Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM

Churn rates in SaaS are often taken for granted. A 5% churn rate? Sounds manageable until you unpack the numbers. If you're losing customers at that rate every month, you're left with less than half of your original users by the end of the year. The average B2B churn rate might be lower due to the methodical decision-making process, but there's no getting around the fact that B2C companies are more susceptible to quicker exits. Voluntary churn is where the real battle lies, as buyers pull the trigger on cancellations for reasons ranging from budget cuts to outright dissatisfaction. So, what's the play? You need to visualize your churn as a strategic battleground. Whether it's by tightening your onboarding processes, identifying churn indicators early, or even tailoring your cancellation offers, the aim is simple: keep the customers you’ve worked hard to acquire. Churn isn’t just a metric—it's a mindset. Let's debate: Is it smarter to accept a higher churn as a given in a rapidly changing market, or is the focus on reducing churn at all costs a more sustainable strategy? Keep it civil, folks. https://lnkd.in/ehMpvWed

4

Tired of losing hard-earned deals? Solve for Revenue Leak. In Clari’s 2024 Revenue Leak Report, RevOps leaders said leak happens at every stage of the funnel. - Creating: Poor and slow upsell pipeline tracking - Converting: Unsure where pipeline is dropping off - Closing: Slipped deals Don’t let Revenue Leak drag down another quarter – or another year. Download the Revenue Leak Report for more: https://lnkd.in/g9gnGrdz  

13

Why are the best RevOps people former sales reps? 🤔 Because they get it. They know the grind, the frustrations, and the reality of those roles—not just the theory. And that makes them 10x better at building systems, processes, and automations that people actually use. If you haven’t felt the pain of chasing a deal with a broken CRM or launching a campaign where the tracking didn’t work (but still got blamed), you’re missing the instincts to truly fix those problems. Why this works: ✅ Empathy is a cheat code. If you’ve lived the role, you naturally prioritize what matters: speed, simplicity, and results—not fluff or over-complication. ✅ You can speak the language. You know why a sales leader freaks out about pipeline hygiene in Q4 or why a marketer’s biggest fear is the attribution report at quarter’s end. And because you know the stakes, you build accordingly. ✅ You’re closer to the goal. Ops is about removing obstacles—not adding new ones. The best RevOps people aren’t there to “manage tech.” They’re there to help close deals faster, plain and simple. The same logic applies across the board: 🔥 The best marketing ops? Former marketers. 🔥 The best CS ops? Former CSMs. 🔥 The best IT ops? People who’ve had to “just fix it” for non-technical teams. My hot take: Ops should be a natural evolution of someone’s career in the trenches—not a fresh start. The best solutions come from people who’ve lived the problems. What about you? 👉 Have you made the leap from the trenches to ops? 👉 What’s something you “got” immediately because of your past role that other ops folks might miss? Drop your stories or disagree with me—I’m here for it.

12

2 Comments

Awesome SaaStock workshops yesterday led by Kevin "KD" Dorsey on how he operationalizes his sales teams and keep them up to date, Rita Jhaveri on the importance of customer onboarding with a fun workshop (Team Monkey FTW!), and Jake Dunlap for new insights on creating a effective buying experience. My biggest take aways from the sessions were: Our buyers' environment is changing and how they buy is changing. Are your internal processes staying up to date to meet your buyers where they're at? At startups I think of my sales org processes within a constant loop -> What's our.... TAM -> SAM -> SOM -> ICP -> Buyer Persona -> Pain Points for said personas within the ICP -> Does our product solve those pains points -> relevant messaging for marketing + disco + demo -> win customer -> case studies -> renew -> apply case studies and stories to new business sales cycle -> repeat The challenge I hear often is that people don't know what their ICP should be and so everything after that falls flat. But why is this so hard to figure this out? It's going to sound ridiculously simple..but it's your industry tags. Read more on why and how to fix it in the comments below and if you’re attending SaaStock today let’s meet up! #saastockusa2024

