ve probably had at least one awful support experience where automation has been used to disastrous effect.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Payment Methods Payments 222