Janis Zech on this episode
Eddie Reynolds, Founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, joins Janis Zech and Philip on RevOps Lab to discuss how to execute a successful customer success motion in B2B SaaS. With two decades of revenue operations experience—including three years at Salesforce covering growth-stage companies—Reynolds brings a strategic lens to the intricacies of modern CS operations. His consulting firm specializes in revenue operations as a service, helping companies build the processes, systems, and strategies needed to improve their revenue engines.
The core insight is that net revenue retention, not acquisition, has become the primary growth lever for mature SaaS companies, and most organizations lack the foundational processes to capture it. Reynolds argues that sloppy processes worked during the market boom when customer acquisition was cheap and capital was abundant. Now, with tighter budgets and CFO scrutiny, companies must reimagine customer success from sales handoff through onboarding, health monitoring, and expansion—and most lack the capacity planning to do it well.
The episode reframes customer success as a strategic discipline that bridges sales, implementation, and account management. Rather than treating CS as a cost center or support function, leading organizations treat healthy customer management as a predictable revenue stream. Reynolds outlines the connective tissue: proper handoff processes, health scoring systems that combine usage data with stakeholder mapping, proactive outreach with pointed value conversations (not boilerplate account review requests), and disciplined pipeline management for expansion and renewal opportunities.
The discussion covers onboarding best practices (getting implementation partners into the sales process early), customer health measurement (combining product analytics, CRM data, and stakeholder coverage), year-round engagement strategies, expansion and renewal pipeline discipline, and the broader market shift from acquisition-first to retention-first go-to-market models.
What we cover in this episode
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2:39
Defining Strategic RevOps RevOps as strategy, process, metrics, and systems to support revenue team execution and net revenue retention focus.
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4:46
Core Problems in Customer Success Broken handoff processes, poor capacity planning, and lack of health scoring systems leaving customers neglected until renewal.
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8:37
Onboarding Best Practices Involving implementation partners early in sales, aligning account executives on success, and defining clear paths from customer dream to reality.
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14:18
Market Shifts in Customer Success CROs taking over CS, focus shifting from acquisition to net revenue retention, but processes still lagging behind strategy.
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18:13
Health Monitoring and Engagement Playbook Building early warning systems with usage data, triaging accounts by risk, and executing proactive outreach with business intent.
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23:35
Expansion and Renewal Pipeline Management Treating expansion like new business pipeline with rigor, using product and stakeholder white space, and forecasting based on health signals.
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28:13
CFO Alignment and Consolidation Trends CFOs scrutinizing every spend dollar, customers consolidating tools, and product expansion becoming primary upsell lever.
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31:57
Growth Evolution and Market Dynamics Mature companies now depend on NRR for majority of growth, capacity planning gaps emerging, and profitability acceptance changing expectations.
The lines worth sharing
Rev ops is there to support the revenue team and make them more effective and efficient. The state of rev ops is the state of revenue.
Eddie Reynolds · 3:25
There are times where you have to get in front of an executive and say, if you want to do X, Y, Z, you're going to fail. Full stop.
Eddie Reynolds · 9:50
CSMs are not salespeople. It's really important to maintain this relationship as the trusted advisor, not somebody trying to push something down my throat.
Eddie Reynolds · 21:45
There should never be a point in time where you have a customer that's not using the product and there's no communication or action plan there.
Eddie Reynolds · 26:30
Common questions from this episode
What is revenue operations and why does it matter now?
RevOps is the strategy, process, metrics, and systems that support a revenue team's execution. It's critical now because companies are shifting focus from acquisition to net revenue retention as the market tightened and CFOs began scrutinizing spend. RevOps ensures all teams work together toward that retention goal.
What are the biggest problems in customer success operations?
Broken handoff processes from sales to onboarding, lack of capacity planning (CSMs managing 1000+ accounts with only automated emails), and absence of health scoring systems. Most companies don't identify unhealthy customers until 30 days before renewal, when it's too late to fix the relationship.
How should companies build a customer onboarding process?
Involve implementation partners early in the sales process to set realistic expectations. Align account executives on renewal incentives. Map success paths by studying successful customers. Ensure the customer moves from the initial business case through to actual product value realization with clear checkpoints.
How do you measure and monitor customer health?
Combine product usage data, CRM visibility, and stakeholder coverage mapping. Build early warning systems in Salesforce or your CRM showing usage patterns, feature adoption, and which executives are engaged. Triage accounts into red, yellow, and green risk buckets for prioritized outreach.
What is the difference between handling renewals versus expansion opportunities?
