Kanako T.

I was talking to a MarTech leader a couple weeks ago and they paused me and asked, "This seems great, but is it TRULY zero-copy?" While companies like Salesforce have been marketing "zero-copy" aggressively, we're consistently seeing customers struggle with Salesforce Data Cloud's implementation. And, paradoxically— it still requires data copies! At Hightouch, our Composable CDP has been zero-copy from day 0. Marketers can use all of their data, in the warehouse where their data & IT teams are already operating. And if your warehouse isn't perfect (because whose is?) and you need help with identity resolution, sourcing additional data, etc., we've got your back with the rest of our product suite :) Our team just published a quick deep-dive that will help you cut through Salesforce’s confusing marketing and actually set up a zero-copy CDP: https://lnkd.in/e4XuMrBF

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🔴 You can't outrun churn by forcing CS teams to drive revenue through upsells, cross-sells, and referrals. Startups are missing are missing the forest for the trees. Chasing a 120% NRR? Good luck if you're bleeding customers left and right. If you were as obsessed with stopping the bleeding as you are with hitting sales quotas, you'd be far better off. 🤯 Here’s the brutal truth: even the best CS team can't save you if have a high churn rate. Reaching a 1-2% monthly churn rate takes discipline, effort, and consistency. Many startups struggle with this because they: ❌ Don't invest in better discovery. BANT and MEDDIC is not the answer. ❌ Think Customer = Company. Companies dont buy, people do. ❌ Confuse Initial Company Profile for Ideal Company profile. ❌ Deliver customer onboarding are like a 42km hurdle race. ❌ Rely too heavily on Buyer Personas and not JTBD. ❌ They lack the courage to stick 6 months to a plan. ❌ Build ICP from a acquisition pov, not retention. ❌ Fail at refining the Initial Company Profile. ❌ Don't delivery recurring outcome/values. ❌ Have short visioned sales incentives. ❌ Can't say no to bad-fit customers. 💡 Why should you focus on reducing churn? ✅ Lost referral opportunities. ✅  It shrinks your target market. ✅ Drives up your CAC as you fill up the sales funnel. ✅ A 5% increase in customer retention = 25% to 95% increase in profits. ✅ High churn rates can tank your startup’s valuation. ✅ Compounding revenue loss. The bottom line? 💡 You can’t outrun churn. Prove me wrong. PS: 👇 Do you think high churn rates are more a product issue or a sales issue? What strategies have you found effective in reducing churn? #customersuccess #saas #startups #careercoaching  #CS #CSM #SuccessHacks #customersuccessmanager #saas  

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We often talk about the friction between marketing and sales teams, or marketing ops and rev ops, but I don’t think we talk nearly enough about the friction marketing ops teams seem to always have with IT and Finance. Finance won’t approve budget. IT wants full admin control. "Why do we need HubSpot when we have Salesforce?" The list of potentially stressful and heated conversations could go on and on. And you know what? I honestly think this friction is mostly self-inflicted. Why? Because you’re not treating them like real stakeholders! Most importantly, you’re making decisions about your marketing tech stack without involving them, leading to all them seeing about you and your role is one big black box. I’ve made it a point to align myself very closely with decision makers on these two teams since I’ve been managing marketing operations. And you know what, it’s actually incredibly easy to get on their good side and work well with them. How? Documentation. You know, that thing that always gets deprioritized? Yep, that’s the key. Seriously, if you want to remove the majority of the friction you’ve ever had with IT and finance leaders, document your marketing tech stack. This actually makes it easier to get more of the new tech you want approved. Who doesn’t want that? PS - I’m actually speaking about this at MOps-Apalooza in a few weeks. In addition to sharing some important principles of tech stack management, I’ll be giving away to all attendees my own personal template I’ve used for the last two years that has helped me to earn substantial goodwill from IT and Finance teams.

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What the heck does being "a strategic CSM" mean? Let's decode it together. 🧐 Vague job descriptions and generic training often leave us with buzzwords like "strategic advisor." But without practical steps, this advice is unhelpful. Let’s break "strategic" down into 7 actionable components: 1. Understand Your Customer’s Goals. Know why they bought your product and how it benefits their business. 2. Connect Goals to Your Solution Guide them on using your product to achieve their objectives. 3. Drive Adoption and Change New systems require new habits. Help your customers adapt smoothly. 4. Communicate Persuasively Influence action by speaking in a way that resonates with your customers. 5. Create Win-Win Scenarios Balance your company's needs with those of the customer. 6. Prioritise Effectively Invest your time where it yields the best returns. 7. Multi-threading Establish connections with multiple contacts at different levels within the customer’s organisation. Master these 7 skills and you won’t just be "strategic. You'll be a top-performing CSM, advancing your career and boosting your earnings. Ready to elevate your CSM game? 🚀 Join 11K+ Customer Success Professionals who read my weekly newsletter for insights on building and scaling a CS team. 📩 [Sign up in the comments] #csm #customersuccess #customerexperience #CX #revops

