Robin Laster

What is the most exciting thing about the fintech and payments space today? 💸 ZoomInfo Founder and CEO Henry Schuck shares his thoughts while at Money20/20 on how ZoomInfo empowers companies to pinpoint and understand their total addressable market—unlocking new growth opportunities. #Money2020

4

Writing this Account Scoring Guide was a must because today, RevOps leaders need to do more with less. Account scoring is critical to cut through the noise and help teams focus on the highest-value accounts. I’ve seen first-hand how better scoring can shorten sales cycles and improve win rates. Want to get more strategic with your scoring? Check out the guide for the full breakdown: https://bit.ly/3ZzpERu 

46

4 Comments

✨ When I determined that Net Revenue Retention (NRR) was my north star, everything came into focus. It became clear that driving customer value and retention was the key to sustainable growth. I recently had the opportunity to discuss how I increased NRR on CSM Practice with Irit Eizips. We went deep into the strategies that led to Banzai's consistent year-over-year NRR growth.🎙️ Podcast link in comments! I’d love to hear how others have successfully increased NRR. What’s worked for you in driving customer retention and growth? #CustomerSuccess #NRR #CustomerRetention #Leadership #SaaS

21

Let’s nerd out and talk about the metrics in your comp plan for #CustomerSuccess managers. I’ve been thinking about this as we work together with our new Chief Customer Officer Brent Krempges and new Chief Revenue Officer Marilee Bear at Gainsight on our 2025 strategy. If a CSM is paid with 80% base and 20% bonus, the question is - what are the measures to calculate the bonus? Here are a few options we’ve considered: 💰 CSMs Incentivized Purely On Renewals: This one is attractive, in that it ties CSMs clearly to financial performance. Indeed, the reason many companies have cut CSMs is a belief that they don’t tie to the bottom line. The downside is that in companies with multi-year contracts, a comp plan tied 100% to renewals could lead CSMs to focus 100% on the near-term and miss out on long-term risk. Of course, this can be counteracted with actively weekly management of the team. In addition, if a CSM inherits accounts (e.g., from a departing teammate) that are already going to churn, it can feel punitive to the individual. Some companies manage this issue through exceptions. 🤝 CSMs Incentivized Purely On a Shared Renewal Target: In this approach, CSMs share a collective target - perhaps across a segment or region. The upside here is to reduce the short-term focus and mitigate the issue of a CSM inheriting un-saveable clients. The downside is each CSM has a minimal impact on the overall number. 🚦 CSMs Incentivized Purely On Leading Indicators: Here, CSM bonuses are calculated based upon metrics like adoption, NetPromoter Score, ROI delivered and executive alignment. This approach focuses CSMs on the future. But skeptical CFOs might consider the CSMs in this model to be a cost center. 📈 CSMs Incentivized On Renewals AND Leading Indicators: This is a good blend. However, if the plan has too many “levers,” it can become dilutive. For example, if there are 5 metrics and the bonus is 20%, each metric only represents 4%. ❤️ CSMs Are On 100% Base: While this might sound crazy, some companies have chosen to believe CSMs are “intrinsically motivated,” versus driven purely by compensation. That being said, the goal for CSMs can be confusing for teammates. 💲 CSMs Are On the Company Bonus Plan: Here, the goal is to align CSMs with corporate goals. But this model can suffer from the same dilution as #2 above - but worse. There are many more considerations too: 🙋🏾‍♂️ Do CSMs get incentives for upsell and cross-sell - e.g., a SPIFF for leads? 🙋🏾‍♂️ Do CSMs get compensated for customer advocacy? 🙋🏾‍♂️ Do CSMs receive “accelerators” for overperformance? How do you measure the bonus calculation for your team?

466

67 Comments

I LOVE waking up each morning, drinking coffee and going through our SFDC Dashboards for clients, letting them know what their data is telling us, Good OR Bad: "Our net-new Stage 1 Opportunities are up QoQ, however, our ratio of overall Closed Lost Opportunities is increasing at a higher rate based on those generated from SDR Outbound Opportunities. Have we lowered the definition of a net-new Opportunity so we should expect our trend of more going directly to Closed Lost?" See graph pic attached! "Mktg Influenced Opportunities are up the past 6 months, however, our ratio to Closed Lost looks to be increasing for Mktg Event Opportunities. Are we following up on those prospects beyond the initial post-show outreach? Your SFDC Instance has all the data you need to have these same discussions - what hidden issues are in your Sales Pipeline? Let me design your complete Rev Ops Dashboards to maximize your marketing AND sales ROI!

3

🚨 Gainsight has acquired Staircase AI 🚨 Why is this game changing? Relationships with your customers and accounts are complex - they are multidimensional. They are rarely one person to one person, but rather interactions are often occurring between many people at your company and many people at your accounts. Those interactions are seemingly invisible to everyone except the people they're occurring between and key details get lost across chat, email, calls, support tickets, CRM, etc. Missing those details is what causes surprise lost revenue, surprise churn and missed growth opportunities. That doesn't happen with Staircase AI by Gainsight because it analyzes every interaction across every channel occurring between you and your customers - and surfaces customer insights directly to where you're already doing your work.

