#16 Driving growth
with
Eddie Reynolds
,
Strategic RevOps Consulting for B2B SaaS
February 13, 2024
·
36
min.
Key Takeaways
- Customer success failures almost always trace back to a broken sales-to-onboarding handoff. When salespeople pitch over the fence without involving implementation or CS resources mid-cycle, customers arrive with misaligned expectations — and no amount of reactive outreach later can fix a bad foundation.
- Capacity planning is the silent killer of CS teams. Most companies have never calculated whether their CSMs actually have enough hours to meaningfully touch every account — so they default to "send all" boilerplate emails, leaving hundreds of accounts unmonitored until it's too late to save the renewal.
- Customer health scoring is only useful if it's actionable in the system CSMs live in. Eddie's example from Salesforce — an "early warning system" embedded directly in the account record showing usage metadata — illustrates the gap between having data in a BI tool and having it surface at the moment a CSM needs to make a call.
- Unhealthy accounts should never sit in silence — there is no acceptable window of zero communication. If a customer exits onboarding still unhealthy, or becomes unhealthy mid-contract, an action plan should trigger immediately. Waiting until 30–60 days before renewal to ask "are you renewing?" is not a CS motion — it's a Hail Mary.
- Expansion opportunities deserve the same pipeline rigor as new business. Qualification, discovery, stakeholder alignment, and a defined close process should all apply to upsell and cross-sell — not just a casual mention on a QBR. Treating expansion as a soft conversation is how revenue gets left on the table.
- Stakeholder white space is as important as product white space. Eddie's team at Salesforce tracked not just which products a customer hadn't bought, but which internal stakeholders had never been contacted — combining that with usage data to identify who to call and why, rather than sending generic account review requests.
- The market correction is exposing process debt that frothy conditions were masking. Companies that never built rigorous CS, onboarding, or lead response processes got away with it when budgets were loose — now CFO scrutiny and reduced seat counts are forcing a reckoning that RevOps teams are being asked to solve retroactively.
Hosts and Guest

Janis Zech
CEO at Weflow
Janis Zech is the co-founder and CEO of Weflow, and previously scaled his last B2B SaaS company from $0 to $76M ARR as CRO. In the episode, he talks about customer success as a growth driver, connecting onboarding, expansion, and renewal to the broader revenue process.

Philipp Stelzer
CPO at Weflow
Philipp Stelzer is the co-founder and CPO of Weflow, focused on how revenue teams capture activity, inspect deals, and forecast inside Salesforce. In this episode, he adds a practical product perspective on customer success, pipeline management, and the opportunities RevOps creates for B2B SaaS teams.

Eddie Reynolds
Strategic RevOps Consulting for B2B SaaS
Eddie Reynolds is a guest discussing the importance of customer success in B2B SaaS. In the episode, he talks about implementing processes for onboarding, expansion, and renewal, as well as managing and forecasting the customer success pipeline and the current state of RevOps.
Full Transcript
Janis Zech: Hello and welcome to another episode of RevOps Lab. We're here with Eddie Reynolds. I hope I pronounced this correctly. Welcome, Eddie.
Eddie Reynolds: Thanks. You're close enough. My wife is from Argentina, and her family can't say the name either. So okay. Thanks.
Janis Zech: Great to have you. I mean, I've been — isn't this, like, totally fine? It's a different accent. I'm German, you know, and as funny as one can be. No. But, like, I've been following you on LinkedIn for a long time. Super excited about having you on the show. I mean, why don't you do a quick intro, and then we dive into, you know, all things RevOps.
