The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, dives into the ever-evolving world of customer success, sharing ten critical practices to modernize strategies. With SaaS rapidly transforming, he emphasizes the necessity of integrating sales with customer success to enhance client experiences. Nick also highlights the importance of focusing on net dollar retention and adapting to customer needs through technical proficiency. His insights stress that the right collaboration and data-driven approaches can prevent companies from becoming outdated in a competitive landscape.

Abhinav Asthana, CEO of Postman, discusses his journey in scaling a $5.6 billion company through a product-led approach. He highlights the importance of community and continuous innovation while navigating customer needs. Asthana emphasizes that product-market fit isn’t a destination but a continuous journey. He advocates for engaging customers directly to gather feedback and enhance satisfaction. His insights on team collaboration showcase how alignment across product management and sales can drive successful outcomes.

Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias, leads a customer service platform tailored for e-commerce. He reveals how Gorgias successfully acquired 10,000 SMB customers through innovative data-driven strategies. The conversation dives into the importance of tailored outbound sales techniques and optimizing customer experience using data insights. Romain shares key methods for measuring customer success and transforming it into a powerful marketing tool, showcasing how effective execution can drive impressive growth in a competitive landscape.

The biggest challenge in building a data infrastructure company over the next decade will be to redefine strategies for awareness, activation, user-centricity, and growth. While all of this is possible in theory, building categories with staying power in the age of the public cloud remains a lofty goal. Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder of Neo4j, will discuss the blueprint that's emerging and some of the lessons he's learned after launching Neo4j Aura, the company's fully-managed graph database as a service. Video: https://youtu.be/6vay3Ny3o0M Blog post: https://www.saastr.com/modern-infrastructure-companies-in-the-cloud-lessons-learned-building-a-2-billion-database-company-from-scratch-with-neo4js-ceo-emil-eifrem/ Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software. Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976 Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/ Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Kady Srinivasan, SVP and Global Head of Marketing at Klaviyo, brings over 20 years of marketing experience to the discussion. She delves into scaling marketing teams during hyper-growth, emphasizing the importance of brand storytelling and strategic hiring. Kady explores how to align marketing efforts with leadership while navigating customer insights. She also highlights the need for a culture of experimentation and intuition in marketing, balancing accountability with compassion to meet evolving demands.

Patrick Moran, CMO of Calendly with a rich background from New Relic and Salesforce, dives into the evolving landscape of product-led growth. He discusses how strategies have shifted from traditional sales to user-centric approaches, emphasizing the importance of flexibility in product offerings. Moran shares insights on adapting to market disruptions and the need for companies to focus on both individual developers and enterprise buyers. The conversation highlights the cultural shifts necessary for embracing this new paradigm in the SaaS industry.

We've talked a lot on SaaStr about how to hire a Great VP of Sales. And we'll keep talking about it — so long as 70% of first-time VPs of Sales don't make it 1 year. In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, shares his best advice for all first-time VPs coming into a SaaS startup. Video: https://youtu.be/_gWZxKwV44w Blog post: https://www.saastr.com/how-not-to-fail-as-a-first-time-vp-of-sales/

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization? Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, and Anoushka Vaswani, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, moderated a panel with Carlos Delatorre, CRO at TripActions, and Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense to discuss how you can scale your startup from $20 million ARR to $200 million ARR through go-to-market execution, talent, and culture.

Driving peak sales performance is a mission most SaaS companies strive to accomplish. Yet, sales team targets are often set extremely high, with management expecting their teams to miss. This might bring success for the company, but it leads to negative experiences for the sales rep, and your teams may ultimately fail to perform to their fullest potential. Hootsuite CRO Melissa Murray Bailey shares secrets to running a successful SaaS sales team and reducing employee turnover. Video: https://youtu.be/wl1Qx4KHqMo Blog post: https://www.saastr.com/how-to-create-a-high-performing-saas-sales-organization-with-hootsuite-cro-melissa-murray-bailey-pod-521-video/ Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software. Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976 Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/ Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Every high-growth organization inevitably reaches the point of pivoting its strategy and offerings to capture new audiences—a journey made more complex with the new demands emerging this past year. In this session, Dorian Stone will share lessons learned from Grammarly's evolution from consumer to SMB to enterprise, address common assumptions and pitfalls in the process of scaling, and reveal must-know strategies to drive efficient growth this year and beyond.