32

5 Comments

I speak to many SaaS leaders and their main pain point is scaling effectively while ensuring they have a steady stream of quality leads. At WMAmerica, we tackle these challenges head-on with a targeted approach to lead and demand generation that delivers real, measurable results. Here’s how: - Personal Story: When I joined WMAmerica, my mission was clear: help SaaS companies break through the noise and connect with the right people to drive growth. From my own experience in sales, I knew how challenging it could be to get a foot in the door with potential clients. I made it my priority to not just open doors—but open the right ones. - Client Story: Recently, we worked with a SaaS company that was struggling to scale their demand generation efforts. They had great product-market fit, but their lead funnel just wasn't flowing. In just 3 months of partnering with WMAmerica, they saw: - 60% increase in qualified leads - Closed 5 new major clients - Massive impact on their pipeline, allowing them to scale faster than anticipated. - Another Success Story: A founder approached us frustrated with "bad leads" that led nowhere. By focusing on targeted outreach and quality lead generation—not quantity—we helped them achieve: - 30+ meetings with ideal prospects in one quarter - 40% revenue growth, giving them confidence in their sales process Scaling a SaaS business isn't easy, but with WMAmerica's proven approach to lead and demand gen, it's absolutely achievable. If you're ready to take your demand gen efforts to the next level, let's chat. Your growth story could be our next success post.

73

Thanks for sharing how you use SalesIntel.io's intent data to build warm lead lists and create an effective outbound strategy, Shaheem! #leveragedata #customerfirst

17

3 Comments

For Revenue Operations Directors, staying on top of market trends is essential. With the rapid growth of sales technology, evaluating RevOps tools has become more important than ever. A valuable resource for this is the HG Insights IT Spend Report, which helps identify spending trends and make data-driven decisions. In this article, key takeaways from the Sales and Marketing section of the report are highlighted, emphasizing the importance of investing in RPM software like Xactly. Read on: http://spklr.io/6043Q0w1

2

The key to winning deals and nailing GTM? Aligning buyer and seller priorities. For the buyer, purchasing might be priority #20. Sellers who win are the ones who elevate it to a top 3 priority by understanding and solving what truly matters

11

Sales got its first real taste of automation 10 years ago. Since then it has gone from innovation → competitive advantage → table stakes → abused → toxic. Here's how that happened (and how to avoid it): A company wants to boost results. Low outbound activity or reps failing to do programmatic, repetitive activities are seen as challenges. A progressive leader sees automation as an answer. An automation vendor is selected and implemented. Initial results (almost always) yield amazing results. Why? Because automation is good at harvesting low-hanging fruit. Because it's working, the leader thumps their chest and "scales it up." More processes are automated...ones that are critical. Results continue to go up (usually) but not as efficiently as before. It takes more accounts, more leads as low-hanging fruit disappears. Results start to dip bc automation isn't great at helping reps harvest fruit on the high branches of the tree -- where you gotta work to get the good stuff. Leader has overly invested time, money, and political capital into automation. So, they panic a bit and really crank up the automation. Why not? It used to work, right?! And automation is the future. But, they don't realize the automated systems are doing a different job now. Picking low-hanging apples while you stand on the ground is different than climbing high into trees to get the tastiest ones. Leader (or someone the leader blames) gets fired. New person/people come in and unwinds it all and put in their own version. Rinse and repeat bc no one has thought about where helpful automation ends and toxic automation begins. Imagine this cycle happening at 1000s of companies. What does it do to reps? leaders? the market? buyers? That's why over-automation has become a toxic condition. We all believe it, but many of us are scared to act on it. You should be more terrified of what the effect of toxic automation has on our sales environment -- global warming and scorched earth in GTM is a real thing, too. How do you avoid this? Know the cycle above. Avoid the pitfall. Experiment with what processes can be automated and which can't. You can dip a toe in without cannonballing into the pool to see if the water is nice or not.

91

34 Comments

SaaS leaders tell me the same thing: "We need more leads, but good ones." That's where WMAmerica comes in. We don't do fluff. We do results. When I joined, my mission was simple: help SaaS companies grow fast. Not just any leads, but the right ones. Take one client: They had product-market fit but zero lead flow. In 3 months, we: 1. Boosted qualified leads by 60% 2. Closed 5 new major clients 3. Got them scaling like never before Another founder? Sick of bad leads. We stepped up and: 1. Booked 30+ meetings with perfect prospects in a quarter 2. Grew their revenue by 40% Lead gen is tough, but with the right partner, it's a game-changer. Ready to see results? Let's talk.