Eddie Reynolds: Sure, absolutely. So I never know where to start because I started my career about twenty years ago, but basically I've spent the majority of my career in sales out trying to open and close deals. And along that journey, I got pretty obsessed with process with Salesforce, implemented it at a couple of companies. Then I drank the Kool Aid so much that I ended up going and working at Salesforce for three years. During that time, I covered largely, at least my best customers were growth stage B2B SaaS companies in New York, primarily VC backed. And I spent the majority of my days trying to get meetings with revenue leaders and executives at these companies and trying to figure out what their goals were for revenue and how they grew their companies, how they grew their revenue engine. I would compare what they were doing to what we were doing internally at Salesforce, which has a pretty finely tuned revenue engine, and just all day, every day meeting with folks and trying to compare notes on best practices in sales marketing and customer success. After doing that for three years, it inspired me to want to start a consulting company where we could go much deeper and help companies actually implement these strategies, both in terms of the strategy and process as well as the tools. And that's what my company Union Square Consulting does. We are B2B SaaS or B2B — wow, I totally ruined my pitch. We are revenue operations as a service or fractional RevOps or whatever term we want to use of the day. And we provide both the strategic as well as the tactical resources for companies to improve their revenue engine.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, and if you haven't heard of Eddie, I mean, follow him on LinkedIn. Check out, you know, the newsletter you write. I think it's really insightful. A lot of deep dives onto very important topics. And I'm curious, I think you talk a lot about, like, strategic RevOps. I'd love to start high level and then really dive into a topic we, I think, care deeply about, like CS ops. But, like, how do you define RevOps and what is strategic revenue operations for you?
Eddie Reynolds: Well, it's so funny because I was watching the recording from our prep session and I had this one liner that I somehow eked out that I really liked. You asked me, what's the state of RevOps? And I said, the state of RevOps is the state of revenue. RevOps is there to support the revenue team and make them more effective and efficient. And so when people are asking me what's going on in RevOps, my answer to that is it's what's going on in revenue. And we've seen, at least in B2B SaaS, obviously, took a pretty big hit with the market. People have been changing their focus and we can get into that on this topic. And I think RevOps is there to serve that shift in focus, which is a lot of net revenue retention and how we retain and grow our existing customers. How do we actually do that? High level, what is RevOps? With that specific question, RevOps is what is the strategy? What is the process? What are the metrics? And what are the systems that we use to execute in order to achieve that goal? So if we think about net revenue retention, what is it we need to do as a company? What do all the different employees in the company need to do on a day by day basis in order to improve net revenue retention? RevOps is the folks that actually document that down on a piece of paper and take that all the way through to implementation and execution.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I love it. I mean, and I think you're already diving into the NRR topic, right, like, that essentially is touching on renewals, expansion. And I think, you know, if you think about the stats, right, the best B2B SaaS companies are above a hundred fifty percent of net revenue retention or net dollar retention if you look at the public, the traded companies. The same is true in private, obviously, but then at the same time, I think a lot of focus in the last couple of years have been spent on acquisition. Right? And I think that's something that is changing due to the change of the markets, you know, essentially making acquisition a lot harder and also CAC to LTV ratios a lot harder. I'm curious, like, if you think about that specific topic, right, customer success, I mean, how would you look at it, if you work with customers? Right? Like, what are things that are fundamentally broken in many places?
Eddie Reynolds: Sure. Well, so let's define customer success first. I think we take the stance that we take customer service off the table and think about that as sort of a separate thing. Definitely you could argue that you want to at least see what kind of tickets are being surfaced and have some visibility into customers that are having issues versus not. But let's push that aside for a moment and let's talk about how do we make customers successful. It starts with a really good handoff process from sales. Is sales handing off a customer to onboarding, to implementation, whatever it is necessary to get up and running on your product? Are they doing that in a seamless way where the customer is having a good customer experience and it's setting them up for success so they can be a healthy active user of your product. And when I say user, I'm assuming we're talking about B2B SaaS companies, but a lot of these concepts apply to other industries as well. We then need to take that customer and get them onboarded to a point where they have healthy usage of the product. We then need to make sure to monitor that and maintain that healthy usage because a customer is not gonna renew if they're not using the product. And even if they are using the product, that may still not be enough to renew them. I think one of the biggest problems that we had, especially a couple years ago, is that companies had these processes in place of handing people over to onboarding and implementation that were broken. There's also, and I'm gonna get off track here a little bit, a big issue with capacity planning. If we talk to our VP of RevOps strategy, Joel Arnold, he talks a lot about how he's never seen a company that has a proper capacity plan for their customer success team. Meaning, what are all the things that need to get done every day by the different people in different roles? And do we have enough people to do those things across our customer base? If you give a customer success manager one thousand accounts, they can go out and say, all right, I'm going to send an automated email. Hey, I'm your new customer success manager, please reach out to me if you have any questions. A very small percentage of those people respond. And then you have all these other companies out there using your product or not using it, that are being neglected. And then you wait until the renewal comes up and reach out to them thirty days ahead of the renewal and say, hey, are you still renewing? And then they say, no, we haven't been using your product for a year. We're not renewing. And by that point in time, it's way too late to save it. You have no chance of fixing that issue at that point.
