Cassandra Dixon

Our partnership with Brex now gives us unparalleled insight and breadth in SaaS purchasing reports

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Really interesting perspective on how a GTM systems team can drive business success.

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Technical founders can sometimes get so enamored with the product they are building that they really don’t understand why customers actually buy their product. I’ll take it one step further… Sometimes your product might be only 25% of why a customer buys, the other 75% is stuff you might not even realize until you take a closer look at each specific buyer. - Some buyers value the quality and responsiveess of your support above product feature maturity or feature parity with competitors. - Others use your product and also desire a partner they can work with, for example to teach others and conduct educational workshops. - Still others have specific KPIs and they are buying your product as a means to an end. They see the customer success team as partners who can work with them weekly to help meet and exceed their objectives (cloud cost optimization, increasing the satisfaction of the end users they support). Advice to the founders in my network, take the time to try understand why your customers buy. - It might have less to do with your feature roadmap and more to do with how you show up when they need you and how you help them win. - Your product offering also gets better faster when you understand all the manual things your sales, support, and customer success team do to get the sale and make customers happy. - Talk to more customers to understand why they first bought and why they continue to be paying customers. Understanding why customers really buy makes it so much easier to prioritize the product roadmap and find ways to improve the sales cycle and customer retention. What do you think? Have you experienced the disconnect that can sometimes occur between founders and customer facing leaders? Would love to hear your experiences and advice for others in the comments.

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TTC - the most underrated metric in a rev org. Time To Close. How long does it take from first contact to closed won? The shorter the time the more deals get closed in any given period of time. It's a secondary metric, but one of my favorites. Conversion is the primary, TTC is the secondary. Everyone wants to improve conversion, but there are many factors that lead to the conversion number. TTC being one of them. This is specifically true for high transaction businesses with heavy inbound. Enterprise is a bit different. The best AE's almost always top the leaderboard for TTC. They are quick to respond, get commits for next steps and keep projects moving through the process. They are proactive and lead the customer along the path. This translates into better deal velocity. Want to pick one simple thing to help drive conversion up, try measuring and focusing on TTC for a few months and see if that doesn't make things better. 

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Top H1 takeaway from QBR's about our Rev Org: "We're an ecosystem, not a hierarchy." (h/t Alexandra B.) We collaborate, everyone's voice matters, and we strive to put people in roles they love so they can be madly successful. Hearing this statement was validation that what we are building in the Revenue Org at LibraryPass is unique, and scalable, and contagious. And we have roles coming soon! So if you're interested in being part of an ecosystem, let's chat. Here's to an even better H2!

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#andanotherone Want to use your conversations to empower your teams? Do you use Gong or do you think your team should be using an AI solution to improve their process? Hit me up! #zoominfo 🤑

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From working with revops folks, this is one of my biggest pet peeves. ✴ Overengineering everything to show off technical expertise This has tons of consequences for their orgs: - Documentation is a mess (if it exists at all) - Day-to-day GTM folks don't have a basic understanding of how things work - When things break there's a domino effect and suddenly everything is on 🔥 - Having someone as the single point of failure is a recipe for disaster Don't get me wrong, sometimes things are super complex and need to be built with that in mind. But why build a complex flow when a simple one will do the trick?

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"You can't pay enough to grow at hypergrowth rates; it starts with an amazing product that people love to use." — Carilu Dietrich, former CMO at Atlassian through their IPO. Look at a company like Slack. They invested in advertising, but what really drove their growth was how much teams loved using the product and shared it with others. Ads can help build awareness, but they won’t drive hypergrowth alone. True hypergrowth happens when word of mouth kicks in, and people organically spread your product because it genuinely solves their problems. PS: Check out Carilu's Hypergrowth Leadership newsletter.

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Great insights Kyle. I believe selling to the right customer is key: 1️⃣ Sell to the right customer. 2️⃣ Nail onboarding. 3️⃣ Stop overselling on the 1st deal. 4️⃣ Market to your customers. 5️⃣ Set up integrations. 6️⃣ Solve more problems. 7️⃣ Give yourself more time. #CustomerSuccess

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We talked yesterday about why Stripe's new usage reporting features announced at Sessions were lacking. You'd expect them to be more mature in the actual usage billing piece, so let's talk about that. For a usage-based billing system, you have three responsibilities, at least: 1. Support each pricing model to generate the correct set of invoices 2. Support change so companies can evolve 3. Give realtime visibility to internal teams and customers. 1️⃣ On the first point: Two notably absent and "coming soon" features in the billing stack are ironically the most important and common: (1) annual platform fee monthly overages and (2) credit burndowns (think Snowflake credits or even just enterprise $$ commitments) Credit burndowns are a genuinely deep functionality: you have to implement virtual currencies, mid-period credit expiry, recurring allocations. They change how the invoice looks. This is why we believe that usage-based pricing is a GTM shift, not a billing model. This isn't a superficial thing or limited to missing features -- the primitives are unworkable as-is, and make it impossible to implement simple add-ons and contract ramps. We talk about this in depth here: https://lnkd.in/dPi8aiPa 2️⃣ Something else that companies often overlook is how a subscription changes once it's live: think usage-based add-ons or changes to your price point. When you're billing on usage, backfilling and time periods are crucial. Unfortunately, if you've built a billing system with seats in mind, you're thinking in static proration terms. This behavior won't cut it (see screenshot). You need to be able to flexibly backdate and blend usage-based prices, (re-)processing usage data that's already been ingested. in addition to changing individual subscriptions, there's the reality that many companies (especially AI companies!) are still figuring out their pricing - they will want to migrate customers en-masse to new models. You're stuck with scripts running at midnight, nothing native. 3️⃣ visibility. here, Stripe *has* improved; they allow you to visualize specific groupings in your event data - this is what was demo'd in realtime. But, of course, visibility isn't just about a Spark pipeline that gives you grouped quantities over pre-declared groups. Customers and businesses need flexibility (Orb lets you query data via SQL!) and to power workflows over that, like *alerting* and *spend management* This is thread 2/3 - We'll talk more about rev-rec and financial reporting soon.

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