126

5 Comments

How does Refine Labs tackle long sales cycles? 🥊 🎧Tune in to the latest podcast episode we did together with CEO Megan Bowen to listen to our full conversation on B2B marketing.

20

2 Comments

Your Support team is a feature of your company. You can hire people to answer questions (functional) all day but building a scalable and repeatable experience that adds real value to your company is another thing. 📅 Retention ❤️ Customer Satisfaction 🌟 Product Feedback & Improvement 💰 Revenue Protection 👍 Better Brand Reputation Invest in your competitive advantage.

8

As CS is getting increasingly aligned with the revenue function, this conversation is happening a lot... CRO: "I just took over customer success, can someone explain to me what our CSMs do?" VP CS: "We make sure that our customers are getting value from the product..." CRO: "OK, what does that mean?" VP CS: "We answer all of their questions and log support cases." CRO: "Isn't that support?" VP CS: "Well no, because we have QBRs" CRO: "OK, well what do we talk about in the QBRs?" VP CS: "All the tickets we fixed and the features that we rolled out" CRO: "Ok, what other things do our CSMs do?" VP CS: "We help with implementations and continuous improvement!" CRO: "Isn't that professional services?" VP CS: "Well we read an article that says that we shouldn't charge for services, so our CSMs just do it." CRO: " 🤯 " VP CS: " 🤯 "

9

5 killer mistakes you're making when onboarding new sales reps that's costing your company millions in revenues. If you're a sales leader at an early stage tech company, you probably just onboarded new sales reps this week. Here's the 5 common mistakes you likely made 1️⃣ You don't have a written down training plan and hour-by-hour schedule for the entire training period. 2️⃣ You're doing a demo of your product and calling it "training." (time for new hires to get a quick nap in) 3️⃣ You're overvaluing "call shadowing" by having your new reps sit with other random reps. (Frankly, this is just lazy on your part) 4️⃣ You're not giving any sort of quizzes or assessments to see if they actually learned & retained something. 5️⃣ You've shown them your CRM but then not had them SHOW YOU that they know how to use it. (People learn way better by doing) There's actually a lot more than 5 but if you at least shore these up, you're on a great path to onboarding success. What other onboarding mistakes have you seen leaders make when onboarding new sales reps? If you found this post useful - you'll enjoy my free guide: Best Practices for Onboarding and Training New Sales Teams https://lnkd.in/gT2D2z3m

6

2 Comments

Hey #RevOps people... ... Do you own the GTM AI-evolution tech stack? In a convo with Ray Rike yesterday he was advocating that the RevOps team should be working with one AI-tool (evaluate through deployment) every Quarter. I suggested that with the current work load also on very small RevOps Teams, this was a "bit" of a stretch goal. That said, the idea of RevOps being the nerve center for AI-tools, is something we both agree on. S.T.E.P. U.P. RevOps. Start owning the AI-based recommendations for GTM. For your CRO. In 2024 we saw the company emphasis shift to Efficient Growth. We also saw AI start to come into its own. 2025 will continue to be about UNIT ECONOMICS. That basically means going MORE with LESS. Becoming more profitable when deploying resources. That is the signal for RevOps to drive efficiencies and automations. Sales Headcount might stay relatively flat in 2025 for many companies. But Sales Productivity will be expected to go up. This is where RevOps comes into their own. Own it. #sales #productivity #growth

1

6 Comments

Update: Turns out Customer Success gets crazy ROI from Daydream. Increases CSM capacity by 25-50%, grows NRR, lets leaders/CSMs be strategic v. tactical. Just watch. We're leaning into Success hard. Success teams are stretched thin & under more pressure than ever. Growing their book of business means digging deep into each account, pulling data from multiple sources, researching news & role changes, revisiting past calls, mapping that to ICP-specific playbooks. It's basically impossible to do that well across 50-300+ accounts. So accounts get neglected. Opportunities get missed. We give Success AI-powered leverage, the power of 1000 revenue analysts digging deep into every account, looking at past calls, product usage, marketing touches, etc. and pulling out insights and recommendations that help you expand your book of biz, without having to throw bodies at the problem -- Scaled Success. If you are or know a Success leader, lmk and we'll get a magical result. Key use cases: - 1-click QBRs, with pre-drafted analysis - Magical Account Planning (Researched For You) - Customer Health/Churn/Expansion Flagging + Next Best Actions (Pre-Drafted) - 360 Customer + Book of Biz Views w/ All Relevant Data - Pulling Insights from Transcripts/ Calls -- e.g. Risks, Product Feedback Trends - Analytics & NRR

