H Dan Irwin

Building Weflow, I've spoken to 200+ #RevOps folks the last 12 months about common Salesforce data capture challenges. Here are things that come up: 1) Poor Salesforce adoption - Shadow tooling - Reps avoid Salesforce - 42% forecast in sheets 2) Poor activity capture - EAC not reportable, nor stored - Missing activities on opportunities - Limited insights based on activities 3) Missing contact data - No contact roles - Buying committees unclear - Multi-threading happening? 4) Process in-compliance - Missing stage entry/ exit criteria - MEDDIC (etc.) not populated - Close date pushed/ overdue 5) CRM bloat - Ops-debt (fields, integrations) - Over customization - Consolidation nightmares after acquisitions 6) Historical data - Opportunity snapshots missing - Process change, data worthless - No unlimited field history tracking Takeaway: Poor Salesforce data quality > missing insights > poor visibility > ineffective deal execution > low predictability > broken revenue engine. What would you add? Comment 👇 -- ➕ Follow me for RevOps content 🔊 Listen to the "RevOps Lab" podcast - link in profile 👀 Visit my free RevOps content library - link in profile ♻️ Share with your friends #RevOps #GTM #Sales

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Renewals are the lifeblood of every SaaS company. However, we don’t talk enough about what makes a great AM/CSM who handles renewals. Since there are so many lists on what makes a great AE, I thought I’d take a stab at what makes a great AM/CSM who handles renewals: 1/ They prioritize the renewals that move the needle Renewal rate comes down to simple math. What renewals are going to move the needle for them? Great AMs/CSMs spend their time where they’ll get the most bang for their buck. 2/ They prepare 6 months in advance Average AMs/CSMs prep 3 months in advance. Great ones plan 6 months in advance. This includes asking hard questions well ahead of time during a mid-year QBR, so they know where to spend their time. 3/ They can re-sell the product Stakeholders change. Priorities change. Competitors try to break in. Great AMs/CSMs can sell the product as well as their AEs and know how to position their value props and handle objections. 4/ They know how to negotiate I don’t know any procurement person in the post-ZIRP era who doesn’t try to negotiate their contracts. A great AM/CSM knows how to turn negotiations into win-wins. 5/ They know the difference between procurement and decision-makers Similar to point four, they know how to negotiate and with whom. Negotiating with procurement is much different than negotiating with a key stakeholder. Each party wants something different, and it’s important to recognize what that is. 6/ They know how to rope in their AEs or extended teams Just like the best AEs know how to “quarterback” deals, a great AM/CSM knows how to rally resources to help with renewals. AEs, Execs, SEs, and Professional Services can all be brought in to help show the customer extra love. 7/ They develop a renewal champion We always talk about champions in the presales process, but not enough about champions during renewals. A great AM/CSM knows how to develop champions to help push renewals through. An AM/CSM who knows how to do these things is worth their weight in gold. Keep them happy as long as you can!

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SaaS Companies are losing HUNDREDS of deals from their crappy discovery and qualification process In the last month, I’ve had 3 discovery calls with 3 large software companies, and all 3 went the same way… Sign-up required a discovery call before the demo, which was just an SDR rattling off a checklist of qualifying questions (classic) All 3 asked: ▶️ What is your company website? ▶️ What are you going to use this for? ▶️ How many users do you need? All 3 said: ▶️ We have a minimum user requirement, which you don’t meet ▶️ I’ll send you a video demo  ▶️ Reach back out when you meet our minimum All 3 failed to: ▶️ Follow-up with pricing details (or send ANY follow-up whatsoever) ▶️ Ask about my growth plans in Q4 and 2025  ▶️ Set up any sort of next steps Some really simple questions could have improved their disco to qualify us better: 1️⃣ What is/ isn’t working about your current process? 2️⃣ What’s the biggest challenge you are looking to solve? 3️⃣ What size is your team today? 4️⃣ What do your growth plans look like? None of these questions were asked. I can’t blame reps for following a strict qualification and discovery process—that’s what they’ve been trained to do But this rigidity can lead to a ton of missed opportunities. It’s not always about a checklist. SDR leaders should listen to some recent disco’s that didn’t make it to an opportunity. Setting a next step might not do anything for your quota this month, but could help get you there next month. Since no one asked about our growth plans, no one discovered that we have an AE joining next month, and would qualify us for their seat requirements… High-quality discovery is impossible if you’re focused on a shortsighted checklist. Sometimes it’s good to go off script. 🦜

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Sales reps need to be grown adults that want hard facts; today in SaaS we've allowed petulant children who need constant flattery to class themselves as reps. Tough love kills the latter and energizes the former. For a deeper dive on the art of "tough love" in sales, perhaps the most valuable skill of any revenue leader... ...subscribe to the RVNU newsletter. #sales #saas #startups #venturecapital #GTMdebt

