SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customer success 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.

Technical Review 258

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 258

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2024

How do you leverage your customer success team to drive revenue growth? Hook’s Head of Customer, Natasha Evans, took the stage at SaaStr Europa to discuss the three things leaders should focus on to fuel revenue growth. Historically, customer success teams have been pretty data-poor.

Scale 278

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 278

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2023

So I think 2023 may mark The End of Customer Success as We Knew It. The Massive Push to Efficiency As almost every public SaaS company got cash-flow positive and radically more efficient, and most startups had to stretch their dollars much further — customer success took a lot of the brunt. What happened? Just This Week.

Customer Success 293

Customer Success Pricing AI Enterprise 293

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2025

The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #4. How to Build a World-Class Customer Success 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.

Scale 147

Scale Customer Success Scaling AI 147

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

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. Customer Success. Time-to-value is your most critical early metric.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. The event is known for its focused content on SaaS growth strategies, metrics, and best practices, making it particularly valuable for B2B SaaS companies.

Software 240

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 240

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2022

It created a lot of discussions and was more controversial then — that NPS was a great core metric. And most segment it across customer size or other segments. Back then, I wrote that when I was a SaaS founder, I thought Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) was a somewhat dumb, Big Company metric. Who’s right?

Metrics 286

Metrics Churn Engineering Innovation 286

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2021

Moving from Churn to NRR as the Core Retention Metric. NPS is now the #1 metric at HubSpot — for all employees. We’ve talked about this so many times over the years, that the real power of NPS is that it’s the one metric every employee in every functional area can impact. NPS is A Great Core Metric. #3.

Metrics 60

Metrics SMB Scale B2C 60

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

The landscape of customer success has been evolving rapidly. So much so that we seem to be releasing new content on customer success just about every week. Today we’re focusing on actionable insights you can use to drive down churn with customer success in today’s new era of SaaS efficiency.

Customer Success 292

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 292

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success 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.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2024

A related post here: The 1 Simple Test to Know if You’ve Actually Hired a Real VP of Product or Customer Success … 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.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 294

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2025

For a paid pilot, especially with a big expansion opportunity, you need to be laser-focused on setting clear goals and success metrics 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?

Technical Review 204

Technical Review Software Review Engineering Metrics 204

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Is it the end of an era for customer success in SaaS? We just wrote up how some of the biggest changes of SaaS are now coming, specifically in Customer Success and Sales. Customer Success Is Vulnerable to Cuts Jason shared that he didn’t realize how vulnerable customer success was to cuts until 2023.

Sales Hiring 315

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 315

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

If you are a SaaStr reader, you’ll know how passionate I am about Customer Success, since Day 1. What it all means is that if you do it right, you’ll make 6x or more the revenue from your customers after the sale itself. For not just your customer success team, but yourself as well. Word-of-Mouth.

Customer Success 321

Customer Success Compensation Churn Enterprise 321

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 14, 2020

Customer success – every business wants to invest in it but only a few know what it actually entails or how to do it well. There are a lot of words that get thrown around with customer success: problems to be solved, implementation, product experts, expansion, strategic partners, technical advisors, proactive versus reactive.

Customer Success 249

Customer Success Management Technical Review Onboarding 249

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital and 25-year C-level veteran, shares the top 14 signs that you have a SaaS metrics problem, the five reasons those symptoms exist, and a SaaS metrics maturity model with five layers to help you move the needle at every stage. The 15 Types of Misuse and Abuse of SaaS Metrics #1: Bludgeoning.

Metrics 337

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 337

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2025

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.

B2B 213

B2B Data Scale Startup 213

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2025

Post-Sale Handoff : The transition to customer success will be streamlined as AI teammates transfer complete relationship histories without knowledge gaps. And to an AI+Human Customer Success team. The AI side will already know the customer cold the moment they are handed over.

Scale 240

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales 240

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2022

The definition of success will vary from business to business, from customer to customer. That said, customer success is evolving, and the importance of customer success continues to grow. Embed customer success into the core of your business. Offer enhanced value.

Customer Success 269

Customer Success Retention Company Culture Metrics 269

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2022

Customer Success isn’t just for established leaders; it also helps growth-stage companies compound their growth through retention, upsell and expansion. ChurnZero Chief Customer Officer Alli Tiscornia explains why earlier is better, and how to build a CS team that scales for the future. When should you start customer success?

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Leadership 246

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2025

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, customer success, and AI adoption that challenge conventional SaaS wisdom. If they didn’t, then it doesn’t matter.

152

152

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

If this is your first SaaS company, you may not have ever hired or built a Customer Success team. If you hire a great, experienced Client Success leader as your first hire here, and you like him/her, and the experience is on point — my guess is you’ll be fine. If not, are you sure your have this right? Measure both.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2022

Even with late stage VC capital much harder to get now, and the IPO markets still frozen, I see many folks on my LinkedIn feed saying Sales and Customer Success are underpaid. Well, for most of time, about 10% of the “profit” on a deal has done to sales, and about 5% of renewals have gone to customer success.

Scale 277

Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales 277

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

If this is your first SaaS company, you may not have ever hired or built a Customer Success team. If you hire a great, experienced Client Success leader as your first hire here, and you like him/her, and the experience is on point — my guess is you’ll be fine. If not, are you sure your have this right? Measure both.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 245

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

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, customer success, and post-sales team.

Revenue 286

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 286

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #5. The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures. #3. Why Im Scared to Buy New SaaS Apps Now with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin #4.

AI 261

AI Venture Capital Sales B2B 261

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

ChurnZero: 38% More Customer Success Departments Are Reporting to the CRO. 5 Metrics that Matter When Raising Your SaaS Series A and Series B with Christoph Janz of Point 9 The post The Top SaaStr Content of the Week: CEO Klaviyo, CRO Slice, CRO Rippling, HyperFunctional SaaS, and So Much More!! FBOW. | #3.

Scale 285

Scale SaaS Scaling Customer Success 285

ChurnZero

MAY 23, 2025

If youve come up in your career through sales, you’re used to living in a world defined by revenue metrics. Customer success, 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.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Metrics Revenue Scale 52

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

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?

Technical Review 179

Technical Review Sales Forecasting AI 179

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

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.

Construction 248

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 248

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2025

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?

Scale 249

Scale AI Underperforming Technical Team Sales 249

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

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.”

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 195

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

The Five Metrics to Help Increase Your Value. # Yet because of this decision to focus on growth instead of profitability, they achieved one of the highest revenue growth metrics at the time of IPO of any software company. It typically includes things like cloud computing costs, professional services, customer success, and licensing. #3

Metrics 269

Metrics Banking Benchmarks Investment 269

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2023

In this episode, Snow shares the journey to realizing the strength of revenue alignment through sales, marketing, and customer success and the principles for implementing this structure to yield tremendous results. This structure drove the company to a $2.5 billion-dollar acquisition by Bill within five years.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Revenue Marketing Sales 246

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2025

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.

Scale 179

Scale AI B2B SaaS 179

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. If you don’t have the time to watch the whole session, here are the main metrics you should be mindful of. It’s basically lost customers.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

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 (..)

AI 255

AI Scale Government compliance 255