Janis Zech: Yeah. And typically, before they send that email, they think, should I send an email or should I rather stay silent so they don't look at the contract? I mean, joke aside, but I mean yeah. I think from onboarding to, you know, basically — it reminds me so much of, like, SKOs. Right? Like, oh, we do this big splash at the beginning of the year, but then, you know, let's not talk about it for a while. Right? I think customers are very similar actually in that sense that from the onboarding experience to the value. Right? Like, let's assume you're in B2B SaaS. You have a, let's say, a case you present to the executive leadership to get the deal over the line. How do you actually build the value against the ROI case? Right? And I think that's a really interesting question. And at least in my experience — so my previous company, Fiverr, we had, like, you know, ACVs between a hundred to a few million and a very technical product, so we had to become part of the road map. The onboarding process was where essentially, you know, you could essentially lose deals over. Right? You signed a contract, but the contract didn't mean anything. And if you don't do a good job in onboarding with the solution engineers, with CS, and sales coming together and really having a, like, a properly defined roadmap to get that customer over the line and, you know, essentially come from the dream or the future state to the reality. Right? I think a lot can go wrong and it affects already your renewal process and essentially the value you're driving. I'm curious, like if you think about onboarding, is there certain best practices you put in place? What have you seen works well?
Eddie Reynolds: Sure. And let me provide some context on my experience here before I answer this question. So when I was at Salesforce, I covered both new and existing customers. So I would take somebody that could potentially come off the website or that I cold called or had some other interaction with, take them through the sales process, close them. During that sales process, I'm introducing them to third party implementation partners and Salesforce outsources their implementations. And then once they sign, they go start to work with that implementation partner. They have customer service at Salesforce, basically creating a ticket to help them, but not much else support. Not a ton of other support beyond that. And then I'm there as the basically account manager at that point, trying to monitor the account, doing what I can to make sure the implementation partner is bringing them through a successful implementation. But as an AM, I'd be pretty limited there. And then just trying to monitor the health of the account in hopes of growing the account and at least retaining it before the renewal. Since I left Salesforce, I've been on the other side of that table where the Salesforce account executives are sending us those customers and we're going and seeing that through to implementation. And then now we work mostly with our clients on annual contracts. So we've got a lot of clients where we have been working with them continuously for three, four, five years at this point. So forgive me if that was a long explanation, but what my experience has taught me is that first and foremost, it's really, really helpful to have the people that are responsible for onboarding and implementation to be part of that sales conversation. So when I was at Salesforce and now that I'm on the other side of the table working with Salesforce, usually the implementation partner is coming in somewhere in the middle of that sales process to scope out the implementation, to ask questions, also to push back on the customer. Salesforce especially is an extremely complicated tool as many people have experienced, and there's a high failure rate for implementation. And you can't just say yes to people and expect to have success. There are times where you have to get in front of an executive and say, hey, mister and miss executive, if you wanna do x y z, you're gonna fail at this, period. Full stop. And I think that if you have a salesperson trying to manage all of those conversations and then just pitch it over the fence to onboarding and implementations, you're gonna have an extremely high failure rate, especially with, like, a difficult to implement product like Salesforce.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I totally feel you. I mean, I think that Salesforce is a great example because the optionality of the implementation is so huge. Right? That, yes, there's best practices. But if you're incentivized in a renewal contract and you don't start strategically to understand what's actually important to the customer, and not from a tooling perspective, but from a go to market perspective — as CRM is go to market. Right? Like, I think it's such an important aspect to drive value after the onboarding. Right? And if you get that wrong and you don't — and often, I think it even starts with not having the right information, not understanding what the customer wants or, you know, sometimes sales overselling a bit too much. Right? And then essentially, CS trying to somehow adjust the conversation back to value. But that's obviously super hard to do, and I think something I've seen working well is, like, having solution engineering or solutions consulting joining the sales process really early on as a bridge to then essentially hand over to customer success at some point in time. Do you think that should be the same role, it should be different role? It probably depends on the ACV on the use cases, but, yeah, super curious what you think about that.
