Nick Mehta is the CEO @ Gainsight, the #1 customer success platform for corporate services, turning your customers into your best growth engine. To date Gainsight have raised over $156m from some of the world’s best VCs in the form of Lightspeed, Bessemer, Insight Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. As for Nick, prior to Gainsight he was the CEO @ LiveOffice where he grew cloud archiving ARR from $2m in 2008 to $25m in 2011 and drove and negotiated the acquisition by Symantec for $115m in cash. Before LiveOffice Nick was Senior Director of Product Management @ Symantec where he led $378 MM market-leading email archiving / security businesses managing over 180 people across 3 continents. I do also have to say a huge thank you to both Byron Deeter and Jason Lemkin for the intro to Nick over two years ago.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
How Nick made his way into the world of SaaS and came to lead the charge in the category creation of customer success as CEO with Gainsight? What were some of his big lessons from being CEO at 2 companies during 2 macro market crashes? What does Nick mean when he says, “customer success will fail if it is just a role and not a strategy?” What can the leader and CEO do to imbue this company wide approach to customer success? What tangible actions are on offer? What works? Where do many make mistakes? Nick has previously said, “burying customer success undel sales does not work”. Why does this have such a high rate of failure? What should the optimal sales to customer success relationship look like? What does Nick mean when he says, “product is to customer success what marketing is to sales”. How should product and customer success work together? Why does Nick believe the mythology of the “A player” when business building is fundamentally dangerous? What can leaders and CEOs proactively do to ensure a diverse and differentiated talent pipeline? What question does Nick find most revealing in terms of one’s character and potential? Where do many go wrong in building and scaling their teams in SaaS? Why does Nick push back against the “hire fast and fire fast” thesis? What are the negative consequences of it? Why is it short-sighted and premature in many cases? What does Nick suggest for individuals struggling to find their optimal role within an organisation? How much time does one give someone struggling to find their role?Nick’s 60 Second SaaStr:
Who must fundamentally own the renewal, sales or customer success? What Nick know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What would Nick most like to change in the world of SaaS? Most surprising action that has moved the needle for a company in terms of retention?If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Nick Mehta
SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal
SaaStr 558: Building a Values Playbook that Led to a $1.3B Exit with Emery Wells, Co-Founder & CEO @ Frame.io & VP, Digital Products, Adobe
SaaStr 557: Where Venture Is Right Now with Iconiq GP Doug Pepper and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 556: 7 Drivers in Building to a $7 Billion Company with 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner and 1Password Advisor Carilu Dietrich
SaaStr 555: Secrets to Building a High-Performing Revenue Marketing Engine with Demandbase VP of Marketing Tracy Kraft
SaaStr 554: The Builders and Sellers Playbook: Proven Models that Help GTM and Product-led Teams Scale with CircleCI CEO Jim Rose
SaaStr 553: 10 Things You Can Do Today To Grow 10x Faster With SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Boast.ai Co-Founder Lloyed Lobo
SaaStr 552: 5 Lessons on Building Your Sales Organization for Scale with Than Hancock, EVP of Sales @ Podium and Carlie Adams, Head of West Coast Sales @ Podium
SaaStr 551: Top 5 Mistakes While Building & Scaling Global Product Teams from Microsoft to Salesforce to Hubspot with Hubspot GM & VP, Products, Poorvi Shrivastav
SaaStr 550: How to Reinvent a Category that’s Already Been Won with Mark Ghermezian, Co-Founder @ Braze, and Founder and General Partner @ m]x[v capital
SaaStr 549: From 0 to $500 Million ARR in 6 years: Learnings from Innovating in Underserved Markets with Samsara CPO Kiren Sekar
SaaStr 548: How to Build a Super High-Retention Sales Team with Twilio SVP & GM of North America Sales, Alice Katwan
SaaStr 547: The Secrets to Going Big, Going Multi-Product and Going Public with Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates, Part 2
SaaStr 546: The Secrets to Going Big, Going Multi-Product and Going Public with Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates, Part 1
SaaStr 545: Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack with DigitalOcean CMO Carly Brantz and SaaStr GM & SVP, Marketing Amelia Ibarra
SaaStr 544: People, Process and Product: A Product Leader’s First 90 Days with Notion CPO Madhu Muthukumar
SaaStr 543: The Office is Back!! But What Will It Be Like? Jason Lemkin & Justin Bedecarre of Raise.Work
SaaStr 542: 5 Rules to Win When Competition is Everywhere With Atlassian COO Anu Bharadwaj and Boast.AI Co-Founder Lloyed Lobo
SaaStr 541: How to Set and Hit Revenue Targets with Sam Blond, CRO at BREX
SaaStr 540: 15 Ways to Help the Sales Team with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Insight Story: Tech Trends Unpacked
Zero-Shot
Fast Forward by Tomorrow Unlocked: Tech past, tech future
The Unbelivable Truth - Series 1 - 26 including specials and pilot
Acquired