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To all SDRs or anyone entering B2B sales, read this post to avoid falling into common traps. 1. The most successful AEs I have met were the best SDRs. 2. SDRs who didn’t excel in the role and are now AEs are still struggling to generate their own pipeline. 3. AEs who skipped the SDR role, often due to an MBA or strong interview skills, fear switching jobs and roles without inbound leads. They’ve never faced the grind of building a pipeline from scratch, filled with rejections. 4. AEs who have never been an SDR majorly rely on their SDRs or Inbound leads from marketing to help them build pipeline and if any Quarter they don't get inbound or enough meetings from SDRs they sh** in their pants. 5. When these AEs become managers, they often question their team—"Where are the numbers?" or "Why isn’t there a pipeline?"—instead of guiding them on building it. Lacking experience in pipeline generation, they fail to lead by example and eventually lose the respect of their team. Learn the art and science of being an SDR and excel at this job at any cost, you will never have to look back or depend on anyone for pipeline EVER. Prospecting and Generating Pipelines is fundamental to Sales whether you are an SDR, AE, Sr Manager, or VP if you don't know how to do OUTBOUND you will continuously live a sales life of fear and anxiety. So SDRs ask yourselves do you want to be such AE and Managers in the future who depend on others to determine their performance and faith or would you like to own your job? #sales #prospecting #outbound #pipeline #sdr #ae #b2b #saas

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I did an informal poll on CSM vs Sales commission splits. I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 95% of companies do not have Sales take a commission on renewals unless it’s a particularly challenging one; the AE is there to help with it as a “bounty renewal”. in this case, the AE gets a % but is not taken from the CSM. Other interesting data points: "Commission on upsells and renewal made up 30% of the total compensation package. However, the exact commission % was determined by dividing the 30% by $$$ into the total ARR managed by the CSM." What metrics should this be based on? Most followed this model to Typically, companies that are earlier in their CS maturity will base this off a few leading indicators (adoption milestones, EBRs, etc.), and then move to comping on lagging indicators (retention, expansion, NRR, etc.) once their leading indicator activities have been proven. The following are examples of metrics you can use, not an exhaustive list: Leading: QBRs and/or EBRs (attained vs scheduled) Product adoption milestones (product dependent) Lagging: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) - this is likely the most common Retention Expansion Advocacy (hard to make this scale across large teams and mixed portfolios - this is better as a SPIFF or annual metric to Bonus on) From there, you can determine the weight of each metric on the bonus. I'll give an example using a bonus that is achieved by a renewal retention goal and an NRR goal. Criteria for 100% Bonus Attainment: 90% Renewal Retention (50% weight) 125% Net Revenue Retention (50% weight) "This keeps it pretty simple with two priorities. Retain and Expand Revenue. The Retention goal being assessed separately ensures CSMs don't have significant churn masked by massive upsells. In this example, if a CSM had 85% Retention and 115% NRR, they'd end up at 93.22% to goal for their overall commission/variable comp."

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I did an informal poll on CSM vs Sales commission splits. I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 95% of companies do not have Sales take a commission on renewals unless it’s a particularly challenging one; the AE is there to help with it as a “bounty renewal”. in this case, the AE gets a % but is not taken from the CSM. Other interesting data points: "Commission on upsells and renewal made up 30% of the total compensation package. However, the exact commission % was determined by dividing the 30% by $$$ into the total ARR managed by the CSM." What metrics should this be based on? Most followed this model to Typically, companies that are earlier in their CS maturity will base this off a few leading indicators (adoption milestones, EBRs, etc.), and then move to comping on lagging indicators (retention, expansion, NRR, etc.) once their leading indicator activities have been proven. The following are examples of metrics you can use, not an exhaustive list: Leading: QBRs and/or EBRs (attained vs scheduled) Product adoption milestones (product dependent) Lagging: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) - this is likely the most common Retention Expansion Advocacy (hard to make this scale across large teams and mixed portfolios - this is better as a SPIFF or annual metric to Bonus on) From there, you can determine the weight of each metric on the bonus. I'll give an example using a bonus that is achieved by a renewal retention goal and an NRR goal. Criteria for 100% Bonus Attainment: 90% Renewal Retention (50% weight) 125% Net Revenue Retention (50% weight) "This keeps it pretty simple with two priorities. Retain and Expand Revenue. The Retention goal being assessed separately ensures CSMs don't have significant churn masked by massive upsells. In this example, if a CSM had 85% Retention and 115% NRR, they'd end up at 93.22% to goal for their overall commission/variable comp."