Eddie Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on the ACV a lot because you can crank up your cost of acquisition pretty high, but it also depends on the product. If we're talking about a point solution that's easy to implement — I think about all the tools we have, we use Zoom. I don't think I've ever spoken to a single employee at Zoom ever and we've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on it, right? It depends on the tool. But I think it's really important to map out what that process is to get your customer to success by looking at what customers do you have today, who's successful, what steps did they follow, what are the common practices. And then I think another thing that's really important is making sure that your account executives are aligned there. Now what's weird to me about Salesforce is I didn't have any comp expectations or anything. I could have just pitched stuff over the fence. The one carrot on the stick is that Salesforce, at least when I was there, was famous for doubling the spend of their customers within the first twelve months on average. So you as the account executive are thinking, okay. I can close this deal right now, but if I do this right, I can get double within this year if I do everything the way I'm supposed to do it. I want that like two x return. So what are the steps I need to follow? And so I would literally be on calls pushing back against clients like, hey. No. You can't do that. Do it this way. I know you wanna sign the contract and you wanna get a, you know, really cheap quick start. You wanna hire resources in India. But, like, let me tell you, like, why this is oftentimes not gonna result in the outcome you want. Why am I having that difficult conversation with somebody? Now I didn't get any kind of clawback if people didn't renew, but I was at least incentivized to say, okay, I want this customer to be successful so that I can upsell them on the next product. And I think that that's a really key piece. But I would also say that I think in addition to financial incentives at Salesforce — and I'm not gonna pretend that every AE at Salesforce does a perfect job of this. Let's not pretend that Salesforce is the perfect company. But I do think that they had a pretty decent culture, at least on my team around this of, like, nobody on my team was trying actively to sell people into an implementation that they knew was gonna fail. And that goes beyond the financial incentives to just, like, our culture of, like, hey. Like, we want to have a customer we retain.
Janis Zech: You just mentioned renewals. And, I mean, that probably in the last couple of months has become even more important in the markets. So I'm curious, like, thinking about customer success in the last twelve to eighteen months, what were some of the biggest fundamental changes that you've seen with Union Square Consulting and your customers?
Eddie Reynolds: Well, I think a lot of these changes are in process or even still yet to be executed on. I think the biggest thing I've seen is just a lot more CROs taking over CS, which tells me that now there's more focus on CS. There's more focus on net revenue retention, less of just pure client acquisition. But I think that when we talk to a lot of companies out in the market, at least the ones we're talking to — keep in mind, people aren't talking to us if they have the perfect revenue operations team. The folks we're talking to, they still have a long way to go. They have this idea that we need to focus on net revenue retention. We need to get our customers healthy, but, like, they don't have the processes in place. So let's take this explanation to, like, the next logical step, which is measuring customer health. How do you identify a healthy customer? Do you have access to your usage data? Is that in whatever system your customer success managers or account managers are using? Do you have a way to triage your accounts and identify these are the red accounts, these are the yellow, these are the green accounts? What does a successful, healthy customer look like? Do you have it defined, do you have it documented, do you have that built out in the system, and can you literally look at a report? So when I was at Salesforce, I could pull up an account and literally right in the middle of the page in Salesforce, we had our early warning system. I think they've updated this since. And it had all these metrics around how they were using the product. And it was enough that I could tell not only if they were using it or not, but I could tell how they were using it. I could tell if it was just the marketing team sending out emails or if it was just the sales team or if they were only using it to manage call activity or if they were actually actively managing their deal pipeline. I could see the metadata to know how they were using it, which would then inform me who I needed to call and what conversation I needed to have to dig deeper to find out why they weren't using Salesforce in the way that they should be using it if they wanted to get value out of it.
