← The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 787: 10 Ways Sales is Different in Vertical SaaS with Mangomint’s VP of Sales Marchelle Mooney
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SaaStr 787: 10 Ways Sales is Different in Vertical SaaS with Mangomint’s VP of Sales Marchelle Mooney While some might dismiss sector-specific vertical SaaS software as ‘too small’ or ‘too niche’, companies like ($40B), Clio...
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Welcome to the official Saster podcast where.
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You can hear some of the best Saster speakers.
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This is where the cloud meets up.
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Today on the Saster podcast.
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So jumping in. The first thing Jason teased on is like hiring for vertical experience over SaaS experience. Now we've got a mix on our team, but our top performing AE was a salon manager in San Francisco and she outsourced reps that came from like very high volume SaaS companies. So her deals close faster because she has these authentic conversations about specific industry challenges that make them feel aligned among the AE team. Our top two performers have no prior SaaS experience. So this is a big one. If you are deep in vertical and you take a look at your sales team and you don't have anybody that flipped pizzas working at Slice, go find that person. Find the one that has felt the pain of running out of things, of answering the phones, of texting customers, of fulfilling orders and bring them into your team.
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Hey everybody. Thanks to the 10,000 of you who.
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Came out to Saaster Annual this year.
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We had a blast and big news.
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We'll be back in May of 2025 or in May of next year.
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That's right, SAS training will be a bit earlier next year.
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The 13th to 15th of May 2025, we'll still be back at the same venue in the SF barrier in our 40 acre San Mateo County Event center. And tickets are never cheaper than right now. So grab your tickets@saster annual.com with my code Jason50 for an extra discount on our very, very best pricing. That's jason50isyanual.com See you next May at Saster 2025.
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Welcome everybody. It's Team Sastard here for our first workshop Wednesday this year. It's very exciting. We have what I think will be one of the better tactical pieces of content in a while. We have Marcel Mooney, VP of Sales at Mango Mint Marshalle. Thank you so much for joining us.
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Thanks Jason.
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Just a little bit of background and then I'll hand it over. Marcel has 10 learnings of vertical SaaS and the whole team at Mango Mint worked on this. So I think it's going to be pretty good. And vertical SaaS is an area of super high interest at Saster. We'll have a ton at Saster Annual this year we'll have the CEO of Clio which just raised at 3 billion when they added fintech and payments more to their legal tech, which Marshalle will tease into. I remember in the early days of Saster we had Peter Gassner from Viva, which is vertical SaaS for pharma worth almost 40 billion today. No one got it. Who cares about this vertical SaaS stuff? But it's incredibly popular. We had I invested in Mango man a little while ago so I know a little bit about the company. I've gotten to know Marshall and it is different. Took me a little while to see is different and that's why I really like these points. And one of the most, one of the most interesting and challenging questions is around domain expertise. How much domain expertise do you want El Mango Mint for context it's a good one because it's probably around where folks are where you want to be. In a year or two they're coming up on 20 million growing 100% year over year with 110% NRR. Pretty good. Selling a tough product actually a tough product. They're selling SaaS to SPAs and salons. This is tough because if you put it on a two by two venture matrix you would not want to invest even though I did. Why would you not want to invest? A lot of competition and seemingly small tam. There's a lot of competition from the old days. There's folks like Mind Body that used to be public that now have a broader suite. There's a bunch of newer entrants. We'll probably touch on why Mango Mint has one. Basically it's focused on the mid market and is an incredible state of the art ease of use but it's a tough one like smaller TAM, lots of competition but they've won. They're growing 100% coming up on 20 million with 110% NR. So I want to dig in on why and but the one thing I I want to queue up before we go is Marelle's background because one of the most vexing questions for vertical SaaS or other very more complicated spaces domain expertise do you need to know Mango Mint is selling software to spas and salons? Do I need to be a spa expert? And I've generally found over the years I'm a little bit wrong here that maybe you do need to be a domain expert early on. And Marshalle tell us you are on the spectrum when you started from domain experts to I can sell anything. You literally worked at a spa and forced yourself in the door at Mango Mint as like the first sales, first business person in the company like you literally interned for free. Didn't you force yourself in the door and say this software is so great I'll work here for free and are now The VP of Sales. Is that the story?