Treat expansion like new business with qualification, discovery, and presentation rigor. Renewals are harder to forecast because lack of early indication of intent. The key is never allowing a customer to drift; proactive health monitoring and multi-threaded stakeholder engagement inform both renewal likelihood and expansion potential.
Why is net revenue retention becoming more important than acquisition?
As SaaS companies mature, their existing customer base grows and becomes the largest portion of revenue. A $50M company targeting $70M next year may get $50-60M from existing customers. When customer acquisition becomes expensive and capital tightens, retention and expansion of existing customers drives growth more reliably.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds of Union Square Consulting shares how to build a customer success motion focused on net revenue retention, health scoring, and strategic account expansion.
Target keywords
customer success operations
Eddie Reynolds Union Square Consulting
net revenue retention NRR
customer health scoring
RevOps strategy
Salesforce customer success
expansion renewal pipeline
SaaS onboarding process
account manager capacity planning
B2B SaaS retention strategy
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Read the full transcript · 41 KB · Janis Zech
SPEAKER_01Hey Philip. Hey Janice. So what are we talking about today? Yeah, today we're talking with Eddie
JANIS ZECHReynolds from Union Square Consulting and Eddie shares his insights on how to run a successful customer success motion, the do's and don'ts, and how market dynamics have changed the game these past few months. It's an episode worth listening to and we hope you enjoy it. Welcome to another episode of RefOps Lab. We're here with Eddie Reynolds. I hope I pronounced this
JANIS ZECHcorrectly. Welcome Eddie. Thanks. Now you're close enough. My wife is from Argentina and her family
EDDIE REYNOLDScan't say the name either. So, okay. Thanks. Great to have you. I mean, I've been following you on LinkedIn. I'm German, you know, and as funny as one can be. No, but I've been following you on LinkedIn
JANIS ZECHfor a long time. I'm super excited about having you on the show. I mean, why don't you do a quick
JANIS ZECHintro and then we dive into, you know, all things RefOps. Sure. Absolutely. So I never know where to
SPEAKER_10start because I started my career about 20 years ago, but basically I've spent the majority of my
EDDIE REYNOLDScareer in sales, out trying to open and close deals. And along that journey, I got pretty obsessed with process, with Salesforce, implemented it at a couple companies. And then I drank the Kool-Aid so much that I ended up going and working at Salesforce for three years. And during that time, I covered largely, at least my best customers were growth stage B2B SaaS companies in New York, primarily VC backed. And I spent the majority of my days trying to get meetings with revenue leaders and executives at these companies and try to figure out what their goals were for revenue and how they grew their companies, how they grew their revenue engine. And I would compare what they were doing to what we were doing internally at Salesforce, which has a pretty finely tuned revenue engine. And just all day, every day meeting with folks and trying to compare notes on best practices and sales marketing and customer success. And after doing that for three years, it inspired me to want to start a consulting company where we could go much deeper and help companies actually implement these strategies, both in terms of the strategy and process, as well as the tools. And that's what my company Union Square Consulting does. We are B2B sat or B2B. Wow. I totally ruined my pitch. We are revenue operations as a service or fractional rev ops or whatever term we want to use of the day. And we provide both the strategic as well as the tactical resources for companies to improve their revenue. Yeah. I mean, and if you haven't heard of Eddie, I mean, follow him on LinkedIn,
JANIS ZECHcheck out, you know, the newsletter you write. I think it's really insightful. A lot of deep dives onto very important topics. And I'm curious, you know, I think you talk a lot about like strategic ref ops. I'd love to start high level and then really dive into a topic we, I think, care deeply about like CS ops, but like, you know, how do you define ref ops and what strategic revenue operations
SPEAKER_11for you? Well, it's so funny because I was watching the recording from our prep session and I had this
SPEAKER_10one liner that I somehow eked out that I really liked. You asked me like, what's the state of
EDDIE REYNOLDSrev ops? And I said, the state of rev ops is the state of revenue. Rev ops is there to support the revenue team and make them more effective and efficient. And so when people are asking me what's going on in rev ops, my answer to that is it's what's going on in revenue. And we've seen at least in B2B SaaS, obviously we took a pretty big hit with the market. People have been changing their focus and we can get into that on this topic. And I think rev ops is there to serve that shift in focus, which is a lot of net revenue retention and how we retain and grow our existing customers. How do we actually do that? High level, what is rev ops? With that specific question, rev ops is what is the strategy? What is the process? What are the metrics? And what are the systems that we use to execute in order to achieve that goal? So if we think about net revenue retention, what is it we need to do as a company? What do all the different employees in the company need to do on a day by day basis in order to improve net revenue retention? Rev ops is the folks that actually document that out on a piece of paper and take that all the way through to implementation and execution. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I mean, and I, I mean,
JANIS ZECHI think you're already diving into the NRR topic, right? Like that, that essentially is touching on renewals, expansion. And I think, you know, if you think about the stats, right, the best B2B SaaS companies are above 150% of net revenue retention on that dollar retention. If you look at the public, the traded companies, the same is true in private, obviously. But then at the same time, I think a lot of focus in the last couple of years have been spent on acquisition, right? I think that's something that is changing due to the change of the markets, you know, essentially making acquisition a lot harder and also cut to LTV ratios a lot harder. I'm curious, you know, like if you think about that specific topic, right, customer success, I mean, how would you look at it if you work with customers, right? Like what are things that are fundamentally broken in many places?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSure. Well, so let's define customer success first. I think we take the stance that we take customer service off the table and think about that as sort of a separate thing. Definitely, you could argue that
