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 299

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 299

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

How To Capture This Global SMBTech Opportunity There is massive market opportunity to sell to SMB businesses. Efficient Go To Market There are a lot of ways to GTM as an SMB. The keys to customer success are: Onboarding Most small business owners aren’t super tech-savvy. It’s a fragmented customer base.

Scale 245

Scale SMB Merchant Services Payment Methods 245

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

Mangomint has worked hard to create an incentive structure that makes it attractive for sales reps to invest in customer success. How Much Time Should a CEO Be Involved With Customers When you have a high-velocity SMB motion that’s still sales-driven, how much time should the CEO spend in sales and with customers?

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 257

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

During SaaStr Annual , Eric Huff, VP of Sales Strategy and Programs, and Theresa Stevens, Regional VP of the SMB sales team, shared an “under the hood” look at how Salesforce does its internal forecasting using Salesforce.

Forecasting 284

Forecasting SMB Sales Technical Review 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

However, there are practical methods you can use to acquire new customers, drive higher retention, and grow your company. . Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre has successfully scaled the Gorgias SMB customer base from 1,000 to 10,000 by relying on data. Measure Customer Success. Build A Map.

SMB 246

SMB Scale Data Scaling 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

Build the Right Team for Enterprise Success Enterprise selling requires a fundamentally different skillset. Start Planning for Enterprise Earlier Than You Think The biggest mistake SaaS companies make? Waiting too long to start their enterprise planning.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Customers have become very thoughtful about where they can spend their budget and how to do more with less in times of uncertainty. Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot, has many insights on how to serve SMB customers at scale. The Challenge of Digital Expansion for SMB. This pace cannot be sustained forever.

Scale 261

Scale SMB Scaling Innovation 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2022

In that time, they’ve managed to appeal not just to the big players of the industry, but to the SMB market as well. Their success as a business has been grounded in how they prioritize the success of their customers.

Customer Success 274

Customer Success Scale SMB Enterprise 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Dorian Stone , Head of Organizations Revenue at Grammarly, is here to share lessons from his experience of scaling the company from consumer to SMB to Enterprise to help you steer your expansion efforts in the right direction. The admin, influential decision-makers, and consumer sales reps can be the same people in a Consumer or SMB setting.

Scale 246

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

Let’s look at some of the top public SaaS companies: Shopify — very SMB: 100%. Hubspot — mostly SMB: 100%. Surverymonkey — fairly SMB, but going more enterprise: 100%. Zendesk — 116%, mix of SMB and enterprise. Developer-focused, but still fairly SMB. And mostly SMBs. 119% net revenue retention.

Retention 349

Retention SMB SaaS Enterprise 349

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Marketing SaaStr Session #1: “The State of Software Buying: From SMB to Enterprise with G2’s CMO”. Customer Success Sessions at SaaStr 2021. These sessions from SaaStr Annual 2021 provide a window into what approaches best-in-class marketers in SaaS are taking today: . Video: HE RE. Scaling Sessions at SaaStr 2021.

Scale 358

Scale Marketing SMB Leadership 358

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2021

This may sound obvious to more enterprise folks, but many Very Small Business and SMB focused SaaS companies still focus more on churn than NRR. It’s part of the legacy of B2C and SMB having a lot of similarities in SaaS. But try it.

Metrics 61

Metrics SMB Scale B2C 61

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

Differentiating between Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) and Enterprise, or larger companies, is vital. You’ll need to find and hire different types of sales reps, specifically to sell into the Enterprise since enterprise sales are more challenging and typically take longer than selling into an SMB. 3 – Sustain.

Scale 293

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Enterprise readiness 293

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

Sales, Support, Success and Marketing Roles Will Soon Start to Blend AI will enable salespeople to handle more of the customer lifecycleprospecting, closing, onboarding, and even customer success. We Just Won’t Need as Many SMB Sales Reps. But 1 and 2 call closes for SMBs? At least, the best AEs.

AI 157

AI Scale Sales SMB 157

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2021

7:00 AM (50 MINS) – Acquiring SMB 10,000 Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias’ CEO Romain Lapeyre. 7:30 AM (20 MINS) – Customer Success Re-Invented: New KPIs and Tactics to Level Up with Verdane’s Customer Success Expert Niclas Staberg. All times are in Pacific Time.

Scale 273

Scale VP of Engineering Scaling SMB 273

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2022

In fact, my uber-learning is one of the Top 10 reasons customer success is so important is to make sure this business process change is implemented. If you do nothing else in Customer Success, make sure you have full engagement by Day 5, Day 15, Day 30, Day 60 … whatever exact amount of time is right for your app. .

Business 284

Business B2C SMB Customer Success 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2022

That journey here: Most of us don’t stay SMB forever. Zoom similarly started off almost 100% self-serve and SMB, and then later added an enterprise team. Today, 63% of the revenue is 10+ seat deals, and they have 2,000 Enterprise customers. PagerDuty was almost entirely SMB at IPO, at $125m in ARR.

SMB 341

SMB SaaS Enterprise Software 341

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2023

Others may seek to corner the SMB market. How is it that you want to sell to startups differently than the rest of your customer base?” Zendesk knew that they could risk selling to startups like any other SMB, so that was the problem they set out to solve. Think about how to find these valuable customers.

