SaaStr

MAY 19, 2022

I remember about 24 months back I asked one of the very best VPs of Sales I know to help me find a VP of Customer Success. This VP of Sales has built legendary teams, and his Directors and Managers have gone on to run many of the top SaaS companies out there. The best VPs of Sales are closers. Or want to, really.

Customer Success 293

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Sales 293

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If a sales rep closed a deal, A customer success manager should take it over. An open question around smaller customers is how do you staff up Customer Success for them — if at all. And as startups scale, many try to automate away support and success for the smaller accounts.

Customer Success 353

Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 353

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

A little ways back Databricks VP of Sales Heather Akuiyibo joined SaaStr to share unexpected things that work well at Databricks GTM organization as well as some things that havent worked as well. Deep Dive: Unexpected Learnings Time Management as Competitive Advantage Most sales organizations guess how reps should spend their time.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 202

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

10 Ways AI Will Change Sales Forever. The #1 Thing That Makes Enterprise Customers See Value: A Great Dashboard #3. 10 Ways AI Is Going to Change Sales. The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #5. Top Posts: #1. Its Already Happening, In Fact. #2.

AI 268

AI Venture Capital Sales B2B 268

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 9, 2022

A decade ago, Gainsight championed the creation of the customer success category. People curious and passionate about customer success convened at the Pulse conference to debate customer success. Ten years hence, customer success continues to evolve.

Customer Success 336

Customer Success Outsourced Development Technical Support Startup 336

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Getting customer success right is one of the most powerful levers in SaaS: Upsell + expansion with existing customers costs 62% less than acquiring new customers ($0.63 new customer CAC, per KeyBanc 2021 Private SaaS Company Survey ). upsell + expansion CAC vs $1.67 Video: Intriguing Session Slides: .

VP of Engineering 363

VP of Engineering Customer Success Engineering Retention 363

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2021

Nick Mehta, CEO of Customer Success leader Gainsight, recently did a short post above on his Top 7 takeaways talking with customer success leader for the first time in-person in a long time. I love having NRR be the #1 metric for Customer Success. I love having NRR be the #1 metric for Customer Success.

Customer Success 359

Customer Success Trends Retention Metrics 359

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2025

Heres how Id break it down: 0 t o $ 1M ARR: Founder-Led Everything Sales : Founders should lead sales. No VP of Sales yetdont even think about it. Having said that, if you have a steady stream of leads and customers, you really can’t hire a great VP of Demand Gen / Growth too early. More on that here.

Sales Hiring 250

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Scale 250

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

A gap opens up when: – Sales abandons the customer the moment deal is closed – Support too reactive & slow to solve real issues – Deployment harder than should be. What I mean is, with most SaaS companies, there’s just a huge customer workflow break. So Customer Success becomes the default Gap Filler.

Customer Success 332

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing 332

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2022

Customer Success has gotten worse over the past few years. The best Customer Success teams are still amazing. A head of customer success at a unicorn this week asked us for a meeting after turning over team — and literally knew nothing about us. We’ve been a customer for 6 years.

Customer Success 324

Customer Success AWS Systems Review Software Review 324

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2025

B2B Startups Spend 15% of Revenue on Sales and 10% on Marketing, Per SaaS Capital #4. Built a Bottom-Up AI SaaS Without a Single Sales Rep #5. The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #4. The Problem with Small But Mighty AI Start-Ups #2. 100+ Are in B2B. #3.

Scale 147

Scale Customer Success Scaling AI 147

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.

CTO Coach 300

CTO Coach CTO Technical Review Customer Success 300

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 300

Customer Success AI Pricing Enterprise 300

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

2025 is year that AI takes over all of support and customer success that isnt sales. A lot of support is questions and problems from existing customers. But, where support is really sales, humans will handle it still. The same is happening, just more slowly across customer success. It still is today.

Customer Success 162

Customer Success Customer Support AI Trends 162

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

So ChurnZero put out a great new report surveying 1,037 customer success professionals. It can be a bit tricky to implement if you don’t have high alignmment between your VP of Sales and your VP of CS, but you should still try to do this. Having Sales own them usually creates the most pain. Grab it here.

Customer Success 347

Customer Success Headcount Churn Revenue 347

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2023

I’ve talked with three CEOs at leading vendors in sales and post-sales at $200m+ in ARR the past few weeks and they’ve all reinforced these are some of the biggest changes in a generation. What we’ve seen in the first 15 years of SaaS: Specialization in sales. Segment reps, and have closers close. Everyone now.

