David Moore

Your SaaS is probably leaking revenue right now. Not from churn. From failed payments. Expired cards. Silent declines. Retries that never convert. Customers didn’t cancel. The payment just didn’t go through. Growth is important. But protecting what you’ve already earned? That’s smarter. Are you actively tracking failed payments in Stripe? #SaaS #Founders #Revenue #Subscriptions #Stripe

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Your best CSM just burned out. They were good at their job. But the problem was they were REALLY good at saying yes. - Every off-scope request? Yes. - Customer wants to extend the call by 45 minutes? Sure. - One client eating 60% of their calendar? They'll make it work. And now they're gone. Because people-pleasers make incredible CSMs until they completely fucking implode. This keeps happening. CSM thinks their job is making every customer happy all the time. Customer asks for extra time, extra support, extra everything. CSM delivers. Book grows. Time doesn't. Something breaks. Usually it's the CSM. You're not serving customers well when you're overdelivering to three accounts and under-serving the other 47. You're just choosing which customers get screwed. Here's how you enforce boundaries without sounding like a robot: - Use the pilot move. Customer wants to extend calls indefinitely? Say this: "Happy to extend the next call by 30 minutes. After that, let's stick to our regular cadence so I can stay consistent across all the teams I support." You're not saying no. You're saying "I'll flex once, then we're back to structure." Most customers don't push back because they get it. They just needed someone to set the boundary. - Name your support model early. Week one, say this: "You'll have 30-minute check-ins every eight weeks. For anything in between, here are your best resources and contacts." If you don't define the model upfront, they'll define it for you. And their version will involve you on Slack at 9pm answering questions about password resets. - Train your internal stakeholders. Exec wants white-glove service for their pet account? Coolio. Ask: "If I shift time here, what would you like me to deprioritize?" Make them choose. Because you shifting 10 hours to one account means 10 other accounts aren't getting what they need. Force the trade-off conversation early or you'll be the one making impossible choices later. - Always get the agenda 24 hours in advance. Customers love extra time until you run out of things to talk about. Email them: "Can you send over your top 3-4 topics by EOD tomorrow? That way we can make sure we cover everything in our scheduled time." If they can't send an agenda, they don't need the meeting. Or they need a different kind of meeting. Either way, you just saved yourself from 30 minutes of "So... anything else?" If you're a CSM reading this, you might think boundaries make you look difficult. You'd be wrong. :) Boundaries make you sustainable. And sustainable CSMs deliver better outcomes because they're not constantly buried under one client's bullshit. You're not difficult for having a boundary. You're protecting every other customer in your book from getting half your attention because one account took all of it. Say yes when it matters. But say no when it doesn't. Burning out doesn't help anyone.

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18 Comments

The coverage model is a churn machine dressed up as a CS strategy. Nobody says this out loud because the metrics make it look like it’s working. You know this CSM. Owns 80 accounts. Knows every client’s first name, their kids’ names, their renewal dates. Responsive to everything. QBR completion rate: perfect. Health scores: green across the board. (Health scores are always green right up until they aren’t.) Then Q4 comes and three of those accounts are offboarding. The thing the coverage model can’t produce isn’t effort. It’s access. The client who tells you the relationship is cooling before it becomes a decision. That conversation only happens with the CSM they trust enough to have it with — and that trust requires depth, not volume. Maile Collmer — a referral networking coach who rearranged how I think about this — said something I’ve been applying to CS ever since: stop thinking about what you want from the room and start thinking about what the room needs from you. The wide-net CSM is optimizing for the room. The deep CSM is doing something the coverage model has no metric for: becoming a genuine business partner. On Thursday’s episode, Anika Zubair said the CSMs driving 120% NRR aren’t managing the most accounts. After 14 years scaling CS teams at hypergrowth SaaS companies, her read is clean: the ones hitting those numbers are the ones their clients treat as actual partners in growing the business, not just contacts at the vendor. AI can write the QBR deck. It cannot be the person your client calls when something is going wrong before it’s officially going wrong. That’s the deep CSM’s job. You can’t do it across 80 accounts. Your coverage model didn’t create this problem. Your metrics did. #KarlTheBridge P.S. The wide-net CSM gets recognized at the SKO. The deep one gets the call at 4pm on a Thursday before the client talks to anyone else.

