Customer success is your product. Your product is customer success. Period, end of story. It’s time to change the culture of expectation for customer success. Having worked with products that had incredible product-market fit (PMF) and products that didn’t, I can tell you that perfectly executed customer success plays do not make or break a […]
Is It Time to Let That Person Go?
I have had many conversations (far too many to count) with managers and leaders who are trying to decide if it’s time to let someone go. The decision to keep investing in someone to try and nurture them, and coach them up to expectations, is often a gut-wrenching roller coaster of emotions and energy. But […]
30/60/90 Day Sales Ramp Sample
If it’s time to hire the first sales rep for your company you are probably nervous and excited. As you should be. Find the right person, and you’ve accomplished a big step that can help propel your company’s growth. Hire the wrong person and you’ve wasted a lot of time and energy and probably stalled […]
Does a Product-Led Growth Company Still Need a Sales Force?
Think about some of the online tools you can’t live without. Chances are, you backup your work to Dropbox, keep your colleagues updated on your progress via Slack, and automate your marketing emails with a service like Mailchimp. And what all these companies have in common, according to Forbes, is that they’re product-led growth companies. […]
Why Selling Authentically is Your Best Bet for Customer Retention
There’s no better way to ensure a customer bails on your solution than to make promises you can’t keep. And while it’s only natural to want to say a solution is better, stronger, smarter, and faster than the other guy’s, statements like that (if they’re not true) are likely to attract bad fit customers who […]
A SaaS Customer Success Team Org Chart Example
You can scale your SaaS customer success organization in a fairly predictable manner. The trick is to scale just slightly ahead of revenue, and to get creative to solve your most pressing problems. Here are some considerations and a few sample org charts to show you how. The 1st example is the most simple approach […]
Startup Life: Love it or Leave it.
Staff your startup with people who love the pace, rhythm and unpredictable nature of starting and growing a company. It’s really not for everyone. When you have people who just don’t get what it’s like to work in a startup environment, there will be a lot of complaining, a lot of bloated processes (that become […]
To Reduce SaaS Churn, Help Your Customers 24/7
Sometimes big questions get floated like, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What’s my passion?” or “How can we reduce our SaaS customer churn?” If you have ever dealt with customer churn, reduced customer churn, worked in customer success or run a SaaS company, you know the enormity of this question. It takes a village […]
50 SaaS Sales VP Interview Questions I Always Ask
Yes, I really ask every single one of these when I interview candidates for sales leadership. Last week I posted some thoughts about what a new sales leader should focus on in their first 90 days. Since then a couple of people reached out and asked me to share my favorite interview questions for a […]
An Annual Sales Compensation Letter Example
The first time I did quota and commission planning I shared it with my team in a Monday morning meeting. One of the reps said innocuously, “When are you sending us our annual comp letters?”. I had no clue what they meant, but I nodded my head and told them to expect it any day. […]
