Infinite Renewals: The ultimate measure of post-sales success
I’m pleased to announce that Jeff Kushmerek Consulting is now Infinite Renewals.
Our new brand and website reflects our expansion to be a resource for all things post sales for early stage, venture funded B2B SaaS companies. It also reflects the ultimate goal of all post sales activities: infinite renewals. To support clients in achieving that, we’ve expanded the team to include Kate Mazzini, an experienced strategic account management and customer success leader, and Kristine Vallila, an accomplished ecommerce, customer success, data and operations executive.
When I first started consulting, I wanted to leverage my background in professional services to help SaaS startups nail onboarding and implementation. This is where infinite renewals start. If you don't manage onboarding correctly, you can have customers waiting for many more months to go live. That brings them pretty close to renewal decision time, with little to show for it. We believe that retention starts in implementation, and investing into this critical part of the customer journey correctly will help your teams scale and grow.
Of course, there is much more to it than just getting your customers live, and clients would often ask, ‘while we have you, can you help us with our whole customer journey? Infinite Renewals is all about helping SaaS startups create a scalable post sales customer journey.
What we typically see happen in SaaS startups is that they get some funding and they start building their product. Then they get some more funding and they start marketing and selling it. Only then do they start to think about how they’re going to service customers.
So they hire a customer success manager. This is usually someone with a background in account management, but they ask them to do account management, onboarding, implementation, renewals, troubleshooting bugs, customer support and professional services management. Clearly these are very different activities, requiring different skill sets. When one person has all of these responsibilities, they burn out and the company experiences churn.
For B2B SaaS companies, post-sales success is the result of getting all of these things right. That’s why we take a holistic approach, and why we’ve put together a team with operating experience in each aspect of customer success. Each one of us has spent 20+ years on the front lines addressing post-sales problems and doing the work to build out our respective functions.
We can play defense as well as offense. If your SaaS business is experiencing churn of 10% or more, we can troubleshoot your operation and figure out very quickly where you should focus your resources. Once churn is under control, we can help you scale your processes and build out your team to drive growth until you’re ready to hire a C-level customer success leader. We can also identify activities where you are giving away advice and custom work for free, and turn them into profitable professional services offerings.
Building a scalable post sales operation is not optional for SaaS companies. In any type of business, it’s always cheaper to keep the customers you have than it is to find new ones. The SaaS operating model is based on that premise. A renewal rate below 90% will kill your business. Our goal is to help you build a post sales machine that will generate infinite renewals and propel your SaaS business to success.