SaaStr 284: Why We Need To Remove The Title of CRO, What Happens If You Apply Customer Success To A Venture Portfolio & Why Net Retention Is The Most Important North Star Metric In SaaS with Travis Bryant, Partner for Founder Experience @ Redpoint Venture

Travis Bryant is Partner for Founder Experience @ Redpoint Ventures, the venture fund with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Netflix, Zuora, Hashicorp and Juniper Networks just to name a few. As for Travis, prior to joining Redpoint, Travis was head of Customer Growth at Front, after spending 5 years building the global Sales organization at Optimizely, the world’s most popular experimentation platform. During his time at Optimizely, the company grew from from $7 to >$90M in ARR and from 40 to 400 people. Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Travis made his way into the world of venture as the first ever Partner for founder experience at Redpoint? What were the 2 biggest lessons Travis took from Salesforce? How transformational is the 12 quarter year for Salesforce?
• Why does Travis believe we need to abolish the title of CRO? Why does it suggest misalignment between customer and vendor from Day 1? What aspects of CRO’s roles is Travis in favour of? What elements is he not in favour of? What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams?   
• Why does Travis believe that SaaS has upended the economic model but not the engagement model? How does the engagement model with customer need to shift? What does this do to the structure of the conventional funnel? 
• Why does Travis believe net retention must always be the guiding North Star? How does Travis think about the different steps to customer qualification today and what makes the best SDR’s? What does Travis advise founders when it comes to churn analysis? What questions must you ask? What metrics must you look for? 

Travis’ 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What motto or quote do Travis frequently revert back to?
2. What is the most challenging element of Travis’ role with Redpoint?
3. How should startup operators coming out of larger organizations determine which startup to join? 

Read the transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Travis Bryant