customer success

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. You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.

Dear SaaStr: How often will a sales engineer also wear a customer success hat in an early stage of an SaaS startup? Pretty darn common. The “traditional” role of a sales engineer is to support the sales team through the close of a deal. And as you scale, the role should likely end there. Traditional…
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Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr, answer your Top 10 SaaS Customer Success Questions of 2024 and what they mean going into 2024.

In SaaS, there are a lot of great “rules” that do make sense overall but can be confusing or borderline misleading at times. E.g., Sales +Marketing Expenses < First Year ACV = Success? I.e., keeping the Magic Number at or above 1.0. Great rule — if you have the capital to fund it. But maybe…
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Is it the end of an era for customer success in SaaS? SaaStr CEO Nick Mehta joins SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share their prediction for 2024.

So it does seem like some of the biggest changes to the human side of SaaS are now coming. 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…
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In part one of this week’s Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) with SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, he answered the community’s questions about whether all anyone cares about is AI anymore, investor appetites going into 2024, vertical SaaS, and thriving as a solo founder. Catch up on the first half here if you missed it. In part…
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So I think 2023 may mark The End of Customer Success as We Knew It. What happened? At least 3 core changes: #1. 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…
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  Dear SaaStr: What are the most effective ways of increasing SaaS activation rates? In the early and middle days in customer success, we tend to talk about several core goals and KPIs: Driving up NPS. This always works. More here. Logo retention. Important. Drive it up. Net revenue retention. This is the mathematical magic…
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Dear SaaStr: Who Should Our First Head of Customer Success Report To? Ah, who should Customer Success report to. It’s not super simple. There are generally 3 options in the early and middle days: CEO. VP of Sales (once you have one) and/or later, CRO once you add one. VP of Something Else. Finance sometimes….
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