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3 Comments

GTM Engineering is just Rev Ops. It's not a new thing, and it's not the future. It's a clever rebranding. Having experience with a new tech stack, doesn't change the function. You support the GTM org with tools, solutions, and process that drive desired outcomes. There are people who sell, and people who support them. The tools today are way over engineered and not built for sellers. In time, that will change... and sellers will be better for it! ...and the supporting cast of "specialists" will be far less necessary.

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9 Comments

Hiring your Founding AE might be the most important hire in your SaaS journey — and one of the easiest to get wrong. The AE who crushed it at $50M ARR might crumble at $1M ARR. Early-stage SaaS needs a different kind of seller: 💡 Adaptable – thrives without a playbook. 💡 Curious – great at discovery, not just pitching. 💡 Builder – helps create the sales motion. 💡 Resilient – handles rejection and iteration. Your Founding AE doesn’t just sell — they help you build the machine. Full breakdown here 👇 👉 https://lnkd.in/d5SPdbGg #scalewithstrive #accountexecutive #gtmhiring

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As an SDR I went from SMB to MM to ENT in 11 months, averaging 137% across all 3. Each segment was like a completely new role. Want to progress as an SDR? Here’s exactly how I won at each level. 1. SMB It is all about relevancy at scale. Your TAM is huge. You often have thousands of accounts so you don't have the time to personalise for each account. Instead, you should think how can I hit as many accounts with good messaging as possible? This is the process I'd follow. - Define your true ICP which companies to sell to - Define your personas, who to reach out to - Define the trigger, why to reach out - Define messaging, why now This sounds super simple but it works, in theory it would be like: Sales ATL + SaaS companies + Closed Lost. SMB is mostly high-volume sequences with you ripping dials, it’s quite simple. 2. Mid Market Now more of a strategic approach comes into play. Naturally, your time gets smaller because the companies you're going to be going after are bigger. Therefore, tiering accounts is much more important at this stage. A tier 1 account should represent about 5% to 10% of your total book with the rest falling into tier 2 and tier 3. And those tier 1 accounts are the ones where I would give them personalised relevant messages. Things like CEO mentions, key initiatives from the organisation, anything that could only be tied to that company, and that's what you should be referencing in your messaging 3. Enterprise This is where the real fun begins of true personalised prospecting. You could have a book of business from anywhere from 10 to 200 accounts you want to break into, so each account needs deep research. This is where you have to make it specific about the company but more importantly you have to craft a perspective to show how what you solve directly ties into a key business initiative. Enterprise is mostly timing. There's so many things they could be fixing. You have to show why this one issue you solve is the one they should be focusing on. Why this fire out of all the ones they could put out? 4. Processes & SOPs Rep, you should really be building out your processes for each stage because how you approach SMB vs. mid-market vs. enterprise will be completely different. I used to do all of this in Notion. It took me hours but tools like Tango can now make this 10x easier for you to just document what to do so you can do it at scale. Do your outbound as you would normally and let it record everything you're doing. You have a detailed breakdown of your system. The easier it is for you to focus on outbound, the more meetings you’re going to book. I think there's a lot of advice saying that you have to be personal but the truth is that only applies to the segment you're selling into. If you do an SMB focus on trying to be relevant at scale to the bulk of your accounts. If you do an enterprise, make it personal, make it one-to-one. Advice isn't one size fits all.

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17 Comments

Stop hiring more CSMs to fix your churn problem. You don't have a capacity issue; you have a strategy issue. Most SaaS founders treat Customer Success as an insurance policy against churn. They play defense. But the top 1% of public SaaS companies treat CS as their primary growth engine. They play offense. The difference isn't the software they use. It's the operating model. When we deploy the Xelura framework, we shift the mandate: From: "Keep them happy." To: "Engineer their growth." The data in the slides breaks down the transition from a Reactive Cost Center to a Predictive Profit Center. #CustomerSuccess #SaaS #NRR #Strategy #Xelura

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