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Are your renewals killing your quarter? Here are 10 ways to make sure you have a terrible Q2 10. Don't update them on new features they were asking for 9. Have a complicated renewal process. 8. Having misaligned data in the CRM  7. Mismanage your renewal process by not tracking discounts or giving away free services that weren't budgeted for. 6. Ignore them because usage is high, so "everything is cool" 5. Ignore them because it's auto-renewed 4. Never contact the Champion and just work with the admins 3. Don't have meaningful renewal conversations. 2. Start the renewal process in the same month its due 1. Never articulate the value they are getting from your product How are you going to have better Q2 numbers?

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There are three types of sales process design concepts: 1/ Pipeline Stage Focus: This approach uses pipeline stages to gauge deal status. You'd be amazed at how many sales organizations still use Salesforce's default pipeline stages for this purpose. 2/ Milestone Focus: This approach defines stage-specific exit criteria as milestones that must be met to move from one stage to the next. In the context of assessing a deal's forecasting status, the milestone focus is certainly better than the pipeline stage approach. However, the problem arises when you turn the milestones into stages, often leading to more than ten stages. The best practice is to make the exit criteria focused on buyer behavior. These sales process design types are solely used for inspecting pipeline and forecast status which is why they are of little use to salespeople, and why "sales process" is a 4-letter word to them. There's a better approach: 3/ Deal Coaching Focus: This approach remains true to the cause of helping gauge deal status but flips the script by making the primary purpose providing guidance on how to advance a deal based on proven deal-winning attributes and (rep and buyer) behaviors. In the context of a complex sale, especially an enterprise sale, this is the recommended approach. It takes a page out of “The Checklist Manifesto”, which suggests that even experts need checklists and that one missed step can lead to failure. It requires a level of granularity that leaves nothing to chance. More importantly, it provides reps with a detailed blueprint for stage-specific success criteria.

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Great post ! 🙏🏽🏆 With my top 3 being How many accounts does a CSM handle? - are you burning your employees out? 👀 How does CS, Product, and Engineering collaborate - can your teams collaborate and share data and input to the roadmaps What happens when a customer isn’t a good fit for your product?- the best one yet! Finally ask CEO what they think 🤔 It will likely surprise you how many leaders do not place importance on customer succeed and it shows 🤦🏽‍♀️

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Unpopular opinion - SDRs shouldn’t even have a license for your data provider tool. Why? It’s a complete time suck each day if they are searching for companies and validating their own prospect contact info. I’m talking a potential outbound quota of 5 bumped to 10 each month if they have a team pulling this data for them. This is the biggest lesson I’ve learned these past few months.

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It's not about getting more notes into Salesforce. It's about increasing your conversion rate through more detailed emails after in person meetings. It's about making sure when reps leave or change territories new reps have the information they need to know when to re-engage. It's about making sure management understands whether the forecast numbers are real or not. So next time your manager or RevOps is bugging you to update your pipeline remember why!

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How much is Salesforce holding your salespeople back? When SFDC isn’t implemented properly for your company… When salespeople can’t use CPQ to speed up deals Or can’t reach out to customers at the right time because alerts aren’t set up Or when they don’t know how the best way to input data so opportunities are getting missed every day… How many deals could they be missing out on? How many customers might churn? How many renewals don’t get handled at the right time? How much smaller are deals because your salespeople didn’t have the data they needed? And how much could you be losing, because the job opening for that CPQ consultant or SFDC developer has been open for 3 months? 

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Absolutely agree! Unless you're in customer success, it's hard to grasp what CSMs handle daily. They must be consultants, sellers, product experts, industry gurus, relationship managers and incredibly patient - all to excel at their job. When I hear jokes about CS not doing much, it’s clear I’m dealing with someone who has no idea what it takes to run a successful business. To be a CSM, you need to be on your A game constantly, without rest. If you want the best in the industry protecting and advocating for your business, pay them accordingly. End of.

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Customer Success should always be specialist, proactive, strategic advisors, and leave Support tickets, renewals, or onboarding to specialist teams, right? Wrong. I'm seeing a lot of posts about what #CustomerSuccess should and shouldn't be, and a lot of posts miss the point: what CS should be depends on the needs of your business right now. Scaling CS absolutely means specialising roles and focusing on proactive, strategic outcomes. But here's what gets lost: in the early stages of a #SaaS business, that model doesn't always work. 💡 For #startups and small-scale SaaS businesses, CS often needs to be generalist to succeed. Early stage businesses often don't have the luxury of hiring specialists teams and it's likely that a #CustomerSuccessManager needs to wear multiple hats and be that "single-point-of-contact" for their customers. Handling #onboarding, and #renewals and, yes, even Support tickets on occasion. Reactive CSMs aren't "doomed to extinction" as I read recently. They're often the ones paving the way for the future, plugging gaps and helping to scale the business to a point where CS can evolve into proactive, strategic advisors, supported by specialist teams working in Onboarding, or Retention, or Support. ℹ️ Early-stage SaaS businesses don’t need the perfect CS playbook from day one. They need CSMs who can adapt, learn, and lay the groundwork for what comes next. There. I said it.

