The Modern SaaS Podcast

In this episode, Aditya (CEO, Avoma) and Mark Stagi (VP Customer Success, Avoma) discuss whether or not should you charge for customer success, the factors that go into deciding 'when to charge for customer success' and more.

➡️ Key Points⁣ covered

00:00 - Intro

00:50 - What goes into deciding whether or not should you charge for customer success

06:23 - Isn't offering customer success in the interest of the vendor?

07:59 - When does CS become worth paying for? And what's the value proposition?

13:46 - What CS services to provide out of the box, and what services can you monetize valuably?

18:24 - The role of sales enablement in empowering the customer

22:25 - How to bake CS services into pricing tiers offering value

27:20 - The need for listing the pricing line items clearly on the website

28:20 - Customer success - cost center vs growth engine

31:36 - Key takeaway: Keep it simple as much you can

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss the thoughtful meeting scheduling habits modern SaaS companies can build to improve the buyer experience. They discuss the balance between optimizing for efficiency and customer experience. Some of the key points discussed in the episode include

1. How to use meeting scheduling links more thoughtfully

2. Sharing a clear meeting agenda & how to minimize no-shows

3. The need to allow meeting participants to join the meeting and not make them wait until you join

4. Offering the best experience in Scheduling, rescheduling meetings, including shifting ownership for meetings and a lot more...

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss Collaborative Selling -- how to win with a system of collaboration. They discuss how the old world view of collaborative selling focused only on collaboration with prospects and how 'team selling' focused only on the collaboration amongst internal teams. The key points discussed in the episode include:

1. Talking to a prospect alone isn't selling, but there's a whole gamut of things that happen before, during, and after that conversation.

2. How it takes a village to close a deal.

3. Collaborating with prospects, peers, managers, leaders, and cross-functionally

4. Collaborating with AI and Tools

5. Building a system of collaboration (People, process, and tools), and a lot more...

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss the myths around product-led growth in the SaaS world. The myths discussed include:

1. PLG is the most popular go-to-market motion

2. PLG products grow on their own without Marketing

3. PLG doesn't need a sales team

4. Buyers are entirely self-sufficient and want self-serve product experiences

5. The product team alone is responsible for the execution of the PLG strategy

6. PLG isn't for enterprise companies

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss whether we in SaaS can call ourselves purely product-led or sales-led? All growth motions primarily have 2 parts -- acquisition and conversion. They highlight how different growth motions help you in various stages of the growth lifecycle across acquisition, conversion, and retention.

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Mark (VP of Customer Success, Avoma) discuss what to do when a big account churns. They discuss why churn matters, the key metrics to measure, and, more importantly, the things to do when a big account churn happens, such as:

1. Trying to meet the customer in person and attempting to remedy the situation

2. Sharing churn insights with everyone in your company

3. Validating churn data with existing customers

4. Implementing the learnings to improve the experience of existing customers

5. Focusing on Net Retention Rate, landing-and-expanding as a key SaaS metric, and a lot more...

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss building revenue predictability. The first question that comes to mind for most is—Can we predict revenue?

They discuss a process to build predictability:

1. Predictable revenue needs a predictable pipeline

2. Predictable pipeline calls for predictable prospecting

3. Predictable prospecting needs a dependable salesperson

4. Dependable salesperson means they have a predictable process

5. Predictable process needs predictable habits and a lot more...

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss how SaaS pricing is tricky. And how your product pricing should reflect the value that your product offers and make it easier for your buyer to decide.

They discuss some of the gimmicks often used in the SaaS world, such as:

1. Forcing buyers for an annual commitment without offering monthly subscription options.

2. Offering pay-for-what-you-use, but having a minimum threshold

3. Charging for collaboration

4. Charging Platform fees in addition to subscription fee

5. Charging Customer Success fee

6. Having minimum no. of seats as a requirement, and a lot more...

In this episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss how many SaaS businesses offer a rusty buying experience that’s reminiscent of the 2000s. And how the broken buyer experience is not limited to sales-led or product-led companies.

They discuss six ways to improve the buyer experience:

1. Offering a rewarding trial experience

2. Making demo booking easy with easy calendar access

3. Offering sales assistance (in-addition to product-led nurturing) to reduce friction

4. Being upfront and transparent about pricing

5. Offering flexible pricing options

6. Shortening the sales cycle, and a lot more...

In this first episode of The Modern SaaS Podcast, Aditya and Yaag discuss whether you should go for the best-in-breed solutions or is an all-in-one platform a better choice?

The discussion throw light on:

--> The collaboration pains when using a best-of-breed solution

--> Why is an all-in-one solution the preferred choice?

--> How did ClickUp become successful despite jumping into a red ocean of productivity tools?

--> How to execute the all-in-one vision for your platform, and a lot more...