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That is. That's the story in a nutshell. Yeah, absolutely. I owned a salon in San Diego. I knew we needed something better, something that had Payment Processing incorporated, which in 2017 wasn't very common. I called the phone number on the website. Much to my surprise. Two days later when I was signing up, I found out that the AE was in fact Daniel, the CEO. I was probably the 27th customer and I loved what I saw. A lot of the things that were true then are still true now, like world class product, super fast smart automations. And at that point I'm like, hey, how do we do this? How do we do this together? I don't know what SaaS is. There's far too many acronyms for me. But I had spent 10 years selling 20 inch hair extensions, so I knew how to sell something and jumped right into SaaS. Thanks to you learned what that acronym stood for.
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And you'll get into this, at least touch on it. But. So you were the 27th customer, you offered to work, you owned your own slot, you offered to work for free in sales in the beginning until they paid you. And we'll talk about. You probably will touch about on outbound versus Inbound. Right. The company ultimately perfected a high velocity inbound model. But you literally. But I think for this domain expertise question in the early days you were literally doing outbound at first. You have to at 27 customers and you were going into spas as a spa owner yourself and could have a conversation that maybe someone that worked at Outreach or gong or Salesloft might struggle to have. Talk a little bit about that. Getting it, getting that engine going and having that. Being able to have those conversations and outbound.
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Absolutely. I think the first thing I thought about is in our larger vertical, ignoring the kind of micro verticals I'll talk about in a little bit. They are used to someone showing up, but similar to any of you who have sold into FinTech POS where toast you show up at the restaurant. They are used to people showing up to the point at which if you are buying shampoo and conditioner from a salon or spa, the rep that sells that literally walks into the salon, takes inventory for them. It's a very forcing function for sales in that industry. So I knew it needed to look the same for software. What was really interesting is no other SaaS company approached it in that way that they were used to. So literally showing up with granola bars because you'll never meet people that can eat lunch Faster, like doing this whole thing that made sense to them. It felt a lot more familiar than the mind bodies who were just trying to cold call them. So we started with that outbound process from the viewpoint of what did I like as a salon owner, what made it easy for me to buy. Yeah, so we got our first couple hundred customers that way.
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It's interesting. Yeah. We had, we did a workshop Wednesday with Lauren Paddleford who's a CRO at Slice. He was the first head of enterprise at Shopify before that and he's even at 100 and something million at Slice. It's all going into the pizzerias, it's all walking in and building relationships with these single owner establishments which for most SaaS companies is an, is an anathema. I'm working from home, I'm working 20 hours a week. I'm being handed a list, I email, if I have to, I'll pick up the call phone. But I would never visit someone in person. Certainly not for a 4k for a 4 figure deal. Certainly not for a deal under 203. Like the classic SaaS rep is only going in person for 250k plus deals.
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Yeah. And hey, it's been like a bit of a double edged sword because as I have grown and built out the team, now I have a team of over 25, there's still these questions. I see em come through slack and I'm like oh man, I just wanna go spend an hour schooling these people. And so that's where I go, okay, we need to create this mix. And that goes into the first point that I'll talk about is like in this deep of vertical SaaS you've gotta have a mix of that prior experience, that industry experience over SaaS experience. You can't over index on the SaaS side only, which I made that mistake at first.
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Okay, let's get into that. But let me just ask one follow up question and then I then let's kick it off with the slides. So fast forward today. So in the beginning you're literally, you are someone from the industry going out, talking to your peers, getting them to.
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Buy.
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Today now that you have a brand, right, and thousands of customers is how much, how many are, how much do you have to sell in the field, in the salon, in the spa versus texting over the phone, what's the ratio of the motion today?
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So there's no selling in the field today, no more physical, it's all done. Unless I go somewhere and I want to be a customer there and they're not using Mango mitt yet. And I refuse to go there for not. So anywhere that I live, you'll see a bubble around me. But other than that, we have been a hundred percent inbound up until this year. So end of last year, we rolled out an outbound. Our outbound now does look like calling. So they're not actually physically showing up. I'm sure many of them would. And sometimes people ask me and I'm like, go for it. But at this point, a hundred percent, we're doing it remote.