Startup 271

Startup Scale SMB Venture Capital 271

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2021

The State of Software Buying From SMB to Enterprise with G2’s CMO, Amanda Malko. Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: 10 Things That Are Changing Now in Customer Success. The RevTech Stack Playbook: Going from $1M to $100M with SalesLoft’s CMO Sydney Sloan. appeared first on SaaStr.

SMB 58

SMB Enterprise Customer Success Software 58

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

Churn is a good term for your SMB and freemium customers. They will come and go, and their lifetime values often will be relatively small & short, so your customer acquisition strategies will have to be extremely precise. This is Broken Record Advice at SaaStr, but go visit at least all your top customers.

Churn 362

Churn Sales Hiring Systems Review B2C 362

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

What we learned from ’08-’09 in SaaS: First, SMB churn went through the roof — as SMBs went under much more quickly and often. As soon as the economy went south, SMBs started to simply go bankrupt and/or shut down. Anyone processing a lot of SMB and credit-card deals saw churn probably double.

SaaS Payments 280

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 280

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 177

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Strategy 177

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2022

I asked Yamini where to put the incremental dollar into — Sales or Customer Success? I strongly believe in investing as much in Customer Success as possible. But ultimately, in many cases, Customer Success is putting band-aids on product issues. The average SMB now uses almost 300 (!)

Scale 292

Scale SMB Scaling Customer Success 292

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2020

And even when you do check “dashboards” from SMB-y apps, they often don’t even look like dashboards. Make it a core asset for your sales and customer success team. You may even think they are kind of lame, or at least, low priority. After all, how often do you check your Slack dashboards yourself?

SMB 363

SMB Enterprise Innovation Communication 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2022

4 Recent, Very Bad, Truly Terrible Customer Success Experiences. SaaStr 616: Secrets to SMB at Scale with Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan and SaaStr Founder & CEO Jason Lemkin. . Secrets to SMB at Scale with HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin. Coupa, Marketo, And the Great Coming Rebound in SaaS.

Scale 258

Scale Venture Capital SMB Scaling 258

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

Right now, you may have 3-4-stage sales processes that work for SMB customers. Hopefully, you’ve built a partnership ecosystem for SMB customers, but it’s probably a completely different strategy for what you need to go upmarket for a couple of reasons. Now you have upmarket customers.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2021

The State of Software Buying From SMB to Enterprise with G2’s CMO, Amanda Malko. Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: 10 Things That Are Changing Now in Customer Success. Is the “Covid Boost” Over in SaaS? It Depends. A Tale of Two Trends. Dear SaaStr: VCs or Founders: Who Makes More? Top Vids This Week: 1.

SMB 274

SMB Cloud Trends Enterprise 274

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

A few things that always work to drive down churn in the early days — and later: Make sure you have a strong Head of Customer Success … whose #1 goal is reducing churn. Too many early-stage VPs of Sales don’t have a strong “wing person” running customer success. And they’ll be much more likely to churn.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring SaaS SMB Churn 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

SaaStr 529: Ten Things to Avoid Being Blindsided By In Your Pursuit Of Customer Success Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. The 4 V’s of Sales: Volume, Value, and Velocity with Waze Head of SMB Sales Fernando Belfort and Head of Sales Enablement Kendra Wrightson. SaaStr 528: Building a $5.6B Top Videos This Week: 1.

Scale 300

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Sales Enablement 300

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2022

BowtiedCocoon: Top SaaS SMB AEs have $125k OTEs. 10 Rules for Defining Churn with SVP of Customer Success & Retention at Solarwinds, Andrea Webb, and SVP of Commercial Strategy & Operations at ForgeRock, Tim Willey. Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Revenue Scale SMB 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Because SaaS requires so many functions beyond engineering, especially if it’s sales-driven … outbound, SDRs, inbound, field sales, marketing, customer success, support, more complex product management, etc. In Customer Success, we’ll probably need about 20 headcount: Assume $1m ARR per CSM as you are scaling, $1.5m

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 349

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. WorkRamp shifted its focus to a different segment –– the mid-market and SMB side. Because when we looked at our data, we saw that we had much more success sub 5,000 employees,” Blosser says. Well, not all the time.

Scale 246

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 246

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

The Strategic Advantages of UBP Aligns vendor success with customer success : When a customer like Uber grows, their usage naturally expands, benefiting both parties. This creates genuine mutual interest in the customer’s growth.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

“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. We all underresource customer success vs. sales. Lost a bank customer we had served well for 5 years and up to.5M

CTO Hire 325

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 325

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2019

Nothing is more painful than losing a big customer. But if you are thinking in terms of Decade Long Relationships … put sales and even customer success back on lost customers. I ask almost every public and unicorn CEO at the SaaStr Annual how much time they spend with customers. They may boomerang back.

Scale 353

Scale Churn Construction SMB 353

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2019

How much can a customer success manager manage? In the SMB the distribution is more uniform. Price points in the SMB can vary widely, as can the success effort. I’d heard the wisdom of $1-2M in ARR per year and around 80 accounts. But I hadn’t come across any data. But it varies by segment.

Management 253

Management SMB Enterprise Retention 253

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

But a great head of demand gen (or maybe growth hacking if you are SMB) should be very accretive at even $20k in MRR. You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Customer Success by $2m-$3m in ARR. This will seem crazy early to many of you. And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%.

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363