SaaStr Interview: Harry Stebbings & Nick Mehta

I was recently interviewed by Harry Stebbings on SaaStr’s podcast series. We had a great discussion about customer success, Gainsight and the future of the industry. It originally aired on Product Hunt.
From the original post by Harry Stebbings: 

This week on SaaStr we are celebrating the rise of @GainSightHQ with a special feature week dedicated to Gainsight and joining me today we have Gainsight CEO, @nrmehta. Since Nick has been at the helm of Gainsight, it has experienced a meteoric rise to the top of the world of SaaS having practically created the category of customer success and revolutionising business work processes in doing so. Due to this, Gainsight has raised funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

In today’s show with Nick we discuss:

What were the solutions before Gainsight? Why were these inefficient and what the market opportunity for Gainsight?

Why has the power shifted from the hands of the vendor to the hands of the customer? What can vendors to do optimise this shift?

Is the proliferation of available tools and the resulting competition not dangerous as there is only so low prices can go?

To what extent does Gainsight have a monopoly over the customer success market?

How much should startups spend on customer success in the early days? How can one measure that success and return on investment?

What does the hiring of a customer success officer look like for Nick? How can we optimise this process?

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

ACV is everything: Explain?
Being a specialised CEO: Right or wrong?
On again, off again hiring in sales?

Nick Mehta

As a huge sports fan, Nick thinks of his job as being like that of a head coach. His role is to help bring the right people together on the team and put them in the best position to win for our customers, partners, employees and their families. He’s a big believer in the Golden Rule and we try to apply it as much as we can to bring more compassion to our interactions with others. And he talks way too fast and overuses the word awesome like it’s going out of style. Before coming to Gainsight, Nick was the CEO of awesome leading Software-as-a-Service E-Discovery provider LiveOffice through its acquisition by Symantec and prior to that was a Vice President at VERITAS Software and Symantec Corporation.