Hunt Club’s Post

Navigating growth strategies can feel like a labyrinth. But what if there was a path that married the strengths of two worlds? 🔥 Presenting the Hybrid Motion: ✅ Merges the agility of Product-led Growth (PLG) with the precision of Sales-led Growth (SLG). 🔧 Uses the product as a demand magnet, but personalizes sales experiences for premium clients. 📌 Fun fact: Sales and success teams drive 58% of upsells, versus the product's 10%. For startups entering the GTM phase or PLG companies looking upmarket, the hybrid motion isn't just a strategy—it's a revolution. 📘 Dive deeper into the future of SaaS growth: https://lnkd.in/g9wTXsNv

Melissa Llorente is currently Head of Customer Experience at Elevate Leadership, but has had previous stops as a Director of Customer Success at Gem and spent the bulk of her career running account management and CS teams at Google. She sums this thought up nicely: “Customer success is a whole team effort and a company mindset, so show your customer success team love. They are the glue that holds everything together.” On a granular level, Llorente elaborates on what buying into customer success looks like in practice for everyone at an org. “A smart account executive knows that the customer success manager is the key to unlocking critical insights. A smart product manager knows the customer success team can quickly identify themes and patterns that will inform product development. A smart marketer knows that the customer success manager has learned the customer's language and what's on their customer's mind.”

🚀 Excited to announce that my course has been featured in Maven's latest Go-To-Market category release today. Huge thanks to Gagan Biyani for the opportunity! In a world where growth is everyone's priority, my course is tailored to drive customer-led growth. 🏆 Reflecting on my journey, I took on the challenge of spearheading customer advocacy at Asana, just before their IPO in 2020. This experience propelled me to Forbes 30 under 30 and beyond. Working with hypergrowth tech giants like Anaplan, Adobe Marketo, and Talkdesk, I decoded the power of customer programs in fueling growth, fostering communities, and boosting engagement. Through trial and error, I've crafted a customer-led growth playbook that truly works, and I'm eager to share this knowledge for your success. 🎯 Geared towards mid-to-senior level marketing professionals and leaders in rapid-growth startups, my course offers insights on building customer communities, implementing effective programs, and crafting campaigns that drive loyalty while minimizing churn. 📚 Ready to take your customer marketing to the next level? Join me to transform your marketing strategy for sustainable growth, harness customer engagement, secure buy-in, and foster a thriving community. https://lnkd.in/gtm3nz_R Registration is open! DM me if you have any questions regarding the course. #customermarketing #training #community #tech #CLG #Course #siliconvalley #growth #customerengagement #advisor #forbes #forbeswomen

Wonderful news today from Catalyst and Totango - they are merging! As a CS leader- Edward Chiu we couldn't agree with you more that today’s problems with CSPs are: - CRMs, designed for a different purpose, can't adapt to post-sale best practices. - CSPs focus on activities and productivity, not outcomes. - Spreadsheets, project management tools, internal tooling aren’t scalable. Looking forward to seeing what Catalyst Software and Totango do to solve these! #customersuccess, #csps, #csprofessional

The internet is full of success stories from SaaS companies that expanded rapidly and almost exclusively through product-led growth. But as they scale, more and more PLG companies are transitioning to sales-assisted or sales-led growth. Ioana’s article on Custify explores the challenges of shifting from a product-led motion to a hybrid one (with its strengths and weaknesses) and the steps to help you with the transition.

🗞️Exciting News 🗞️ We’re thrilled to share that @Catalyst and @Totango have joined forces to support businesses with the most powerful customer growth platform. Read more from our CEO @ Edward ⬇️ #customersuccess #GTM #merger #announcement #revenuegrowth