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And they'll. And the salon owners. Because the owners are buying. Right. These are small businesses. They'll pick up the phone and then they'll have a sales call from. For the.
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When this is something that a lot of the tools for getting data on these people.
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Yeah.
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Don't work for us. We have to approach it from a different angle because I am finding Susie of Susie's hair salon cell phone number. And yes, she's picking up because for the most part, she's also used to getting her clients calling her like, hey, I gotta get in for a haircut. I forgot to book last time. So, yeah, they're definitely picking up. That's very normal.
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That makes sense. Yeah. It's just when we've done a lot with Kyle from owner that. And they've got thousands of small restaurants. Phone is zero there. The owner will nep. The owner is working. You can text like they do a lot. They do in person and text. But phones a zero. Right. You literally just cannot. No one in owning a small restaurant is going to pick up the phone. It's just not their motion. But it makes sense. For salons, the owner is often a practitioner. Right. And they're picking up the. They're used to that cadence.
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Even if we call into the front desk. Yes. They're trained to be a bit of that, like gatekeeper. But even if the front desk person is the one speaking to us, the owner's over their shoulder, like, they're right there. We're never more than one chair away from that decision maker.
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It's a good one. All right, so let's talk about the 10 learnings in scaling. I'm going to add scaling vertical SaaS from Mango Mint. Thank you.
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Yeah, let's dive in. Thank you so much, Jason, first of all, for having me. We're going to look at some slides, but we'll really focus on me riffing on these things. You gave the background. I was a salon owner 10 some years. I sold hair extensions for a Top manufacturer and distributor. Jason likes to sell a pen. I sold hair and when I moved over to SaaS, there was a lot that I didn't know and so a lot of these learnings. This is my first foray in SaaS. I've been with Megabit for six years now and I live, eat and breathe SMB vertical SaaS. So we're going to really drill into the things that stand out to me and some of them might piss you off. That's okay, we can talk more into it. I'm all about debating it out, but the reality is we have a product that is world class. So I'll start with that. A lot of this won't mean much, do much if you are not working with a product and a product team that is incredibly rigorous and relentless in building world class product. So big shout out to our product team, our cto, Sandra, one of our founders who's been there from the beginning and the wonderful team that they have built. So knowing that we are also going to be really segmented into SMB. And when I say SMB, very SMB. So when Jason says mid market, our mid market, just for framework of looking at this lens is gonna be our SMB would be solo provider. So this is someone who rents a booth and runs their own business, the solopreneur. We do not sell to them. So for us, mid market looks like a mom and pop shop that has five or more staff members. And this is gonna be up to say 10, 15 locations that are corporately owned. But a lot of these can be applied across different size verticals. So jumping in. The first thing Jason teased on is like hiring for vertical experience over SaaS experience. Now we've got a mix on our team, but our top performing AE was a salon manager in San Francisco and she outsells reps that came from like very high volume SaaS companies. So her deals close faster because she has these authentic conversations about specific industry challenges that make them feel aligned. She can build trust faster. She just knows what these people actually face. Like what does it actually look like when you're answering the phone and credit card numbers on post it notes across the front desk. Like she gets it and she can be in their shoes. I will also mention she's somebody that moved up. She started in support with us, she moved over to onboarding manager. Now she's an AE. So big shout out there among the AE team. Our top two performers have no prior SaaS experience. We do have great performance from people with prior SaaS experience. But we'll talk about how we get them there. Like how do we get them to get out of the feature selling, feature dumping and really know how to build trust with those that they are speaking to now. So this is a big one. If you are deep and vertical and you take a look at your sales team and you don't have anybody that flipped pizzas working at slice, go find that person. I guess we're not flipping pizzas, we're spinning them. Whatever you do with pizzas, go find that person. Find the one that has felt the pain of running out of things, of answering the phones, of texting customers, of fulfilling orders and bring them into your team. Right now we have about a 50, 50 split. And then on my onboarding side, because I also oversee onboarding and implementation, I think maybe one person doesn't have prior vertical experience. So I found it even more important on that side of things to have them really close to the industry. So that's what I'll say on that. Obviously I'm an example of that. And I mentioned the kind of double edged sword. There are times where I see like deals coming through that are really struggling. And I'm like, it's because we're not addressing this