Nick Mehta: SaaS startups hitting 50 employees must hire dedicated CS operations
Nick Mehta · Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: 10 Things That Are Changing Now in Customer Success | SaaStr 2021 · Oct 5, 2021 · at 15:25
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Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta speaks at SaaStr 2021 about modernizing the 10 Laws of Customer Success and scaling operational rigor in SaaS companies.
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“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?”
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More from Nick Mehta
Mehta: Hire executives for current needs, not four years of scale
“I think often people miss more than they hit, and this is especially true now, because before people would often say, and boards would say, you need to hire for the person you need four years from now, right?
Because you're going to be growing so fast, and you…”
Mehta: Growth-stage startup net retention rates dropped 10 to 20 points year-over-year
“I've seen a lot of startups for growth stage companies where their net retention rate is down 1015, or 20 points year over year.”
Mehta: Net retention rate is a 'vanity metric' mixing disparate levers
“Net retention rate is a mix. I said it's a bit of a scam because it's mixing a lot of things together. So vanity metric.”
Mehta: Smaller SaaS companies saw gross retention drop 5 to 10 points
“And we looked at this year versus last year on average gross attention is down one point.
But again, this includes a lot of big companies with more sticky products for smaller companies.
Gross attention is down anywhere from five to 10 points year over year.”