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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Dear SaaStr: Who Should I Hire First to Get My Customer Success Function Going? Key criteria for first customer success hire: – smart – truly understands and cares about the problem your product solves– lives and breathes making customers happy Rest, you can give on — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) August 20, 2023…
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As a VP of sales at early stage SaaS companies, what’s your best advice for reducing churn rate? A few things that always work to drive down churn in the early days — and later: Make sure you have a strong Head of Customer Success … whose #1 goal is reducing churn. Too many early…
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Jason Lemkin, CEO and Founder of SaaStr, recently answered our audience’s most pressing questions about the present and future of startups. Here is part 2 of the cold truth about SaaS in 2023.

Jason Lemkin, CEO and Founder of SaaStr, recently answered our audience’s most pressing questions about the present and future of startups. Here is part 1 of the cold truth about SaaS in 2023.

Hande Cilingir CEO of Insider and Merve Nazlioglu, CMO of Insider, share the 10 game-changing customer marketing tactics they used to achieve to 140% NRR (Net Retention Revenue).

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. While now mainstream, our early thinking on the power of Second Order Revenue, in many ways, informed a generation of SaaS entrepreneurs and the whole CS space. But … things have…
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If you do raise prices, how about also adding more value than price increase? E.g., add: – More great features– Close feature gaps– Better support– New integrations, partners– Better API, security– New stakeholders, dashboards, analytics Turns a Rip-Off into a Good Deal — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) June 4, 2023 For the last…
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Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. But sometimes, the road less traveled is the path to success. In an eye-opening workshop, WorkRamp CEO Ted Blosser shares how to overcome setbacks, trust your customers, and defy traditional wisdom to…
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In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge. With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Wiz, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies focused on security solutions, was one of them. The company helps enterprises internationally with contextual and actionable insights…
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Everyone usually gets pretty good at segmenting customers by ACV. Large, Medium, and Small. Or at least by splitting up sales-driven and self-service revenue. Or enterprise vs smaller customer. And later, we often start segmenting by vertical and industry. More of you right now should be putting that aside a bit and segmenting your customers…
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In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, continues a mini-series on founder-led sales with Colin Zima, founder and CEO of Omni. Omni is trying to build the next-generation business intelligence (BI) platform. In a year’s time, they’ve built a team with more than 150 years of experience in…
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Do you want to avoid the common pitfalls of scaling a startup? Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, shares part two of his 10 top mistakes in 10 years at the company. The first five mistakes many startups make can be found here and include: Not holding leaders to the highest standard Not betting on your…
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Scaling a company comes with all kinds of hiccups and failures. Sometimes the best way to avoid hard-to-fix mistakes is by hearing how other people flubbed it while they were scaling. In this week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Weds at 10 a.m. PST, Nick Mehta, the CEO of almost $200M ARR Gainsight, shares the top…
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Former CEO and founder of Yext and current CEO and founder of Roam, Howard Lerman, shares successful strategies and lessons learned building two successful startups with Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, in this week’s episode of CRO Confidential. Typically, sales leaders are the primary focus of CRO Confidential, but increased demand for this concept…
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