36

3 Comments

Attention San Francisco! Join me and other RevOps pros at RevOps After Dark to discuss some of the hottest topics in revenue right now: -- AI & Tech. -- Strategic alignment. -- Collaboration. -- Market trends. -- The future of RevOps. Don't miss out on this opportunity to join the conversation & network with like-minded professionals. Check out the link for more information and feel free to share! #RevOps #SanFrancisco #Networking

51

3 Comments

When you look at your tech stack, do you ever 🤔 think about how combining certain solutions might make more of an impact than using them separately? Sinehan Kerman, Sr. Director of Global Revenue Operations at TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions), is currently under the TrustRadius #CustomerSpotlight for doing just that. She 🔀 integrated downstream intent data from TrustRadius into ZoomInfo Sales to help accelerate deals—and, boy, did it work! After training her team on how to get the most out of the integration, they saw: 💥 6 new opportunities 💥 2x increase in average TrustRadius intent opportunity value 💥 4x faster deal velocity Talk about an impact! Great job, Sinehan, and welcome to the spotlight 👏 👏 Check out the story: https://gag.gl/LNQdsb #CustomerStories #IntentData #DownstreamIntentData #ZoomInfo #ZoomInfoSales #TreasuryManagement

3

Top H1 takeaway from QBR's about our Rev Org: "We're an ecosystem, not a hierarchy." (h/t Alexandra B.) We collaborate, everyone's voice matters, and we strive to put people in roles they love so they can be madly successful. Hearing this statement was validation that what we are building in the Revenue Org at LibraryPass is unique, and scalable, and contagious. And we have roles coming soon! So if you're interested in being part of an ecosystem, let's chat. Here's to an even better H2!

13

3 Comments

What do I mean when I say I’ve been doing contract work? Here are 5 examples of different consulting gigs I’ve worked on lately: • Customer Experience - Weekly check-ins with a CSM who is the only one in their department at a small company, offering guidance/strategy on customer retention and scaling. • Substack Strategy - Weekly check-ins with an early-stage Substack author on how to grow and scale her audience and optimize analytics and tools within Substack. • Content Strategy - Conducted an audit of previous Pinterest + blog content and offered SEO tweaks/improvements, which led to managing visual and written content. • Education Curriculum Standards Alignment - Aligned a startup’s scope and sequence with state standards. • Marketing Content Calendar - Coordinated with several teammates to ensure aligned content was published on various channels. Years ago, when I heard "consulting," I used to think, “What do they mean? What are they actually doing?” So I hope that de-mystifies it a bit. All your work doesn’t just need to be in one niche either! I love contributing to a new, small team that isn’t ready to hire someone full-time but needs a little expertise to keep them on the right track. Is there anything I can help you with? Let’s chat!

17

3 Comments

SaaS leaders spend a lot of time on the micro. When will this feature ship? Is that customer churning? What led to that production issue? Even the most senior leaders often get caught here. Then you see OKRs to match. Trailing churn, grow revenue from new features, maintain x% uptime. And processes and tools spring up to measure all of this with drilldowns and rollups to match. Sure sometimes this starts with a strategic vision, identifying areas of opportunity, and then breaking that down into manageable tasks. Planfully creating process and the organization to execute. But I reckon that's less common than we'd like to admit. The secret is, it's often more like this: - Oh bleep, I just got a call that super important customer threatened to leave! - Let's get five people in an emergency meeting with the customer! - The customer said the competitor has a better version of a highy specific feature! Is an upgrade on our roadmap? How can we rally the team to execute on it sooner? We need a swat effort - who can we pull into a team without making any sacrafices? - We need a r/y/g to discuss customers with this issue. And other customers with issues. And other issues we've noticed internally. We'll go through the list item by item, thrice weekly at 8 am. - etc. And this is of course all common and natural. Once the firehouse starts it's hard to fit in anything but more reaction. So the products and processes adapt to fit reality. And they grow. So we attempt to make that process we don't have time for twice as fast. And the overwhelm sets in, and the to do list gets too long. Since so many very succesful companies experience this that we assume it must be the way. There isn't a magic fix, but I don't think it happens by saying "I'm going to spend less time on the micro by optimizing the time I spend on the micro." It starts by carving out time for macro strategy. This may be the 30 minutes that doesn't feel urgent researching your place in the market. Maybe it's a call with a customer that doesn't need anything right now. Or - I hope - a solution like Rabble AI which can put the strategic priorities right in front of you in plain language. Will this turn the firehouse of micro off? No, nothing will. But at least it prevents the micro from completely washing the strategic away.

