SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2022

ChurnZero is the Customer Success platform and partner for growing SaaS and subscription businesses. You need an efficient way to keep your customers successful, reduce churn, drive adoption, and increase net revenue retention.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 260

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 260

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In many ways, your Quality of Life will simply be awful. The phase from $2m to $12m ARR … once I had a great VPS, VP Product, VP Marketing, and VP Customer Success … that phase … and man it was hard … and I worked 24×7 … but my “Quality of Life” was so very, very. Do not pass go.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 299

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

On an adoption basis, there have been some “green shoots,” particularly with Klaviyo and the impact they’ve had bringing AI from a project siloed or customer interface level and into their core business where they’ve automated 700 humans and over two-thirds of their customer success. Why is Klaviyo noteworthy?

AI Search 293

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y SaaS social networking company — and the usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful. Customers bought because they thought their organizations needed this functionality, and so they wrote the checks for Year 1, and even Year 2.

AWS 338

AWS Churn Enterprise Pricing 338

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. A 6 Part Test to Help You Get It Right.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

Yes, you now know how to make customers successful and happy now. You have 2,000 customers now. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. From $100k-$1m in ARR, the hardest part is how slow it is. It seems to take too long to get anywhere. But it is so slow.

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

Find those individuals inside the sales org, not just AEs but SDRs and the customer success side, to find those who can serve this upmarket profile. You’ve built your product today, and maybe it integrates with Salesforce or Hubspot CRM for your downmarket customer. Now you have upmarket customers.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2023

Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!! Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!!

VP of Engineering 246

VP of Engineering AWS Engineering AI 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the Customer Success lead hire, but worse. Or can you compromise?

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Technology Alliances: The tech alliances offer important integrations, especially critical for ServiceNow’s target market of enterprise customers. Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. The focus also widens to executing an outstanding GTM strategy and build top-notch customer success.

Outsourcing Services 290

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 290

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. A Lesson Learned: Stay Close to the Customer Organizations should focus more on customer success no later than 100 paying customers. Customer success is a company’s culture.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. Mining your existing customers for upsells is the best way to rain cash. So is SaaS cursed? I know this seems counter-intuitive. But break away. Go more enterprise. Get better.

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

. #1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. 7: Having the CMO Report to the CRO is a Terrible Idea Having marketing under a CRO is an awful idea for two reasons.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. Is there a recipe or formula that will predict the success of a pre-growth, high-potential company? Of course, we all know how that turned out. They were either enterprise, mid-market, or commercial.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2021

Still awful. At least you know the vendor is there, but many of your customers will need more than just … a frustrating bot. There are certainly cons to traditional outsourced support vs. highly trained support that works right inside your company. Support only from bots. No live support at all.

Outsourcing Services 214

Outsourcing Services AWS Customer Support Scaling 214

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

In B2B, you also have fixed costs, but you can diversify monetization based on tokens or seats, or in the case of AWS, however you like. Even though 2% will pay you, you can still capture value if you have an attentive audience. As you think about conversion to paid or freemiums, try not to leave any uncaptured value on the edges.

Payment Features 306

Payment Features Subscription B2B Mobile 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2022

The role of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Marketplace is becoming increasingly important. “45% From the first quarter of 2018 to the last several years, there has been a nearly 8X increase in software helping companies drive existing customer outcomes. Demand is up for software that drives customer time to value .

Software Review 245

Software Review Software Azure Cloud 245

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Look no further than AWS Re:Invent where Amazon announced an entire suite of Machine Learning tools that compete with nearly every player in the ecosystem in every level of the stack. Startups begin to siphon off important but underserved segments of SaaS incumbent's customer bases. Data engineering is the new Customer Success.

Blockchain 183

Blockchain AWS Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 183

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 28, 2022

Hyperscalers Report Quarterly Earnings This week we saw AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google) and Azure (Microsoft) report earnings. Overall, it wasn’t pretty… AWS grew 28% when expectations were 30-31%. Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS Cost optimization & reporting 130

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

Did you catch our Customer Success and SaaS metrics crash-course webinar with leading SaaS expert Dave Kellogg, of Dave Kellogg Consulting ? We’d like to extend a huge thanks to Dave for his expert insights below, which will help you choose and use Customer Success and SaaS metrics in a more nuanced and purposeful way.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

But as you get bigger and more well-funded, participate in traditional field marketing strategies because they account for 40% of revenue at scale. You can run your own conference, but third-party events like AWS, Dreamforce, SaaStr, and others allow you to get 40% of your pipe from their ability to draw in the best in the industry.

