The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: The Majority Of SaaS Companies Moved Customer Success Under Sales
“Churn zero did a survey gains. I did a survey. They're both on Saster. I'm sure hook would give you similar data. The majority of SAS teams have moved CS into sales, the majority.”
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.”
Mehta: Do not scale customer success simply by hiring more CSMs
“In fact, if I give you one piece of like advice from the beginning, it's don't just hire a bunch of CSMs, maybe one or two. It's heretical for me to say, by the way, but it's true. Go fix all your processes, your product, make it so you can scale without a cra…”
Mehta: Large, Storied Companies Rely on Internal Promotions Over Senior Hiring
“This is why when you get to really big companies and really storied companies, there's very little senior hiring. Most of the people in these huge companies grew up in the companies and moved around”
Mehta: Delaying a Second Product Line Traps Slowing SaaS Companies
“And if you wait till you start slowing down a lot and then need to go launch something new, but you have to create it and you have to raise money for it. And that might take three, four or five years. You're in a trap, and so kind of that really, really can hu…”
Mehta: SMB customers often require more hand-holding than enterprise clients
“And actually, ironically, SMBs sometimes need more hand-holding, because they have less internal capability, and they're, like, more distracted, so it's kind of weird, like, you know, the smallest customers sometimes need more help, so.”
Mehta: Introducing a second product can save struggling customer accounts
“I think what's a little counterintuitive is when a customer hasn't gotten value or isn't happy, Sometimes actually this extra thing can actually tip the scales.”
Mehta: SaaS sales forecasts will suffer far worse than retention
“So I believe that your retention forecast will be hit, because some of your customers will go out of business, and some will hit budget troubles, but your sales forecast will probably hit significantly more than retention.”
Mehta: Almost all Gainsight executives were promoted from internal roles
“Now, the flip side, if you look at my executive team today, we're 1300 people.
Let me just go through it.
Chief Customer Officer, seven years ago, was a CSM at Gainsight.
Head of sales.
Nine years ago was a sales rep at Gainsight.
Chief marketing officer six y…”
Nick Mehta: Gainsight accumulated roughly 1,200 pricing models across 1,300 customers
“Gainsight, we're like, 1300 customers, I don't know, 1200 different pricing models, something like that.”
Mehta: Customer indecision, not technology, drives slow software time-to-value
“I'd argue the biggest part of time to value is not your technology. It's how people implement it. Cause people spend a lot of time on indecision.”
Mehta: Gainsight ARR scaled to $61M before single-product bookings flattened
“So again, tying to our ARR, I think it was one to five to 16 to 30, and there's like 48. That was 61, right? And we didn't do anything wrong. It's just like they started having the same number of logos a year. So what that means is like your new bookings flatt…”
Mehta: My success rate on outside executive hires is around 20%
“They had the resume, but I gotta admit, I have swung and miss on way
more executive hires than I've actually hit on.
And if you have to, don't feel bad.
It's something that I think a lot of us do.
I mean, I don't think my batting average is more than
Literally…”
Mehta: Burned-out leaders are ineffective and send damaging signals to teams
“It's not acceptable to let yourself work all the time and get burnt out because that sends a signal to your team. And by the way, you're not a good leader when you're burnt out.”
Mehta: Gainsight cut onboarding time to four weeks via prescriptive methodology
“Honestly, our time to value literally went from, like, you know, months and months and months to now it's, like, average four weeks, and a big chunk of it was this of being more prescriptive.”
Mehta: Gainsight reaches nearly $200M ARR and 1,200 employees
“Today we are close to two hundred million of ARR, just about, almost there. And we're about 1200 employees.”
Mehta: SaaS companies must build digital CS infrastructure early, not just add CSMs
“If all you have is CSMs and like a kind of a people-driven approach, then it looks like everything requires a CSM. And so kind of what I would say here is just early on, get a lot of the basic stuff in place. Like, you know, people should be able to open a tic…”
Mehta: SaaS companies should invest in CPQ at 100-200 employees
“Custom deals seem great at the time, but make sure they're really worth it. They have to be big enough to worth it and be worth it. And then invest in back office systems early. So your accounting, your CPQ, all that stuff is pretty good. I'm not talking about…”
Nick Mehta requires all Gainsight leaders to meet 10 clients per quarter
“I expect our leaders to meet at least 10 clients a quarter. It doesn't matter if you're a CFO, it doesn't matter if you're a teammate, you know, teammate success, HR.”
Lemkin: Enterprise SaaS reps no longer do first meetings in person
“COVID changed it in that we are, like, I don't know what you see in your portfolio, but all of the enterprise SaaS companies I've invested in and work with, they're all going back to face-to-face meetings.
Nick met on Gainsight's talking about it, they're all …”
Nick Mehta: In-product onboarding is the best way to accelerate time-to-value
“What I would say today in 2021 is the best way to do that's 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.”
