Pankaj Prasad

Your entire quote to order process can take literally 3 minutes.... If you've ever been in sales or finance of a growing tech company, you know the horrors of communication between sales and finance. Sales just wants finance to put the deal through, and finance just wants sales to politely tell them what was sold. It's a massive back and forth that wastes time and energy all while straining the relationship between two of your critical departments. The solution? A seamless integration between your CRM (in this case Salesforce) and your subscription management / billing platform (in this case Younium). This elegant solution removes manual re-entry of data from a PDF, and ensures that what was sold is what gets billed, no matter how complex (works with usage, metered, tiered, one-time, and any other fees you can think of). Take a look at my 3 minute walkthrough below, and DM me if you'd like to learn more. #saasbilling #saassales #salesops #revops #salesforce #younium

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Struggling with churn? Validate the value your customer receives. This is not a static metric/KPI - it needs to be nurtured, revisited, redefined, and reinforced throughout the customer lifecycle ♻ #customersuccess #sales #customervalue #value

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Customer success is the new sales in the PLG era. Reducing churn automatically helps drive expansion. Gainsight found that companies with mature customer success programs achieve 130% net revenue retention. Evolving customer success for PLG: • Focus on product adoption metrics • Use behavioral data to predict needs • Automate low-touch engagements • Prioritize expansion opportunities • Align compensation with net revenue retention In a PLG model, every user interaction is an opportunity for growth. How is your customer success team driving product-led expansion? #founders #startups #growth

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Salesforce is getting pummeled in the markets (-5%) on the announcement of late-stage acquisition discussions with Informatica, a cloud data management platform with a market cap of about $11B. With $1.6B of revenue at a 77% gross margin growing 12% YoY (ARR growing 30%+ YoY), Informatica is a very healthy business that seems well positioned from a market perspective with a product focus on Data and AI, two of the biggest buzzwords in tech today. In the last year, Salesforce has been pushing its Data Cloud product, repositioning the company away from traditional CRM and towards the data layer at the foundation of an enterprise's entire business. Informatica definitely adds to this narrative, focused on the ETL side of data movement and processing and comes with tight relationships with data warehouse players like Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the large cloud providers. Data Cloud is Salesforce's fastest-growing segment by far, up 90% YoY. It's surprising to see the stock getting beat up this bad on the news. Informatica seems like a solid acquisition consistent with company strategy and at a current trading price 7.2x revenue, not overly expensive given the solid margin profile of the business. We'll see if these two move towards a deal and where the price lands, but overall this seems like a good get for #CRM

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Maybe the most important skill for enterprise sales and CS is the ability to quickly connect the dots. The very best can hear or read disparate pieces of information and construct them into a coherent value narrative then make this relevant to different stakeholders. Often on the fly.

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The future of NRR: Will CCOs become the new CROs? (...a 7-figure ARR CCO asked me) A CCO recently asked me, "I've seen CCOs reporting to CROs these days and CCOs becoming CROs. What do you think the future holds? Is this going to be a trend to stay?" It's a fascinating question. Here's what I'm seeing: Companies are laser-focused on improving NRR. But who's directly responsible for it? Marketing, support, CS, AMs, strategic account sales...everyone influences NRR, yet no single executive owns it. That's changing. CCOs are emerging as the "Chief NRR Officers." Why? Because the CCO's ultimate goal aligns perfectly with growing NRR. CCOs are under immense pressure to drive new revenue. However, acquiring new customers is far more expensive than retaining and expanding existing accounts. Putting CCOs in charge of NRR makes strategic sense. But there's another strong candidate for owning NRR: The COO. Retention is a team sport. Every customer touchpoint impacts churn, including product, pricing, sales, onboarding, and support. The COO oversees all these critical functions. They're ideally positioned to drive NRR improvements. Mark my words: Having a dedicated NRR executive will soon become the norm. Will it be CCOs or COOs leading the charge? Only time will tell. I break down the full future of NRR in this video:

