SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. I Need a VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep. Move the bottom 10% out and give the best leads to your top performer, and watch sales go up 20%. The best VPs of Sales design comp plans so the team never wants to leave. You should be striving for zero voluntary attrition on your sales team.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A head of customer success that doesn’t own churn, or net revenue retention in the first 90 days. I can go on. But the top VPs of Sales know you have to get it going soon. Never will. Never will. Never will.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

SImple tips to Do Better in Q4 With What You Already Have: – Drive Down Churn – Drive Up NPS – Be More Grateful – Zoom with 10 Customers a Week – Promote Your Star(s) – Less Spam, more ABM – Weekly Webinar – Improve Lead Routing – Improve Lead Scoring – Talk to Every Prospect.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Do at least 20–30 customer interviews before you start writing too much code. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer. A 10x feature that customers will pay for, that the key competition doesn’t have.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales.

Scale

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. All good stuff.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Churn slowly increases. More here: Should You Fire an OK-but-Not-Great VP of Sales? Then, manage a small team.

Sales Recruiting

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. It’s important to track the number of leads in the conversion rates to sales generated by sales.

Metrics

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of Customer Success at the revenue intelligence platform Gong. Moving upmarket means larger customers and higher revenue, but it’s not without its challenges. For Linda, it all comes down to your approach to customer success.

Customer Success

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

And, depending on the initial contract duration, high customer churn [1]. churn of 25%, and services margins of negative 66% when I started working with them [2]. Customers are left high-and-dry with failed or partial implementations that, if left unfinished, will likely lead to churn. High adoption failure.

Consulting

Totango

JULY 19, 2021

And in this customer-centered economy, your customer success (CS) team is invaluable. The team’s goal is to retain your hard-won customers and help them grow by deepening the customer relationship and ensuring they are realizing value with your product every step of the way. Customer support.

Customer Success

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2015

At the Gainsight Pulse conference yesterday, I moderated a panel with Boaz Maor, VP of customer success at Mashery and Mike McKee, SVP of customer success and services at Rapid7. During the panel, both men described their path to building substantial customer success organizations at their respective companies.

Compensation

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Average Revenue per Customer. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). & One is your churn. SaaS businesses have churn. Two is the growth of your existing customers. Three is your new customers that’s kind of how we’re gonna structure the rest of the discussion today.

SaaS Payments

Kellblog

MARCH 13, 2020

In days of yore, chief revenue officer (CRO) was just a gussied-up title for VP of Sales. If someone was particularly good, particularly senior, or particularly hard to recruit you might call them CRO. Chief revenue officer meant chief sales officer meant VP of Sales. Frank, the head of Sales, had a $1B number.

VP of Engineering

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And so I think this does put heightened pressure on us, as SaaS vendors, to make sure our customers are adopting our technology and to make sure that it’s secure and compliant. And here’s some interesting data also, on the challenge for SaaS vendors, for all of us, that we will, a lot … most of us will see increased churn.

Software Review

Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Hiring team members with the right customer success manager skills is critical for the effectiveness of your CS team and strategy. Here we’ve identified the 13 most essential qualities to consider when hiring a CS manager. What Is a Customer Success Manager (CSM)? Relationship management.

Sales Hiring

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

This is a guest article by Michael Su , senior consultant of Customer Success, The Success League. Customer Success is still a young field and a new concept for many companies. When I ventured out to build my first Customer Success department at a tech software company, my leadership team thought I was nuts.

Customer Success

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

Level Up Your Customer Success Organization. In the subscription economy, there’s no debate about whether or not to invest in Customer Success (CS); 70% of rapidly growing businesses say that Customer Success is extremely important ( Hubspot , 2017). The fourth challenge is complexity.

VP of Engineering

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2019

About Nick… Nick Mehta and Anthony Kennada presented on how to create a new category (customer success). Gainsight’s customer success software empowers companies to increase revenue and decrease customer churn. His sales focused, actionable content made an impact on the audience.

Sales Recruiting

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

However, it’s tough to predict the future alone — so we asked Customer Success leaders across the industry to share their top trends for 2023. Second, the power of AI in customer experience will become more evident and accessible—an innovation we at ChurnZero have jumped on with the introduction of Customer Success AI.

Trends

ChurnZero

JANUARY 26, 2021

A J oint Success Plan is a simple but powerful tool for outcome-based customer success management. It’s designed to help solution providers align with their customers’ business goals and objectives. Customer success continues to evolve as a practice within companies that enjoy recurring revenue models.

Customer Success

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

As ChurnZero recently secured a Series B investment bringing our total funding that has been raised to date to $35 million, we thought we’d take a look back and see the role that Customer Success plays at each respective stage of funding for SaaS companies. Early-Stage Funding & Customer Success.

Scale

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2019

How to Design a Sales Comp Plan to Get You to $100M with Work-Bench, Movable Ink, MongoDB and Concert Finance. This panel will speak tactically to various comp design options as a way for management to determine and promote ideal behavior in their front-line teams. Meghan Gill | VP of Sales Ops @ MongoDB. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting

Totango

DECEMBER 13, 2022

As subscription models and recurring revenue become the norm for both SMBs and enterprise solutions, customer success is becoming an essential part of businesses across the globe. To make it easier, give recruiters more input on what CS is, the careers and paths to advancement it offers, and criteria for an ideal candidate.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

However, while many are flocking to reap the benefits of the SaaS model, truly understanding how it works sustaining success over time is not as easy as some make it look. He will also provide insights on the differences between commercial and enterprise customers and the key metrics to keep an eye on as you grow your business.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 19, 2022

Sales compensation planning can be a tricky beast to tame — but know that you’re not alone. I asked 12 incredible sales leaders across the SaaS industry to share their biggest challenges with comp planning and how to overcome them. Related: New to sales compensation planning? Top 10 sales compensation challenges.

Compensation

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 18, 2020

With each passing year the Customer Success industry matures and meets new challenges along the way, and this year has been nothing short of challenging in many ways. . Q&A Recap: Speakers: Megan Macaluso , VP Customer Success & Operations, ESG. Jay Nathan , Chief Customer Officer, Higher Logic.

Customer Success

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

The value of your contracted subscriptions taking into account revenue added/lost from components such as new sales, renewals, upsells, churn, etc. Churn Rates. Customer Churn = # of customers lost / total #of customers. Revenue Churn = # MRR this month / # MRR lost from last month.

Benchmarks

ChurnZero

MAY 10, 2019

Top 10 Customer Success Takeaways from TSW 2019. This event brought together thousands of technology leaders from Customer Success, Services, Sales, Product and Marketing. What was particularly great to see was the amount of Customer Success content that was structured into the programming.

Technology

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

They started in the point of sale market, and then as the company scaled, they rolled out new value props and modules for payroll, or Toast capital, or ways to manage your employee base. This is really founder-led sales. That’s really analyzing a period back, how much does it cost to acquire a customer?

Sales Hiring

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Your customer success teams need to grow with your user base to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. Your marketing and sales budgets, and the personnel assigned to those teams, will also rise. A longer lead time for recruitment means higher quality recruits. It helps maintain consistent growth.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question? Ash Bhoopathy (@ashbhoopathy): Probably more around go-to-market and sales. First of all, on go-to-market and sales and marketing, be very, very wary of folks that want to outsource your core.

Scale

Incredo

OCTOBER 17, 2019

common software sales comp plans, 2. what factors to consider before defining your SaaS sales commission percentage. We will share 8 ideas on how to increase your sales team’s productivity and help them close more deals. We will share 8 ideas on how to increase your sales team’s productivity and help them close more deals.

SaaS Payments