Streaming Live from SaaStr Annual: Cantina Stage - Monday

to do a surf check, decided, you know, not a lot of good surf today, so I'm going to go to jiu-jitsu class at noon after checking my calendar. And, um, yeah, that's when the accident occurred. I cracked 2 vertebrae. I have a severed artery on my left side in the back of my neck. Um, pretty fucked up right now, but, uh, pretty positive. I don't care. It's gonna be a while before I'm back to normal. I had it in my mind that I was gonna walk again, but prognosis and everything else, everyone was like, "Yeah, good luck." That's amazing.

So they had to really That's really a— what a progress from the Vector to this.

I was walking independently about 5 months after, 6 months after. So around the 6-month mark, I was walking without forearm crutches or any sort of poles. That's when I started go try and live my life again. Mount Whitney is the tallest peak in the lower 48. It's 14,505 feet, and it's the highest peak you can go to without any sort of technical skill, so it's one continuous hike. The idea of Whitney was something that was happening long before the injury. This was something that he wanted to do prior to the accident, and it was the first goal he set. I trained really hard. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could go do these things that I'd always done. Woo!

Ah!

Wow, this is so cool.

Our original plan was to do the 22-mile main trail. We couldn't get permits, and then that's when the whole trip really became a sufferfest. What we did was 40 miles round trip. I had never done a 40-mile backpacking trip like that, able-bodied or disabled, so we were kind of going into uncharted territory in that regard. Jack was very dialed in from the start of the hike. The level of discipline and strength that this, this guy has regardless of everything that happened and and that's part of him that, you know, stems from his core. The first day we started really late in the day and we didn't get into our camping spot until 9:30 PM at night, 10 o'clock-ish. So we were just wiped and we didn't get to bed till 11 that night. So we woke up the next morning, we did about 5 miles down to Rock Creek. I was in good spirits, but my body just— my right leg was not working. It would not lift. I just dragged for 5 miles. And I remember sitting down and being like, the anxiety sort of hit and I was like, I know we can do this, but like, I'm scared and nervous right now. And like, we're 14 miles into the backcountry. Like, there's no, there's no getting out of here in any easy way. Couple deep breaths. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] The terrain in this hike varied throughout the entire trip. You know, there's parts where you're on a side of a mountain where there's sand, and there's parts where you're, you know, closing towards the peak and there's treacherous cliffs with boulders. The terrain was so bad, and loose rock and big boulders for me are really hard to move on. Just because my legs don't lift to a certain height and my ankles don't work and all that sort of thing. So when we were a mile from the summit, you can look up to your right and you see the summit hut and the summit itself, but you realize you still have a mile to go and you have to go around the backside. And so I constantly— I have multiple affirmations that I would say to myself, but one of them was just like, "Stay focused, believe." And then I would just say that over and over in my head and out loud. As we got to the backside of the summit, we kind of paused and everyone went like, "You're making this a reality today. Like, this is like, this is 3 years in the making." Yeah, everyone cleared the summit. It was dead silent. There had to be about 40 people up there. I limped onto that sign and onto that rock and that summit and just, I, yeah, I lost it. And it was just like, everyone let me have a moment. It was really beautiful. And then it was just like this big round of applause. Like, I was like, oh, this is, there's no trophies up there. There's no trophies when you're summiting a mountain, but I think that was my trophy, was that round of applause. I believe 1 out of 3 people make it to the peak, and Jack was one of those people. Like, I gave 3 years of my life to this project, and come hell or high water, you know, we made it happen.

And now please welcome to the stage Jack Ryan, partner manager, Saastr. What's up?

This is Pretty surreal. I've actually been visualizing a moment like this for 2 or 3 years now. So, um, super stoked to be here. I was just hoping for like 10 people. There's way more than 10 people. So this is really rad.

Yeah.

So who am I? I'm the partner manager at Saastr. I manage all outbound sales. I'm a Team USA paraclimbing athlete as of June 2021. So I get to represent the U.S. in international competition for adaptive climbing. I'm a writer, a photographer. I get to travel around the U.S. shooting climbing as well as other adventure sports. Adaptive athlete, and I'm a plant dad to Dave, who resides in my apartment back in Denver. So this was me 2018 and prior. I was running the jiu-jitsu circuit on the West Coast. Coast as well as internationally. I competed in Mexico City, I trained in Thailand, I got to train all over the world, and I was also a passionate surfer. So my path, you know, wasn't necessarily in tech at the time. I was actually a luxury real estate agent, I was running digital marketing, etc. So every November 29th, 2018, everything changed. My neck was broken via my jiu-jitsu instructor at C4 and C5. He did an illegal move and basically torqued me over and next thing you know, completely paralyzed from the neck down. The way I could describe it is, you know when you get into a hot tub and it's that like warm flushing feeling? That's what it feels like to be paralyzed from the neck down initially. So this is an MRI scan of what my neck looked like post-injury. So as you can see at the C4 and C5 vertebrae, you can see the impact to the spinal cord. So what I have is called an incomplete injury. There's two types of spinal cord injuries: incomplete and complete. For me, mine's incomplete, which means neurological signals from the brain are able to get past the damage in the spinal cord. Now initially, I also, the way I describe paralysis to everyone and an incomplete injury to everyone is it's like being stuck in an ice block, right? So essentially the ice block is up to your neck right here and you have no idea what's gonna dethaw come 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc. And the only way to find out is through very intensive rehab and basically time. So you're probably wondering, what does paralysis have to do with sales as a whole, right? I know the title is Climbing to $1 Million in Sales, but yeah. So first off, it's all about taking risks. When I set out to do Mount Whitney, that was a goal I had prior to being disabled in 2018. And with that, when I said, I announced it on my Instagram, I believe early 2019, being like, Hey, I'm gonna go climb this mountain. Everyone looked at me and was like, hey, that's great, good for you, but like, slow your roll, basically. So, same with sales, right? In March, on March 31st, 2021, I was actually looking for a new role. I was a digital marketing manager at the time, and I found Brian Ossesser, who's actually my current boss, via LinkedIn post, and he's like, I'm looking to hire somebody for the sales team at Saster. And so I shot my shot, and that's how I've gotten every single opportunity I've got, like, in this day. From Saster to working at, like, the International Surfing Association, everything I've done has been through cold email and cold calls my entire career. That's how I've gotten every opportunity. So, for me, you know, what are the 3 things that it takes to get to where I stand today, both from climbing mountains and from a sales perspective. And I truly believe the 3 things that make not only a great athlete, a great individual, but also a great sales individual is consistency, grit, and curiosity. So with consistency, the past 2 years after my initial rehab, I took 2019 off to basically relearn how to do life. Life. I relearned how to crawl, eat, breathe, swallow, you name it. Everything I relearned at 23. My rehab process was 5 days a week at Craig Hospital in Denver, Colorado. Now I turned that into 7 days a week because I realized if I'm not making efforts every single day, I'm not gonna get to where I wanna go, which is walk out of that hospital in 90 days. Which is very, very uncommon, especially based off the fact that not only did I have this injury that paralyzed me, I also had multiple strokes 12 hours after the fact. So, and then consistency in sales, you know, you do have your daily tasks, and for me, that looks like simplifying as much as humanly possible. I do not like complicating my day in any way. So for me, when I think of simplifying and keeping consistent tasks, it consists of list building, prospecting, and cold email outbound. So grit. Grit's obviously a very popular buzzword in the sales community, and I think it's a little overplayed sometimes. But grit to me, at least in sales, is, you know, we've exceeded $1 million in sales in 6 months at Saastr. With that being said, I can't tell you how many $150,000 deals I've lost, $200,000 deals I've lost over the course of the past 6 months. And for me, when that occurred, I was like, "All right." You know, I'd message Pooja, I'd message Brian being like, "You know, we just lost so-and-so." And they're like, "Yeah, we did everything we could." And I'm like, "All right, so what?" Like, let's move on with our lives. Let's, you know, pick ourselves up from the dirt. Let's keep going. In terms of rehab, My rehab consisted of getting electrocuted for hours on end by stimulation packets. It consisted of dry needling and basically putting as many needles into my muscle bellies to essentially free those muscles up to encourage movement. It's very, very painful. And then when we talk about the hike, for me, I don't really, you know, I walk around with a cane, I'll walk around this venue with a cane, and it takes all of my mental effort just to walk around. Like, I am actually physically thinking about standing on this stage right now and shifting my weight from left to right. And so that takes a lot of grit in that, you know, I don't have a choice. I don't have a daily choice to like not think about these things, and therefore I do have to tough out even the simplest of days. So curiosity, right? So why not summit the tallest mountain in the lower 48? You know, why not attempt this crazy feat? Where am I falling short and what can I be better at, right? So when we talk about mountains, I did a ton of research and I was like, okay, you know, no one's ever done the tallest mountain in the lower 48 with a spinal cord injury, with quadriplegia. Why not? And so I got curious. I started Googling. Has anyone done this? OK, there's been an amputee ascent, right? That's fairly common. You know, has anyone else done any like big mountain ascents in the world besides like in the US? And there happened to be a gentleman in the UK who's a friend of mine named Ed Jackson who runs also a nonprofit called "Millimeters to Mountains." He's the only one in the world besides me who has been above 14,000 feet. He's done a few ascents in the Himalayas. So when I found him on Instagram back in 2019, I was like, huh, why can't I do what he's doing? And so this led to that curiosity. In terms of sales as a whole, we're always looking to basically kaizen, continuously improve our methods, whether you're in startup, a marketing role, a sales role, you're always trying to find that next edge. So for me, this is a message I send to one of my colleagues, Puya. One of the things that I personally have been working on in the past 6 months is when we have a big deal in the pipeline and we're setting that follow-up and stuff, I still lack the experience in terms of like, okay, pushing the steel further down the pipeline, right? So that's where your, no, your teammates, Brian, Puya, come in, and I fall back on them, 'cause I'm only as good as the collective unit around me. And that's really important because you can't succeed in sales specifically to get to that quota, get to that number, you know, hit that revenue goal, and that's, I think, as broader, As a broader whole, everyone here is involved in startups. You start from ground zero, right? So you're constantly looking, you're looking at sasr.com, you're looking on Google, you're looking on Quora. You're like, how do I make this better? And that curiosity, I think, makes individuals, one, individuals great, and two, startups great by proxy. [SPEAKING CHINESE] Cool. You can switch the—

