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.

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Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 353

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. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. Everything customer facing that required product expertise lived under the umbrella.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 297

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales? Another question we asked in the survey is the most senior title leading the customer success, sales and marketing teams. The VP titles remain in customer success in marketing. In the earliest days, leads head all of these teams.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 363

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. And he said to me, “You know I don’t really know that much about Customer Success.” Customer Success should be a deep partner with sales, but have their own KPIs.

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Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Sales 300

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

So Customer Success becomes the default Gap Filler. After all, everyone else has abandoned the customer. I see this way too often as SaaS companies scale past $15m-$20m ARR, and hire a very process-oriented VP of CS / CCO. But they are, at best, usually just jumping in on a spot issue. Don’t allow this.

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Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing 334

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO @ Stack Overflow recently shared with our community the four key pillars he feels are necessary to propel a company to scale upward. Is your product sound, and does it solve a big problem for customers, enough for you to scale? The four key pillars he lays out are: Product market fit & expansion.

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Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 326

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

or so at the very latest, youll need to start hiring dedicated customer success professionals. Assume 1 per $1m in ARR, youll need to scale a team of 5 at least to get to $10m in ARR. And reps take time to scale. And youll need a real QA team as you scale. And youll need a few managers to manage them.

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Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 265

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2023

The rise of customer success as a new, empowered function. Human support remained imporant, at least for paying customers. Customer Success has in many cases morphed into part of the sales team. And with that, the classic role of making customers happy with humans is in retreat.

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Customer Success Scale AI Pricing 340

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. The post Transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth and Scaling to $100M ARR With Apollo’s CEO Tim Zheng appeared first on SaaStr.

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Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 166

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

So we’ve been talking about customer success at SaaStr longer than almost anyone else, going back to our very first posts in 2012, including on Second Order Revenue. is a number to back into, at scale. It’s a reminder CSM staffing overall is actually fairly thin at scale. CLTV Isn’t The Whole Story.

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Customer Success Scaling Management Churn 205

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. But now, I see that if you can hire a great COO as soon as possible after that, you can scale faster. is one of the top ways to help all of us scale faster. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customer success the core growth engine. The KPI Alignment System Have customers email explicit performance expectations Build custom reporting dashboards Weekly cross-team optimization meetings Formal performance reviews 2.

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Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 269

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. The Second Most Important SaaS Hire? But the results?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

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 305

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 305

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies.

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Construction Scale SaaS Travel 255

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Lesson #1: Invest In Customer Support Early Cloudinary strongly believes that customer success and support are enablers of PLG growth and aren’t just a cost center. If you think about Cloudinary’s core audience in the beginning, developers, the fifth employee they hired was the first person in the customer success group.

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Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 317

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Your First Enterprise Customer Lucid’s first Enterprise customer was a large publishing house in the U.K. It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer. You can only handle a limited amount of hand-holding and customizations.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

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.

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Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 323

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. Less Than 1% of Grafana Labs’ Users Pay The 6,000 to a million ratio is staggering regarding how much usage there is vs. paid customers. Probably not.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 298

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2023

Because many CS leaders view the job once you scale as primarily one of process. That their job is to process customers, to attempt to drive NPS up (and these days, really more upsell up). I don’t think you can expect most CS teams at scale to be product experts or problem solvers. More problem process managers.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Leadership 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

On a sales front, how do you evolve past founder-led sales, or together with it, so that you can scale your organization? PST, Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico, shares how to scale beyond founder-led sales on your path to Series B. It’s not a repeatable process, and it doesn’t scale. Time is the enemy.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2022

No matter whether your business has two clients or two thousand, you want to give them the best customer experience possible. But how can you build a product that provides a superior experience across vastly different scales? . Their success as a business has been grounded in how they prioritize the success of their customers.

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Customer Success Scale SMB Enterprise 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2021

SaaStr Scale 2021 is starting soon. 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.

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Scale VP of Engineering Scaling SMB 279

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.

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Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales 290

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? And as you scale, the role should likely end there. Traditional customer success, and/or a specific team for deployments, can take the baton from there. Pretty darn common.

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Scale Engineering Customer Success Startup 279

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 13, 2023

How do you scale a product organization quickly? 5: It’s More Than Just Product When thinking about scaling your product organization, look for three pillars. You want to build that from the ground up before you scale. That combination of three pillars will help you scale. Success requires alignment on the execution.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Construction 290

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 247

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 247

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

You can talk about the roadmap or sales strategy until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t have the team to do it at scale, there’s no point in talking a ‘big game.’ For years there’s been a QA space where businesses were manually grading thousands of customer success agents.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 311

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

At SaaStr AI Day 2025, Jim Palmer, Dialpad’s Chief AI Officer (and co-founder of TalkIQ, which Dialpad acquired), shared the tactical playbook they used to build and scale their AI capabilities. Here are the key learnings every SaaS company should know. Make this decision early.

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AI Scale Government compliance 268

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. As are you.

Scale 280

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 280

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.

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Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 300

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2022

Especially after interviewing 50+ customer success managers over the past few years. The thing is in SaaS, if your product is pretty good and it has a strong market position, you’ll end up with decent NRR even with a mediocre Customer Success team. But — it’s one that that is best not neglected.

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Customer Success Metrics Scale Retention 264

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. Scaling your customer success team.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Leadership 246

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. When is it time to add frontline managers?

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2021

Q: Can the majority of a SaaS company’s revenues come from existing customers? Yes, especially once you are at scale. 73% of Salesforce’s new bookings come from its existing customers. UiPath is at $600m ARR now growing 65% a year … and 75% of its new revenue / bookings are from existing customers.

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Scaling Revenue Enterprise SaaS 313