I’m THRILLED to announce Catalyst is officially joining forces with Totango! Not only is this a monumental moment for the customer success community, it’s hopefully an exciting “catalyst” for how businesses will protect and grow their revenue through our unified customer growth platform. Alistair Rennie and I are delighted to step up as co-CEOs to navigate this remarkable new chapter, with my focus concentrated on leading all GTM functions. I'm eager to announce my close collaboration with heavy-hitting leaders who are now leading our GTM functions - Karen Budell our CMO, Ned Leutz our Interim CRO, and Chris Dishman our SVP of Global CS! Additionally, our incredible CTO Sha Ma and product leader Benjamin Edick are going to ensure this is the best damn product on the market! Seven years ago, Kevin Chiu and I launched Catalyst Software to revolutionize the #customersuccess category. Our mission was to transform the cumbersome user experiences of existing CS tools into something intuitive, beautiful, and data-driven. We succeeded and got venture funding from leading VCs like Accel, Spark Capital, True Ventures, Work-Bench, Greenspring Associates, securing corporate funding/support from juggernaut enterprises like ServiceNow and Databricks, and managing over $5B in revenue from 200 customers. Despite all the momentum, Catalyst faced a major challenge: the perception of being a “startup” made some businesses hesitant to take the leap of faith. Even though we have publicly traded and Fortune companies operating their businesses on our platform, this misconception proved to be a barrier for some. We needed a transformative change to scale globally. Enter Totango, a founder and pioneer in the category, who literally wrote the book on CS. They currently support the exact type of enterprises we aspire to work with, companies like SAP, Github, Schneider Electric, and Dynatrace. Catalyst made a decisive pivot last year, we designed our product to not only support CS teams, but the entire GTM motion to accelerate revenue from existing customers. We were the first customer success platform (CSP) to make this shift, and now, with Totango, we will be the ONLY platform offering a true end-to-end customer growth platform (CGP). Yesterday’s tools can’t solve today’s problems: - CRMs, designed for a different purpose, can't adapt to post-sale best practices. - CSPs focus on activities and productivity, not outcomes. - Spreadsheets, project management tools, internal tooling aren’t scalable. Together, we're unstoppable. We're merging the best of Catalyst’s revenue innovation and UI/UX with Totango’s enterprise capabilities, APIs, integrations, and offer a powerful solution no other company can. More details will follow, but let me preempt any skepticism, much like B-Rabbit 🐰 did in the film 8 Mile 🎥, by addressing what our competitors will say about this exciting venture. Check comments below for a juicy freestyle 👇…

After having been on thousands of GTM strategy sessions with SaaS Founders… Here’s what I learned from the best of them: 1. Iterations win: The Founders and GTM teams that kept iterating saw the most success. It’s very rare that a company gets their ICP, Manifesto, or Broadway Show right in one shot. The ones that look at the data and kept iterating to double down on what works, won. 2. Old school GTM channels are making a comeback: Webinars, online events, and referrals were a significant source of pipeline for some of the fastest growing companies I talked to. 3. People don’t buy productivity: They buy transformations. One of the most common shifts in messaging that yielded results for these companies that I worked with was a shift away from “Your people will be more productive” to “Here’s how we’ll transform how you and your people do business.” 4. Invest in Customer Success: For many of the companies I’ve worked with, they really doubled down on building out their Customer Success functions. When they did, they saw dividends across the business from new customer onboarding, retention, and referrals. If you’re an early stage SaaS Founder and you’re looking to revamp your GTM strategy for 2024, grab a complimentary copy of my 5-Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. Just follow the link in the comments below. If you don't see my comment, choose "Recent Comments" in the dropdown below this post. 👇

The two biggest killers of SaaS business profitability in 2024 and beyond will be operational silos and the sacrifice of strategy for speed in your GTM teams. 2022-2023 were transitional years of switching from VC value levers of “growth over profits” to where we are now - the exact opposite. Or what I like to say, “duh! You mean the point of a business?!”. Those two “business killers” mentioned above are biproducts of an era now done and gone. If any of the following sounds like you, it’s time to self reflect and mature… EXAMPLES OF OPERATIONAL SILOS: 👉you ask anyone in your sales team what the top three goals for the year and quarter are for their peer departments (marketing, product, etc) and watch them shrivel into this 🤷 👉your marketing team is focused mostly on one part of the customer cycle creating disjointed strategy and team loyalty divides. I can’t tell you how many marketing teams are almost solely funded on Demand Gen and have no support for BOFU sales/customer enablement and product marketing, despite telling their sales team simultaneously that they are the priority for revenue pull. 👉your product team makes decisions as engineers and have no sense of a consistent product roadmap or has one that lacks product marketing input for prioritization based on market valuation and GTM strategy EXAMPLES OF SACRIFICING STRATEGY FOR SPEED: 👉your product team pushes a major new product or feature to customers without at least a month long plan in place for GTM strategy launch, both externally and internally, which includes: marketing/pr, beta testing, ICP definition, sales/customer enablement, TOFU strategy, metrics of success and more 👉you’re hiring new sales team members without any plan for onboarding, knowing this will delay their time to value, but hoping they will “figure it out” (hello expensive gamble!) 👉you’re creating robust enablement and TOFU programs and content that leverages a ton of internal resource, based on mostly gut feeling, instead of quality data analysis, experience, and strategic planning (which you guessed it - takes time!). This results in redundancy, failures to launch, low adoption rates, immeasurable outcomes and more. Anything else you’d add?