Nick Mehta: SaaS companies must align sales and CS around customer outcomes
“What you need is an integrated journey from sales to customer success, because the truth 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, ri…”
Nick Mehta: Top CS teams create mutual success plans assigning client tasks
“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. So…”
Nick Mehta: Top CS executives demand core company commitment before joining
“If you are in a position where you're founder or 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 y…”
Alon: Direct instructional copy significantly outperforms conversational welcome copy in SaaS
“We saw that very interestingly that the instructional one, as you're showing a message saying here, learn how to operate a feature was outperforming the friendly welcome as hello, Jim was really, really dramatic difference. I guess user are trying to learn som…”
Alon: SaaS trial retention curves should remain above 30% to 40%
“And eventually once you get into a proper place, which is this line should be above 30 or 40%, you want to also start collecting some feed user feedback to drive into the next level.”
Alon: Product growth must be owned end-to-end by a dedicated team
“You wanna have people that own that A to Z. If it's still gonna be partially on marketing, partially on product, it's just gonna fall between the cracks. You wanna make sure that this is owned by a growth Team.”
Alon: $10K to $15K annual SaaS pricing fits tech-touch nurturing
“And we're seeing in the market, for example, costs around 10 to 15 K a year kind of qualifies to a tech touch approach, which is kind of one too many type of nurturing.”
Mehta: Gainsight uses comped specialist overlay sales teams for technical buyers
“So what we created is a specialist team. That works with our main team, but is very focused on talking to that specific buyer and they're kind of an overlay. So both sides get comped, but the specialist team is good with that technical buyer who wants to just …”
Mehta: Use renewal SPIFs rather than overhaul core sales comp plans
“A SPF is kind of an incentive on top of the core plan to help people kind of redirect their activities. And so there's an opportunity to have a SPF around renewals particularly for your focused accounts, like maybe pick a list of the 20 renewals that you could…”
Mehta: Every business will face a 20% to 90% new sales slowdown
“I think the bottom line of all of this is everyone's going to be affected, particularly in new sales, and we'll talk about retention as well, but your question here is about deals. I think every business is going to be affected, and whether that's a 20% slowdo…”
Mehta: Running a startup shifted after 2021 into an ongoing grind
“It used to not be like this in 20, 21. Now it's just a grind. I feel like if you feel like yours is a grind, you're truly like. 99% of companies were all in the exact same boat.”
Mehta: Average SaaS net retention rates declined by 3 points year-over-year
“And we asked people your net retention rate this year versus last year. So this essentially the chart looks at the X axis is the net retention rate. The Y axis is number of percentage of people that are in each of those buckets. And net retention rate was down…”
Mehta: Deploying software only with junior staff leads to severe churn risk
“A lot of people, what they do is they sell the software. They end up working with the junior people to get it deployed. The executive lose track of it. They quit. Somebody else comes in and says, what the heck is this stuff? And do we get any value? And people…”
Mehta: Gainsight waited five years for second $1M+ deal after hiring 10 reps
“We closed our first gigantic enterprise deal. 2.6 million dollars of ARR. The biggest deal we'd done till then was maybe 300 grand, 400 grand. We're high-fiving around the office. I'm sure champagne is being passed around. I don't remember. But it was a big da…”
Mehta: Gainsight is profitable and generating cash
“We were profitable company now and generating cash and things like that.”
Mehta: Gainsight conducts blameless retrospectives for all customer churn
“Whenever we have a churn at Gainsight, you know, I always start the meeting and be like, look, we're just here to like, we'll do a retro meeting and we're here to learn, like, cause all of us can learn and get better. This is not about like who did what or who…”
Mehta: Gainsight went five years without a second seven-figure deal after its first
“We literally didn't get like another one of those deals for like five years.”
Lemkin: All four panelists from a 2015 SaaStr session became SaaS unicorns
“You did a panel you did it with three entrepreneurs on, that were at a million in ARR, and all four of you are unicorns and decacorns. So it's interesting. It was you, Tiago from TalkDesk, Nicholas from Algolia, and Daniel from Greenhouse, and all were growing…”
Mehta: Gainsight had roughly 750 enterprise customers as of October 2020
“About seven, seven, 750 customers roughly.”
Mehta: In a downturn, assume peer executives are cutting budgets simultaneously
“As one principle I was going to share is I think one thing that's reasonable for you to think about as a CEO, founder, executive is whatever you're doing, everyone else is doing or more. So if you have your spreadsheet open of your budget and you're like, what…”
Mehta: Gainsight Q1 forecast stayed steady due to lag effect
“Our forecast for our Q one, which ends in April looks quite similar to where we were a few weeks ago. But I think that's a bit of a lag effect, right?”
Mehta: Simple conceptual slides of the customer journey resonate with investors
“If you can show an investor a slide, that's just like how you're approaching your customers. I think it goes a long way. It's not, you don't need to automate it. You don't need a ton of processes, just like a simple concept of what you're trying to do.”