Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The Power of High-Level Relationships and Overcoming Challenges

8 Sept 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:52

A short YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin recounting a setback when Salesforce chose to partner with DocuSign despite Lemkin's company having more customers and many positive reviews. He attributes the choice partly to a CEO-level relationship with DocuSign's CRO, describes the decision as a significant blow that influenced later choices (including a sale), but emphasizes resilience—his company nonetheless closed major customers such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, and Twitter.

Chapters

But we did not have a deep relationship with Salesforce. And I remember when Salesforce told us that they were going to partner with DocuSign despite us having 10 times more customers at the time on the partner, despite us having 1,000 five star reviews, they were going to partner with Docusign. And the specific reason was very interesting, which was that the CEO was very close to the CRO at the time, which is a reminder of the power of those high level relationships sometimes to think all of a sudden the game was no longer going to be equal, that we were. That we were going to be competing with our partner, that they were going to recommend DocuSign over us was a huge body blow that maybe in some ways led to us deciding to sell. But you know what? And it was a real blow and they really did recommend us and it really did hurt us. But you know what, it didn't really stop anything after that happened. We still closed Facebook, we closed Google, we closed Yelp, we closed Twitter. Okay.