Cassie Young is a General Partner at Primary Ventures. She’s also a longtime SaaS operator with stints as Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Customer Officer at Sailthru and at its acquirer, Marigold.

Cassie tells us exactly why customer centricity is about driving outcomes customers care about, why retention is your cheapest form of growth, and why the best companies are all about alignment.

Key Takeaways:

• The playbook for building a company is the playbook for building a company regardless of which stage you’re at. Resourcing and order of operations may vary, but at the core, stage doesn’t really matter in terms of building a successful venture-backed business.
• Centering on customers is so much more than NPS. It’s about driving outcomes customers care about. 
• Retention is your cheapest form of growth. Too many companies miss this.
• Common GTM pitfalls you have to solve for from the earliest days: 1) mastering qualification and discovery & 2) pipeline coverage – how real is your plan to hit plan.
• There is merit to having diversity of customers in the early stage but you have to know you’ll need segmentation to actually grow longer term.
• All jobs ultimately converge the more senior you become.
• The best CEOs & senior execs are out with customers every day.
• People fail to thrive in executive functions when they’re overly concerned with their own team’s success, at the expense of the business. Senior leaders need to work on the business not just in the business. 
• Top advice for CEOs & executives: Do absolutely everything you can to make your customers successful, and everything else will take care of itself. 
• Sharing customer insights intentionally and consistently changes mindsets and helps drive alignment across GTM teams.
• High performance companies are completely aligned, and it really shows up in incentives at every level of the org, all the way up to executive compensation. You will see real behavioral changes when your head of product has their bonus tied to NPS and new logos.
• Aligned goals at Sailthru included: exit ARR, a NPS target, cash-oriented target which evolved into an EBITDA target. 

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Where to find Cassie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassyoung/

https://www.primary.vc/

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Where to find Neeta:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neetabidwai/

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Where to find Good Revenue:

https://dfnstrategy.com/goodrevenue 

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