On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Rav Dhaliwal, former customer success leader at Yammer, Zendesk, and Slack, and now VC investor. Rav has scaled international customer success teams and now in his new role, he is looking at how Venture Capitalists look at Customer Success strategies for their future investments.
As companies and startups continue to grow it becomes essential to find the right funding in order to grow and scale the business. It is especially important to make sure your SaaS business has a strong CS team in order to nurture and support your growing client base. As a business starts to grow it is sometimes difficult to know when and where to look for investment. In today’s podcast, we will deep dive into the topic of Customer Success from a Venture Capital perspective. We will be speaking to Rav Dhaliwal – Currently an Investor and Venture Partner at Crane Venture Partners. who previously built and led Customer Success functions at Yammer, Zendesk, and Slack. His experience in Customer Success is what makes him so successful at finding businesses to invest in.
Customer Success is fast becoming one of the key drivers of company valuations. Having a clear, repeatable customer lifecycle, low gross churn, high customer net retention, and a Customer Success strategy that maximizes customer lifetime value are differentiators when VCs assess potential investments.
Rav provides his perspective on key metrics for Customer Success executives to be monitoring, whether they are Customer Success metrics oriented around revenue such as Net Dollar Retention, or key SaaS usage and telemetry metrics. His view is that in younger companies, metrics such as time to first value are key, but as companies mature, Customer Success teams should be working actively to identify more commercial opportunities within their portfolio, and partnering with Sales to drive customer expansions.
In addition to the Customer Success strategy, Rav gives his input on how a VC assesses company teams, including Customer Success teams, and how businesses can be managing the current unique scenarios created by Covid-19.
In our discussion Rav helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to how Customer Success can help a company’s valuation:
- What are some of the basic metrics that you need to report on in Customer Success to a VC?
- Why is it so important for a business to invest in CS in order to get funding from a VC?
- What advice would you have right now for CS teams given all the disruption with the Covid 19 virus?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Make sure you are leveraging different technology in order to ensure your customer success team is ready to help customers grow during the covid-19 disruption
- CSMs should partner with sales in order to identify revenue opportunities within the customer base
- In younger companies, metrics such as time to first value are key, but as companies mature, Customer Success teams should be working actively to identify more commercial opportunities within their portfolio
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!