Janis Zech: Yeah. So I would assume, like, with customer success, it's obviously much more important that you plug in to, like, a real good BI system and, you know, to get all that data, like, from whatever product the company is selling or using and feed that back into Salesforce. Is that something that's, like, developing such a system — is that something that you feel like always needs to be done from scratch, or is this something that you can carry over from one organization to the next one? Is there, like, basically one model, or is it, like, reinventing the wheel over and over again?
Eddie Reynolds: I think it does depend on what the product is, who's using it, what they're using it for. I mean, as we mentioned, like, with Salesforce using that as an example, like, you can use Salesforce for anything. So, like, it's pretty difficult to, like, have, like, a cookie cutter approach to it. And at the end of the day, like, I couldn't access, like, somebody's version of Salesforce — that probably wouldn't be ethical. I could see metadata, like the number of accounts, contacts, leads, etcetera, how many people logged in. And then with Salesforce as an example, there's so many different use cases. It is really hard to figure that out. With other companies, they have one use case and it's pretty straightforward and it might be something very different from a Salesforce, for example. So it has to be defined for the customer and for the product.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think in SaaS, it's often your product analytics feeding via CDP into your CRM. Right? Like, I think that's a very common way of essentially calculating health scores or even using customer success platforms to do it and connecting dots. Obviously, if you're in a different industry and you don't have a digital product, it's a lot harder to do. Right? Like, how does, let's say, a daily active by weekly active or weekly active by monthly active user or even specific component metric look like in health care? Right? It's probably a lot different and differently done. Let's assume you have the onboarding right, you get the health data into your CRM. What are the touch points throughout the year you would set up to not have this nine months of no communication and then suddenly somebody is actually doing something against renewal. Right? Which I think is just — I mean, it doesn't make sense no matter what. But, yeah, I mean, is there a specific playbook you think of to essentially have specific touch points as a multithreading thing? Right? Like, how do you think about that?
Eddie Reynolds: Yeah. It's a great question. So there's a lot that goes into that. I wanna touch on capacity planning. But before I do, I'll talk to you about, like, what I did at Salesforce that worked. So keep in mind, I was a sales rep, I carried a quota. I wasn't a customer success manager, but I had about sixty to one hundred active accounts at any one point in time. So it was manageable enough that I could handle it, and unfortunately about half of those customers were not healthy. So you take sixty, let's call it eighty accounts divided by two, that's forty — there's forty accounts that are not healthy. All I'm doing is I'm trying to figure out in what way are they not healthy, who bought off on this, who signed the contract, who's managing the team that's using this, and then I'm trying to get in front of them and I'm basically saying, hey, look, you're not getting value for your money. You're spending one hundred thousand dollars a year on Salesforce. It doesn't look like you're using it. Would you like to fix that? And then what I'm trying to do is basically as a sales rep, kick the door down to get in front of the right person because at least with Salesforce, that was usually the issue. The right person was not paying attention to it. The VP of sales, CRO, CEO is like, not a priority for them. So I'm trying to figure out any way I can to make it a priority for them. And then at the point where I get them to say, yeah, I wanna fix this, then I'm bringing resources in, whether that's a CSM or an external implementation partner to go and fix that. And sometimes that was successful. Sometimes we bring in a Salesforce implementation partner, they reimplement Salesforce, and six months later, they're like a happy, healthy customer. Now they're asking me about buying the marketing tool or buying the customer service tool. One of the problems that we see with a lot of customer success teams is they don't have sixty accounts, eighty accounts, one hundred accounts, they have one thousand, two thousand. So how are you supposed to cover two thousand accounts? Well, first, you have to triage it in the way that I described. But even then, does your team have enough capacity to go and follow up with those customers in the way that they need to to maximize your net revenue retention? It's a big question. And largely customer success teams are understaffed. And so what they end up doing is they send out that send-all email. Hey. Like, we wanna do an account review. It's a boilerplate email. I get these emails from Salesforce. Hey. I wanna do an account review. Like, I don't wanna do an account review. Why would I wanna do an account review? That's not the way I personally approached it. I would come in with a very pointed question. I would say, this is what I am seeing. It looks like you guys are not using Salesforce in this way. I wanna help you fix it. Is this a priority for you?