And now, welcome to the stage, Brian Ellis, VP Sales at Saastr.

Jack, your story is incredible. I think when going back to that slide, you showcased your initial note to me on LinkedIn, and I remember I I went and looked and I saw Paralyzed to Peaks. What is it? He runs a nonprofit? And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, oh, oh, like very real. Jack's actually, he's very humble, but he's actually in 6 months as an SDR, we're not talking pipeline, he's realized almost $1.5 million in revenue, which is really incredible. I think bar none, in 10 years of leading teams, He's the biggest success story I've ever seen in SDR. And so I think there's a lot of here that the crowd and the people that are watching this really need to know. So I'm very curious, you know, first off, I wanna go back to your accident and the time after that. Sometimes I feel like doubt must for you become like an old conquered friend, right? So talk us through some of those moments of doubt. What was that like?

On the peak or in sales?

Let's just, just in general, and let's start on the peak. Moments of doubt, we can go then to doubt in sales.

Okay, yeah, so on day 2 of my Mount Whitney ascent, because we couldn't get the original permits on the main trail, we had to figure out an alternative route via another entrance. So on day 2, we were coming down, and as I said in the video, down to Rock Creek, I literally was literally dragging my right leg for 5 miles straight, right? And I got down to Rock Creek and I sat down with my team thinking, oh my God, we have another 10 miles to do, you know, to get to our next waypoint if we wanna have a rest day and a buffer in between. And so with that, I sat down and I actually broke down. My buddy was talking to me, I was like, "This is the first time, like, I don't think I, I don't know if I can do this." Like, there's a lot of doubt in my mind, and in the endurance world and the ultra running world, they say you always have a low, and day 2 for me was that low where I truly encountered like real doubt. So when that occurred, I basically spoke it out loud, and when you speak something out loud, whether it's depression, whether you have anxiety, whatever it may be, it loses its power over you because it can then be given to the collective to discuss and openly contemplate. And I think that's how I eliminated doubt in that specific moment during my lowest point of the hike. Wow.

Wow.

So now we're going to transition that, right? So there's a lot of SDR leaders, a lot of sales leaders, a lot of SDRs even here today, and they're going through doubt. And I know you've went through some doubt. A little bit, right? Walk me through how that might be relative.

Yeah, so entering my first month at SaaStr, I actually had no idea what SaaStr was when I signed up for the role. I did my research, I did my due diligence, but I was like, I wasn't really super familiar with Jason M. Lemkin. I knew startups, I knew B2B, but like, wasn't all too familiar. And I remember that first month, I had it in my mind, I was like, I need to close at least an $85,000 deal. And I was pinging Brian the first month being like, why haven't we gotten one? Why haven't we gotten one? And it finally hit like that last week, and a brand that I outbounded happened to come on board literally 30 days to my start date. And I was like, well, it's post one month, but this is great. And I think what— to eliminate the doubt in at least in my mind, I once again fell back on my team. I fell back on Brian. I fell back on Puya for their collective knowledge because I take pride in knowing that I'm not the smartest person in the room. There's so many more brilliant people sitting down in this room than me, and so I fall back on them by proxy, and I think that's what led to my elimination of doubt, just as it led to my elimination of doubt on the hike itself.

You know, when Jack reached out to me for the role, I had put together an assignment to see if he would fit in the environment that we had put together. And the assignment was an Excel sheet. It had 36 accounts on it, okay? It was completely blank. And the assignment was find out who's the contact we should be in touch with, what's their relationship to SaaStr, and why should they care? 4 hours later, I'm doing my work, and I get a text message, and it's from Jack. And he goes, "Hey, do you have a minute?" And I'm thinking he has a question. He goes, "I wanna work with you." I'll walk you through the presentation. I open up the Google Doc, this thing is decked out, it's color-coded, it has organization all over it, and I said, "Yes, I have the time." And it was one of the most fascinating moments I've ever seen in an interview. So I wanna talk, let's talk a little bit about determination. [Speaker] Yeah. [Speaker] Okay, that's a mental shift, that's like a setting that you must have on overdrive, right?

[Speaker] Yeah.

[Speaker] You're a guy that finally, like, you're laying in bed and going, Okay, I'll walk again, and the doctors and nurses are going, right?

They literally threw their hands up. I had one person be like, I believe you're gonna walk again, and then everybody else was like, yeah, cool, good luck.

In SDR land, you're not walking, you're running.

Yeah.

So let's talk about determination.

Yeah, in terms of the peak or the—

No, no, just in general, your makeup, man.

Yeah, so for me, like, I actually grew up grappling. I grew up fighting. I was always that, like, tall skinny kid on the wrestling team. And so I've always had a massive chip on my shoulder, right? Um, somebody takes me down, I'm gonna take them down 5 times. If somebody submits me in an armbar, I'm gonna choke them out 3 more times, right? Um, I think at the core of it, it's having this massive chip on your shoulder, recognizing that you have it, not letting it destroy you as well. So it really does come from from fighting and grappling growing up?

I'm gonna shift to the SDR role specifically.

Okay.

Okay. One of the number one questions that you get when you lead SDR teams or you're on a panel about SDR teams is like, what does it take to hire the best SDR, right? I've heard it forever, but you're actually someone that possesses these skills. So from your vantage point, okay, what are the qualities? You went through consistency and grit and curiosity. And I think those are great high level, but like maybe a day-to-day, like what does it take to be that consistent, that grit, that curious person?