53

18 Comments

Is your go to market team truly aligned, or are you just hoping for the best? Too often, I see companies silo their sales, marketing, customer success, solutions, and partnerships teams, expecting them to magically align on their own. The reality? They don’t. And the fallout isn’t just missed revenue targets—it’s a disjointed customer experience that costs trust and loyalty! Here’s the thing: alignment isn’t just a buzzword or a quarterly objective. 💓 It’s the heartbeat of a successful go-to-market strategy. At Cerby, we’ve found that bringing our sales, marketing, solutions, partnerships, and customer success teams together isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s critical for a unified approach to both customer acquisition and retention. 🪄 When these teams move in sync, magic happens: • Sales gets the insights they need from marketing to engage prospects in meaningful ways. • Solutions and Partner teams build bridges that extend our reach and credibility. • Customer Success doesn’t just react—they anticipate needs because they’ve been part of the journey from the start. 👓 But let’s be clear: alignment doesn’t happen by chance. It takes intentional leadership, open communication, and a shared commitment to the customer journey. It’s not always easy—sometimes it’s messy and uncomfortable. But the payoff is immense. For those leading go-to-market teams, my question is: Are you facilitating alignment, or are you hoping it will just happen? Because, in my experience, and as the saying goes, “hope is not a strategy.” Let’s not just talk about breaking down silos; let’s actually do it. We haven’t figured all of this out yet, and we’re only at the beginning of the Cerby GTM journey; the good thing is that we are asking the hard questions and having those uncomfortable conversations as a team. How are you ensuring your teams are truly working together? #leadership #gotomarket #startuplife

24

7 Comments

Welcome to the latest episode of Scale Your Sales, where our guest James Cuthbertson brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise on revolutionizing your sales process. Uncover the power of MEDDIC as not just a methodology, but a game-changing project management system. Discover how the top 5% of successful sellers are defying traditional perceptions, and the importance of implementing kick-off forms early in the sales process. Get ahead of the game with key insights on professionalizing your approach to deal management and drive your sales success to new heights. Tune in now and level up your sales game! https://lnkd.in/eCkQz_t2 #customergrowth #scaleyoursales #salesstrategy #salessuccess #salesprocess #meddic

5

This is why you don't get demos or meetings. What early-stage companies can do about messaging: Message-to-Market-Fit. MMF is the relationship between 1) the words in your value prop and 2) how RELATABLE those words are to your market. It's similar to Product-Market-Fit. 1️⃣ PMF is about solving for customer retention. 2️⃣ MMF is having customers stick around to hear everything you have to say. Imagine your acquisition funnel as an upside-down pyramid. What you do exactly in your funnel is irrelevant, to some degree. As long as that funnel is a nicely sloped pyramid. ❌ When your MMF is poor, your pyramid looks jagged. • Fewer people stick around to hear your full message, how it works, and why it's better. • Your value proposition doesn't resonate. It's not relatable. • They drop off more frequently as you share more messaging with them. • Before they get to the core of your offering, you already missed out on potential leads, demos, and meetings. • You are safe to ignore. ✅ A healthy MMF creates a smooth, nicely sloped pyramid. • More people are interested in what you have to say next. • Your message is clear and relatable. • They see themselves in your words, feel understood, and want to click to learn more. • Your funnel is fuller at each subsequent stage. • This leads to better conversion rates and ultimately more customers. The best driver of healthy MMF is, in a strange way, the things that are hardest to keep up with. - Customer interviews - Engaging and listening on social media - Attending niche events - Building relationships with influencers - In-person visits - Customer advisory boards Doing these things might take time and effort, but they can make your message fit your market better.

8

2 Comments