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Here are 3 differences between a low-performing and high-performing #CSM. Low-performing CSM (LP CSM) <---> High-performing CSM (HP CSM) 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐝 <---> 𝐈𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥 #CS can be overwhelming. There is always a lot going on. From customer requests, demands, expectations etc to internal goals, KPIs, priorities etc. LP CSMs have a really hard time managing this. While HP CSMs know how to prioritize, say no, and focus on what moves the meddle, the LP CSMs spend their time putting out fires, chasing customer requests and running around. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 <--> 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 LP CSMs are reactive with their work. They start their day by opening up their email or Slack, see what is being asked of them and jumps in to resolve those things. HP CSMs spend one hour on Sunday night planning out their week to see what they need to accomplish, what will move the needle and create a plan of attack. 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 <--> 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 LP CSMs typically still need to improve their business acumen, but can still be good at talking about their product and all the features and things it can do. That becomes their focus with customers, how to use the product or service. HP CSMs on the other hand, have high business acumen and focus on the "why" as much as the "how". Why will this feature help? Why is this important for their business goals? What is their business really? HP CSMs know how to talk business, not just product. At the end of the day, there are many, many tactical and strategic difference between low and high performing CSMs that I could list out. But these 3 are typically fundamental. If you spend your entire time chasing tasks and requests, you will not have time to move the needle on anything important. If you are tactical and start each day from scratch in CS, you will never be "ahead" of the game and constantly stay in chase-mode. If training a customer on the product is just about the features, the CSM wouldn't be needed...just send them a training video and do group training sessions for customers. So as a CSM - or leader of CSMs - ask yourself: am I (are we) in control, proactive, and business-minded? If yes, then you have the foundation to succeed. If no, then you have some work to do... *** 🛎️ If you enjoy my content, follow me for more ♻️ Repost to share with your network #CS #customersuccess #CS #accountmanagement #revsetter

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In this age of Gen AI, the enterprise SaaS industry is experiencing severe air-pockets! Bell weather Salesforce plummeted 20% in one session yesterday post a muted guidance. Not just $CRM, every SaaS name was down taking cue from Salesforce's reduced revenue forecast. Gen AI applications are compute heavy. They require more cloud computing resources making them ideal for consumption based models that naturally scale with the customer as compared to models that charge on per seat basis. Consequently consumption based models are eclipsing subscription based ones with fewer seats to sell, as compute heavy Gen AI makes workforce more efficient, reducing head count! It is a grim realisation of how AI rapidly commoditizing SaaS. The transition is so sudden that most of the SaaS names are caught napping. They are pitching their AI vision by way of a GPT wrapper. Salesforce muted revenue guidance serve as a wake-up call for the entire industry. If enterprise AI applications are a trillion dollar opportunity then those capitalizing on all that actually needs to be delivering value as part of their transformative AI vision and not just a vision that is built to be sold, will be the winners, who would take it all, ones the dust settles. It's not just about selling a vision; it's about creating transformative solutions!

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RevOps reports, guides and best practices - you want it, and we got it over at RevOps Co-op. 💪🏻 I was browsing the various RevOps reports we have, and they are absolute 🔥 so had to share here. I mean, just take a peek at a few we have available 👇🏻 The 2024 State of RevOps Report from Openprise 3 Ways Your GTM Tech Stack Can Help You Survive the "SaaS-Acre" from Nue.io A B2B Guide on Ramp Pricing from Cacheflow RevOps Roadmapping Starter KIt from Go Nimbly The RevOps Expert's CRM Migration Checklist from Syncari and Carabiner Group The Impact of an Economic Downturn on the SaaS Industry from Everstage RevOps Trends Report from Scratchpad You can find 'em all here → https://lnkd.in/gT5YAfyR #revops #revenueoperations #salesops #salesoperations #mops #marketingoperations #marketingops

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This concept came up at the awesome update ai design session. What is CSM drunk dialing? Only contacting your customers when you need something: - Renewals - References - Expansions You get the drift. Your customers see RIGHT THRU this. They will only take so much of your shenanigans before they kick you to the curb. What proactive activities are you doing so that your customer does not feel like an afterthought?

