4 Simple Things You Can Do to Not Lose Your Top Customers; Plus Weekly SaaS News and Updates

Hey SaaStr Community,

Hopefully, 100% of your customers love you. But as time goes on, you’ll oversell a few deals. Or not quite deliver in some fashion. Or fail to deploy in others. And some customers will ask for their money back. When they e-signed binding, good old-fashioned contracts.

What should you do?

The simple answer “of course” is that yearly contracts can’t be canceled — per se. That’s the whole point of whatever explicit or implicit discount you give for doing a yearly contract (vs. monthly or quarterly). And the language likely will plainly say the contract cannot be canceled.

But … it’s just a contract. So a few qualifiers:

What To Do When A Customer Wants to Cancel A Contract

I remember the first time I lost a six-figure customer. It was a surprise. They seemed happy. They had even done a case study for us.

And then one day, we got a call. We lost a top logo customer with no quantitative flags. Nothing you could have seen.  Unless … unless you were there.  Unless you were really looking.

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by Zapnito

Recently a number of founders have reached out to me about offers to acquire their company from Private Equity firms like Thoma Bravo, Vista, etc.  Once you cross $10m-$20m ARR in SaaS, you’ll likely start getting these calls and emails.

M&A isn’t all fun.  Yes, you get liquidity.  But once you sell it, it’s not yours anymore.  You’re not the sole boss, you don’t get to make the decisions.  “Bean counters” tell you what to do.  And your upside is capped.  You can even … lose your sense of purpose and self sometimes.

Especially now that dozens of next-generation SaaS companies have IPO’d, you can start to see the turnover more viscerally than you can observe at quieter, privately-held start-ups.  You see the VPs moving on every week.  12-18 months after almost any IPO … folks leave.

I think in most cases, as long as your best employees stay 4-5 years … it’s OK. But if you lose someone truly great after 18-24 months, someone that truly owns a core function at your company — that’s just devastating.

SaaStr Europa 2022 is back this June in Barcelona! 

We'll be bringing the best in SaaS to Spain for 2 days on 7-8 June. 

A few of our incredible speakers already include:

• Andrey Khusid, CEO @ Miro
• Dave Kellogg, Principal @ Dave Kellogg Consulting
• Eléonore Crespo, Co-Founder and Co-CEO @ Pigment
• Bill Binch, Operating Partner // Former CRO @ Battery Ventures // Pendo
• Phil Fernandez, Co-Founder @ Marketo
• Henry Schuck, Founder and CEO @ ZoomInfo
• Laura Urquizu, CEO @ Red Points

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by Snyk

Founder conflict is, unfortunately, pretty common. It’s happened to me twice, that “moment", and it was the same thing both times.

Sam Blond, Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, shares how to set and hit revenue targets for your sales team, when to adjust, and how to structure and hire your team around your sales KPIs and goals.

• SaaStr is seeking a Director of Digital Events to to own executing our global, digital events from end-to-end, including: acting as the lead producer for our digital events, driving attendees, meeting or exceeding ticket sales, leveling up communications to build awareness, community-building, and anything that will drive our digital events to the forefront of SaaS and Cloud. 
• Printfection is looking for an Operations Specialist to help support existing customers by working with our outsourced partners to ensure each order is produced to spec and delivered on-time.

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Building a Successful Customer Advisory Board in the Enterprise with Mapistry VP of Customer Experience Maya Colato

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15 Ways to Help the Sales Team with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

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How to Set and Hit Revenue Targets with Sam Blond, CRO at BREX

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

When a VP of Sales is truly failing,

Sometimes as CEO you still think it's better to have them than nothing

But it never is

You always sell better the day they are gone

Worst case, just build what your top customers want

They can't see too far into the future

But they probably have a better sense of what really moves the needle right now than you do

Community is hot

But, realistically, you can only be part of 1 or 2 actively

Add a ton of value, go narrow, build something that matters no one else can get anywhere else

Get 100 super fans, go from there

Otherwise, it's just more crappy content marketing really

So many mistakes you think you can’t recover from

But after even $1m ARR, maybe the only one you can’t is burning through 100% of the money

© SaaStr 2022

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