Ownership. I think you and I actually talked about it during our interview process, Extreme Ownership, which is Jocko Willink's book, right? That was a very formative book for me back in 2017 when it came out when I was still in college. With that, when I came into SaaStr, when I talked to Brian, I took ownership of my role. My ramp was supposed to be 1 month, right? My ramp realistically was 7 days? Yeah. 8 days, right? And it's because I recognized, I was like, no one is gonna make me succeed except myself, and then I'm gonna have to fall back on the team when possible. So I think what makes a great SDR manager, makes a great SDR, what makes a great exec, right, is one, taking ownership of the role and taking ownership of your shortcomings and where you're not executing on, and then two, vulnerability. I've confided in Brian on multiple occasions when I've lost friends, when I'm really struggling in the role, when something's not working, and being able to be vulnerable, once again, when something's scary, right, and you say, hey, I'm scared right now, like, this is terrifying, like, I don't want to die today, like, it immediately loses its power. And so there's that ownership aspect, and then there's a vulnerability aspect.

Amazing. Really, really insightful. I think what's interesting, you also brought up the notepad on your vision of Notion that we have, right? And you have an accountability workbook that you're working through, Okay, you're probably one of the most accountable people I've had. So I guess like when you think about accountability in the morning, all right, when you think about it throughout your day, what are some of the tactical pieces of advice that you could give someone to maybe increase their own accountability so they can have some of the similar success?

So there's good days and there's bad days, right? You're gonna have hyper-productive days and you're gonna have a Tuesday where you get absolutely absolutely nothing done. But there should be a standard that you always get done. And for me, at least when I wake up at 4 AM, 5 AM, it's always one, wake up, check my notifications, set the phone down, meditate for 10 minutes, meditate for 15 minutes. As long as I get that in and analyze any of the thoughts that come in, it allows me to then and proceed with the rest of my day relatively calm and relatively aware of what I need to accomplish. Now, I'm just like you guys, like, there are days I just don't get things done, but so long as I get those, like, 3 minimum things when I wake up done, the rest of the day usually goes to plan, more or less.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So it's funny. I think when we think about grit, it's a buzzword, as you said. It's probably the number one thing people say, "Oh, you gotta be gritty." In SDR, you gotta be gritty, right? But it goes a step further, right? 'Cause you're doing some form of mental fortitude every day to tell yourself what you're doing. You've shared this with me. Do you have a phrase that you go to that, like, in your down moments?

You know—

Is it more fluid?

It's more fluid. I do also do daily note-taking and affirmations every single day post-meditation, and those affirmations change on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis. When we think about the hike, my main affirmations were stay focused, believe, and rage on. I can't say the F word up here, but it's rage the on, right? But those were my main affirmations during the past probably 6 months. In terms of day to day, it's always focused around positive positive vocabulary, right? So I believe, or I'm speaking on the SaaSer stage. I'm doing $2 million in outbound net new revenue, right? Speaking it into existence, and it kind of tricks your brain to basically be like, oh crap, I'm only at $900K in revenue. I have this $2 million goal. I better get those standards and those necessary things done on a daily basis to get to that new goal.

Awesome. Yeah, that— the affirmation piece, I think, can sometimes be really overlooked. I, um, I really only have one more question for you, Jack, and, and you've been so forthcoming, and thank you for sharing your story. But let me, let me just ask, um, there's a lot of revenue leaders that are going to be here that are going to listen to this and watch this. What kind of pieces of advice or tactical pieces of advice could you offer them to help them next level their SDR team? It's something that I think everyone wonders, what's the magic bullet? And there isn't one. So what would you, what would you say to them?

The more vulnerable you are with your team, the more your team will empathize with you, right? Empathy is also a big buzzword in the sales community as a whole because you can't sell without empathy. And so you as a leader, whatever position you're in, the more vulnerable and forthcoming you can be with the team of where you're struggling, struggling, they by proxy are gonna come back to you and be like, "Hey, I'm struggling with calls right now. What do I need to change? What do I need to do differently?" And it creates this team environment, this supportive environment that truly will allow you to get to that revenue goal, that marketing goal, what may have you.

Jack, congratulations on your summit. Congratulations on your story and your success. And let me just say on behalf of everyone at SaaStr, we're super stoked to be a part of your team. So thank you very much for today.

Thank you. Vice President of Product Management at Mailchimp, Sarah Higgs.

Hello, FastTrack.

Woo-hoo!

