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 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh
SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt
SaaStr 637: Unveiling the Data Behind Effective Scaling with ICONIQ Growth General Partner Doug Pepper and ICONIQ Growth Partner & Head of Analytics Christine Edmonds
SaaStr 636: Extreme Product Design: Building Things People Actually Use with Stripe CTO David Singleton
SaaStr 635: CRO Confidential: How Customer-First Focus Drives Retention and Revenue With Brex GM of Startups Lucas Fox
SaaStr 634: Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed
SaaStr 633: Why You Want to Develop Product Painkillers, Not Vitamins with DigitalOcean CPO Gabe Monroy
SaaStr 632: CRO Confidential: How To Adapt Your Sales Strategy To The Current Sales Environment with Sam Blond and Hannah Willson, SVP of Sales at Modern Health
SaaStr 631: What Is Going On In Venture Capital in 2023 with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin and 20VC Host Harry Stebbings
SaaStr 630: Sales-led vs. Product-led? Today’s Startups Need Both with Jason Eubanks, CRO at Harness
SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport's Ben Braverman
SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow
SaaStr 627: Move Over, Sales: Why Product & Marketing are the C-Suite's New Power Partnership with Checkout.com CMO Leela Srinivasan and CPO Meron Colbeci
SaaStr 626: 10 Lessons Learned Scaling to $1B Valuation with Drift Co-founders David Cancel and Elias Torres
SaaStr 625: True Story: What Breaks Going from $0-$100M ARR in Less Than 2 Years with Wiz CRO Colin Jones
SaaStr 624: Investing and Venture Capital in 2023 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin and Atrium Founder and CRO Pete Kazanjy
SaaStr 623: Removing Friction: How to Turn More Than 40% of Your Prospects Into Long Term Enterprise Customers with Attentive Co-founder and CEO Brian Long
SaaStr 622: CRO Confidential: What's Changed for Hiring a VP of Sales in 2023 with Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond and Stage 2 Capital LP and Former Lattice CRO Dini Mehta
SaaStr 621: Big Numbers from Small Customers: How DigitalOcean Accelerated at Scale with DigitalOcean Senior Vice President of Revenue Cliff Bockard
SaaStr 620: 8 Ideas on How to Motivate the Sales Team After a Rough Patch with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin
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