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou want to at least see like what kind of tickets are being surfaced and have some visibility into customers that are having issues versus not. But let's push that aside for a moment and let's talk about how do we make customers successful? It starts with a really good handoff process from sales. Is sales handing off a customer to onboarding, to implementation, whatever it is necessary to get up and running on your product? Are they doing that in a seamless way where the customer is having a good customer experience and it's setting them up for success so they can be a healthy, active user of your product? And when I say user, I'm assuming we're talking about B2B SaaS companies, but a lot of these concepts apply to other industries as well. We then need to take that customer and get them onboarded to a point where they have healthy usage of the product. We then need to make sure to monitor that and maintain that healthy usage because a customer is not going to renew if they're not using the product. And even if they are using the product, that may still not be enough to renew them. I think one of the biggest problems that we had, especially a couple of years ago, is that companies had these processes in place of handing people over to onboarding and implementation that were broken. There's also, and I'm going to get off track here a little bit, a big issue with capacity planning. If we talk to our VP of RevOps strategy, Joel Arnold, he talks a lot about how he's never seen a company that has a proper capacity plan for their customer success team. Meaning, what are all the things that need to get done every day by the different people in different roles? And do we have enough people to do those things across our customer base? If you give a customer success manager a thousand accounts, they can go out and say, all right, I'm going to send an automated email. Hey, I'm your new customer success manager. Please reach out to me if you have any questions. A very small percentage of those people respond. And then you have all these other companies out there using your product or not using it that are being neglected. And then you wait until the renewal comes up and reach out to them 30 days ahead of the renewal and say, Hey, are you still renewing? And they say, no, like we haven't been using your product for a year. We're not renewing. And by that point in time, it's way too late to save it. It's, you have no chance of fixing that issue at that point.
JANIS ZECHYeah. And typically before they send that email, they think, should I send an email or should I rather stay silent? So they don't look at the contract. Yeah. I mean, joke aside, but I mean, yeah, I think from onboarding to, you know, basically, you know, it reminds me so much of like SKOs, right? Like, Oh, we do this big splash at the beginning of the year, but then, you know, let's not talk about it for a while. Right. I think customers are very similar, actually, in that sense that, you know, from, you know, the onboarding experience to the value, right? Like let's assume you're in B2B SaaS, you have a, you know, let's say a case you present to the executive leadership to get the deal over the line. How do you actually build the value against the ROI case? Right. And I think that's a really interesting question. And at least in my experience, so, you know, my previous company
JANIS ZECHfiber, we had like, you know, ACVs between a hundred to a few million and a very technical product. So we had to become part of the roadmap. The onboarding process was where essentially, you know, you could essentially lose deals over, right? You sign a contract, but the contract didn't mean anything. And if you don't do a good job in onboarding with the solution engineers, with CS and sales coming together and really having like a properly defined roadmap to get that customer over the line and, you know, essentially come from the dream or the future state to the reality, right? I think a lot can go wrong and it affects already your renewal process and essentially the value you're driving. So I'm curious, like if you think about onboarding, right? Is there certain best practices you put in place? You know, what has, have you, have you seen works well there? Sure. And let me provide some
EDDIE REYNOLDScontext on my experience here before I answer this question. So when I was at Salesforce, I covered
EDDIE REYNOLDSboth new and existing customers. So I would take somebody that could potentially come off the website or that I cold called or had some other interaction with, take them through the sales process, close them during that sales process. I'm introducing them to a third party implementation partners and Salesforce outsources their implementations. And then once they sign, they go start to work with that implementation partner. They have customer service at Salesforce, you know, like basically creating a ticket to help them, but not that much else support that not a ton of other support beyond that. And then I'm there as the basically account manager at that point, trying to monitor the account, doing what I can to make sure the implementation partner is bringing them through a successful implementation. But as an AM, I'd be pretty limited there. And then just trying to monitor the health of the account in hopes of growing the account and at least retaining it before the renewal. Since I left Salesforce, I've been on the other side of that table where the Salesforce account executives are sending us those customers and we're going and seeing that through to implementation. And then now we work mostly with our clients on annual contracts. So we've got a lot of clients where we have been working with them continuously for three, four, five years at this point. So forgive me if that was a long explanation. But what my experience has taught me is that first and foremost, it's really, really helpful to have the people that are responsible for onboarding and implementation to be part of that sales conversation. So when I was at Salesforce, and now that I'm on the other side of the table working with Salesforce, usually the implementation partner is coming in like somewhere in the middle of that sales process to scope out the implementation, to ask questions, also to push back on the customer. Salesforce, especially as an extremely complicated tool as many people have experienced, and there's a high failure rate for implementation. And you can't just like say yes to people and expect to have success. Like there are times where you have to get in front of an executive and say, Hey, Mr. Ms. Executive, if you want to do X, Y, Z, you're going to fail at this period, full stop. And I think that if you have a salesperson trying to manage all of those conversations, and then just pitch it over the fence to onboarding and implementations, you're going to have an extremely high failure rate, especially with like a difficult to implement product like Salesforce.
