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Dear SaaStr: How Should Founders Build Their First CustomerSuccess Team? Building a CustomerSuccess (CS) team early is critical for SaaS startups. CustomerSuccess should be a single-digit hire—ideally, your first 5-10 employees should include at least one CS hire.
Dear SaaStr: What Should I Know As a First-Time CustomerSuccess Manager? Customers will look to you as the expert, and your ability to guide them will directly impact their satisfaction and retention. Focus on Metrics : CustomerSuccess is all about the numbers. These metrics are your report card.
Dear SaaStr: What Is the Playbook for a SuccessfulCustomerSuccess Team? A good playbook for customersuccess is all about driving retention, expansion, and customer happiness while making it scalable: Hire Truly Product-Savvy CustomerSuccess Managers at First Focus on hiring people who customer-focused product nerds to start.
Managing revenue operations (RevOps) in a SaaS company is all about aligning sales, marketing, and customersuccess to drive growth efficiently. Here are some best practices that I’d recommend: Centralize Data and Metrics RevOps thrives on data. Align Sales, Marketing, and CustomerSuccess These teams need to work as one unit.
With outcomes and metrics that align directly, find out why customersuccess should be the foundation of a customer marketing strategy. CustomerSuccess teams actively track KPIs and metrics that directly align with customer marketing outcomes.
Dear SaaStr: What “Quotas” Should My VP of CustomerSuccess and VP of Product Have? For a VP of CustomerSuccess (VPCS), their “quota” or ownership should revolve around two key metrics: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Gross Retention Rate (GRR). Without them, youre flying blind.
A related post here: The 1 Simple Test to Know if You’ve Actually Hired a Real VP of Product or CustomerSuccess … Or Not (note: an updated SaaStr Classic post) The post The 30-Day Test: How to Know if Your VP of Sales Will Succeed appeared first on SaaStr.
In a recent conversation at SaaStr Annual + AI Summit 2025 , Arvind shared the tactical playbook behind Rubrik’s scale, revealing counterintuitive strategies for product development, customersuccess, and AI adoption that challenge conventional SaaS wisdom. If they didn’t, then it doesn’t matter.
Gross Dollar Retention (GRR) is a critical metric for SaaS businesses, especially when presenting to investors. Here’s the best-practice way to calculate it: Start with your Beginning ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) : This is the ARR from your existing customers at the start of the period you’re measuring. SMB, mid-market, enterprise).
Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customersuccess the core growth engine. The KPI Alignment System Have customers email explicit performance expectations Build custom reporting dashboards Weekly cross-team optimization meetings Formal performance reviews 2.
Workato’s SVP of Embedded Sales and Director of Solutions Marketing joined us at SaaStr Annual to talk about how to nurture customers — a great topic in general, but especially for embedded sales and APIs that can take a while to scale. CustomerSuccess. Time-to-value is your most critical early metric.
Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customersuccess. The event is known for its focused content on SaaS growth strategies, metrics, and best practices, making it particularly valuable for B2B SaaS companies.
The key here is to focus on your unique strengths—whether that’s customersuccess, product innovation, or a specific niche—and double down on them. If you’re not hitting those metrics, fundraising becomes a real struggle. Customer Churn: Retaining customers is just as important as acquiring them. And you should.
This creates several advantages: Immediate scalability : No lengthy enterprise sales cycles Usage-based pricing : Revenue scales directly with customersuccess Lower customer acquisition costs : Developers can start using APIs instantly Key Pricing : Claude Sonnet 4 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
Procore has developed several systematic approaches: Vision Planning Process : Their three-year vision planning involves creating multiple possible futures and gathering extensive customer feedback to choose the right path. This isn’t just about features it’s about understanding where the construction industry is heading.
Rep Performance : Dive into individual and team performance metrics. Metrics like time spent in each stage and reasons for lost deals can provide clarity. Churn and Expansion : For existing customers, analyze churn rates, upsell/cross-sell performance, and NRR (Net Revenue Retention). Are you losing deals at a specific stage?
Post-Sale Handoff : The transition to customersuccess will be streamlined as AI teammates transfer complete relationship histories without knowledge gaps. And to an AI+Human CustomerSuccess team. The AI side will already know the customer cold the moment they are handed over.
No excuses, folks 😉 Focus on sustainable growth over vanity metrics if you’re … at the median. Choose your funding strategy based on your market timing and competitive dynamics, not vanity metrics. The takeaway : Understand where you are in the company lifecycle and optimize for the right metrics at the right time.
If youve come up in your career through sales, you’re used to living in a world defined by revenue metrics. Customersuccess, when tied to revenue outcomes, is a strategic growth lever. Why it matters : NRR is the single most important metric for SaaS companies, especially in the eyes of investors and acquirers.
Instead, they extended their existing customer-first culture into enterprise sales, maintaining their philosophy of “give value first, get value second” even in complex B2B transactions. Treat All Customers Like Gold, Regardless of Revenue Don’t segment customersuccess based on how much customers pay.
Naturally, their first customer was DoorDash and the quickly captured 95% of the gig economy market in their early days. When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customersuccess, and post-sales team.
The Strategic Advantages of UBP Aligns vendor success with customersuccess : When a customer like Uber grows, their usage naturally expands, benefiting both parties. This creates genuine mutual interest in the customer’s growth. Sales teams lose leverage.
