SaaStr

JULY 14, 2023

This does drive me nuts as a customer of SaaS products, when I talk to the CS team and especially the CS leadership of SaaS products at $50m-$200m+ ARR … and they literally not only have no idea how to solve my problem, but often don’t even fully understand it. The post Customer Success: Do They Need to Be Product Experts?

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Leadership 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

The most important leadership framework is to establish and grow this team culture. Without it to lean on, other frameworks simply won’t be as successful. Set and maintain a quarterly cadence for success across all teams and team members. A high growth, high-performing sales team’s success rests on strong frameworks.

Scale 265

Scale Leadership Sales Hiring Sales 265

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Under his product leadership, Procore has grown exponentially, went public in 2021, and recently crossed the coveted $1B ARR milestone. Balanced Metrics : While they track traditional SaaS metrics, they also measure customer success indicators specific to the construction industry.

Construction 255

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 255

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

JULY 18, 2024

How can you bridge the gap between sales and tech to drive customer success? The 3 Building Blocks The three building blocks that bridge the gap between sales and Field CTOs are: Product knowledge Balance Trust Building Block #1: Product Knowledge Field CTOs must work closely with sales from a customer perspective. . #1:

CTO Coach 306

CTO Coach CTO Technical Review Customer Success 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Customer Success is a team sport – we play well with Sales and Solution Architecture.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

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.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

This inefficiency stemmed from the high costs associated with maintaining sales development representatives (SDRs), customer success managers (CSMs), and account executives. Strategic Transformation The company’s leadership, including CEO Tim Sang, recognized that their challenges extended beyond typical growing pains.

Scale 166

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 166

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Bringing your leadership team to SaaStr Annual allows for compressed learning experiences that would otherwise take months to acquire.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

ChurnZero

JANUARY 6, 2025

Whats the one thing that wont change in customer success this year? So how should you position yourself for 2025s incoming customer success trendsand should you be nervous, optimistic, or a cautious blend of both? ” So what 2025 customer success trends can we anticipate? The pace of change itself.

Trends 52

Trends Customer Success Scale SaaS 52

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

For us, that means including a clear understanding of the challenges and obstacles facing AEs, SDRs, CSMs and Revenue leadership. The NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology has even provided guidance on how to handle COVID-19 discussions with customers and prospects. .

Scale 359

Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 359

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Intriguing Session Slides: Last but not least: Marketing SaaStr Session #5: “The How and Why of Category Creation and Leadership with BlackLine’s CMO”. Customer Success Sessions at SaaStr 2021. Presented By: Andres Botero – CMO – Blackline – @BlackLine. Video: HERE.

Scale 358

Scale Marketing SMB Leadership 358

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. I still believe a CEO should “do it all” in terms of building a decent management team first before hiring a COO. But now, I see that if you can hire a great COO as soon as possible after that, you can scale faster.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2024

Who is Peter Gassner CEO and Founder of SaaS Leader Veeva Systems Peter Gassner has established himself as a significant figure in enterprise software, particularly through his leadership at Veeva Systems. They expanded into quality, regulatory, clinical and more – capturing more and more of each customer’s tech stack.

SaaS 265

SaaS Leadership Cloud Enterprise 265

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. This shifted from doing odd jobs to a deep focus on customer success and scaling teams around customer success. Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 297

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. Whatever the decade it originated, if you fast forward to today, this concept certainly crosses many customer success leaders’ minds as they’re considering growing their teams. So, why does any of this matter in customer success?

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2020

Sales breeds leadership. Someone to take over the hackey way you pick features, drive engineering to get there, and also, to live at the intersection of sales, customer sucess and dev. A “head” of product that sales, engineering and customer success won’t respect … can’t get the job done. You can’t go too junior here.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Management Leadership Engineering 300

ChurnZero

APRIL 25, 2025

And since customer lifetime value and NRR are integral to broader revenue goals, it is time for CS to embrace the predictive, in which strong forecasting begets lower churn. Weve outlined a process for data driven customer success renewals forecasting, plus some extra tips on how ChurnZero can help. Where can you start?

Forecasting 52

Forecasting Customer Success Payments Data 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Customer success is all about outcomes. What does NRR have to do with customer success? PST — Former VP of Customer Success and current founder and Managing Partner at Success Venture Partners, John Gleeson, shares his lessons learned scaling customer success from $1M to $300M in ARR.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 183

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

They need to hear the customer and use that feedback to refine products. There’s also a management and leadership layer to enable and coach individual contributors. On average, as companies move up toward the $15M ARR mark, they’re doubling their team size on the sales, marketing, and customer success side.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 2, 2021

24 SaaStr 195: How To Truly Understand The Politics of Selling to Enterprise, Why Current Org Charts Are Upside Down and What Your Customer Success Team Has To Be Obsessed with Doing with Dan Reich, Founder & CEO @ Troops.ai. #23

Scale 315

Scale Benchmarks Enterprise Leadership 315

ChurnZero

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Should you be charging for customer success? Why not take customer-facing services as seriously as our products? It’s also a major strategic shift that comes with plenty of challenges, including internal and customer resistance. Charging for customer success: the pros and cons.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Enablement Onboarding Leadership 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 24, 2025

Too many customer teams are still relying on mismatched technologyand it’s holding them back. ChurnZeros latest Customer Success Leadership Study found that technology adoption shifts depending on company size by revenue. A CRM is a great tool for sales operations, but it falls short for customer success needs.