vertical. We're not addressing what a med spa goes through. And so what I have found is like to get myself out of those leads, hire more people. Hire people that have worked specifically in med spa, specifically in hair salons. So we do have those sub verticals. We'll talk more about that. This next one might seem so freaking obvious, especially if you've been a fan of Saster or listened to anything Jason's ever said. Your team must deeply understand this product. The reason I bring this up though is I mentioned we just started building our outbound team. Fortunately, the two BDRs I brought on to prove this concept, one has her cosmetology license, does hair. The other was an ex esthetician, so she did skincare. So they both speak the language of the industry. But what was really interesting is when they started with us, both of them were, were like very awkwardly surprised that we were putting them through the full product education at Mangomint. And when I dug a little deeper, they were like, oh. We were calling by day three at our prior SaaS companies and these are big SaaS companies, one that I have even looked at using for my own team. So it was really surprising to me that this was like a novel concept to make sure that every single person across your team is a product expert. We've Debated this out as we go to scale. You really want to have a solid onboarding for your entire team. And what's the right dose for the growth team? What's the right dose for the support team? In my opinion, it's a gold standard. Everyone needs to know the product. Everyone needs to speak the same language on our product. And when we're rolling out features, new products within the product, they need to be trained on them and they need to take accountability in owning that. So it's one of our performance standards. Huge one. Okay, now I mentioned some of this is very specific to our S and B. This is going to be one of them. But make your onboarding free. When I hear listening into deals and they're like, oh man, we just paid $1,200 to go to X competitor. We really want to use you, but we can't recover that $1,200. And then they end up switching over anyway because we're going to give them some sort of incentive to make up for it. I just think to myself, was it really white glove? Then they go through our process and it's like, yeah, boom, you're in the product within your free trial. You haven't even paid us a dollar. And I just deeply believe that. Removing friction for vertical customers. I'll preface this way by saying 90% of our customers coming over are moving from another software, another competitor. So they're always going to have a pretty large stack of data to bring over. So clients, appointments, staff, service, menus, a lot of them have recurring revenue built in. That's why they're moving to us. So they're moving over memberships that are renewing, they're moving over packages, gift cards, previous balances, a lot of this, in my opinion, if it's like mission critical to do business with you, just make it free, make these things easier. One of the things that also just gets under my skin is how often I will see this huge fee for onboarding that when signing a contract is suddenly waived or when needing an incentive is suddenly waived. So it's if this is really part of your revenue stream, then how come it's constantly waived? It just makes it feel shaky to me. I don't like it. I don't think it's the right thing to do. So no paid white glove onboarding. We look at it like the onboarding is included. We're going to get as the other thing about it is, okay, we go to onboard and oh, by the way, white glove is included, but we can't get X, Y and Z from your previous software. So we're going to blame your previous software for why we can't do the thing that we incentivized you on. So again, that's my take on the onboarding piece, plg. It's still a hot topic. I think three years ago, four years ago, it's all we heard about. I like to see say plg but make it sales led, which could sound expensive, but the idea being your trial. Our sales team doesn't wait for the trial to show them that someone is qualified. We're really using it as a way to witness the behavior of the customer. Like what are they doing in there? So they can personalize. The outreach. Example being a customer starts a trial with Mangomint. Very easy. They fill out five fields on our website. Boom, they're in a trial. That trial is in demo mode. They can literally check out sales, adjust inventory. It is set up with services that look just like their sub vertical. So if you're a hair salon, you're getting haircuts and hair color. If you're a med spa, you're getting injectables and facials. It is all customized to them. They can test out the online booking, they can add gratuity, they can send text messages. And what we're looking at from the sales perspective is where do they go first, where do they get stuck? So recording those sessions, having that bubble up to the AE so they can say, ah, okay, we got a med spa, they went straight to memberships, they got stuck. At this point, not in a creepy way, but we're going to send them a text right away. Hey look, I see you've got these memberships, you checked it out in the trial. Let's connect, let's take a look at this together and see how we can build them just for you. So this is important because when you combine the PLG piece, meaning there's a very easy way to get them into the product and then the sales team. So our AES are following up within minutes of a trial starting. So it's like trial starts, check out that full story session, see what they did, reach out. If that is happening, we're not using the trial to prove the product works like the product works. We know that it's about giving the sales team the exact conversation starters that they need for each prospect. I