Outsourcing Services 262

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 262

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Whether Customer Success or Sales should own the renewal, expansion, and upsell is a hot-button issue in today’s SaaS sphere. This Customer Success showdown, which took the form of an Oxford-style debate, was held at BIG RYG, ChurnZero’s annual Customer Success conference.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success SaaS Payments Sales 98

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. The Absolute Importance Of Putting Your Customers First Your biggest priority in series C and beyond is to own customer success. Your customers come first.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

So, it’s more customer-friendly, but it also has its pros and cons. What’s evolved over the years and is driven by hyper-scalers like Google Azure, AWS, Twilio, and Stripe is the consumption-based model. It’s a very customer-oriented approach — you pay for what you use, and closing a deal is the start of a journey.

Compensation 182

Compensation Sales Azure AWS 182

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success. Many of the tactics that everybody is using today hadn’t been invented yet. In the last ten years the playbook has been written and subsequently published.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now. We want to tell anybody that listens, you can save $100,000 on your AWS bill and demos are actually as high as they’ve ever been in late stage tech. We found something that works. Jason Lemkin: Got it.

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

Resource expansion: entice the customer to store more data or use more of your service (ex. AWS S3, EMR, etc). And of course, in many cases, the customer success team is responsible for this type of expansion. New Relic, Twilio, Heroku). Cross-sell: sell adjacent products that increases the value of the core product (ex.

Churn 125

Churn AWS Startup Revenue 125

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The wave of SaaS companies that built themselves on the likes of AWS and Azure have reinforced the pre-eminence of cloud computing. And that changes a lot: how we think about marketing, how we think about what our product is and how we think about what customer success actually is…This shift moves us from brand promiscuity to brand loyalty.”.

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

CloudGeometry

MARCH 22, 2022

If the architecture specifies tracking of user-level activity, it’s not difficult to slice-and-dice the log data to select for a user parameter (such as with a JWT token ), or using tags to match user/tenant activity to the per unit billing that AWS itemizes in your monthly cloud bill.

DevOps as a Service 130

DevOps as a Service Software Delivery Well Architected Framework AWS 130

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

And if you think about AWS, if you think about the rise of cloud data warehousing, that is a big technology change and a big game changer for a lot of companies. We’ve had many cases where someone automates a few things at a company, someone else notices say, “Oh my gosh, can you help me over in my customer success team?”

Scale 181

Scale Marketing AWS Artificial Intelligence 181

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. Some folks might have feared that investors would hate usage-based pricing because customers aren’t locked into a subscription.

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Anthony : I’ll add more too and this sounds like a sponsored answer, but customer success becomes even more important as we sort of think about where growth is coming from. Obviously, marketing and investments are expensive and we know the cost to keep a customer is obviously a lot less. The customers love her, right?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 246

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

The mission statement of Customer Success is simple: ensure customers realize value from your products or services. A defining characteristic that separates Customer Success from Customer Support is being proactive in delivering that value. Impact on Customer Success teams.

Customer Success 43

Customer Success Revenue AWS Retention 43

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

We have, as you all should have, the customer success teams. They’re onboarding, and their job is to make the customer successful and help them use the features of the product. Then, bam, they move to a competitor in one day. Have you been able to find that? Dharmesh : We tweaked some of that out.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

This has consequences both for the cost of onboarding a customer, as well as the cost of maintaining the customer during the discovery period. Think beyond the cloud about what other resources you need to invest in making customers successful with your platform.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

So one place would be in your customer success organization. We were doing more customer support, less customer success. It was less about making sure that customers were happy and individually reaching out to them. So that means retooling your customer success organization. Thanks Allie.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB compliance 222

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Low touch you’re gonna talk a lot about what we call customer success teams. Customer success teams are basically about building at scale this self-serve engine. That’s typically the AWS model, depending on how much space you take, service space, you will pay more.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246