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People that care about UX and productivity for sales people: SDR Managers (god bless you wonderful folks). I do find that most direct managers in Sales aren't polling their employees--especially AE's to find out what's not working, what they are putting up with and not complaining about. There are tons of tools that sales folks are buying on their own dime like Scratchpad, Superhuman, etc. We all care about "giving developers the right tools to stay in flow".. but your revenue team? Sure, leaders need our forecasting tools and enablement systems (maybe)--but ask your team "what sucks about this CRM layout, how does thing work on your mobile device, what things are getting in your way, how much time do you spend clicking around poorly designed tooling interfaces---and what would move the needle for you". As an AE-centric leader, i'm working to put things in place that sure--make folks more productive--but that they don't hate using. What say you? whats sucks in your world? what tools do you buy on your own to deal with your day? or even how should the world work for a day-to-day SDR/AE/Account Manager, etc

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To be honest, I get this question in both my personal and professional life. Depending on who I'm talking to depends on how I answer the question, but this is a great overview for anyone who is interested in learning more about Revenue Operations!

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How do you define an MQL? And how does this compare to what other companies do? 🤔 Someone asked this question in the ROC Slack group recently, here's how the RevOps Co-op responded 👇 1️⃣ 2 out of 4 BANT criteria met Consensus here was BANT is the responsibility of the sales team, not the marketing team, so shouldn't be used. 2️⃣ Exceeds lead score threshold based on demographic and behavior data This was a popular choice. Lots of folks said an MQL should be a hand-raiser that meets some sort of grade / score threshold. 3️⃣ Based on account and title fit with ICP This can be the basis of a lead score or grade mentioned in number 2 above. ☝️ 4️⃣ Based on Minimum Viable Customer Profile (MVCP) This is basically a twist on number 2 and 3 above, but I thought it was intriguing. It's basically a more broad version of your ICP using secondary criteria. For example, if your ICP is a Fortune 500 account, your MVCP may be any company with > $50M revenue. Or if your ICP is HQ in the US, your MVCP could be HQ in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. What do you think - anything missing here for different ways to define an MQL? PS - thanks to Malorie Packard, Colby Ricker, Colin Illar, Jeff Ignacio, Jacqueline Freedman 🦋, Rex Biberston, and others for participating in this 🧵 #revenueoperations #revops #marketingops #marketingoperations #mops #GTMOps #alltheops #MQL

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It's not about getting more notes into Salesforce. It's about increasing your conversion rate through more detailed emails after in person meetings. It's about making sure when reps leave or change territories new reps have the information they need to know when to re-engage. It's about making sure management understands whether the forecast numbers are real or not. So next time your manager or RevOps is bugging you to update your pipeline remember why!

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CSMs, ➡️ you have accounts currently Quiet Quitting ⬅️ your product. Do you know who they are? Quiet Quitting, also known as Quiet Cancelling isn't the dramatic, sudden churn that makes headlines. It's the slow, insidious loss of customers who disengage over time, quietly fading away without a sound. They start by using your product less frequently, logging in sporadically, and before you know it, you're looking at their cancellation notification email. No warning, no feedback. This type of cancellation usually doesn't show up on generic analytic systems found in Product Analytic Software packages or even Customer Success Platforms and definitely not Google Analytics. Letting revenue die on the vine is far worse than the more dramatic cancellations that come from poor onboarding or customer support related issues. Here's the kicker: this kind of churn is completely, 100% avoidable. With the right tools such as Churn Assassin, a Churn Analytics and Prediction Platform (CAPP), you can spot the warning signs early and take the needed actions to change the accounts outcome. It is truly the easiest way to get ahead of churn and to never get caught off-guard again by a cancelling client. #CustomerSuccess #SaaS #HRTech #QuietQuitting #QuietCancelling #ChurnPrevention #B2B #RetentionStrategies #technology

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A software training tragedy in three acts: ACT 1 RevOps roll out a new process or system change in CRM. The team creates documentation, holds training sessions, pops into team meetings, and cajoles users by Slack to spread awareness. Users just want to get on with their jobs and see training attempts as an annoying interruption. ACT 2 The user tries to do something in CRM and is completely blocked by their lack of training. ACT 3 User starts pinging RevOps in Slack asking “how do I do this thing?”. FIN I’ve seen this play out again and again, and it speaks to something fundamentally broken with how we’re approaching digital process adoption. Users don’t care about the information at all until they actually need to use it. At this point, the information becomes vital and relevant. So why not just give them that information in the moment when they really want it? They’ll learn, they won’t bug ops, and everyone will be happy. This is the premise behind Tango, a software training tool that delivers information in the flow of work. Today we chat with Tango COO and co-founder Dan Giovacchini about why this is the better way, the trials and tribulations of founding a company, finding product-market fit, and much more. He also likes to grow olives in his office, because why not.