will argue that every vertical SaaS needs a trial. Even if it's like a pop up one page, full data filled in, there's not too much they can do. See where they go see where they click, get them in some sort of demo mode to where your sales team then deploys and goes in really tight. Whatever your little script is for us, it's sending a text messages because that's where our customers are and making that happen. So don't wait for them to discover that value because it probably won't happen and you probably have a leaky bucket. Number five Ditching long term contracts. I teased on this with the onboarding piece. Daniel, our CEO, he was recently on the Saster podcast and I saw a lot of comments on LinkedIn and maybe it was the YouTube about how do they have that NRR with no contracts. And I keep seeing this come up and all I can say is that the evidence is in the numbers. Customers stay with us and often when customers leave, they come back because they're going to face these heavy contracts with other customers for a product that's 300amonth. And it, it gives them this feeling of it's like they get cagey. So we have eliminated contracts, not eliminated. We never had them. We've never had them since the very beginning. We let customers cancel at any time. So they write in middle of the month, hey, I want to cancel. Great. If it creates a better experience for them. We want to export all their data. We want to make things as fee, fee free, as easy as possible. Removing friction. This is still part of the sales process. We're leaving, but we want them to come back if they're going through a hardship. If they had a walkout, which is also you got to know your customer. In our industry, it is not uncommon for a salon owner to have boom, their entire staff walk out because somebody pissed somebody off and it turned into a whole thing. If they rebuild, we want to be the company that they think about first. So it's a big one. And again, very specific to our SMB markets. But big fan of ditching any sort of contract. Vertical SaaS wins by eliminating choice. I think about this one a lot and I think this is like a very big topic. There's this idea that customers want this open API and they want to plug in here and go over there. Well, we know our customers so well and we know that if we build the solution and we make those decisions for them, that layer cake of integrations doesn't make sense to our segment. I often see 1 out of 10 leads that come through is like a consultant for salons and spas and they're going to build out their website and set up their Google Ads and they want this, this integration and tracking this on Pixel. As soon as they're no longer paying that consultant, we recognize that the integration that they may have set up is not sending a web hook anywhere. And the review management software that they had tried to integrate isn't. They're not even paying for that anymore. So it's like these dead ends that when we really dial down to that salon owner, they just want us to do it for them. So really focusing on eliminating all the choices and being that one solution for them really going to be crucial I believe in the next few years for vertical SaaS regardless of your size. This one, this is an interesting one because I mentioned we work with businesses that might just be one location, six employees, but we have 24 locations. And so really to smooth out what happens on our sales team. How do we forecast? We've got different deal sizes and many of our competitors do an even larger segment or multiple segments. I believe you can have both high velocity and high value sales. And the way you do this is you have to stop segmenting by company size. And this is where segmenting by sub vertical becomes even more important. So Jason mentioned having that customer domain knowledge within our vertical. There are sub verticals. So the example I have here is a high end medical spa operates different than a chain of hair salons and that couldn't be more true. So to know the right dose to give your sales team of understanding those differences and that starts all the way from our growth team. So the way we go after sub verticals, the way they come in, the information the AE has on them, this is so important because when your ACV is smaller like ours and churn is naturally higher due to the space we're in, you have to trim off a few days of the sales cycle. This means AES can more easily hit quota. This means that they're not stressing to get to that quota because they know their sales cycle is repeatable. S and M, payback period goes down, cash is cycled faster, less need for fundraising, faster growth, less dilution. Everybody's happy. These two things need to happen. But the only way it can happen is if you understand the sub verticals within them. So a med spa that could do 10x the volume as a hair salon in, in terms of their own processing, A med SPA that does 3 million a year, a hair salon that does 400,000 a year, those can close at the same time if you train your sales team to be specialists in, in the specific business models that they're selling to. So Very crucial to get there. And you really have to dial in what how much education is needed because it's not being an absolute, it's not mastery of how a med spot runs, but it's like understanding the value that they need from the software. So we built an agnostic software that can serve all those sub verticals. We don't use the word patient, we use the word client because both subverticles can use that word. But then the team needs to have that information to have the same sales cycle across deal size. Hopefully that makes sense. Okay, next. Being not for everyone is your biggest advantage. If you haven't thought about this in the vertical space you're doing something wrong. You have to know what to say no to. And really