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A Tale of Two Cities in GTM SaaS in Q1.... generally the strongest got STRONGER💪.... while the weakest got weaker🤒. Our GTM metric: How much sales & marketing spend was required for $1 in Net New ARR. Most improved: Top Tier: Veeva & Atlassian Mid Tier: Instructure, Blackline & C3.ai Bottom Tier: Box & Zoom Most degraded: Mid Tier: PTC, Paycom & Mongo Bottom Tier: ZoomInfo, Dropbox & ModelN Using last 12 month data eliminates blips, but also means it’s harder to move the needle... But that’s good…. more fair fight 🤜🤛🤕 What do you see?!!! #SaaS #Benchmarks #GTM ----- Notes: 1) Stock-based compensation has been backed out of S&M. 2) Sub 60% gross margin companies excluded. 3) ARR calculated using last-quarter revenues, annualized – imperfect but best we can get from public cos.

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The GTM Podcast is now a top 1% podcast out of 3,363,892 podcasts globally. Here are the top 10 episodes (by # of downloads): 1. The Pioneer of Account Based Sales Development with Lars Nilsson, former SVP of Global SD at Snowflake 2. Resilience is Your Willpower with Anna Baird, former CRO of Outreach 3. How Stripe Supercharged their SMB Team with Meka Asonye, Partner at First Round Capital 4. Weekly Active Users up by 33% by Making the Hard Decisions Faster with Melanie Fellay 🐙, CEO of Spekit 5. The Real/Raw Version of Selling a Start-Up with Eli Rubel, CEO of Matter Made/NoBoringDesign 6. Contagious B2B Messaging Mastery with Dave Gerhardt, CEO of Exitfive 7. 261% More Likely to Trust a Company when their Founders are Posting on Linkedin with Samantha McKenna, CEO/Founder of #samsales 8. Consultative Selling and The Positive Snowball Effect of Building Strong Relationships with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solution Engineering at OpenAI 9. Klaviyo's Blueprint for Sales Success for $25M-$450M+ Growth with Sean Marshall, former SVP of Global Sales at Klaviyo. 10. The Revenue Viking Shares his Competitive Edge & Winning Culture Tactics with Mark Cranney, CRO at LVT A huge thank-you to all of our guests and listeners. And if you haven't check out the pod, the above episodes are a great place to start. We'll continue to share real stories from real operators who are still in the trenches making things happen. Here's to the next million downloads...just getting started. 🎙

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Great conversation with Joey Brodsky! Definitely one of the sharpest guys I know. I love his passion, drive and unique perspectives. I have followed his podcast for a long time and was super happy to be able to be a guest. I will share more insights from our time together but wanted to post a quick thank you to Joey and share the episode. #NextGenSales

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The #SAAS revolution of ever growth of sales & market cap is not working for most users The impact of unspent licenses and unused tools are becoming an eye sore The use it or lose it philosophy with users are being used for many IT tools by business focussed IT departments I see decommissioning of SAAS tools becoming a trend as many companies see taking out systems that are just protecting old ways of doing work a value driver Those providers that try to arm twist customers into staying may succeed in the very short term, but are well served to remember that SAAS was sold on " pay per drink", rip and replace and their ilk #Salesforce #Microsoft

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Salesforce revised its pipeline coverage ratio to 3x, shedding light on the math keeping execs up at night. How can 1 ratio blow up your entire GTM model? It's not rocket science. It's just math. Particularly, pipeline generation math. Salesforce went from 2x to 3x. You might be going from 3x to 4x, or even 4x to 5x. What does this mean? Assumptions about pipeline coverage are falling like dominos and leaving GTM orgs with a massive hole in their forecasts. When this happens, the math gets really bad, really fast. Picture this: you're a best in class GTM org like Salesforce and you've just updated your pipe coverage ratio from 2x to 3x. Needing 50% more pipeline is painful enough. But the punishment doesn't stop there. Pipeline generated by your sellers is also down. Buyers are reluctant to champion products, and budgets are tight. This leads to longer sales cycles, more discounting, and plummeting deal sizes. Across the board, reps are producing less pipeline. Ranges vary by category, but let's assume pipeline creation is down 25% for illustrative purposes. (We're going to keep the math simple, because specifics will vary by company). On a $100M new business goal, you'd previously need $200M in pipeline. At $1M in pipeline per AE, you could bring it in with a team of 200. Now you need $300M of pipeline to close that same $100M in revenue. AEs are creating $750k instead of $1M, so that same team of 200 is bringing in $150M in pipeline, only half what you need for the year. Draw out the math and you suddenly need 200 additional (fully ramped!) sellers to deliver the same $100M in revenue. That's DOUBLE the headcount. Your CEO and CFO's heads are spinning, because this wreaks absolute havoc on a company's operating model. But that's a post for another time. You can tweak the assumptions if you'd like, but it's terrifying any way you look at it. No amount of passion, skill, or dedication can overcome math. You can't escape math. The bad news? This doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. The good news? Recent advances in AI can change some of the assumptions around the people, process, and technology equation required to generate new pipeline. In the old world, the only answer would be to double headcount. In the new world, there are ways to drive enormous leverage into the equation. Scaling with people doesn't have to be the answer, you can scale people with AI like no time in history. Which means the cavalry could be on the way...