JANIS ZECHYeah, yeah, I, I totally feel you. I mean, I think that, you know, it's Salesforce is a great example, because the optionality of the implementation is so huge, right? Yes, there's best practices.
JANIS ZECHBut if you're incentivized in a renewal contract, and you don't start strategically to understand of what's actually important to, you know, the customer, and not from a tooling perspective, but from a go to market perspective, as CRM is go to market, right? Like, I think it's such a, such an important aspect to drive value after the onboarding, right? And if you get that wrong, and you don't, and often, I think it even starts with not having the right information, not understanding what the customer wants, or, you know, sometimes sales overselling a bit too much, right? And then, essentially, CS trying to somehow adjust the conversation towards back to value. But that's obviously super hard to do. And I think something I've seen working well is like having solution engineering or solution consulting, joining the sales process really early on, as a bridge to then essentially hand over to customer success at some point in time. Do you think that should be the same role? It should be different role? It probably depends on the ACV on the use cases, Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the ACV a lot, because you can, you know, crank up your cost of
EDDIE REYNOLDSacquisition pretty high. But it also depends on the product. If we're talking about a point solution that's easy to implement, I mean, I think about all the tools we have, like, you know, we use Zoom. I don't think I've ever spoken to a single employee at Zoom, ever. And we've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on it, right? It depends on the tool. But I think it's really important to like map out what that process is to get your customer to success by looking at What customers do you have today? Who's successful? What steps did they follow? What are the common practices? And then I think another thing that's really important is making sure that your account executives are aligned there. Now, what's weird to me about Salesforce is I didn't have any like comp expectations or anything like I could have just pitched stuff over the fence. The one like carrot on the stick is that Salesforce, at least when I was there was famous for doubling the spend of their customers within the first 12 months on average. So you as like the account executive are thinking, okay, I can close this deal right now. But if I do this right, I can get double within this year. If I do everything the way I'm supposed to do it, I want that like 2x return. So what are the steps I need to follow? And so I would literally be on calls pushing back against clients like, Hey, no, you can't do that. Do it this way. I know you want to sign the contract and you want to get a, you know, really cheap, quick start. You want to hire resources in India. But like, let me tell you like why this is oftentimes not going to result in the outcome you want. Why am I having that difficult conversation with somebody now? I didn't get any kind of like clawback if people didn't renew, but I was at least incentivized to say, okay, I want this customer to be successful so that I can upsell them on the next product. And I think that that's a really key piece. But I would also say that, like, I think in addition to financial incentives at Salesforce, and I'm not going to pretend that every AE at Salesforce does a perfect job of this. Let's not pretend that Salesforce is the perfect company. But I do think that they had a pretty decent culture, at least on my team around this, of like, nobody on my team was trying actively to sell people into an implementation that they knew was going to fail. And that goes beyond the financial incentives to just like our culture of like, Hey, like, we want to have a customer we retain. You just mentioned renewals. And I mean, that probably in
JANIS ZECHthe last couple of months has become even more important in the markets. So I'm curious, like, thinking about customer success in the last 12 to 18 months, what were some of the biggest
SPEAKER_33fundamental changes that you've seen with Union Square Consulting and your customers?
