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 289

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 289

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 306

Customer Success AI Pricing Enterprise 306

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 299

Metrics Churn Engineering Innovation 299

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 246

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 246

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

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 62

Metrics SMB Scale B2C 62

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 304

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 304

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 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 306

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

DECEMBER 27, 2024

The Beginning of The End of Customer Success, SDRs, and Support Agents #9. And a few other related metrics, JIC of interest: 33% of our views came from SEO / search 15% of our views came from our own SaaStr newsletters 8% of our views came from LinkedIn and X/Twitter. How Would a Person Start a Venture Capital Fund? #8.

Venture Capital 260

Venture Capital Startup Pricing Customer Success 260

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 323

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 323

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 328

Customer Success Compensation Churn Enterprise 328

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

In 2024, for customer success in SaaS, what’s “good” NRR? Who should Customer Success report into? Questions like this and many others are the most common questions asked of SaaStr Fan Fave and expert on Customer Success, Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta, and SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin.

Customer Success 314

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Benchmarks 314

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Delivering a cohesive and die-hard customer experience doesn’t happen accidentally. Customer success is a mindset or a continuous journey before it’s a department that takes an analytical approach towards retaining and constructing long-lasting relationships with customers. Who should be your first customer success hire?

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling Construction 264

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 340

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 340

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

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 278

Customer Success Retention Company Culture Metrics 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2024

What metrics is PE looking for today? ” Is Customer Success Dead, Now That it Reports to Sales? Dave and Jason have slightly opposing views on this matter, as Dave is a true believer in customer success. I think customer success / account management is a specialization of sales that you argued for.

Headcount 274

Headcount SaaS AI Pricing 274

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 299

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 299

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 288

Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales 288

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

DECEMBER 29, 2023

Q: As you scale, how metrics-oriented should the company be? ARR asks Jason how he sees the best companies steering into metrics and KPIs to drive performance at a leadership level. Some of his team are more metrics-oriented while others aren’t. Fire anyone that isn’t metrics-oriented. Literally,” Jason says. I doubt it.”

Scale 289

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 289

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

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

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 255

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 255

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 278

Metrics Banking Benchmarks Investment 278

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

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

In this week’s Workshop Wednesday , Salesforce Ventures Investor, Jessica Bartos, shares the 5 metrics every SaaS company should care about in any market environment, especially the one we’re currently in. Growth Is Still Number One Growth is still the number one metric, but it’s not the only one. You do that by showing momentum.

Metrics 264

Metrics Marketing SaaS SMB 264

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #4. How Codeium /Windsurf Built A Billion-Dollar AI Company and a Winning Sales Machine #2. The 10-Point Checklist For When You Sell Your Company With Founder Collective #3.

Scale 165

Scale AI Sales Customer Support 165

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

MARCH 11, 2021

What you don’t want to do is push your VP of Sales to also own Customer Success and retention if she just wants to close. The post What Core Metric Should Your VP of Sales Be Responsible For? If she just wants to close, let her just do that. A little bit more on the job spec itself here: What a Great VP Sales Actually Does.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Metrics Sales Churn 279

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

And in many cases, also seen the number of human customer success reps already reduced by -20% to -30%. Can AI replace almost everything a human does today in customer support? I don’t know but perhaps what’s just as important is what customers are expecting, thinking, and buying based on.

Customer Support 207

Customer Support AI Software Engineering Engineering 207

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Sessions typically focus on real metrics, strategies, and lessons learned, not theoretical concepts. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Get out of the home office. Pull together the team.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

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. Sales teams lose leverage.

SaaS Payments 276

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 276

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

Build the Right Team for Enterprise Success Enterprise selling requires a fundamentally different skillset. Focus on Land-and-Expand Economics Don’t obsess over initial deal size.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

Totango

NOVEMBER 21, 2024

In a world where customer expectations are sky-high and data complexity is ever-increasing, Totango Unison is the game-changer that customer success and post-sales teams have been waiting for. Welcome to the future of customer success with Unison. Today, it’s about lighting the path to growth.

Customer Success 62

Customer Success AI Churn Data Analysis 62

ChurnZero

JANUARY 10, 2025

While those consumer innovations may still be a few years away, 2025 is sure to be a year of creativity and change in the B2B technology space, particularly in customer success (CS). And even more specifically, in the sphere of digital customer success. How are these digital programs impacting revenue?

Trends 52

Trends Customer Success Technical Review Artificial Intelligence 52