The Latest from SaaStr: 4 Recent, Very Bad, Truly Terrible Customer Success Experiences. Just This Week.

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin · Monday, December 12, 2022 | Customer Success

So I’ve written a bit about a topic that a lot of folks challenge me on.  But look, it’s true.

Customer Success has gotten worse over the past few years. 

Much worse.

The best Customer Success teams are still amazing. They jump on a problem like a grenade. They truly solve your problem. Often, in a way the software itself can’t. They are amazing.  They are the great gifts in SaaS.

But most CS folks don’t do this anymore. The quality of the average CS experience I’ve had over the past decade has deteriorated as SaaS has grown.

By Amelia Ibarra · Monday, December 12, 2022 | Leadership, Marketing

Every SaaS company strives to adapt to the emerging changes in the market as soon as possible and achieve sustainable growth.

Adam Markowitz, Co-Founder and CEO at Drata, and Amanda Robson, Partner at Cowboy Ventures, walk us through key lessons they learned while growing Drata and the guiding principles that helped the company to sustain its growth.

Media Sponsorships are now officially open for 2023 after being completely sold out for 2022.

While all of our sponsored media assets have nearly doubled in the last year, our rates for Media Sponsorships are remaining the same for now, so let us know if you're interested media placements for the months around our events tend to go very quickly.

The Official SaaStr Podcast was just ranked for 2022, and we're in the top 1% of most followed podcasts on Spotify, reached 87 countries around the globe and had 8+ million impressions of our sponsor ad placements.

By Jason Lemkin · Sunday, December 11, 2022 | Sales

So SaaStr polls aren’t perfect, but they do seem to capture the zeitgeist of things pretty well.  One recent one surprised me a bit. 

Only about half of you are actually adding to your sales team next year.

Times certainly are strange these days.  CIOs are scrutinizing budgets like never before.  Salesforce has suspended forward guidance for 2023, saying it just doesn’t know how much it will grow.  And yet … so many leaders in SaaS and Cloud are still growing like almost never before.  

It makes sense to hit the brakes if your growth has slowed dramatically this year.  And perhaps that ties to the data above.

By Jason Lemkin · Saturday, December 10, 2022 | Hiring, Sales

In the early days of SaaStr, we wrote a bunch of posts that were controversial at the time, but later, most sales leaders eventually agreed with.

That you know early.

That you know even in 1 sales cycle if a VP of Sales is going to work out.

Yet, in some ways, this breaks down a bit in tougher times. If sales cycles are long and getting even longer, how can you know if it’s your VP of Sales … or just macro issues?  How do you know if it’s “the downturn” — or it’s you?

By Jason Lemkin  · Friday, December 9, 2022 | Blog Posts, Scale

So look, very few, if any, SaaS or Cloud companies are out there saying times are easier now than 12 months ago.  Probably none. 

Everyone from Amazon to HubSpot to Salesforce is saying is tougher.  At least, more scrutiny on spend. More stakeholders to sell to. NRR down a smidge.  Salesforce even said it just didn’t know how it would do next year, and for now, suspended guidance.

But it should be at least a little harder. CIOs and SMBs went on a huge “digital transformation” spend wave in 2021 and into early 2022 that was, in many ways, a one-time reaction to how the world changed post-Covid.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

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