SPEAKER_35Well, I think a lot of these changes are in process or even still yet to be executed on. I think the biggest thing I've seen is just a lot more CROs taking over CS, which tells me that now there's more
EDDIE REYNOLDSfocus on CS, there's more focus on net revenue retention, less of just pure client acquisition. But I think that when we talk to a lot of companies out in the market, at least the ones we're talking to keep in mind, like people aren't talking to us if they have like the perfect revenue operations team, the folks we're talking to, they still have a long way to go. They have this idea that we need to focus on net revenue retention, we need to get our customers healthy, but like they don't have the processes in place. So let's take this explanation to like the next logical step, which is measuring customer health. How do you identify a healthy customer? Do you have access to your usage data? Is that in whatever system your customer success managers or account managers are using? Do you have a way to triage your accounts and identify these are the red accounts, these are the the yellow, these are the green accounts. What is a successful, healthy customer look like? Do you have that defined? Do you have that documented? Do you have that built out in the system? And can you literally look at a report? So when I was at Salesforce, I could pull up an account and literally right in the middle of the page in Salesforce, we had our early warning system. I think they've updated this sense. And it had all these metrics around how they were using the product. And it was enough that I could tell not only if they were using it or not, but I could tell how they were using it. I could tell if it was just the marketing team sending out emails, or if it was just the sales team, or if they were only using it to manage call activity, or that they're actually actively managing their deal pipeline. I could see the metadata to know how they were using it, which would then inform me who I needed to call and what conversation I needed to have to dig deeper, to find out why they weren't using Salesforce in the way that they should be using it if they wanted to get value out of it.
SPEAKER_32So I would assume like with customer success, it's obviously much more important that you plug
JANIS ZECHin to like real good BI system and to get all that data, I don't know, from whatever product the company is selling or using and feed that back into Salesforce. Is that something that's like developing such a system? Is that something that you feel like always needs to be done from scratch? Or is this something that you can carry over from one organization to the next one? Is there like basically one model or is it like reinventing the wheel over and over again?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think it does depend on what the product is, who's using it, what they're using it for. I mean, as we mentioned, like with Salesforce, using that as the example, like you can use Salesforce for anything. So like, it's pretty difficult to like have like a cookie cutter approach to it. And at the end of the day, like I couldn't access like somebody's version of Salesforce that wouldn't probably wouldn't be ethical. I could see metadata, like the number of accounts, contacts, leads, et cetera, how many people logged in. And then with Salesforce as a, as an example, so many different use cases, like it is really hard to figure that out with other companies. Like they have one use case and it's pretty straightforward and it might be something very different from, from a Salesforce, for example. So it has to be defined for the customer and for the product. Yeah. I mean, I think in SaaS, it's often your product analytics feeding via CDP into your CRM,
JANIS ZECHright? Like, I think that's a very common way of essentially calculating health scores or even using customer success platforms to do it and connecting dots. Obviously, if you're in a different industry and you don't have a digital product, it's a lot harder to do, right? Like how does, let's say a, you know, daily active by weekly active or weekly active by monthly active user, or even specific component metric look like in healthcare, right? It's probably a lot different and differently done. And I'm curious, you know, like let's assume, you know, you have the onboarding right. You get the health data into your CRM. What are the touch points throughout the year you would set up to not have this, you know, nine months of no communication. And then suddenly somebody is actually doing something against renewal, right? Which I think it doesn't make sense no matter what, but yeah, I mean, is there a specific playbook you think of to essentially have specific touch points is multi-threatening a thing, right? Like how do you think about that? Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a lot that goes
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto that. I want to touch on capacity planning, but before I do, I'll talk to you about like what I did at Salesforce that worked. And so keep in mind, I was a sales rep. I carried a quota. I wasn't a
EDDIE REYNOLDScustomer success manager, but I had about 60 to a hundred active accounts at any one point in time. So it was manageable enough that I could handle it. And unfortunately about half of those customers were not healthy. So you take 60, let's call it 80 accounts divide by two. That's 40. There's 40 accounts that are not healthy. All I'm doing is I'm trying to figure out in what way are they not healthy? Who bought off on this? Who signed the contract? Who's managing the team that's using this? And then I'm trying to get in front of them. And I'm basically saying, Hey, look, like you're not getting value for your money. You're spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on Salesforce. Doesn't look like you're using it. Would you like to fix that? And then what I'm trying to do is basically as a sales rep, kick the door down to get in front of the right person. Because at least with Salesforce, that was usually the issue. The right person was not paying attention to it. The VP of sales, CRO, CEO is like not a priority for them. So I'm trying to figure out any way I can to make it a priority for them. And then at the point where I get them to say, yeah, I want to fix this. Then I'm bringing the resources in, whether that's a CSM or an external implementation partner to go and fix that. And sometimes that was successful. Sometimes we bring in a Salesforce implementation partner. They re-implement Salesforce. And six months later, they're like a happy, healthy customer. Now they're asking me about like buying the marketing tool or buying the customer service tool. One of the problems that we see with a lot of customer success teams is they don't have 60 