Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You don’t. Instead, you drive it down. Each quarter. You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., by signing multiyear contracts). And you can drive it down. But you…
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So there’s kind of a mean exercise I do at board meetings. It doesn’t sound mean, I do it very kindly. But I’ll be honest, it’s a bit of a trick question. A VP of Sales will do a deal review and talk about how they closed a new epic logo for a small initial…
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When you ask customers to switch from an existing vendor to you … Do you offer to do ALL the work? The migration?The implementation?The integrations?The data mapping? If not, imagine all the friction you could remove if you did — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) February 19, 2024 So you can make fun…
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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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Dear SaaStr: What is The Average Ratio of Support Staff to Customer Count in SaaS? Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about it. Another 5%-7% go to core infrastructure costs…
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Dear SaaStr: How Do I Convince My Customers with Monthly plans to Upgrade to Annual Plans? My advice: Don’t. It’s too many calories expended for not enough benefit. Let me explain what I mean … Large customers only pay via invoices, especially for any deal of any material size (>$10k a year). Invoices have their…
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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 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 some best practices for selling a new product/service to your existing SaaS clients? First, make sure your NPS is high. And drive it even higher. Here’s the bottom line: if your NPS is say > 40 or so, a significant portion of your customers love you. If your NPS is say…
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Dear SaaStr: Should We Drop Customers That Complain Too Much? Sometimes, yes. But just as often, the ones that complain are the ones that care. And oftentimes, their complaints help focus you on the gaps you really do need to fix. One thing most SaaS companies get wrong in customer success is they don’t spend…
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If you get even 10 paying customers in your first 90 days in market, and they don't churn … You have something. Never, ever quit then. Even if you have no money.Even if the team isn't sure.Even if the competition is fierce.Even if they say it's too hard. — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  🇮🇱…
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So 2023 was a year where growth proved much harder than before, and many SaaS leaders turned up the screws on existing customers: Large price increases were everywhere We raised prices — without adding more value Customer Success teams turned into upsell teams Customers were threatened to sign long term contracts instead of monthly ones…
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