The most successful Enterprise SaaS companies know that growing revenue only through new customer acquisition is the less efficient way to scale. Rather, they understand that growing revenue within your existing customer base - through up-sells, cross-sells, and expanded use - is the most profitable way to scale. In fact, Enterprise SaaS companies that grow revenue - and company valuation - by expanding revenue within their existing customer base also know the key to making this work is to focus on - and operationalize - Customer Success. This presentation - How to Build Customer Success at an Early Stage Startup - is from Pulse 2014, the biggest Customer Success industry event ever and included panelists from Hoopla, VeaMea, DiscoverOrg, Fliptop

1. How to Build Customer Success at an
Early Stage Startup
Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrgStefano Migliorisi, VeaMea
Doug Camplejohn, FliptopMike Smalls, Hoopla

2. Michael Smalls
Hoopla
Hoopla is the new way to win for high-velocity
sales, marketing and customer success teams.
Hoopla’s Sales Motivation Platform combines modern
game mechanics, data analytics and broadcast-quality
video in a powerfully simple cloud application that make
it easy for managers to motivate team performance and
score more wins.
Founder & CEO

3. Customer Success Team & Strategy
• 300 CUSTOMERS
• TEAM:
• 1 Head of
Customer Success
• 2 CSMs
STRATEGY:
• Successful onboarding for each customer
within 2 weeks of signing
• Regular group communication (emails,
webinars, tips and tricks)
• Bi-Weekly training (for key contact changes)
• ID flags that trigger potential churn issues

4. 2014 Customer Success Goals
• 92% retention rate or better
• Churn plus upsell of over 100%
• Tools
• Gainsight for Customer Success
• Influitive for Advocacy Community
• MVP.Hoopla.Net
• Improve process for product feedback

5. • Never too early to invest, churn is a killer
• Need tooling and analytics to track customer health
• Great people make all the difference
Key Learnings

6. Henry Schuck
DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg, a three-time INC 500 company and 2014
CODiE Award winner for Best Sales and Marketing
Intelligence Solution, provides the country’s top
technology marketers and sales professionals access to
the most up-to-date and accurate data, Information
Technology organizational charts, and Real Time
projects on their target accounts. From small start-ups
to technology giants, DiscoverOrg moves the needle for
sales and marketing groups of all sizes for over seven
years
Co-Founder & CEO
DiscoverOrg

7. Client Success Team
Andrew Brewer
Vice President of Client Success
Ian Seniff Krystan Resch Allison Phillips
Senior CSM Senior CSM CS Administrator
Alyssa Todd Benjamin Croll Bradford DeLuca Gabe Davis Jared Ellis
Kelsey Varce Luke Denby Nova Ahmed Finnigan Ricky Kalmbach Steven Mitchell

8. Client Success Strategy
• Being more efficient with a large
customer base.
• Educate on Sales, Marketing, and
Staffing best practices.
• Identifying Customer behavior to
create valuable reach outs.
• Holding our clients
accountable, along with the CSM’s
to make sure our product is used
correctly. We’re selling
success, but the client has to do
things to see that success.
• Communicating new products and
identifying upsell opportunities
through constant customer
engagement.

9. CS Goals for 2014
• Using analytics to identify customers
that are at risk of churn
• Refine onboarding process
• Creating a customer roadmap and
health plan

10. Tips - What have we learned?
• Just training our clients on our product is not enough- we have to be experts at what
THEY do. Product + Domain Expertise
• CSM’s with higher call volume will have a higher renewal percentage
• An engaged customer is a healthy customer- communicating needs is critical to a
customer’s satisfaction.
• We will not reach our upsell goals if we haven’t identified what our clients corporate
structure is. Leveraging existing relationships to get introductions to other internal
groups is critical to account growth.

11. Stefano Migliorisi
Mobile secure video collaboration
CEO (aka King of Monkeys)

12. CSM: Listen to this cat
Principle 1 - if you do not know where you are going any
road will lead you there
• How do you identify and prove success?
• You need to know why your customers choose you (e.g., go
faster)
• You need to be ready to innovate (cars or faster horses?)
• Clients need to be willing to share info or you need to be creative
(e.g., Doximity or Linkedin in telemental health)

13. CSM: Bob2Bob
Principle 2 - Intelligence is often not intelligent
• Information overflow: how do we distinguish between noise
and real info? There are more common approaches in
measuring sales and marketing than CSM
• Customer success starts in sales (listening is key, a bad
sale is worse than no sale, never over promise)

14. Doug Camplejohn
Fliptop's applications use data science to help companies close
more sales. Our software leverages public web and internal
CRM and marketing application data in order to generate
meaningful sales lift. Our cloud applications provide high return
on investment and can be deployed quickly.
Founder and CEO

15. Customer Success Goals
• Map your customer lifecycle
• Develop seamless handoff process
• Define what success looks like for every
customer
• Deliver happiness and success

16. Learning and Tips
• Customers want to be seen and heard
• Give them a channel to communicate with you
• Listen when they provide feedback
• Invaluable for product and improved delivery
• Build the case for renewal from the moment you sign
• Create growth strategy for each and every account

17. Q & A