accounts, 80 accounts, a hundred accounts. They have a thousand, 2000. So how are you supposed to cover 2000 accounts? Well, first you have to triage it in the way that I described. But even then, does your team have enough capacity to go and follow up with those customers in the way that they need to, to maximize your net revenue retention? It's a big question. And largely customer success teams are understaffed. And so what they end up doing is they send out that send all email. Hey, like we want to do an account or even AEs do this. Hey, I want to do an account review. It's a boilerplate email. I get these emails from Salesforce. Hey, I want to do an account review. I'm like, I don't want to do an account review. Why would I want to do an account review? That's not the way I personally approached it. I would come in with a very pointed question. I would say, this is what I am seeing. It looks like you guys are not using Salesforce in this way. I want to help you fix it. Is this a priority for you? Yeah. Yeah. And I think the earlier you do this, right? Like
JANIS ZECHif we think about the journey of the customer after the onboarding to quickly understand is the value being delivered, is that account on the right track, right? What does right mean? And if not, basically dive in to essentially rescue the account nine months before the renewal comes up and not three months before the renewal date is up, right? I think that's so important because otherwise you're basically running out of time, right? And the decision was already made. If you paid for nine months and you get no value out of a tool, likelihood of renewal is very, very slim. So I really, really love this. So it sounds to me almost like, you know, CS has to become a lot more than like CS. It can't be just digital touch points. It needs to be almost like also prospecting into the account. Do you agree with that? Oh, I mean, yes and no. And it's interesting because we have like an internal debate on this. So Joel, our VP of
EDDIE REYNOLDSRevOps strategy will say like, Hey, it's really important. Like CSMs are not salespeople. Uh, and I get myself into trouble too. I experienced this even as CEO of the company. Like I go and I like close our deals and I hand off our customers to our, our consultants who are effectively CSMs. And then I try to come back in and like, I can tell the customers like, okay, Eddie, what are you trying to sell me next? Like, it's a different vibe that you get. And I think it really is important for CSMs to maintain this relationship as the trusted advisor, not somebody that's going to try to push something down my throat. And so, yeah, like I'm, that's probably not my strength is somebody who's like always trying to close deals. And I think it is important, but I do think that CSMs need to be proactive. They need to be reaching out to the right people about the right things to say, Hey, like, this is what we're seeing with your usage. We want to make sure that you get value. Can we meet and talk through this? If your CAC supports that level of resourcing, and then you have account managers that may be growing the account and they can tag team it. I think what's really hard is like, if you need to meet with the CXO in order to turn this account around, how do you get the meeting with that CXO? That might be something that might be difficult for a CSM to achieve if they don't have the aggressiveness that it might take to, to get through to that person. But at the same time, like I said, you don't want your customers feeling like CSMs are just trying to sell them stuff all the time. Yeah. I think that's a great point.
JANIS ZECHA hundred percent. Um, I'm just, I'm just curious, like if you see any technical trends that help, um, see CSMs to, to, to do that job better, still like a hot new implementation trend that, you know, everybody needs to know who listens to this. I think I'm the wrong person to ask that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou'd have to ask my, uh, my implementation team. I'm not the tools guy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm,
JANIS ZECHI'm super curious about, uh, one topic we also, you know, discussed previously and that is, you know,
JANIS ZECHhow do you do essentially renewal expansion pipeline management and also forecasting? Obviously that's a word we live in and I've seen different ways of how CSMs, like what objects they work in, in terms of, you know, accounts versus, you know, opportunities. I think there's a big trend towards running this as a pipeline. And I'm curious what you're seeing there in terms of, you know, pipeline management for expansion renewal opportunities. And then how do you essentially forecast and yeah, are there specific things you're seeing on that front?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. So I'll go back to Salesforce and my experience there, since I covered new and existing
EDDIE REYNOLDSbusiness, I had a pipeline of new business and expansion. I didn't do renewals and in my company, we treat it the same. If you have an expansion opportunity, it's very similar to a new business opportunity. Uh, at the end of the day, you have to take a customer through the qualification, the discovery process, the presentation demo, et cetera, through to closure. And I think the rigor that you use in new business should be applied to expansion opportunities, just for the same reason that you shouldn't, you know, show up and throw up with every single new business customer or prospect that you talk to. The same can be said of trying to sell an expansion opportunity. Like you should have a qualification stage. You should be careful with your resources. You need to align with their decision-making process, just as you do with new business with renewals. It's a little bit harder because it's oftentimes hard to get that indication as to whether or not they're going to renew. And so going back to like what we were talking about a moment ago, I would say there's no point in time where you should ever not be talking to an unhealthy customer. If they are going through the onboarding process, that should in theory, take them to a point where they're healthy. If they're still not healthy at the end of the onboarding process, then the company should do something to get them healthy. If they become healthy and then turn unhealthy, that should raise a warning and somebody should be reaching out to them immediately. There should never be a point in time where you have a customer that's not using the product and there's no communication or action plan there. And that will really inform what your chances are of renewal. Whereas if all you're doing is saying, okay, well, here's the metrics and we sent them an email and we're waiting to hear back, it's going to be really difficult to forecast that renewal.