Celebrations are shifting from contract signatures to consumption metrics – Their team is evolving beyond celebrating closed deals to automated alerts for customer usage milestones, fundamentally changing what success looks like. “Too many metrics meant no clear priorities.”
The Top 10 CustomerSuccessMetrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #4. How to Build a World-Class CustomerSuccess Org: Lessons from Notion’s CRO and GitHub’s VP of CS #5. How To Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup With Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel #2.
A $60,000 lesson in customersuccess. Eight years of being what most B2B companies would call a “good customer” — we paid on time, didn’t complain much, and frankly, we were probably easy to forget about. Usage metrics that once showed consistent activity now tell a different story. Eight years.
This is a guest article by Swati Garg , founder and CEO, Melo Associates , and Lindsay Lynch , senior recruitment consultant, Melo Associates , a recruitment firm focused on customersuccess hiring for SaaS and tech companies nationwide. For example, “Enterprise CustomerSuccess Manager”.
For a paid pilot, especially with a big expansion opportunity, you need to be laser-focused on setting clear goals and successmetrics that align with the customers pain points and desired outcomes. Set Measurable Metrics Define 2-3 key metrics that will determine success. Does that resonate with your team?
Companies with strong AI adoption across their GTM organizations are outperforming peers on virtually every metric: higher quota attainment (61% vs 56%), shorter sales cycles (20 vs 25 weeks), lower cost per opportunity ($8.3K vs $8.7K), and dramatically leaner operations. This isn’t about sprinkling ChatGPT into your sales process.
Let’s review everything your customersuccess team has to do in the absence of any customersuccess tools. Collect customer data to calculate complex formulas for tracking metrics, monitor customer health scores, and resolve support tickets while continuously trying to improve retention and expansion.
5 Of The Best Ways to Retain Your Customers In SaaS in The Earlier Days … And After 4. Deploy a CustomerSuccess Blitz Your CustomerSuccess team needs to go into overdrive. Start doing 30-60-90 day check-ins with every customer, especially the ones at risk. Be Brutally Honest. Don’t Hide.
Spend the first week or two immersing them in the product, ICP, and customer pain points. Have them shadow customersuccess calls, onboarding sessions, and even product team meetings. This gives them a deep understanding of the customer journey and the problems your product solves.
Per company metrics, Lovable hit $50 million in revenue in just six months, Cursor reported $100 million in revenue in its first year, and Gamma reached $50 million in revenue on less than $25 million raised. Capital Efficiency Creates Competitive Advantage The most successful companies in our dataset are raising less money, not more.
To build lasting growth, companies need both metrics working together. One showing how effectively you’re acquiring customers, and the other how well you’re retaining and expanding on those relationships. Reinforce post-sale engagement to help more customers reach value faster. Active customers. Active subscriptions.
Build the Right Team for Enterprise Success Enterprise selling requires a fundamentally different skillset. Focus on Land-and-Expand Economics Don’t obsess over initial deal size.
Data Governance Needs to Start on Day One Palmer emphasized that data governance isn’t just about compliance – it’s about building a sustainable AI advantage: Own your data story : Even if you’re using third-party APIs, start collecting and organizing your data immediately Build responsible AI practices : Implement clear policies (..)
There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customersuccess team. Whatever the decade it originated, if you fast forward to today, this concept certainly crosses many customersuccess leaders’ minds as they’re considering growing their teams. So, why does any of this matter in customersuccess?
Despite all the sales enablement tools, CRM sophistication, and “sales productivity” solutions we’ve built over the past 20 years, we haven’t moved the needle on the two metrics that matter most: time with customers and account coverage. Because we’ve been fighting symptoms, not the disease. The result?
Whats the one thing that wont change in customersuccess this year? So how should you position yourself for 2025s incoming customersuccess trendsand should you be nervous, optimistic, or a cautious blend of both? ” So what 2025 customersuccess trends can we anticipate? The pace of change itself.
How to apply actionable metrics to different SaaS business stages. It tracks key metrics such as feature usage , user flows, and behavior patterns to explore user preferences and pain points. Then, as you define these problems, ensure you have a list of metrics that can adequately measure your product’s performance.
Not 2020-2021 growth, but top decile growth: What This Means for B2B Leaders Today If You’re Pre-$100M ARR: Don’t panic about “only” 40-60% growth – that’s the new exceptional Focus obsessively on unit economics – capital efficiency is the new growth at all costs Pick a lane and dominate – the days of (..)
billion with over 8,000 customers worldwide, having fundamentally transformed how companies think about trust and compliance. Instead of hiring a customersuccess manager, they created bespoke roles that mashed together different functions. Fast forward to 2025, and Vanta is valued at $2.45
It’s to say many of us do not know how to use AI effectively enough yet to impact conversion metrics. #6: So how much business has it closed? So it’s not to say that AI won’t work.
In today’s competitive SaaS landscape, CustomerSuccess has emerged as a vital strategic asset, driving revenue growth and long-term profitability. However, to fully unlock its potential, companies must go beyond qualitative insights and bring data into the decision-making process within CustomerSuccess ranks and investments.
As we all know, the SaaS ecosystem has changed dramatically over the last few years, and customer retention and expansion are becoming increasingly important for SaaS businesses. Good success planning is key. Satisfaction > Adoption When determining successmetrics, don’t lose sight of the difference between clues and facts.
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