The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 8 Review - Client-Centric SaaS: How to Scale, with Chris Regester
Mon, 16 Sep 2024
We review our conversation with Chris Regester, CCO of PlanHat, who shared his story of an early-stage startup transforming into a successful global SaaS business. He shared the importance of identifying and nurturing talent, and the power of a client-centric approach in building and scaling a software company. Chris discussed PlanHat's unique focus on post-sale customer management and how bootstrapping shaped their business culture. The conversation offers practical advice on creating value, maintaining profitability, and the critical role of customer objectives in driving business growth.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast. So wow, Johnny, what a fantastic conversation that we just had there with Chris Register from Planhat. He shared some really fantastic insights with us around the importance of long-term customer management and client centricity. I'd love to get your takeaway. What was the key thing that stood out to you from our conversation?
Thank you, Matt. And I can only echo what you say and have said about the time we spent with Chris from Planhat. Really interesting and something I resonated with. As a consultant myself, we are really focused on customer outcomes, focusing around what is the return of the investment that our clients make. And Chris made a fantastic point about that.
Really shifting cultures towards a customer approach, really focusing on the organizational shift where teams understand and prioritize the customer outcomes. And that focus possibly in some locations across the world is not as prevalent or a priority anymore.
So Chris mentions about how to achieve that customer centricity by really pushing that cultural change from top down with clear communication and alignment across all departments.
It's something that we resonate with, importantly, across all of the commercial engineers, having all of those important departments wired together with that common narrative around customer centricity that will really drive cultural change. So yeah, echo what Chris was saying there and follows a valuable point. Matt, from your side, what was something of interest?
It's building on what you said there, Johnny, I think a lot of what Chris talked about was, and how he redefined customer success is actually long term customer management, I think is so important and looking at customer success or customer management as a ongoing thing.
motion in your business and and hence your point around why that's so important culturally and to build that culture within your your wider business not just within a siloed part of it i.e your customer success team i think one of the interesting stories that chris shared around the b2b organization that really prioritized sales velocity over anything else and the cro then wondering why you know
ARR was still going down and it's this kind of leaky bucket analogy right where we keep filling in the bucket at rapid pace but the holes in the bucket get bigger and bigger and more and more flows out the other end and I think it's really fascinating to think about what that means and how that relates to long-term customer management and I think
When we talk to customers about this, we talk about having a well-defined ideal client profile and truly understanding the client that you're going after that makes sure that you're bringing the right clients or partnering with the right clients in your business to demonstrate the value and provide them with the services that they need.
And I think that's one way that you can help maintain that high sales velocity and continue to serve your customers well. But I think the other thing that stood out to me is Well, how do you then also look at this from a handover transition? How do you effectively onboard those customers into your business? How do you effectively partner with them?
How do you truly understand their business challenges across their entire business and across your entire business? so that you can really, truly partner with them and continue to support them for the long term. I think that was a really, really fascinating bit of insight and a really great story that he shared with us as well that shows that we can't just focus on one end of the customer journey.
We've got to look holistically across all of it. So many insights in this discussion with Chris, and he talked so eloquently about this topic of customer management and how PlanHat support their customers in achieving this and helping them achieve this for their own clients. We'd love to thank Chris again for being part of the podcast. And we look forward to you joining us again soon.
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