We made it. I'm Sarah Hicks. I'm Vice President of Product at Mailchimp. Let's see if we can get the slides. There we go. So I'm also the co-founder and former CEO of Reaction Commerce. I co-founded Reaction Commerce in 2013. It's an open-source commerce platform. Mailchimp acquired us last year. So I thought it'd be fun to talk about kind of all the lessons I learned and then kind of tried to unlearn as an entrepreneur and a founder, founding a company, scaling a team and a product, then selling that company and almost immediately pivoting at Mailchimp to launching new commerce solutions for 14 million customers. All during a pandemic. Okay, so the first lesson here sounds pretty simple, right? But it's actually not. And that's because when it gets hard, and believe me, it will definitely get hard, that if you don't really care about what you're building, then no one else will either, and the train will derail really, really quickly. So let's just get honest for a second. Second, right? This— here's the hardest moment I faced in the early years at Reaction. So we had 5 people on the team and we were running out of cash. I was suddenly worried that we weren't gonna make payroll. I sat down with each of my 5 teammates. These are people who I convinced to leave their day jobs to join me on this journey. These are people who I knew had— I knew their family I knew they had obligations. And all of a sudden, I was worried that they weren't going to be able to pay their rent or they weren't going to be able to take care of their families. Pretty serious, right? And these are only just some of the lessons. I see some of the founders in the room shaking their head. And it's part of the reason why you really got to care what you're building. It's just the realities of running a day-to-day business. So, and then something happened. We hit the jackpot. This was us winning the inaugural ShopTalk startup pitch competition in Las Vegas. And almost immediately upon being handed this big check for $25,000, my first thought wasn't like, "Oh my God, we won." It was, "Oh my God, we're gonna make payroll." So, you know, if I didn't care or believe in the opportunity of what I was building and what we were doing, things could have gone south really, really quickly. So I found that too often entrepreneurs focus on building something that they really care about rather than things that they're gonna be— more about things that they're gonna be successful rather than things they're gonna care about. And so if you don't build something that matters to you, things will— again, it's just gonna derail fast. And the important thing here is you can't just build for yourself exclusively, right? Of course not. We have to build for our customers. Customers and we have to create opportunity for and solve customer problems. So I'm gonna back up for a little bit and share a little bit about myself. I started my career at GeoCities. I was then the lead product manager for Yahoo Store, which became Yahoo Merchant Solutions, which was one of the earliest software as a service platforms. I then was vice president of product at Etsy. The thread throughout my career has definitely been commerce. I've built and scaled commerce platforms for millions of users doing hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions. I personally love seeing businesses start in their garage and then expand to warehouses. I've seen people and friends quit their day jobs to start e-commerce businesses, and then those businesses turn into online and offline enterprises doing millions of dollars of volume. So how cool is that? So this is gonna lead me to why I started building Reaction Commerce. So Reaction's a completely open source commerce platform for high growth retailers and brands. We are like other e-commerce, other open source platforms on the market like WordPress and Drupal who also believe that all proprietary software is an evolutionary dead end. So I love, love, love a good David versus Goliath story. David versus Goliath story. Mailchimp's purpose is to empower the underdog, which speaks really, really to my, the core of who I am and to my heart. It's also what made the acquisition, I think, a really good fit. So at the time, Mailchimp was looking to get into commerce and needed commerce expertise and a commerce product, and we also needed customers. So as the founder and CEO, I kind of think I I had 3 main priorities and obligations. So one is to set the vision and the strategy and the product roadmap. Two, recruit and retain the team and inspire and motivate the team. And three, always make sure we had enough money in the bank. So from my first story, you know that that one's not always so easy. So the most important responsibility out of all of those, in my opinion, is the team. So people build products and companies. Not the other way around. So I've been fortunate to work with this group of folks for, like, over a decade. We're a diverse group of teammates. This is from our 2019 all-hands in Joshua Tree, where we all gathered annually to build relationships. I've had the privilege of seeing these folks actually grow up. I've seen them get married, graduate from college, have kids, have kids, get pets, lose loved ones, and so much more. And so an important reminder is that while it's always about your team, it's that it's important to not building your team too early. So we were 5 teammates for our first 3 years, which meant that I could focus on product versus management, which was really, really important. I've seen a lot, a lot of startups after they raise their first capital quickly start hiring And if you don't have product-market fit, focus on the product before focusing on the team. So because it's always about the team, it's key to figure out how to support them to do their best work. So there's easy things here. And have a budget for standing desks, for ergonomic chairs. Don't be cheap with swag. Invest in all-hands. And if obviously in-person all-hands but even invest in team building, even if it's all online. So those are things you actually spend money on, but there are so many more important things that create so much more value. Let's chat about those. So there are things like create a comprehensive parental leave policy before you think you need it. It'll really help you with recruiting, and you'll have a more diverse team. Draft and communicate your vacation policy and your expense policies. Again, this one seems simple, but figure out how to reimburse your employees really quickly. Establish regular two-way feedback systems. You're gonna have conflicts, you're gonna have to have hard conversations. Establish a way for you to have feedback on a regular basis. Document your team norms and then continuously keep them up to date. There's kind of, Not much that's worse than a bunch of norms that sit on a wiki or in a Google Doc that are out of date. So I could really go on my whole talk just about this. Don't be cheap here. So this is Eric. He's one of our software engineers. He's now at Mailchimp. He's the reason why I created the comprehensive and inclusive parental leave policy. He came to me and said that he and his partner were going to be having their first child. And I thought— and he asked if he was going to be able I want to take some time off. And I thought, yeah, of course. Right. And then I quickly after that went and figured out what we needed to do for our parental leave policy that fit with our stage, that fit with our values, and fit with the growth where we were at that time. So I built Reaction because I was frustrated, honestly. It's kind of the platform I always wanted. There wasn't a modern open source extensible commerce solution on the market at the time. All of the existing commerce solutions at that time came out before the launch of the first iPhone. So I just knew there had to be a better way. We had a really, really big vision and we were building this large commerce platform. But the lesson here is that I got distracted by building too big of a platform, too many products all at once. I also got a little sidetracked after our fundraise. Into believing that we had more product market fit than we did. And so, you know, we hadn't even really figured out our business model, to be honest. So it's easy to get comfortable when you've got millions of dollars of cash in the bank. But the key here is to kind of focus your strategy and focus your— and iterate. So that leads me to this lesson, which I had to unlearn. So if I were to start all over again with building building my company, I'd have started smaller. I'd have focused on smaller market segments rather than trying to build the whole ecosystem. My vision would have been still exactly the same. I just would have started building and iterating smaller. So in my world, that would have meant maybe I started with a shopping cart or checkout or order management, inventory management, and sold those along the way rather than trying to build the whole platform. We spent our multiple years building the core platform, which also meant we didn't have a product to sell, and we didn't have— it wasn't easy for us to make money in those first 3 years. So once we did start selling, I quickly learned I had to be also flexible with my pricing and with my business model. We initially thought we were gonna go after SMBs, and so our first initial deals were in the thousands of dollars. And then we closed our first 3-year multimillion-dollar deal deal with an enterprise retailer brand and our outlook changed overnight. So the key here is be flexible, start iterating, talk to customers regularly, and iterate on your pricing plan as you go. So one of my favorite, favorite quotes, if you've worked with me, you've heard me say this a few times, is all problems are people problems and all people problems are communication problems. So in organization, it often seems like all problems are eventually communication problems, and that's because communication obviously is the way we interact with each other. And then so it's how almost all of our problems are going to surface. So we were a distributed team across 9 different time zones, multiple countries, several continents. There's obviously been a huge, huge surge towards remote work, but what's happened is, we all know, we've kind of taken our offline work and just moved it online, and it's not very productive, and it's creating these toxic work environments, and a lot of folks are burnt out. So we're gonna detour a little bit on communication because it's that important. So it's probably the most important lesson of all, and believe me, I've made all of these mistakes. So there are communication problems that really, really will destroy morale. There's lack of depth, there's missing There's missing context. There's missing empathy. And then there's communication that triggers surprise. So I'm gonna briefly go into each of those four, honestly, 'cause it's that important. And if I can leave you with anything, it's focus on these communication, 'cause I had to unlearn them all myself. So we're first gonna talk about lack of depth. So lack of depth often shows up when we're communicating strategy. Me, will lay out this big vision and this big strategy and this big path forward. But often we won't outline what is exactly changing in the near term. We'll have a big idea for the long term, but we're not good at outlining the steps from here to there. So that just creates confusion and frustration among the team. We've all done it. I see you smiling. So good strategy requires Depth, which means you have to have an understanding of all the problems. If you don't know all the answers, admit that and then get the team together and start figuring it out. So missing context is a complex one here because it can be really, really subtle. So here's an example. This could be Team A, Team B. It could be Person 1, Person 2. It could be Squad A, Squad B. It doesn't matter. An example though is missing context. Context. So Team A has got this really, really big priority and they go to Team B for help. And Team B is like, "Not my problem, not my