simple thing, simplify things down to the exact person you are serving. This is one that through and through. I Jason teased our nrr this retention is higher because zeroing in on the segment we want to serve allows you allows every customer in our product to get exactly what they need. So being not for everyone is going to be your biggest advantage in vertical SaaS. And checking back on that because I think you can easily lose focus and it can seem really attractive to go dominate the solo market. But if you don't understand fundamentally what's different about that market, if you're not functioning from first principles, you will lose Here the idea is to not just serve a part of the market, it is whatever vertical you're serving, go and dominate the most valuable segment for your vertical. So that can look different. I mentioned our SMB mid market enterprise. If you lay it out in our vertical is a lot different than maybe the one in hotel management software. Okay, this next one come at me. I'm fine with it. But customer success is just too important for one department. And I've put together a little framework here. We did start with a CS team in quotes because it not that it wasn't a function itself but it wasn't doing the right thing and it wasn't needed in the right way. So the way that I see this in vertical SaaS is that you have to have the product like the product has to own success. And I'll show you like the three things that I think about here. But we really want to make sure that we're not compensating for product failure or organizational failures. So again I mentioned this at the beginning. Pango Mint's a fantastic product. I've got it easy in that sense. But our team works so hard to make it such and we need to make sure that customer success is not just one department's responsibility. We build this into our processes. So the like simple framework here is that the product owns success. So this means that it should be so aligned and so good with your vertical's needs that it doesn't need translation and it doesn't need somebody to come back in and say, hey, we noticed you're not using it and that's probably why it's not working for you. Because honestly with our customer, like by then it's too late, it's done. Sales has to own the reality, making sure that they understand how the product delivers the value for their vertical, their sub vertical. And then live support owns the problems. We have a fantastic world class support team. They are live within the software. So if I've got a problem, I click the chat bubble, I ask the question, we've got the experts in there and that is how we are also able to be proactive is like using that same way. So we've got the reactive live side. But to be proactive, if we notice something is wrong, if we notice that they need to update their credit card details to get their payouts, like we're going to reach out to them. We noticed that we got an error in something with one of their deposits, like we'll reach out to them. So building world class life support, this is how we've been able to make customer success and organizational responsibility and it's really like unclicked things. Now it's going to come up when your sales team is struggling because somebody got to onboarding and they had an issue and they're like, can't we just get a CS person? Yeah, doesn't that sound nice to offload? But what are you offloading? What conversation could have happened in that demo? And that's when you send sales manager in. Are we listening to these demos? What did we see happening? Where's the gap? Do a postmortem there because it's never going to solve your problem to just plug in this new team and think that they can smooth out whatever that is. So I'm all about killing off the CS team. Happy to share how we did that. It's been over three years now and it's worked quite well. So finally the tenth point is this is one. We have our annual conference and this year the message to the team was really be how do we become the only in class solution for our segment. So it's, it's very, it's very much what Daniel always says about being Red Bull. Ferrari is great but they are likely comfortable with being number two or number three because that's still really good. We're not there. Somebody mentioned in a meeting yesterday it's oh yeah, we're building the Ferrari engine. No, we're building our own engine. Like we want to be the only in class solution for our customer. And instead of thinking about how do we integrate with these other solutions like payment processor, marketing tools, CRM, we're looking at this growth that builds vertical specific versions of these tools directly into our platform so we truly can have the customer satisfaction that increases with each third party tool they eliminate. So it's great. You now get to get rid of your whatever text marketing. We've got that there with our flows feature. You can get rid of mailchimp, we've got that in here. You've gotten rid of your third party terminal a long time ago. Everything's integrated, everything is here. Your payroll, it's all right here. And it makes the experience for our buyer so seamless and so easy to use. That is really how I think vertical SaaS. Like that's where vertical SaaS is really going to win is just be, build, be and act like you are the only software they'll ever need and you will win. Now I say that 90% of people aren't going to really put in the work that it takes to do that. So that is one thing that our team is so relentless across the board. Very proud to work with a team that, that thinks in this way and it's the only way we'll go. So that is the 10 learnings that have really stood out to me, made it to for me that like this is the company that I will be at as long as they'll have me and how I think about things. And let's open it up just because.
