Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn?
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...Dear SaaStr: How Do You Handle Customers That Want to Build It In-House?
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Handle Customers That Want to Build It In-House? Be “Cool”. What I mean is, we all go through this, at least, a lot of us. When you first build a start-up, it’s often feature-poor, with little-to-no brand. Internal IT teams sometimes think they...Small Deals at Large Customers. Hooray!! And 100% At Risk. (Updated)
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 deal that...You Don’t Do Nearly Enough to Help With Customer Migration. But It’s Magic If You Do.
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 🇮🇱...Customer Success In The Era Of Efficiency: A Deep Dive With HubSpot, ChurnZero and SaaStr
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 a SaaS Startup?
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...Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr: Answer Your Top 10 2024 Customer Success Questions
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.
The $2 Million(*) Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team (Updated)
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...Dear SaaStr: What is The Average Ratio of Support Staff to Customer Count in SaaS?
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...Dear SaaStr: How Do I Convince My Customers with Monthly plans to Upgrade to Annual Plans?
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...5 Predictions about the Future of Customer Success in 2024 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
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.