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Most Customer Success "experts" on LinkedIn are far less experienced than they think, and following their advice will actively hurt your career by preventing you from developing the skills that a Customer Success leader ACTUALLY needs. I'm gonna show you how to spot them by telling you about muay thai. When I started doing muay thai, I wanted to learn all the cool action-movie stuff: the flying knee, the spinning elbow, things like that. But in real life you have to spend your first couple years working on more mundane things, like your footwork, your jab, your body kick. I played around with the flashy stuff here and there, but it was 3 or 4 years before I *really* got into all those fancy moves. Once I did, I was all about it. Couldn't stop talking about how effective they were. I thought I was pretty badass. But you know what happened every time I fought more experienced people? They'd kick my ass without *any* of that stuff. Because the vast majority of the time, those flying knees and spinning elbows are just distractions. By now I've been doing muay thai for more than a decade, and you know what I focus on these days? The same fundamentals I focused on at the beginning. The flashy moves are just too niche to be as impactful, but the fundamentals will be there for you every time. That fancy AI software, or this year's hot new KPI, or whatever book everyone's reading this month and will have forgotten by Q4... those things won't save you. Most of the time they'll just distract you. We're in the business of retaining and expanding our clients, and you know what *really* does that? Demonstrating value. Making them successful. Showing them their ROI. And yeah, I know you can find some company where the fancy AI software was exactly what they needed, just like you can find fights that were won with a flying knee. But you know what wins 99% of fights? Your footwork, your jab, your body kick. They don't make for a sexy highlight reel or a best-selling business book, but they WORK. Every. Single. Time. (But of course, you can't make yourself an influencer by repeating that point every day for years on end, can you?) So if you're trying to develop yourself, and someone keeps telling you about the spinning elbows and flying knees of the Customer Success world, they're probably a lot less experienced than they think. And if you go chasing after all that action-movie stuff, you're gonna realize in a few years that YOU'RE way less experienced than you think.

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Back in my early years at HubSpot, all of the "models" on our website were actually our employees. This came from our scrappy start-up roots, but our customers really loved it. It was always fun to be on a customer call when someone recognized a HubSpotter from the website and said, "Wait, don't I know you?" This happened all the time, even though we were a public company and already had 10,000 customers by then. Our blog and our website got a lot of traffic, after all. So, it was not a small thing to make our employees "HubSpot-famous." We had quite a large community of customers, users, and blog audience. So how do you localize such a thing? When we were preparing to launch our office in Tokyo and localizing our website as part of the process, we realized those images of Americans were not going to cut it. We had a launch deadline to hit. What could we do? We quickly scoured stock photo sites for Asian-American models. They didn't look or feel as authentic as the ones of our employees did, but we needed to get the site live quickly. We could always replace them later, we figured. But, when we did a preview of the new website with our first couple of brand new Japanese employees, they delivered bad news: "These stock images you've chosen? The models are not Japanese." Face palm. Ugh. Embarrassing. We Americans didn't know what we didn't know. Japanese people could easily tell the models were not from Japan. We felt so ignorant! But hey, this is how you learn. Back to the drawing board! At lightning speed, we quickly organized a photo shoot with a local freelance photographer in Tokyo, got photos of our brand new HubSpot employees there, who fortunately were more than happy to help, and quickly replaced all the stock photo images with ones of real TokSpotters. Just like we had, in our home market, in the early days. And you know what? Our Japanese customers began to recognize those models from our Tokyo office, leading to a much more authentic, on-brand, and personalized experience for them as well. #cmo #marketing #localization #international 🌏 PS: Join people all around the world and subscribe to my FREE weekly newsletter, MAKING GLOBAL WORK. You'll get the best tips and advice for driving global growth and succeeding in your international career. 👉 Click my profile and hit Subscribe!

