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30+ Tough Learnings from Losing a Top Customer

SaaStr

“For large enterprise customers, your stakeholder map is almost always too small” — Alex Farmer, VP CS, Cognite Data. Another top mistake SMB folks make trying to sell enterprise. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer.

CTO Hire 264
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Making the jump from Customer Success to CEO with FranConnect’s Gabby Wong

ChurnZero

Additionally, “leapfrog” candidates—those who come from a level below the C-suite, such as senior vice presidents—now make up roughly 5% of new chief execs. They have a core philosophy that you cannot have a successful high-growth software company if your core metrics around Customer Success are not strong, including NPS.

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10 Things That Would Have Helped Me Go From $1m to $10m Faster with Less Stress

SaaStr

Cash was tight and I didn’t know any great VPs of Biz Dev, so between myself and my VPs of Sales, Product and Customer Success, we all jointly managed our key partners. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. This is pretty well understood today, but was fairly new to me. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early.

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Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video, Podcast + Transcript)

SaaStr

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. You will fail if you: 1) try to build a suite of products out of the gate, 2) focus solely on SMBs, or 3) have an MBA. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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SaaStr Podcast #214: Erica Schultz, CRO @ New Relic on What It Takes To Successfully Scale Into Enterprise

SaaStr

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few.

Scale 160
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The Cold, Hard Truths About SaaS In 2023: Part 1 AMA with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. So, as leaders, you have to start from scratch and hire new people who weren’t trained in horrible ways or hire people who have been around long enough to know that sales are hard and deals can take six months to close. They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 172
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SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Bernadette Nixon, Jay Snyder, Nick Mehta, Loren Padelford, and Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Customers’ expectations are higher than ever with more access to information and options. I’m sure many of you use New Relic. Jay Snyder: Yeah.