priority," and they drop it. So it leads to frustration and friction right away between your team. Your teams are operating in silos, they're not going in the same direction. So a strong communication plan can help to alleviate the type of missing context. So my job was often Chief Storyteller, Dot Connector. I think that's all of our jobs. Our jobs as managers and leaders is to provide information and to connect things together and keep them moving in the same direction. So this is a photo from one of our off-sites. We had a mix of fun, team building, and then a lot of mix of planning and sharing to increase our context. And you can also see that we loved a good sticky note. I'm a big fan of getting folks together and doing sticky notes exercises to share information and to share context. So this one's brutal, you all. Empathy shortages, I think, are a chronic condition for so many of our companies. But they're particularly problematic when we're communicating organizational change. So what happens is an organizational change is usually something that we as leaders, we've worked on for weeks or months. We have a strong, strong understanding of why it's important, why it needs to happen. And then we go and we share it with the team and we share this organizational change and we're forgetting that our team is hearing it for the first time. And so the key here is you gotta spend some time making sure your folks have the space, the context, and the framework and playbook to be able to ask questions and to process the information themselves. So this leads me to another important communication challenge. So when managing change, a key communication strategy is just to avoid surprise. So we all know what happens. A surprise triggers anxiety. It can lead to a fight or flight reaction. We don't want that. We've all experienced it. So sometimes if we're telling something, sometimes it may seem like we're telling someone something relatively straightforward, right? And then they respond in utter confusion, maybe in frustration. And so we faced this lesson after our acquisition. So we joined Mailchimp, we had this huge mandate to launch new commerce solutions to our customers, and we were doing that all during a pandemic. So we came in quickly, we changed the team, we changed some of our underlying architecture assumptions, we communicated that out out, and let's just say it was really rocky. And if I had to do it all over again, I would have rolled that out a lot slower and spent more time. And honestly, we all think, oh, we can't have the time to do this. We don't have time to roll that out. It's faster. It's definitely faster when you get your team behind you and when you get everyone going in the same direction. So when communicating anything that you think folks might find difficult, pause, cause, make sure you've got a communication plan and a rollout plan that makes sense. Okay, so it's unfortunately all too common for startups to have homogeneous cultures. They often hire, so we all often hire from our own personal networks, and those personal networks look a lot like ourselves or yourselves. So we all know the statistics. Diverse teams solve bigger problems. They solve more, they're more successful. It's our differences in creating the value that actually makes our companies more successful. I'm one of the 2% of female founders who have actually successfully raised venture capital. 2%. And I think the number's even gone down recently. So there are so many lessons here. Culture is definitely not about perks. I think we all know that. But let's just go into a few of the areas around really creating a vibrant culture. So one is don't skip on your recruiting process. Open all your roles externally and on diverse job boards. Create a transparent and equitable hiring playbook. So craft your job descriptions and interview process right away. Don't wait to create an interview playbook. It will set you apart set us apart from so many companies who just aren't doing this. It's really so important. Establish management best practices. So coordinate all your one-on-ones. Make sure every single person on your team has one-on-ones and then don't cancel them if your life depends on it. If you have to cancel, check in with them anyway and then try to reschedule instead. Make sure you have regular all hands where you're sharing strategy, you're talking about How much cash you have in the bank, what your runway is. Just be as transparent and open as possible. Have clear roles and responsibilities from day one, especially with your founding team. So this was important to us. We had to figure out and be very, very clear who made product decisions, who was making architecture decisions, how about internal tools, internal systems. And then again, look at that regularly, every quarter or every 6 months. Especially as the team grows. What do you have to give up? What's this person taking on? And lastly, we— I mentioned this already a little bit, but great companies have a process for hard conversations. Don't wait until there's a hard conversation to establish a process. You're gonna have it. You're gonna have conflict. There's always gonna be a need to shift roles and responsibilities. People will take that personally. Have a system for being able to share feedback and for be able to have and receive feedback. If anything, I would do this like right away. It only happens with intentional practice, and if you're not intentionally practicing, it's like a muscle, it's atrophied. It's gonna be a bad situation when you need it. So, and of course, have fun. So this is some of our team last year doing a murder mystery event online at the end of last year. There's definitely ways you can do team building that's fun online and offline. And yes, it's the Macaulay Culkin scream. Okay, so let's get real again for another second. There are many established e-commerce platforms on the market. So the list is long, right? There's Shopify, there's WooCommerce, there's BigCommerce, there is Adobe Commerce Cloud, there's Salesforce Commerce Cloud. There's global solutions, there's niche solutions, there's mobile-first solutions, there's more headless commerce solutions, and I honestly spent way, way, way too much time thinking and worrying about all of them. I would practice, I would rehearse my answers to being asked about those companies. I would have keyword alerts and I would read press releases. I'd read business analyst reports. Their quarterly reports. And honestly, it just didn't matter. So focus is one of our most important commodities that we have. And it, honestly, staying true to my vision was a key part of our successful outcome. So this one's simple, we don't have to spend a bunch of time on it. Get a coach. I didn't get a coach until we were several years into building the company. I've been working with a coach for the last 5 years and it's invaluable. I also have a regular weekly call with another founder CEO where honestly all we talk about are people problems and how we're taking care of ourselves, because it's hard to take care of ourselves. So the job of CEO is really lonely. We've all heard that. It's really hard. We're faced with so many, like, like it's a game of whack-a-mole. We're trying to like answer so many different questions and we're making it up as up as we go sometimes. So invest in your people. Get a coach. It doesn't have to be expensive. If you don't know where to go, reach out to me and I'll point you in the right direction. But there's lots of options out there for individual coaching, training, workshops. Don't go it alone. And I loved my investors, but a good reminder is your investors are not your coach. So at the end of 2019, I've got a couple more slides, we were at a crossroads. It was either raise additional cash, raise our Series B, or look for strategic opportunities. So I initially thought that the best thing to do was raise additional cash. I wasn't ready to let go. But I decided to run a parallel process. I went out on a fundraise, and I also started to have strategic conversations. And we very, very quickly saw a lot of interest in what we had built and in the team. And so I, as I looked at all those options, I realized that the path forward with Mailchimp just made so much more sense and was far more advantageous to me and to the team. So over 40% of Mailchimp's 14 million customers are ecommerce businesses. So the thought of being able to build ecommerce for such a large and growing customer base has been a dream come true. So, and had I not been open to the opportunities, if I stubbornly held on to our independent I'd probably have missed this outcome. And then we all know what happened in 2020. Who knows where we, we would've gone. So I easily could've stubbornly held on and the picture with Mailchimp just became clearer and clearer. The key here lesson is just to be open to all potential and to opportunities, which is, leads me to my last lesson. So e-commerce as a percentage of overall retail is still only 30%, uh, here in the United States. United States. We're talking of trillions and trillions of dollars yet to come online. It's early days for commerce. In the nearly 8 years since I started building Reaction Commerce, the numbers already doubled. So it's going in a, in that direction. Part of that is online is because of the shift online from the pandemic. Um, so while it may seem like the race is over, it's really, really just getting started. There will be, there will continue to be major technological shifts and trends and differences in consumer behavior, they're gonna shift these numbers dramatically. So earlier this year we launched our new commerce solutions at Mailchimp. We launched Mailchimp Stores, which is available for US and UK merchants to be able to sell physical goods, and then we also launched Mailchimp Appointments, which makes it possible for any business to be able to schedule an appointment or a booking on their website. So we're just getting started, early, early days, but remember, ecommerce and commerce is still in the early innings. So beyond those stores and appointments offerings, we've also got ways for anyone from an existing commerce platform like Squarespace or WooCommerce to connect to Mailchimp to help them to grow their businesses and to expand their businesses. We have many, many merchants who are using other platforms or using our APIs to connect directly to Mailchimp. So as you can hear, it was incredibly challenging for us to pivot to launch these, uh, products, uh, over this last year. I can humbly say that I made all of these mistakes, uh, maybe even more than once, uh, especially around communication challenges. Really hard to build relationships, uh, and trust amongst the team. But we definitely persevered, and our customers are already adopting adopting these new offerings in spades. So there are growing businesses, and it's just super rewarding and exciting, and it's just the start for us. So I love designing, building, and shipping software. These are my beloved parents. So my mom, she was a painter, and I grew up appreciating design, art, creativity, museums, galleries. Our garage was her art studio. So my mom's medium was a canvas and mine I think of as the browser. And my dad was an entrepreneur who also happened to meditate. I grew up out in Palm Springs, so that's just in the hills outside of Palm Springs. It's hard, it's not hard for me to stand here in front of you and it's like this, Apple didn't fall too far from the trees. I love the craft of how software is built and I love trying to figure out how to bring people together to do their best work. It's kind of in my DNA. So I hope that these lessons learned were helpful to you as entrepreneurs and operators. It's a very, very hard path. If you want to talk or if you need support and you want to connect, I'm around. I'm passionate about startups, commerce, leaders who are trying to figure out how to lead, entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to scale. Or just whatever, if you just need a friendly ear, please connect with me. Thank you so much and good luck out there.