SPEAKER_42Yeah, a hundred percent. I think going from reactive to proactive and understanding health
JANIS ZECHend to end, right? Like holistically is something that is, that is so important. Something I've heard lately, which was also really interesting to me and I haven't heard before was essentially the renewal comes up and suddenly, you know, there's kind of a project manager, maybe the day-to-day admin, but then, you know, a whole prospecting machine runs off and you're talking to the executives about the tool, you know, people reach out to showcase the value and the different use cases you might not yet cover. So suddenly you're in this, and of course the ACV need to allow for that, right? To have that coverage model. But it's, I think that's something that's super interesting to me, right? Like how do you introduce multi-threading as a metric? How do you introduce customer health scoring? And then also the velocity towards renewal very early on, almost like annual planning, right? You don't want to start when it's too late, but you actually want to start in a way that you can still take action and have the hard conversation. Because in this market, everyone is looking at every tool and trying to reduce seeds or essentially consolidate, right? So I think that's a reality
SPEAKER_18we're in and that's something I found really interesting. Yeah, we wrote a newsletter on this a
EDDIE REYNOLDSmonth or two ago. And we talked about, you know, obviously product white space. If you have multiple
EDDIE REYNOLDSproducts looking at your customer base, who's using what product and what opportunity you have to expand it, but also looking at stakeholder white space. So this is something we did at Salesforce. I was typically selling to everybody from the CEO to this VP of sales, CMO, COO, head of customer success or customer service, all the way down to the Salesforce admin. So you have like six, eight, 10 individuals in every company that you could in theory talk to. And they built reports for us to showing here are all these stakeholders and here's who you've met with and here's who you haven't. We're then combining that with the product usage data. So for example, you go in there and you see, okay, I see that you've sent a million marketing emails or a million emails. I don't know if they're marketing, but you can assume they are. Um, but I don't see any like sales opportunities. It's easy for me to assume that your marketing team is sending out mass emails through Salesforce, but your sales team is not using Salesforce. So like, okay, I really now want to know first, why is the head of marketing using Salesforce? What value are they getting out of it? And then why is the VP of sales not using it? Yeah. Any, anything else you can think of when,
JANIS ZECHwhen thinking of like customer success? Oh, well, I think you'd kind of touched on it. I think CFOs
EDDIE REYNOLDSright now are scrutinizing every dollar of spend and it's really important to align with them and to understand the ROI or their perception of the ROI. But we've touched on everything from the new business sales process to handoff, to onboarding and implementation, to monitoring customer health. I guess we didn't really touch on identifying expansion opportunities. And that's the flip side of this coin is okay. Now that we've like, we've, we've dissected our account base, we identified the unhealthy customers and we've also identified the healthy customers. What is our action plan? to expand those relationships. And I touched on this momentarily by saying, let's look at what products they have and don't have the products white space. And let's look at what relationships we have with what stakeholders. And at the end of the day, if you're talking to all the key stakeholders that make decisions on your different products, you're having the right conversations, you're going to maximize your chance of an expansion opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one example. So at Fiber,
SPEAKER_42we basically sold to app developers and game developers. That's also how Philip and I met.