Janis Zech: Yeah. And I think the earlier you do this, right, like, if we think about the journey of the customer after the onboarding — to quickly understand, is the value being delivered? Is that account on the right track? Right? What does right mean? And if not, basically dive in to essentially rescue the account nine months before the renewal comes up and not three months before the renewal date is up. Right? I think that's so important because otherwise, you're basically running out of time. Right? And the decision was already made. If you paid for nine months and you get no value out of a tool, likelihood of renewal is very, very slim. So I really, really love this. So it sounds to me almost like, you know, CS has to become a lot more than, like, CS. It can't be just digital touch points. It needs to be almost like also prospecting into the account. Do you agree with that?
Eddie Reynolds: Yes and no. And it's interesting because we have, like, an internal debate on this. So Joel, our VP of RevOps strategy will say like, hey. It's really important, like, CSMs are not salespeople. And I get myself into trouble too. I experienced this even as CEO of the company. I go in and I close our deals and I hand off our customers to our consultants who are effectively CSMs. And then I try to come back in and I can tell the customer's like, okay, Eddie, what are you trying to sell me next? It's a different vibe that you get. And I think it really is important for CSMs to maintain this relationship as the trusted adviser, not somebody that's gonna try to push something down my throat. And so, yeah, like, I'm — that's probably not my strength as somebody who's, like, always trying to close deals. And I think it is important. But I do think that CSMs need to be proactive. They need to be reaching out to the right people about the right things to say, hey. Like, this is what we're seeing with your usage. We wanna make sure that you get value. Can we meet and talk through this? If your CAC supports that level of resourcing. And then you have account managers that may be growing the account and they can tag team it. I think what's really hard is like, if you need to meet with the CXO in order to turn this account around, how do you get the meeting with that CXO? That might be something that might be difficult for a CSM to achieve if they don't have the aggressiveness that it might take to get through to that person. But at the same time, like I said, you don't want your customers feeling like CSMs are just trying to sell them stuff all the time.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I think that's a great point. A hundred percent. Sorry, Philipp. You were about to say something.
Philipp Stelzer: I'm just curious, like, if you see any technical trends that help CSMs to do that job better. Still like a hot new implementation trend that, you know, everybody needs to know who listens to this.
Eddie Reynolds: I think I'm the wrong person to ask that. You'd have to ask my implementation team. I'm not the tools guy.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I'm super curious about one topic we also, you know, discussed previously, and that is how do you do, essentially, renewal expansion pipeline management and also forecasting. Obviously, that's a world we live in. I've seen different ways of how CSMs — like, what objects they work in in terms of accounts versus opportunities. I think there's a big trend towards running this as a pipeline, and I'm curious what you're seeing there in terms of, you know, pipeline management for expansion, renewal opportunities. And then how do you essentially forecast? Are there specific things you're seeing on that front?
Eddie Reynolds: Yeah. Absolutely. So I'll go back to Salesforce and my experience there. Since I covered new and existing business, I had a pipeline of new business and expansion. I didn't do renewals. And in my company, we treat it the same. If you have an expansion opportunity, it's very similar to a new business opportunity. At the end of the day, you have to take a customer through the qualification, the discovery process, the presentation demo, etcetera, through to closure. And I think the rigor that you use in new business should be applied to expansion opportunities. Just for the same reason that you shouldn't, you know, show up and throw up with every single new business customer or prospect that you talk to, the same can be said of trying to sell an expansion opportunity. Like, you should have a qualification stage. You should be careful with your resources. You need to align with their decision making process just as you do with new business. With renewals, it's a little bit harder because it's oftentimes hard to get that indication as to whether or not they're gonna renew. And so going back to, like, what we were talking about a moment ago, I would say there's no point in time where you should ever not be talking to an unhealthy customer. If they are going through the onboarding process, that should, in theory, take them to a point where they're healthy. If they're still not healthy at the end of the onboarding process, then the company should do something to get them healthy. If they become healthy and then turn unhealthy, that should raise a warning, and somebody should be reaching out to them immediately. There should never be a point in time where you have a customer that's not using the product, and there's no communication or action plan there. And that will really inform what your chances are of renewal. Whereas if all you're doing is saying, okay. Well, here's the metrics, and we sent them an email and are waiting to hear back, it's gonna be really difficult to forecast that renewal.