- [36:00]
B
You brought it up Marshalle and I think it's it deserves a lot more time than we have. But some folks may take the wrong conclusions from it which is blowing CS up as a standalone department. And can you just dig in there a little bit more because I feel like there's a tension there. On the one hand, no one want having the sales reps just not dump all the problems on someone smarter than them is a huge forcing function for excellence in your sales team. On the other hand it breaks my heart when there's no one whose only job is customer success. Literally customer success. Forget about the function when all we've all worked with someone in our lives and I don't think this is true. Of most CS professionals these days. Unfortunately, I think it's a paint by numbers profession. But when you have that person in the org where 50 hours a week, all they care about is that your customers are happy and they bleed sadness when they aren't. I worry we lose that when we blow up the department and we force it on sales. What are the meta learnings here?
- [37:02]
C
Yeah, so just hearing, like hearing you say that like it breaks my heart immediately. I'm like, oh, our support team does that like when I go through. So we have a channel in our slack called customer success and it's okay, you don't have a CS team. When I read through that channel, like our NPS scores and the, and the surveys that they fill out, like they know their favorite support person by name. Our support team is world class and they aren't only reactive, they are proactive. So I think it's like I said, in that framework, it's, it starts with the product. CS cannot come in and fix product gaps. That will not happen. And so that's like the really strong piece for me. And then on the side of support, like what we also can't do is just outsource the port and not train our support team up and not make them. We look at this thing, we have this thing called Mango Mint Pro. And so that is a support team member that even takes a deeper specialty, whether that's in payroll, whether that's in. So it's not just tiered support. It's like this person has a genuine interest in making sure that a payroll question gets answered to the like nth degree. And we still send out mps, we still have these things. But our ACV does not support the like idea of, oh, we're going to send you a quarterly business review. You, you heard who I was talking about. That person doesn't even know what you're talking about. So it's really about again, digging into our vertical, our ACV and knowing what's right for them. And it's fast. It's not just being a ticket on a support thing. We don't do tickets. It's minutes that we respond to them. So I would argue that we do better than just having a CS function in the traditional like SaaS sense.
- [38:59]
B
I guess we can break on that. I guess my learning from that and I did this back in the day too. I had such a good head of customer success and a few folks that, I mean of support that they were customer success. They weren't managing complicated deployment issues for bigger accounts or they didn't touch renewals, but they were so good and technical that it was just as good working with Scott as my VP of cs. And so you're having my takeaway from that which you touched on. But maybe we'll end up to make vertical success. When at Mango Mint you're not skimping on support, you're not automating every single interaction. You're over investing in support to make them domain experts, which I feel like I've written about this for over a decade. No one does this, but it's the winning strategy, the one minute resolution from a domain expert. No one does that. No one does it anymore. And if you win, and maybe for a 14 day sales cycle and a relatively easy to use product, maybe you don't need customer success if your deployment is that fast and your support's that good. Right, you're doing it. You're just not doing it with a the gap CS department. So that's a good learning. So thanks again. This was a plus. So many good comments we've already gotten in the chat on social media and others. And thanks everybody for joining us.
- [40:18]
C
Foreign.
- [40:25]
B
Hey everybody. Thanks to the 10,000 of you who.
- [40:28]
A
Came out to Saster Annual this year.
- [40:30]
B
We had a blast and big news.
- [40:32]
A
We'll be back in May of 2025 or in May of next year.
- [40:35]
B
That's right. SAS train will be a bit earlier next year.
- [40:37]
A
The 13th to 15th of May 2025. We'll still be back at the same venue in the asset barrier in our 40 acre consensus MATO County Event center campus. And tickets are never cheaper than right now. So grab your tickets@saster annual.com with my code Jason50 for extra discount on our very very best pricing. That's Jason50@saster annual.com. see you next May at Saster 2025.