8

I’m excited to announce that I’ve teamed up with Fred Soller to re-launch Big Wheel Performance , a boutique consulting firm focused on helping tech companies build scalable go-to-market motions. Since leaving Spreedly, I’ve had countless conversations about CRO roles at high-growth companies. Growth is exciting, and I love a 3-year plan, but too often the conversation overlooks the practical realities of where the business stands today and what needs to be done now. Everyone wants to find the perfect sherpa to get them from base camp to the summit of Mount Everest, but no one is arranging a ride to the airport. The average CRO lasts only 18 months—often less for smaller companies—and a CRO departure can be devastating. Before you bring in a CRO or expand your team, you need the right processes, tech stack, and GTM strategy in place. That’s where Big Wheel Performance comes in. We can immediately fill leadership gaps and build a system that sets up your next CRO up for success. Our goal is simple: help businesses grow smarter. Here’s what we offer: Fractional CRO services Optimized GTM processes Scalable growth strategies Board advisory services If you’re ready to elevate your business, let’s connect. We’d love to explore how we can help fuel your growth. #FractionalLeadership #GTMStrategy #TechGrowth #BigWheelPerformance #SmartGrowth

76

8 Comments

Want to nerd out with me on Revenue Operations comp plans?? 🤓 If you've been considering revamping your RevOps team compensation and want to add in a spicy new variable comp to better align with the business outcomes you're striving for and reward your team for their contributions, then check out this quick read: https://lnkd.in/gDFmh3jT

12

In a recent survey by SaaStr co-founder Jason M. Lemkin, over 58% respondents said that their SaaS sales cycle has lengthened in 2024. That’s not good news for an industry already under pressure. ⏰ ➡ With third party information sources proliferating, buyers have more control over the product evaluation process - which is an overwhelmingly positive development. However, the process of vetting information credibility is likely to lengthen the evaluation phase of procurement even further. 📑 ➡ With more stakeholders involved in rationalizing business spends, it is getting harder for deal/project drivers to find budget for new technology purchases. Sellers have their work cut out for them in convincing an increasingly cautious roster of decision-makers. 💰 ➡ Deployment, implementation and integrability are under the scanner, as buyers seek to simplify procurement right out of the gate, since they are on the clock to demonstrate RoI quicker than before. 📈 These are some of the reasons why we talk so much about how cloud marketplaces are built around the modern buyer’s priorities, while solving for seller efficiency. Rick Buijserd, Sr. Marketplace Development Manager EMEA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), provided some color to this context in our recent blog. Linking it here if you're looking for an interesting read - https://lnkd.in/d-XqFMVM 

10

1 Comment

I could not be more excited to be working with Fullcast, The Go-to-Market Cloud on their mission to empower RevOps!  In this series, we will explore why RevOps is becoming ever more critical to executing the Go-to-Market engine and how to operationalize strategic RevOps decision-making at the executive level.   We will share a vision of the ‘future’ where RevOps is no longer relegated to the engine room but is up in the revenue command center using today's advanced technologies (including AI) to help executives navigate and steer their organizations through the challenges ahead. For those of you in RevOps, the ASK is that you will read and contribute to this series by offering your comments, thoughts, and stories. Thank you to Ryan Westwood and Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D. for creating a true community for RevOps and for encouraging those of us who are passionate about RevOps to share our stories and contribute to the platform! Fullcast, The Go-to-Market Cloud #revops #revopsleadership Ryan Westwood Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D.

124

14 Comments

80 years after the first digital computer - writing, maintaining, and scaling software is still fraught with difficulty. Most organizations don’t have enough expertise and resources to develop all of the bespoke software they need, much less do it at a high quality bar. At Retool, we’ve set out to change this. We want to make custom software both abundant and exceptional. Building fast, reliable, and beautiful software shouldn't just be possible, but it should be effortless. More software—and radically better software—will continue to propel our society into a new era of prosperity and possibility. If you're interested in joining the mission - bringing good software to everyone - now's the time to join our team.

7

And we're back. One of my absolutely favorite episodes of The GTM Kickback! to date. Richard Brasser - an insanely sharp GTM leader with over 2 decades of sales leadership, executive work, entrepreneurship, and GTM consulting experience with some of the top software vendors in the world - joined me for a little over 30 minutes We talked everything that it takes in 2024 to drive your company towards a more modern, AI enabled, GTM machine - Enhancing your ability to forecast (both as a leader and a rep) - Developing TRUE ICPs based on realtime data & buying trends - Hire better reps that hit quota more consistently - Create IMMENSE amounts more predictability in your revenue models, profitability, and success metrics across the business Absolutely brilliant thoughts from Richard on all of this - a must listen for anyone toying with AI in their operating structure and looking to make more money this year using it. Full link in the comments below 👇🏻⬇️ #GTMSearch #GTMKickback #SaaSSales

110

1 Comment

Folks, I am running a little experiment! Calling all Customer Success managers and Customer Success Leaders: If there was one feature set in any tool/product you would pay for; what would that be? Please DM me or post below! And….. reshare #csm #customersuccess #customersuccessmanagers #customersuccessleader

15

4 Comments