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Hubspot is winning because it fits the market better. Hear me out … Salesforce can do more. Salesforce is super powerful and Hubspot is still not there. Just like Hubspot couldn’t do everything Marketo could do back 10 years ago. (Probably still can’t I don’t actually know.) But Ops teams aren’t staffed to fully use these systems. Companies are not investing in the resources to fully take advantage of all the technology they purchase. #TechDebt And frankly this is something that hasn’t changed and most likely won’t get better anytime soon. So Hubspot doesn’t have to do every that Salesforce does just like they didn’t have to do everything that Marketo did. They just have to do the right things and do it better. And that is what Hubspot does. They make it easier for the average user to do the most important things. Be like Hubspot. Don’t try to do everything. Focus on what matters most and do it better. #ProductUX #Strategy #RevOps #Marketing

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Great insights Kyle. I believe selling to the right customer is key: 1️⃣ Sell to the right customer. 2️⃣ Nail onboarding. 3️⃣ Stop overselling on the 1st deal. 4️⃣ Market to your customers. 5️⃣ Set up integrations. 6️⃣ Solve more problems. 7️⃣ Give yourself more time. #CustomerSuccess

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Sharing RevOps co-op community best practices on something we all know is critical - designing territories to ensure the success of your sales force and, by extension, your company. The number of different strategies available make selecting the right one both challenging and critical. The team at RevOps Co-op delve deep into this topic 👇 https://gag.gl/Nm2xoO #RevOps #Data #DataQuality

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A few uncomfortable truths about RevOps: 1️⃣ RevOps is like therapy. Nobody hires a RevOps team because things are going great. Like a good therapist, a qualified RevOps team will take note of the recurring problems you’re having and help you find the root cause so that you can get back to building (instead of fighting). 2️⃣ A good RevOps team will slow you down. I’ve had clients who, instead of treating us as a strategic partner, have asked us to speed up the sh**ty things they’re already doing. Know how many times that’s worked well? ZERO. Instead of helping you drive faster in the wrong direction, a qualified RevOps team will strategically add friction in the areas of your business that *should* be moving more slowly. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. 3️⃣ If everybody loves your RevOps team, they’re not doing their job. A good RevOps team should be pissing everybody off in your company—in service of a better way of working, of course. They should constantly be calling time out, challenging your assumptions, asking you ‘why’, telling you ‘no,’ and pursuing outcomes instead of tasks. And if they aren’t? They should probably be fired. #b2b #saas #revops #operations #gtm

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This is stuff you're not going to see on RepVue or Salesforce State of Sales. We've been gathering data from GTM leaders on the performance of their team. We asked a few questions that we feel like aren't talked about enough. "Rate your sales team's productivity." "Do you mandate activity minimums? "How important are leading indicators vs lagging indicators?" The results are very intriguing. On of the most obvious ones is that team leaders feel their individual contributors are *AVERAGE* at best at being productive with their days. Huge opportunity there for sure. It backs the findings we saw in another study that said productivity software is one of the only spends companies are willing to make in this type of economic environment. When sales gets more and more difficult... you have to get more and more intentional with productivity, strategy and you're going to succeed.

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“It's about tailoring the metrics to your business” - Nick Mehta, talking about Gainsight Benchmarks Nick knows how to talk! And with this quip, he really got it right!😁 Now.... What does this have to do with my usual LI content on SaaS Metrics?🙄 Everything… For Gainsight's world, we produced something that allows CROs & Heads of CS to answer the most fundamental questions: "Where do we stand?" "How can we improve?" Get a flavor for how we did it by turning through the pages in the graphic. Beautiful, unique... Amazing data! Now imagine having a similar application for SaaS Metrics…. How valuable would that be?!!! That's precisely where we're going with BenchSights! "How do we rank?" and "How can we improve?" -- but for CEOs, CFOs, Investors asking questions about their SaaS Metrics. Same platform. Same UI/UX.... focused on the metrics that people following my LI posts love... And --- as Nick says --- it's about tailoring the answers to YOUR business! Coming soon.... 🥳 #SaaS #Metrics #Benchmarks

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Want to get into RevOps and don't know where to start? Here's a few steps to break in: 📕 Build your knowledge RevOps is largely tribal knowledge. Follow people on Linkedin talking about it, join groups like RevGenius and RevOps Co-op, consider taking courses on it, ask people who are pros in it to have a chat about a specific topic, and if you are at a company with an Ops team become their best friend/ask questions. 🌐 Learn Hubspot and Salesforce You dont need to be a certified admin, but you'll need to know your way around the top CRMs. SFDC Trailhead and Hubspot courses are free and available. Being certified can help but CRM admins are specialists (SFDC admin). 🔢 Take Courses on Advanced Excel/Sheet Data Analysis At a minimum you'll need to be an above average user of Excel and Google Sheets.  And in most cases you'll need to be an expert. Aggregating data from multiple sources, synthesizing that data, understanding what it means and determining recommendations is a big part of RevOps. ✅ Solve Problems where you are This is the most important step. Start solving problems at the company you're at. Offer to run reports, build dashboards, learn about a tool you have offer to support in its admin. Expert in Excel? Offer to assist on analysis of a project. Interested in a tool? See if that tool offers an admin course, take it and offer to support it. If you aren't at company where this is possible, joining a startup where this is the norm might be worth it. Any tips for others on how break in? Any routes other than solving problems where you are?

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