Please welcome CEO at Gainsight, Nick Mehta. How you guys doing? Excited? Are you actually real people? I'm saying real human beings, not a Zoom screen. This is awesome. I am so fired up to be here. So grateful to Jason M. Lemkin and Saastr for bringing us all together again. I don't know about you, but I missed stuff like this. So we're going to have some fun today. I'm Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and we're going to talk about about customer success, which if you follow me online is one of the few things I talk about a lot, but we're gonna talk about how customer success is changing. This conference is so inspirational to me 'cause I've been fortunate to be here since the beginning in 2015, and it's just like shows how much is happening in entrepreneurship, right? Many of you, raise your hand if you work at a company that's like less than 50 employees. Awesome, I love that. Like you're the future, it's so awesome. And what's cool is, you know, you don't have to make all the mistakes that, you know, folks have been around for a long time like me have made in customer success. So what we want to talk about is just like the whole world of tech is changing, customer success is changing a lot. And we're going to try to share some lessons that we've seen and hopefully leave you with some specific actions you can take going forward. So this all goes back to a PDF. This whole presentation goes back to a PDF. In 2013, we launched Gainsight.

right?

And one of the first things we did was built this document called the 10 Laws of Customer Success. Now raise your hand and be honest if you weren't working in SaaS or tech in 2013, and it's totally fine, right? So some of you missed out on those early days. It's all good. And back in those days, there weren't that many SaaS companies around. Literally events like this would've been a few hundred people. I see Brian Plaster in the back, one of early CS executives, and you remember what I'm talking about, right? Not many people out there. Anywhere, so we all had to figure it out. And so we built this document that was based on 10 SaaS companies and what they learned about customer success in 2013. And this document actually ended up turning into a book called Customer Success, which is a blue book. Anyone read the Customer Success book? Sold about 100,000 copies so far. My mom's very proud of that book, which is very important. And so customer success back then was a totally new thing, and a lot of those principles still apply. But what we're gonna talk about today is how the world's changed and how we can take all of this to the next level. Because when you think about it, this is from 2013, right? So let's go back in the time machine to 2013. Just think about how far back 2013 was. For me, it kind of blows my mind. So let me share with you a few fun facts about 2013. First of all, 2013, if you were in San Francisco, was the year that Batkid stole our hearts and stole our imagination. Some of you probably remember Batkid, this little kid that dressed up as Batman. 2013 was also the year that Katy Perry roared for the first time, which is amazing, and I still think that's one of the greatest moments in musical history. 2013 was the year that we saw Frozen for the first time, and it was back when we still liked Let It Go before our kids had made us listen to it like 1,000 times. So back then Frozen was a new thing. 2013 was actually the year after SaaStr got started. So this is actually a photo from 2015, the first Stastur conference, but this concept of an event like this was just a twinkle in Jason M. Lemkin's eye in 2013. So just shows you how far back 2013 goes. Now some things we can agree from 2013 shouldn't be kept for the future. Some things really we should just leave them in the past. For example, 2013 was when Game of Thrones had the Red Wedding episode, scarred us all. I think many of us still are trying to get over that, getting therapy. 2013 was Gangnam Style, right? That was still pretty good, I think. The guy's really excited. 2013 was when we figured out what the fox said, which actually we didn't really figure out what the fox said, but we were supposed to figure out what the fox said. 2013 was a year that I misguidedly decided that our first conference we were going to at Gainsight, we just launched our company, our first conference I decided to do Movember at Dreamforce. That was a big strategic mistake. I think all of you would agree. If any of you control the internet, if you can delete this photo from the internet, I would greatly appreciate it. So 2013 was a long time ago, right? But these 10 laws of customer success, as you're gonna see, they still apply, but we can kind of put a fresh coat of paint on them, and that's what we're gonna do today is a fresh coat of paint on these 10 laws. And by the way, the 10 laws were created originally by a gentleman named Dan Steinman, who actually was one of the authors, the main author on the book Customer Success. We're gonna revisit Dan's laws from 10 years ago. Ago. Okay, these are the original 10 laws. I'm not gonna go through them now, but we're gonna— this is kind of the reference frame we're gonna talk about. So law number 1 back in 2013 was customer success is a top-down company-wide commitment. Raise your hand if you work in the CS function, right? And then many of you— I'm not gonna make you raise your hands again— probably would like the rest of the company to be behind customer success more than you— they are right now, right? It's not just a function. Everyone needs to focus on customer success. You've heard this, I'm sure, a million times. Well, how do we revise this law for the new era? What do we need to change about this? What do we need to enhance about this? Well, it's one thing for CEO to say, "Oh, this is a top-down company-wide commitment," but CEOs say things like that all the time, right? And what actually makes it happen? Well, what I'd argue, what we'd argue at Gainsight, is you need to figure out a way to build customer success into the core of what you do. It's not just platitudes in all-hands meetings. It's not just that you put customer success on your website. It's actually changing the core of what your company does, right? Because I think all of us, if you work in CS, can empathize with this fact that many companies don't do customer success well. So 2 months ago, I decided to have some fun on LinkedIn, and I put up a question which was, okay, let's start a fun thread. What are the best ways to fail at customer success? If a CEO wants to pretend they care about customer success but don't really, what should they do? And this question was like throwing meat into the sharks in customer success. Immediately, 160 comments of people talking about what people do wrong in customer success, how they pretend to care about it, how they pay it lip service, but it doesn't actually turn into reality. And I bet some of you worked in companies like that, right? It's very frustrating. Frankly, I bet if you're in CS, you end up leaving those companies. Companies. That's the reality of it, right? And what does that look like? What does lip service look like? Things like customer success is buried in the organization, right? It reports to somebody, reports to somebody, reports to somebody. Whoops, if you go back one slide, I think this is auto-clicking. Go back to the last slide if you can. Thanks. Second thing, you have a board meeting and there's no section about customer success. I've seen that. It's ridiculous, right, in the modern SaaS world. And a third example, The ultimate faux pas, anytime you call customer success customer support, you owe me a dollar. Every single time somebody does that. But some of you probably heard your CEOs or executives do that. And just to share, in each one of these 10 laws, I'm gonna share a real story. So about, in this case, making customer success the core of your company matters partially 'cause you wanna recruit great people. I'm gonna share a story of one of the top 100 or so CCOs out there. She can work at any SaaS company she wants. Response, and she said, "When I started my CCO search, I knew I only wanted to work for CEOs who really take their clients seriously." So when it was buried under sales, she didn't even want to take the interview. If you were in a position where you're founder, CEO, and you're trying to recruit people, the way you structure it, the way you talk about it, will influence who you can recruit, and you're not gonna be able to get the best people if you don't make it part of your core. So this is law number 1: make customer success part of your core. For. Let's keep going. Law number 2: in 2013, we said sell to the right customer, and that's absolutely true. And many of you have experienced, you know, trying to make a customer work where they should have never bought your software in the first place. I'm sure many of you dealt with that, right? But what we'd argue today is it's not like there's sales and there's customer success. Those are two different functions. What you need is an integrated journey from sales to customer success, because the truth is is your customer is trying to achieve a business outcome. They're trying to generate more leads for their business or make their employers happier or grow their sales, right? They have a goal, and whether they're talking to sales or CS doesn't matter, right? And so just to make this tangible, the way we think about it is you need a continuous loop from the sales process where what you're really doing is defining what outcomes does the customer care about? What are they trying to achieve with your technology, right? That's like the beginning. And then you onboard the customer, and ideally you're onboarding them not just to set them up, but to get them ready to get those business outcomes, right? Then you're getting them to adopt your technology, not just to use the features, but to actually achieve those business outcomes. Then you're actually trying to measure, ideally measure, what impact you've already had. So when a customer and you are talking, you're not just saying, "Oh, you're using our software," you're saying, "This is the value we've driven for you." And then if you do that right, That's fuel for you to get new customers, right? 'Cause those become references and case studies and all that. So this idea of end-to-end outcomes from the sales process through onboarding, through customer success, one of the hottest topics right now in the CS field. Give an example of this. So John Sabino, probably some of you have heard of Splunk. Splunk's a big public company. And John Sabino runs all post-sales at Splunk, so customer success, support, service, businesses, and he was tired of the same thing that a lot of you have dealt with, which is you get a new customer and you jump on a call with them and you're like, what are your goals that you have with our software? And the customer says, I just spent like 3 months explaining to sales what those goals were, right? And why do we have to have a separate process for sales versus customer success? What they did was they built a tool that their salespeople used to basically interactively figure out what the client's desired what the outcomes are, trying to, in their case, improve security posture, reduce downtime, things like that. Each of you has those for your business, right? And that tool automatically then assigns the right services, the right onboarding to the customer, what they call a prescriptive value path, to go from those goals to setting up the customer the right way. And from there, they then create what's called a success plan to make sure that that customer is achieving those outcomes that they were signed up for, right? and then finally, when that customer logs into the product for the first time, they get a pop-up personalized guide based on the goals that they had, why they bought. So if they bought for security, they're seeing different stuff than if they bought for operations. How cool is that, right? So they've integrated the sales process, onboarding, customer success, and