Hey SaaStr Community,

If you are a SaaStr reader, you’ll know how passionate I am about Customer Success, since Day 1.

For one simple reason: Second Order Revenue.

Upsells. Renewals. Word-of-Mouth. Champion Change. What it all means is that if you do it right, you’ll make 6x or more the revenue from your customers after the sale itself. The details on that math here.

And I passionately believe in measuring things. Churn, upsells, renewals, and all that, and compensating against it. And about measuring and identifying Almost Churn.

So if you want happy customers, implement the 5-Visits-Plus-2-Badges Rule. For Your Customer Success Team — And You. 

I’ve interviewed 100s of VP of marketing candidates over the past years and I can tell you one thing — it’s easy to spot the ones that won’t work out.

How?  It’s not that they aren’t smart, or driven, or thoughtful in most cases. 

It’s that they are a mismatch. 

Especially in skills and interests.

There is just so much to do in marketing, from product marketing to brand marketing to customer marketing to, of course, demand gen.  And really, most VPs of Marketing just want to focus on their 2-3 most favorite things to do.  You have to make sure those are your top 2-3 needs, as well.

So with that, let’s review our Top 10 Interview Questions for a VP of Marketing candidate.

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Even lower than they really are. It’s not that they aren’t low. It’s just, especially in the earlier days, there’s so little cash, so few customers, so few teammates … that any body blow feels like it can end everything.

And you’ll almost fail indeed during some low times. But you’ll look back and see you got through those with tenacity and commitment. And actually missed other things that were most important to really worry about.

Near-death / low-time examples:

Running out of money. This is indeed scary as heck. But somehow, someway, the best founders find a way. Many almost run out of money, however. I did.

Losing your #1 customer. This is terrible. But it also teaches you how not to lose the next one.

It took me a while to understand the power of events and field marketing.

For 90% of us, one of the toughest adjustment to being CEOs of SaaS companies is having to constantly recruit.

Once you have Initial Traction at least, you’re going to have to spend at least 20% of your time recruiting.  More on that here.  And really, 50% would be even better.  As soon as you have something in SaaS, you have to stop being an individual contributor as much as practical.  Stop being a functional VP-as-well-as-CEO as soon as you can.  Let it go.  Hire those folks instead, as soon as you can afford it, and have Initial Traction.

But it’s even more than that.  

It’s more than just recruiting a management team.  Because once you finally get your first management team in place, some of them will be a mismatch, or just only a good fit for the next year or so, or end up better as directors or team leads, but not VPs, etc.  

So you’ll be lucky if half of the management team you build at $1m ARR is there at $8m in ARR.  They may all still work for you — I hope they do.  But many of the VPs you recruit around $1m in ARR just won’t scale, or fit, at $10m in ARR.

So recently I caught up with a sales exec I’ve known for a while that is doing pretty well, especially for this macro environment.

He’s making over $500,000 a year as an AE.  And that’s much, much, much more than he made in his last role.  And he deserves it — he’s crushing it.

And yet he just complained and complained and complained about his comp to me.

I asked him how much he closed, and how much he took home.  It seeed like a very fair comp plan to me.  Then I asked him if he felt underpaid compared to the other reps, and he said no, he wasn’t #1, but he was in the top tier.

No, he complained about his $70k base salary.

I talked to him and explained that it hardly matters in sales what your base is, what matters is attainment.  I asked him what would be fair?  He said an $85k base.

From a very, very good rep making $500k+.

It was just a reminder to me how important psychology is in comp plans. 

While the allure of customer acquisition can pull a founder’s attention, it’s equally important to dedicate resources to fighting churn and expanding revenue from existing customers. One company that has unlocked the secret to solid retention and revenue expansion is Brex, an easy-to-use corporate cards and spend management software in an integrated global solution.  

In this edition of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond (former CRO at Brex and current Partner at Founders Fund) hosts his former colleague Lucas Fox (GM of Brex for Startups).

They discuss how Fox helped build a churn-fighting, upselling, and cross-selling machine that continues to generate revenue.

Prismatic is looking for Account Executive who can

build and maintain lasting relationships with clients and partners by understanding their focus and anticipating their needs.

SAP is seeking a Senior Solution Sales Executive who will be responsible for prospecting, qualifying, selling, and closing software/service revenue for both new and existing SAP Ariba customers.

• SaaStr 633: Why You Want to Develop Product Painkillers, Not Vitamins with DigitalOcean CPO Gabe Monroy

• SaaStr 634: Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed

• SaaStr 635: CRO Confidential: How Customer-First Focus Drives Retention and Revenue with Brex GM of Startups Lucas Fox

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

The 100x ARR craziness allowed SaaS startup to burn

cash at a rate we'd never seen before

The reset is still in process

B players hire C players to work for them

and C players?

They hire folks who literally do nothing

The regret we’re all having in VC right now isn’t really vitamins vs. painkillers, or startups whose growth has slowed for now

It’s that we invested in so many startups that weren’t really true game changers

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