Technology 52

Technology Customer Success Scale ChatGPT 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

We get hundreds of thousands of support tickets…lines of feedback through the product, and of course, we interview our customers to learn how they’re using the product and what they’re looking at in the product.”. However, if you want to build a successful product, you must also create a best-in-class service experience as well.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Company Culture B2C 246

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

But the drive and passion remained, and leadership didn’t give up. Because when we looked at our data, we saw that we had much more success sub 5,000 employees,” Blosser says. Leadership introduced a high-velocity playbook and refocused the company downstream. Sometimes it can take longer.”

Scale 246

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 246

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2020

Most SaaS companies will have existing customers. Some of these customers will be insulated from the virus. Customer success and account management teams should focus on understanding customer health. Sixth, leadership. Great leadership is different than great management. Others may benefit from it.

Startup 247

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods 247

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2022

Many founders find themselves confident in one area of their business, whether it be the product, customer success, or, in Schuck’s case, sales. However, leadership soon realized that they needed to put more thought into unifying the cultures, and Schuck made sure to preserve some of the original DiscoverOrg culture in the merge.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Acquisition Investment Leadership 279

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 13, 2024

A $1B Acquisition with a Singular Leader for Both Sales and Customer Success In 2017, tech leader Vikas Bhambry found himself at a crossroads. Kustomer, a SaaS startup navigating leadership changes, unexpectedly handed him the reins to both sales and customer experience/success. Lets get into it.

Scale 109

Scale Sales Hiring Acquisition Customer Success 109

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

But what I learned, after years of procrastinating on tough moves for our leadership team, is that the leaders’ teams suffer greatly through that inaction. Lesson: Be REALLY careful about custom deals and make sure they are worth it. Mistake: Not investing in Digital Customer Success early The cobbler’s kids often have no shoes.

Sales Hiring 331

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Scaling 331

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

Per the 2024 Customer Success Leadership Study , 51% of CS teams are responsible for renewal revenue and 41% for expansion revenue. We are excited for this recognition as a Leader in the Gartner 2024 Magic Quadrant for Customer Success Management Platforms report*. and/or its affiliates in the U.S.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Merchant Services Technical Review 52

Totango

AUGUST 13, 2024

At Totango + Catalyst, we made a strategic decision to challenge the script on revenue priorities, empowering customer success managers (CSMs)—those mostly intimately aware of customer needs and goals—to own core renewals, expansions, and upsells. The results? They’re critical for execution.

Customer Success 101

Customer Success Compensation Management Consulting 101

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Examples include: Thought Leadership : Actively source and share opportunities for customers to showcase their expertise. Personalized Event Recommendations : Demonstrate a deeper understanding of customer needs by recommending relevant events that align with their growth goals. Is customer success COGS or OpEx?

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

ChurnZero

JANUARY 17, 2025

When your CFO doesnt see the direct link between customer success and the financial metrics they track, its harder to persuade them to invest in CSwhich can ultimately lead to preventable churn. What are the top takeaways for working more effectively with your CFO as a customer leader?

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Benchmarks Headcount Scale 52

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2023

Mistake 10: Not Being Yourself A lot of leadership success is figuring out who you are and leaning into whatever you’re good at. Scaling a business will be different for everyone because every business is different. Sure, you have to strive for it, but what matters is how much you’re growing going forward.

Scale 278

Scale Leadership Customer Success Scaling 278

Totango

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

Totango’s customer success software drives cross-functional enterprise teams toward enhanced productivity, retention, and growth. The best of customer success At Totango, we know just how important it is for customers to receive not only a high-quality product but one that has been thoroughly vetted by their peers.

Customer Success 118

Customer Success Software Review Technical Review Enterprise 118

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2021

But the entrepreneurs who take their work to the next level by publishing content about what they’re building at the earliest stage will give themselves a sharp edge in the thought leadership department. . You’ll want them to be a powerful individual contributor but also exhibit leadership in their own right.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Sales 253

Totango

NOVEMBER 10, 2023

As a leader in customer success, who’s your friend in the C-suite? Is the customer journey mapping exercise a worthwhile effort? Who owns the customer community for your organization? 2023, Chris Dishman , Totango’s SVP of Global Customer Success, hosted the lively Hot Takes! We hope so!

Customer Success 104

Customer Success Construction Customer Lifetime Value Leadership 104