Episode description

Alex Hesterberg from Pure Storage joined us back in the studio this week to chat about "Prepping Your Customer Renewal Strategy" and how your SaaS business should think about getting ready for renewals. Alex has a wealth of knowledge on the topic starting first at CSC and Symantec where he was actually on the line handling accounts and dealing with up-selling existing customers. He then moved on to Riverbed where he took on a leadership role managing and building out the professional service and customer success organizations and from there went to Sailthru to manage client services. He's now at Pure Storage as the VP of Worldwide Field Operations focused on ensuring client success through his professional service team. Pure Storage has a great customer renewal strategy and Alex and the VP of Customer Success spend a fair amount of time strategizing to win repeat business. This topic of customer renewal strategy comes up a ton with our own portfolio founders as well as the broader SaaS community and so we thought we would bring Alex on to discuss. We've coveredcustomer successbroadly speaking but in this podcast dive into more specific topics around a customer renewal strategy like the monetary approach and calculations to renewals and upsells, the tradeoff of asking for the same size contract versus for more money, how to create a playbook and framework for your customer renewal strategy, the specific KPIs that matter most to get a renewal, and finally when to say no and potentially churn an account on purpose. Alex was a great guest and any SaaS founder should value his advice. Give a listen below and we hope you enjoy!