Sam Jacobs

When we're committing a deal for renewal, it can't just be, I think they're going to renew.

It has to be against a specific methodology in exactly the same way we would expect the pipeline pre-sale.

So those are some of the lessons that I think we've learned.

what's the world that we live in today and what's sort of like the end of the story.

By the way, this slide right here, this is just a spread away.

This is how HubSpot thinks about designing their post-sale funnel and their pre-sale funnel.

And one of the things that they do is they try to articulate specific activities that are gonna drive each of these behaviors.

What's my favorite example of these kind of time to value activities that you can use in your pre and post-sale funnel

to drive retention and expansion.

Here's my favorite example.

Because it's not always intuitive, right?

So in the old days, when Salesforce was first coming up,

there was a belief within the CS organization at Salesforce that getting your data into Salesforce was the single biggest thing that would lead to retention.

Once they have your data, it's very hard to get it out, that would likely lead to retention.

It turned out that that was not true and that the thing that led to retention most closely and the clearest time to value within Salesforce wasn't getting the data in, it was building a dashboard, those beautiful visualized dashboards that I first saw them through Salesforce.

Sugar CRM did not have them when I was looking at CRMs in 2003.

That a beautiful dashboard that was emailed to a key stakeholder like an admin or a key economic buyer or decision maker.

If you got the Salesforce pipeline dashboard or activity dashboard emailed to a key stakeholder,

within some period of time, it was probably 60 days within signing up for Salesforce, that was the activity that most closely led to retention, right?

So once they knew that, all of their onboarding activities directly drove to getting the dashboard's email to a key stakeholder.