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Hey RevOps: Have you tried “The 5 Whys” when analyzing data? “The 5 Whys” is a simple concept that asking why 5 times will usually uncover the root issue. Here’s an example: Issue: We missed our revenue target Why? (#1) We didn’t generate enough pipeline. Why? (#2) Outbound isn’t working Why? (#3) Our calls aren’t converting to meetings. Why? (#4) Our messaging isn’t resonating with prospects. Why? (#5) We’re casting too wide a net, targeting numerous roles across dozens of different industries. Our messaging is generic and doesn’t address pain points for any specific prospects we target. Notice the first 4 whys don’t give us much. Even after the 4th one we still don’t have a clear picture. We know our messaging isn’t resonating but we still don’t know why or what to do about it. On the 5th attempt, we finally get there and we can see an obvious solution, narrowing our focus and creating relevant messaging for specific roles in specific industries. All too often in RevOps we present surface level information and then we’re frustrated that we’re not seen as strategic. We need to dig deeper. How do you get to the root issues in GTM on your team? ✌️

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Customer Success is harder than Sales. CSMs have to: ▪️ Resell the value of the product/solution every single day. ▪️ Ask the tough questions. ▪️ Set realistic expectations (even the ones clients don’t want to hear). ▪️ Drive expansion and renewals—all while keeping relationships strong. According to the EG SaaS difficulty scale (by yours truly), it’s 4x harder than selling net new. So why isn’t CS the natural next step from sales? SDR → CSM or AE → CSM It often looks like this instead: SDR → AE → Sr AE→ Management Why? It's about the day-to-day responsibilities more than it is about the money (though that plays a role). Great AEs are hunters—focused, driven closers. Some are hunters and farmers. Great CSMs are business operators—they understand the entire customer journey, from pre-to post-sale. They bridge the gap between sales and support and work wth the product team on priorities. That’s what makes CSMs so critical—it’s a skill set that adds tremendous value to multiple areas of the business. So why isn't CS the natural next step? CS is a completely different world. To every CSM out there: we appreciate you more than you know 🙏 🦜

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CSMs: How to survive the meeting madness 👇 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗦𝗠𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗮𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗲𝗹. 🐹 Back-to-back meetings. No time to prep, pause, or pee in between. This is the story for the whole week. Leaving you brain-dead by Friday and screaming 𝘛𝘎𝘐𝘍. And then the realization hits you. You've not yet sent all the post-call summaries or followed up on your task/ action steps. Things slip through the cracks, work remains unfinished, and suddenly, it’s Monday again. You're stuck on the treadmill of inefficiency. Let’s face it: your weekly meeting marathon is killing productivity. 😵 It's silently killing your brain cells. It's taking time away from the productive and creative work that moved the needle for the customer. It's not something that brings you joy. Here's how you get off the meeting hamsterwheel this week itself. 𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 📆 • Limit meetings to 40 minutes. They tend to overrun anyway, and this way, you can carve out time for other essential actions. • Don't just send them the how-to guide, explain the value/benefit, and show them live how to do it. And then still send the guide. Repetition makes it stick. • 2 min rule. If you can do it in two mins, tackle those small tasks during the call itself. Protect your to-do list. • Plan each meeting ahead of time, jot down a bullet-point agenda, it help you keep the call structured. • Use tools like tl;dv - AI Meeting Assistant or UpdateAI to record your discussions effortlessly. 𝗪𝗿𝗮𝗽 𝗨𝗽 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗼. ⏱ • Dedicate the next 5-10 minutes to polishing your notes and sending them off to your customer. • Book your next session while on the call. • Log everything into your CRM or CSP. • Take a sip of water, and breathe. 🙅‍♂️ Enough is enough. This is how you reclaim your time. Implement these changes this week and watch your productivity—and sanity—improve. You'll finish your calls with everything wrapped up neatly, allowing you to move confidently onto the next with clarity and focus. Isn’t it time you stepped off the treadmill and took control? Are you ready to stop being a slave to your schedule and start owning your day? What other strategies do you use to run effective customer meetings? ------------------------------------------- #customersuccess #saas #startups #careercoaching  #CS #CSM #SuccessHacks #customersuccessmanager

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