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Going live in one hour. https://lnkd.in/gnptPsMb

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Clicking a "Book a Demo" CTA doesn’t guarantee you a demo 35-40% loss of inbound request pipeline is a time tested stat. Natalie Marcotullio and the Navattic have collaborated with Chili Piper for a Buyers First Best Practice Report. Ask yourself - does your org fall into this bucket? Many do but the good news is B2B SaaS companies are getting better. The standard in SaaS buying is: rep vets an inbound lead --> determines if it's a fit ---> manually qualifies + reaches out (which is why we probably were rejected 35% of the time). But this only exists because we don’t trust buyers to qualify themselves. To make it worse, buyers can’t qualify themselves because they don’t have the necessary information on the website. Talking about the buyers awareness journey is important here. I watch videos and do my research before I buy anything but software is complex - how can one understand all use cases and applications? As a sales leader I have a list of softwares I want to ultimately buy but my intent to buy and level of understanding changes based on how badly im feeling a need or experiencing a pain. With so much noise in SaaS its difficult for a sales rep to truly trust the buyers own level of education - i'm just speaking facts here. Nobody wants pipeline that wont move. Through pretty simple ways any company can make B2B buying easier: 1️⃣ Speeding up time to demo via automation:  43% of email sequences for the top 100 SaaS companies included automation. Combine with a human touchpoint with a calendar scheduler (34% of responses).  Or speed up discovery by asking discovery calls in the email cadence (25% of responses). 2️⃣ Making your pricing page or interactive demos prominent:  Pricing pages and interactive demos grew by 11% and 14% respectively Make pricing page more visible by including in the main navbar (66% of websites)  Use interactive demos beyond one off product pages in overview demos or demo centers (59% of demos) Navattic and Chili Piper looked at the Top 100 SaaS companies to see who was putting the buyer first, aligning their sales process with how buyers want to buy, and putting the buyer's needs at the center of their sales process. Last year after booking demos with the top 100 SaaS companies: 1️⃣ 35% never got back in touch with us 2️⃣ Average of 2 days for companies to respond  3️⃣Only 17% of websites had interactive demos on their website 4️⃣57% of websites had pricing pages (and 21% of those websites didn’t actually show price) In comparison this year: ⭐Average of same day response time from companies ⭐68% of websites had pricing pages ⭐31% of websites had interactive demos Check the full report here→ https://lnkd.in/egiyUmmt p.s Shoutout on the huge release yesterday CP Team 🌶 #sales #khantent #management

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Launch week was awesome! Thank you so much for downloading the platform, for the amazing comments, for giving great early feedback, and for simply checking out Vertical Insights! You are amazing! We've received some amazing early feedback. One user said, "Vertical Insights is really changing how we look at building our ICP and GTM motions." Hearing this is fantastic. It underscores the importance of building your ICP foundation on sub-verticals to create a truly qualified pipeline, speeding up sales cycles and reducing churn. We do all that heavy lifting for you! Check out the link in the comments to give it a try! #qualifiedpipeline, #reducechurn https://lnkd.in/gr2WdhK5

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"Most Talked about RevTech" prizes go to: CPQ Competitors Nue.io and DealHub.io Clay has come up in every roundtable/meeting I've been in Lead routing competition coming in hot with Chili Piper Apollo.io coming in cheap against ZoomInfo Rattle 🦖 (for workflows) and Recapped 🎯 (for deal rooms) Inflection.io and Iterable (and how marketing automation needs disruption) And Gong coming in hot taking with consolidation Who is coming up for you? #tech #revops

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