JANIS ZECHAnd it was fairly easy because most publishers had a portfolio of apps, right? So you could say,
JANIS ZECHokay, we are, we are integrating this app, this app, this app, but this we aren't, right? I think if you look at SaaS, often it's, it's about the use cases, right? So yes, this use case is covered, but these three use cases aren't. I think what I've observed in software in the last 18 months is that the major players have expanded their product portfolio significantly. And I think it's actually strategy to invest in your existing customers, right? You see that a new logo acquisition becomes a lot more expensive and challenging and it doesn't drive as fast growth as fast. So you expand your product offering, which then allows you to go back to your existing customer base and upsell, cross sell, expand essentially the account. And, and I think that's a really interesting thing that has happened at the same time. And that's also true, right? I think we have seen that kind of a, the companies are not growing as fast. So the seed expansion just reduced. And then also, uh, you basically look at usage metrics from a customer perspective and you really question it, like, do we all need all these seeds? So you essentially try to reduce the ACVs. So I think both forces meet each other. And it's, it's interesting to, to see, because I think some companies in my mind have launched products too early and then essentially told a big value story, try to upsell and tell the consolidation story, but the reality is the products aren't ready yet. And then it essentially, you know, I think also reduces the value, uh, quite, quite significantly. But I mean, that's like, that's, I think a case by case basis, but it's an interesting, I think, trend I've, I've observed over the last 18 months. I think, I mean, I, I, I've seen a lot of that. I saw a lot of that when I was in Salesforce. I've
SPEAKER_35seen a lot of that since I left, I think that's an old problem, but that's more like product
EDDIE REYNOLDSdevelopment that's outside of my, uh, my wheelhouse. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a,
JANIS ZECHI think it's a, it's, it's, it's just interesting to see how, you know, like different, uh, you know, different companies tackle the new reality of go to market. And, you know, what are some of the strategies, you know, companies apply to, to somehow, you know, get back to growth mode, right? I think that's like what we all are thinking about, right? Like how do we get back to growth mode at the same time at a different, maybe profitability level. And I'm super curious to see, as we talked a lot about Salesforce, you know, like 30% profit margin, you know, how do, how do, how does growth look like in the next couple of years? Is it getting rebooted because the market is getting rebooted or is it something that is, you know, just fundamentally changing and, you know, because profitability is accepted by the public markets, less growth is also okay to still, you know, yield some, some interesting multiples, but honestly, I mean, that's a tale to be told, right?
SPEAKER_18Like I, I don't, I don't have the answer, but something I'm definitely following and interested in now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I would just say that I think, uh, from what we've seen, the biggest problem is just that like sloppy processes were working when the market was rich because, you know, like people had a lot of money to spend, you're selling software, people want all these shiny tools or not CFO scrutinizing things. And you're basically just using this like high velocity approach to push your product on your customers. And it was working well enough. And then when the money dried up one, like the funding for that, like extremely expensive cost of acquisition was no longer there. And then two customers are just more difficult. Like they just expect more right now because they have less budget to spend. And so they're spending that budget with people that do a better job of convincing them that there's going to be an ROI there. All that means is that like, we have to go back and look at what we we've been doing as an industry and B2B SaaS. And, and this is literally like what we do, uh, as part of our work is to say, okay, well, where are all the inefficiencies? Where are all the things slipping through the cracks? I use a concrete example. Like how many companies a couple of years ago would like get a lead off their website and then like not respond to you for like a day or two. Like, that's just mind-blowing to me, but there are companies doing that. And like, you're just losing revenue, like hand over fist doing that. But if, if the market's frothy, you might get away with that. You can't right now. I think the, um, man, I, oh yeah. The other thing I would say is that you have this focus on new business acquisition in the early stages of companies. And as the company matures, their base of existing customers becomes bigger and bigger. And so net revenue retention becomes more and more important. It's, you know, if you have a million dollars in revenue and you had, you know, $200,000 of revenue last year, it's, it's pretty easy to ignore or deprioritize net revenue retention. But as you grow into like a $50 million company, and now your target for next year is 70 million. Well, you might get 50 or $60 million of that $70 million figure through net revenue retention. That becomes absolutely mission critical. And I think there are organizations that have just grown up really fast and realized, Holy cow, we have this large customer base, but we don't have the processes in place to support them and retain them. And that's where a lot of companies are at right now. You know, 100%. I mean, look, I think we could go on and on, you know, I've met so many thoughts,
JANIS ZECHbut I think, I think this was great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, all the best for you and your company. And yeah, your second marriage.
JANIS ZECHNot second marriage, second wedding. Oh, sorry. Second honeymoon, second honeymoon. No, I keep throwing people off and like, Hey, I have my second wedding. People are like,
SPEAKER_10congrats, I guess. Like you just got divine. I'm confused. It's like, no, my wife is from Argentina. So we're going to go down and down there and do the second wedding. So everybody in Argentina can
EDDIE REYNOLDSattend. Right. Right. Yeah. That was my, my, my very poor English, you know, translating it correctly,
JANIS ZECHbut I, I realized when saying it, okay, that wasn't actually meant. No, you're not the first person to say that. I'm like, wait, no, no, no. That's not the situation.