Customer Success 339

Customer Success Scale AI Pricing 339

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 283

Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales 283

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 284

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 284

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How will Ai Change Sales in The Next 12 Months? It’s already fundamentally remade the contact center and post-sales. And it’s just getting there in sales. This will take sales calls from 10% being great to 95% being great because the AI will always be prepared and accurate.

AI 157

AI Scale Sales SMB 157

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2023

So we’ve been writing about the power of a strong, funded, dedicated customer success organization since the beginning of SaaStr way back in 2012. I now dread calls and Zooms with Customer Success — and I’m not alone. Having CS report to sales. This turns it into a sales function — not a success function.

Customer Success 293

Customer Success Pricing Revenue Sales 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How often will a sales engineer also wear a customer success hat in an early stage of an SaaS startup? The “traditional” role of a sales engineer is to support the sales team through the close of a deal. Stick around until the customer is fully deployed, at least. Pretty darn common.

Scale 274

Scale Engineering Customer Success Startup 274

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense to Have Post-Sales Functions Report into Sales? In theory, why not let sales “keep” the customer longer? They already know the customer, after all. Even if having a CRO own post-sales and CS is becoming much more common these days. Because most great VPs of Sales are closers.

Sales Hiring 318

Sales Hiring Sales Customer Success Revenue 318

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 320

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 320

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

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

For restaurants, it’s the back end, front end, point of sale, payroll, ERP, and workforce management. Mangomint has one onboarding manager for every two sales reps, but with no contracts and a 30-day free trial, onboarding starts during the trial. Most sales reps hate it. Daniel talks to at least 5-10 customers every week.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 257

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2024

So in the earlier days especially, you’ll be tempted to lean on the sales team to do more than just … sell. Especially because the first 1-2 successful reps you hire will often be a bit of a product expert, and be great at really understanding customer problems. It has some positives, the more you ask sales to do.

Sales Hiring 322

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Customer Success 322

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

AUGUST 7, 2023

Up this week is Jonah Mandel, VP of Sales and Customer Success at Capchase. The post Uncharted: Capchase’s VP of Sales and Customer Success on What Top Performing SaaS Companies Are Doing Now appeared first on SaaStr. Give the episode a listen here.

Customer Success 245

Customer Success SaaS Sales Development 245

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.

Customer Success 326

Customer Success Compensation Churn Enterprise 326

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2024

You should find, hire, and manage the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product and Engineering and even Finance yourself. I think $1.5m ARR is too early for an experienced COO in 95 cases out of 100 — unless it’s a total rocketship and you plan to be at $10m+ ARR within 12 months.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Startup Finance Engineering 299

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

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. The SMB sales team was incentivized purely on logo acquisition rather than revenue. With only 4% conversion by month two versus a 10% goal.

Revenue 293

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 293

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2023

So a little while back we had a deep dive on just how much of a product expert your VP of Sales needs to be, and your sales team in general. The bottom line is while views weren’t consistent, I can tell you VPs of Sales that don’t know the product close to cold … fail. More on that here. Trust me here.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Leadership 246

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2022

In Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy , I wrote about the importance of sizing contracts below customer needs to ensure customer success. Since then, I’ve spoken to many sales leaders & Lee Kirkpatrick who originally surfaced the concept during Office Hours on how to do this well.

Compensation 359

Compensation Sales Customer Success Retention 359

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

If you are sales-driven, youll usually stall out at $1.5m-$2m in ARR or so if you dont start growing the team to the next level, The First 50. Theres just physics here to get to $10m in ARR in a sales-led model, even a partially sales-led model: After $1.5m Youll need another sales rep at least per every $500k in new ARR.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 261

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2024

When Marc Benioff started Salesforce, he codified the sales playbook. Then Mark Roberge , former Hubspot CRO, wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula with deep insights into quota structures. The biggest challenge to that outlook is an increase in the sales cycle. That elongated sales cycle created pipeline supply shocks.

Venture Capital 331

Venture Capital Marketing AI SaaS 331

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

We’re rolling out the next wave of speakers for 2025 SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 in SF Bay: Bill Staples, CEO, Gitlab Josh Reeves, CEO, Gusto Eddie Kim, CTO & Head of AI, Gusto Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox Arvind Nithrakashyap, Co-Founder & CTO, Rubrik Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO, Snowflake Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe AI Jack Newton, CEO and Founder, (..)

New CTO 263

New CTO CTO AI Customer Success 263

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. Large Audience: Considered the biggest SaaS conference with a large number of attendees from leading SaaS companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

Software 243

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 243