product all together. Now, some of you are in small companies, you're thinking, I can't do this right now, but philosophically you can. Philosophically, you can say our goal isn't just to launch a customer, it's to get them to outcomes. Philosophically, you can say in our sales process, are we asking them what the business goals that they have are and really getting that deep insight? Philosophically, you can make sure that your executive business reviews aren't just about the features and functions your customer's using, but actually the outcomes they're looking for. So this is kind of the really important laws part of this. Number 3. Okay, so this is all about this idea that SaaS is hard. You wouldn't be here if SaaS was easy, right? SaaS is really hard, and one of the hard things in 2013 was the natural tendency is if you do nothing, if you don't meet with your customer, they're gonna churn eventually. They will. It's brutal, but it's a reality. What we would say if we revise this now is that customers churn eventually because they always want more value. They always want more, right? They're not buying your technology buying your technology for a point in time. They're buying your technology so that you can constantly deliver more for them, and that's why you innovate in your product. That's why you have a roadmap, but many, many companies struggle with the fact that their customer gets stuck. They get stuck at that initial value, and they're not achieving more value, and the way I think about this is it's all, it's just like a funnel. So in marketing, you've got your funnel, right? So you've got your leads coming in through marketing. Some of you are getting them at the booths here, right? They turn into sales, That's great, but there's a second funnel that we need to all consider, which is now I've got a customer and how am I constantly delivering more outcomes to them, right? And how am I constantly getting them more value such that they become leads for me? Because they become leads, what we call customer success qualified leads, to either buy more stuff from you or in some cases be an advocate and bring you other leads in other companies, right? And so this idea that customer success is not just about keeping the client, It's about constantly getting them more value is something that's super important. Share an example of that. So Jane Graham runs customer success and renewals at UKG, which is an HR tech company. Jane has run CS for a long time. She started with, you know, classic like firefighting, support, all the stuff that I'm sure you've dealt with. And she said, look, the way to make our customers sticky is to get them to use more of our product. And so what she figured out, there's a good quote here, is that a huge chunk of all their sales were coming from existing customers, right? Selling them new modules, more licenses, whatever. Why shouldn't I incent my CS team to actually generate leads for our sales team, right? And it's not about the CS team becoming salespeople. It's about the CS team getting the customer more value and getting them more sticky. And so sales actually will help you drive customer success. And so this is a good example of what you can practically do even when you're small. To actually drive more stickiness in your base, get your customers to expand, and create this concept of CSQL. OK, number 4, the customer's expectation when they buy your software is to be wildly successful. That's what we wrote back in 2013. And I think all of you get that, right? They sign the DocuSign, you celebrate, or EchoSign or whatever. You celebrate, and they're just waiting to get started. They're ready to get started. They want to get the value, and you're celebrating that you closed the deal. Big deal, right? We all know about this. But what's changed is today I think we all realize, and all of you have been there, that customer success takes commitment from the client too, right? How many of you have been in a situation where the customer isn't doing the right thing? Raise your hand actually, been in a situation where the customer's not doing the right things to get value, right? Everyone, 100%, right? And so customer success is a two-way street, and the best CS teams out there are bringing their customers into the customer success process. Creating what we call a mutual success plan with that customer, right? Where the tasks aren't all assigned to your company. Some of them are assigned to your customer to go through training, to go through change management, to define the KPIs they care about, right? And if you don't do this, it's a losing battle. Sharing a good example of this, Klaviyo, some of you know, very hot unicorn startup in the martech space. Klaviyo, Kate Walsh runs customer support and customer success there. and she's built this incredible model where they basically work with lots of online merchants, e-commerce companies, etc., and to get them live on Klaviyo and getting value, they define what does a customer need to do, what do they need to do from day one, right? In the sales process, they're defining what those shared objectives are. Number 5, so in 2013, we talked about the need to relentlessly monitor and manage customer health, right? Part of customer success is this idea of of early warning. It's not helpful to know that a customer is about to churn. It's helpful to know they could churn 6 months from now. But how do you actually make that happen? So you are your founder, your CEO, your head of customer success. How do you turn this into reality? And this is to me the one no-brainer everyone should do at part of the presentation. Every single person, once you get to like 50, 75 employees, you need a CS operations person. Don't just hire CSMs. CSMs are really important, but just like you have in sales, salespeople and sales operations people, you need customer success operations to understand the leading indicators, to define processes, because customer success operations is this incredible lever, right? It basically makes every part of your company better because it helps you understand healthy customers who could be advocates for marketing. It helps you understand flaws in the sales process to help revise things for your revenue operations team. It helps you figure out about how to make customer success people more efficient and more effective. CS operations is an absolute no-brainer, one of the hottest jobs out there, and for good reason. John Neron is the head of customer success at PTC and has done an incredible job of not only building operations at PTC, CS operations, but he's actually built the world's largest community around CS operations. There's actually a whole Slack group of people just talking CS ops, super nerdy Slack group, but definitely very powerful. And if you have people want to get involved in this, definitely let us know. And he really defines CS operations as being all about operationalizing the vision you have in customer success. You know, I talk about all this stuff today, right? Like handoff from pre- to post-sales and selling to the right customer. How do you do that? CS operations. That's how you do it. You have somebody that thinks about the process and figures out how to make it happen every single time. So law number 6: One of the things we said back in 2013, and kind of one of the origin stories of customer success, is it used to be that you could just build loyalty through personal relationships. Somebody would buy from you and they would stay with you 'cause you're friends, right? Like you knew each other for a long time and they would stay on the job. I think most of you know that loyalty in personal relationships is no longer there, mainly because things change so much, right? Like with jobs changing at a faster clip than ever, 56% of Americans plan to switch jobs this year. As I'm sure you've heard that stat, companies being bought at a higher clip. Your sponsors change all the time. And another no-brainer thing almost everyone can do here is create a great process for when you get that LinkedIn update or you get that email that the person you sold to left the company. After your heart sinks a little bit, 'cause it does for all of us, have a process. What do you do? Who's getting a gift basket? Like the new executive should get a gift basket or a book or, material, you should be setting up meetings, sending them information, operationalizing that whole process of the stakeholder change. And this is so easy to do, and frankly, even if you're 10 people in your company, it's critical. I'd argue it's even more critical when you're 10 people in your company. 'Cause honestly, the reason they're a customer is 'cause they were excited about your vision, and when they're gone, the new person has no idea who you are. None. You've been on those calls, right? You get on the call, and the customer's like, so why did we have this software? Why did we buy this, right? And you've got to be all over this. That means the day they change the LinkedIn, you got to get a message out to them. You got to figure out a way to get on the radar network through common connections, right? Just like you do in sales. In my opinion, this is a very high-value activity. One thing people do is they really map out who are all our sponsors in the organization. So you don't just have one. One of the common concepts in account management is you never want to be stuck with single-threading, right? Just one person. So who are all the people we're talking to? Who's an advocate? Who's the detractor? How do we build up that map of the people in our organization? Give you a fun story on this one from Gainsight. So Meg Sarakal is the head of customer success today at HP Enterprise, a great leader. Meg's actually bought— used Gainsight years and years and years ago, right? And he used it, and then he moved on to a new company, and he was trying to buy Gainsight. He did— he wasn't able to buy it. And moved on to a new company and tried to buy Gainsight, wasn't able to buy it. Budget, whatever, right? 6 years later, he goes to HPE, and like the first thing he does is do a huge deal with GainSet, right? And so this isn't just about defensive, like preventing your customers from churning. It's about building relationships that allow you to grow over time. It's so, so critical. Law number 7. So we talked about the fact that product must be priority number 1. In customer success, if you're a software company, at the end of the day, it's about the product. It's about building the right product, making sure it's driving value, and sometimes customer success people are like almost like kind of duct tape over product issues. I'm sure many of you felt that, right? And so that's still very much true, and some of you probably feel that today, right? But the way to make this happen is make customer success people and product people best friends. You have to find that way to build those relationships, and it's not like that today for most companies. It's not like that because they kind of speak different languages, right? Customer success people, really excited about their customers. The product people are excited about their technology. Both want shared objectives though, right? If you think about it, think about like a Venn diagram, right? Yo, CS people care about retention, expansion, their clients. Product people want to make sure their stuff is getting used. Adoption is an example of something that's right in the middle of those two. What I find practically is sometimes a CS team is using different metrics for adoption than the product team, right? The product team is thinking about about daily active users, the CS team is thinking about a health score. You've gotta find a way to link it all together between CS and product. And if you're 100 people, 150 people, I recommend potentially even having somebody in your CS team who's kind of that interface point with the product team. Super valuable. Okay, so number 8, sorry, go back one slide. Number 8, we talked about the fact that in customer success, there's a ticking time bomb all the time, which is time to value.