Janis Zech: Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I think going from reactive to proactive and understanding health end to end, right, like, holistically, is something that is so important. Something I've heard lately, which was also really interesting to me, and I haven't heard before was essentially the renewal comes up, and suddenly, you know, there's kind of a project manager, maybe the day to day admin, but then a whole prospecting machine runs off. And you're talking to the executives about the tool, people reach out to showcase the value and the different use cases you might not yet cover. So suddenly you're in this. And of course, the ACV needs to allow for that, right, to have that coverage model. But I think that's something that's super interesting to me. Right? Like, how do you introduce multithreading as a metric? How do you introduce customer health scoring? And then also kind of the velocity towards renewal very early on, almost like annual planning. Right? You don't wanna start when it's too late, but you actually wanna start in a way that you can still take action and have the hard conversation. Because in this market, everyone is looking at every tool and trying to reduce these or essentially consolidate. Right? So I think that's a reality we're in and, yeah, something I found really interesting.
Eddie Reynolds: Yeah. We wrote a newsletter on this a month or two ago, and we talked about, you know, obviously, product white space. If you have multiple products looking at your customer base, who's using what product and what opportunity you have to expand it, but also looking at stakeholder white space. So this is something we did at Salesforce. I was typically selling to everybody from the CEO to the VP of sales, CMO, COO, head of customer success or customer service, all the way down to the Salesforce admin. So you have like six, eight, ten individuals in every company that you could in theory talk to. And they built reports for us just showing here are all these stakeholders and here's who you've met with and here's who you haven't. We're then combining that with the product usage data. So for example, you go in there and you see, okay, I see that you've sent a million marketing emails or a million emails. I don't know if they're marketing, but you can assume they are. But I don't see any sales opportunities. It's easy for me to assume that your marketing team is sending out mass emails through Salesforce, but your sales team is not using Salesforce. So okay, I really now wanna know first, why is the head of marketing using Salesforce? What value are they getting out of it? And then why is the VP of sales not using it?
Janis Zech: Anything else you can think of when thinking of, like, customer success? I mean, anything else that you feel is, like, important or we haven't touched on?
Eddie Reynolds: Oh, well, I think you'd kinda touched on it. I think CFOs right now are scrutinizing every dollar of spend, and it's really important to align with them and to understand the ROI or their perception of the ROI. But we've touched on everything from the new business sales process to handoff to onboarding and implementation to monitoring customer health. I guess we didn't really touch on identifying expansion opportunities. And that's the flip side of this coin is okay, now that we've dissected our account base, we identified the unhealthy customers, we've also identified the healthy customers. What is our action plan to expand those relationships? And I touched on this momentarily by saying, let's look at what products they have and don't have, the product white space, and let's look at what relationships we have with what stakeholders. And at the end of the day, if you're talking to all the key stakeholders that make decisions on your different products and you're having the right conversations, you're gonna maximize your chance of an expansion opportunity.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, one example — so at Fiverr, we basically sold to app developers and game developers. That's also how Philipp and I met. And it was fairly easy because most publishers had a portfolio of apps. Right? So you could say, okay. We are integrated in this app, this app, this app, but this one we aren't. Right? I think if you look at SaaS, often it's about the use cases. Right? So, yes, this use case is covered, but these three use cases aren't. I think what I've observed in software in the last eighteen months is that the major players have expanded their product portfolio significantly. And I think it's actually a strategy to invest in your existing customers. Right? You see that new logo acquisition becomes a lot more expensive and challenging, and it doesn't drive growth as fast. So you expand your product offering, which then allows you to go back to your existing customer base and upsell, cross sell, expand essentially the account. And I think that's a really interesting thing that has happened. At the same time, and that's also true. Right? I think we have seen that kind of, a, the companies are not growing as
More from RevOps Lab
Learn more about GTM & revenue operations
RevOps Lab Podcast

Free Forecast Cheat Sheet

Free RevOps Salary Report

RevOps' choice for an
effective forecasting process
Weflow helps B2B revenue teams update, review, and forecast their pipeline efficiently. Always in sync with Salesforce.