Time to value.

You close a deal and the customer is looking at their watch about how long it's taking to get to value. And one of the things we said in 2013 is you have to constantly improve time to value. What I would say today in 2021 is the best way to do that is the product, right? It's one thing to send customers emails and get on calls with them and Zoom meetings. It's all great. But the best way to do it is in the product. So one of the most popular things now is just using the product to guide the customer customer, right? This is actually an example of Adobe where they're guiding the customer through a guided onboarding in the product. It's a no-brainer, like everyone should do it in some way, right? And there's lots of different ways you can do it, but trying to do it offline when the product itself is online, it's just kind of old school. So do your onboarding in the product as much as you can. Example of that, Glassdoor. I'm sure all of you know Glassdoor, right? Whether you post on it or use it as a customer, Glassdoor has this interesting kind of business challenge where they've got They've got all these candidates, all these people on the Glassdoor site reviewing companies and all that. Then they sell to the HR people and marketing people trying to use Glassdoor to brand their company. Glassdoor's kind of B2B part of their company has a customer success team and has actually done CS for a long, long time, but they were doing it kind of in hand-to-hand combat, talking to individual customers, sending them emails, and then last year they decided, "Let's do more of this in the product. Let's actually do more to drive the customer to adopt new features, onboard, all that. What that did was gave their CS team a lot more time to be more strategic, right? They're not just talking about the new release or getting a customer to adopt something. They're talking about the business value they've achieved. So the product can be your best friend if you're a CS person. Law number 9. So we talked about the idea that in 2013, you should deeply understand churn and retention. What we would do in 2021 is rephrase that to deeply understand net revenue. Retention. I think most of you know net revenue retention includes— I'm sorry, go back one slide— net revenue retention includes both churn but also expansion, right? It's not just about keeping customers, about growing them. And this slide shows that if you improve your net revenue retention, your company multiple goes up. So, sorry, go back one. I think there's some kind of auto-clicking happening. So the horizontal axis is company's net retention rate. The vertical axis is their multiple as a kind of a a factor of revenue, right? So companies that hire at higher net retention rates have higher enterprise multiples. If you are 110% net retention rate, getting to 120 massively increases your company's value. If you're 120, getting to 130, and so on. Now you might look at your business and be like, I'm 110, I'm never gonna get to 180 like Snowflake, right? Don't worry about that. You probably will never be able to get there. But getting to 115 or 120 company makes a big difference. Give you an example of this. So GitLab, I'm sure many of you use GitLab, it's software for engineering teams, awesome company, incredible culture. And GitLab has David Sakamoto and Sherid Patching, the two kind of leaders of customer success at GitLab, and they from the beginning decided that they didn't want to just focus on retaining customers and firefighting and saving them. They wanted to focus on how they can actually drive more growth in their base. Because the way GitLab works, much like your product, It's a set of products, right? They have lots of different products that help engineering teams. And so what they did was that, okay, our job is to get customers to value, but our measurement is how much they're expanding. And if you check out GitLab's S-1 they just filed last week, 154% net retention. Second highest public SaaS company out there in terms of net retention. Law number 10. So if I wrap it all up, you know, if you kind of think about everything I've talked about, in 2013, we thought customer success needs to be more metrics-driven. Driven. It's not just about feelings and meeting customers and whether— what activities do you did. It's about the numbers. What are the numbers? But I'd argue the first 7 or 8 years of customer success, things are a little squishy. If somebody asked you, what's your value? If some of you have seen Office Space, right? What exactly do you do here, right? And I think for a lot of CS leaders, it was hard to answer that question. But the best companies are getting customer success to be totally metrics-driven in their organization. And I'm gonna go back home for this one. I'll talk about Kelly Capote, our Chief Customer Officer. Kelly runs customer success and, you know, post-sales at Gainsight. She's incredible. And one thing she did was made an incredible board deck that's super numbers-oriented. And actually, we publish it online. You can go find this if you Google "making customer success less squishy." And actually, she did this board deck, she presented to our investors. Our investors were like, that's one of the best board presentations I've ever seen. And honestly, they think way more highly of Kelly now. So if you want to be like Kelly, definitely make an amazing deck and make it be about numbers. So I'll give you an example. This is just one slide from the deck. This slide shows our top 20 customers, kind of early indicators of health, but then like, what's the contribution of that to our renewal rate? If we maximize the renewal, what— how much can we increase our renewal rate by, right? Very numbers-oriented versus just stories or feelings or bullet points. So I would encourage you to say, how do we get more numbers around customer success? So with that, you know, what we've done here is we've looked at the 10 laws from 2013, right? And they still all apply. They're still great. But we've kind of realized those laws were all about defense. They were all about firefighting, keeping customers, and it was really important. But how do we add in a new vector? How do we think of customer success in 2021 as not just being about defense? How do we think about it as being a growth engine, right? I think all of you recognize it's one of the best growth engines out there. Net revenue retention is the most important metric in your business. How do we rethink what customer success is? But I've got one bonus one. So my bonus one, it's not just about numbers. I lied. It's also about people. People. And so at Gainsight, if you followed us over the years, one of the things we talk a lot about is human-first business. The idea that amidst all these companies and logos and boots and AdWords and all that stuff are human beings. Human beings at your company trying to move up in their careers, human beings at the customer trying to get their job done. I think a lot of us lose sight of that in the process of running tech companies. So we think business needs to be human-first, we think customer success is a great example of that, so I'm gonna close with the human-first story. So if you have followed Gainsight before, you know that there's never been a parody video that we didn't want to make. Some of you have seen them, we've made lots of fun videos, and we actually have even amazingly written our own rap song, which was actually performed, by the way, 3 years ago at this venue, about customer success. You can find it on Spotify, you'd be the 6th person to probably download it, but it's pretty fun. So we've done a lot of rap videos over the years, and we were in a sales cycle with a company called Experian Health. It's a healthcare IT company. We found out from our kind of sales team that there's a woman named Mindy Forsten, and Mindy, in addition to being a great customer success leader, it turned out Mindy loved to rap. This is actually from her kickoff. So this is Mindy from her kickoff, and we, in the sales process while we're trying to get the customer, we said, well, what would someone naturally do what would they do when presented with this fact? They would make a rap video to close the customer, so we made Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rewritten for customer success and Gainsight and Experian Health, and it's hard to explain, the outfit made sense at the time. But just to show you how this all comes together, that was all in sales, but customer success is human first, so when Experian Health closed the deal with us, they said one condition, one condition, When we launched Gainsight inside our company of, you know, hundreds of CSMs and, you know, thousands of employees, we needed to make a joint rap video together, a mutual rap video. So this is what happened. So can we get the audio? I think you might be— there you go.

1, 2, 3, and to the 4. Mindy Scott Jags and Nick is at the door, ready to go live so you can back on up, cuz you know we about to turn it up. Give me the microphone first so I can burst like a bubble. Experian, GameSight together, now you know you in trouble. Ain't nothing but a G, thanks baby. GameSight's going live and it's crazy. Experian is the job that pays me. Unbreakable, so please don't try to break this.

Like that and like this, it's like that and Like this and like that, and uh, it's like this and like that and like this and uh.

Launching fast in the SaaS with the hellified Gamester team. Getting clients on the right path and risk from red to green. It's a capital E-O-S-X single P, Erie and Health, you see. Client health checks easy as riding a bike. Retention goes at a clip. Change the game with GameSight. Yeah, and it don't quit. I think we're in a mood for another tool and geez it.

Like this and —like that and like this, and, uh, it's like that and like this and like that, and, uh, it's like this and like that and like this, and, uh—

Straight to the mic. So, Experian Health is pretty awesome. But in closing, what should you take away from this? 3 big things. Number 1, customer success is changing a lot, and you have the benefit of doing it right from the start if you're a young company, and you have the benefit of reinventing yourself if you've been around for a while like us. Number 2, customer success is about data, but it's also about human beings, about building those human connections. Never lose sight of that. And number 3, whenever in doubt, if nothing's working, do a rap battle. Thanks so much, everyone.