Executive Summary:
Extensiv is a SaaS provider in the Logistics industry, writing fulfillment software for both Brands and 3rd Party Logistics companies. When I joined Extensiv, (then 3PL Central) in 2019, it was sub $15MM in annual recurring revenue, growing at roughly 15% and had just launched their Account Management motion. I was hired as the Director of Customer Success, and tasked with creating and implementing playbooks to increase upsell (products and services) along with customer retention. My time at Extensiv has been action packed, including 3 acquisitions, a rebranding and the launch of a few new teams. Along the way, I’ve earned two promotions, grew my team from 3 to 22 and contributed to 460% growth in the past four years. I have highlighted a few accomplishments below, provided detail on my responsibilities and included a timeline for reference.
About Extensiv
| Industry | SaaS | Logistics | ||
| Size | >$60MM | 200 Employees | ||
| Website | www.extensiv.com | ||
| Role: | VP, Expansion Sales | ||
| My Team | 2 Managers | 20 Individual Contributors |
Tenure at a Glance:
Legend:
- Bars: indicate the various teams within my department and their headcount growth over the years
- Projects: As the chief customer advocate, I was involved in the planning and implementation phase of each of these projects. My primary role was to evaluate customer experience impact and create and implement the customer communication strategies.
- Acquisitions: I played a small part in the diligence process, primarily evaluating customer health. Post acquisition, I evaluated and optimized the account management motion for Skubana and Scout.
- Attainment: The attainment figures above are representative of Extensiv’s upsell goal. As our company continued to grow so did our revenue targets. The upsell revenue stream grew by more than 5% YoY consecutively for the past four years.
My Extensiv Experience:
Leadership
Coaching, Mentoring, Department Building
- Awarded the The Revenue Team Leader of The Year Award in 2020 and 2019. This award is bestowed to one of the eight revenue team leaders on the basis of both performance and team sentiment.
- Coached and mentored several top-performing account managers, six of which have been promoted into leadership and elevated positions
- 2023: Launched an expansion team, creating a more efficient upsell and cross sell motion and culminating in a 22% QoQ improvement in expansion revenue
- 2022: Assumed the leadership of the account management operations of two newly-acquired subsidiaries, including a comprehensive relicensing effort, which resulted in a 30% YoY improvement in upsell and an 8% YoY improvement in net recurring revenue
- 2019: Assumed Extensiv’s newly formed account management team and revised our customer engagement practices, resulting in a 3% YoY and a 113% YoY improvement in customer retention and upsell respectively
Accomplishments
Revenue driving initiatives
- Consistent track record of success leading upsell/cross sell efforts; exceeding quota in 2021 by 15%, attaining greater than 96% to quota in 2019 and 2022, and leading the revenue team in quota attainment for four consecutive years
- Led an initiative to monetize our platform’s integration capabilities, which garnered a 36% YoY increase in upsell revenue
- Directed a quarter-long collaborative project with sales and professional services leadership to redesign the first year customer journey, resulting in a 12% improvement in first year customer retention
Responsibilities
Beyond the KPIs
- Served as the chief customer advocate in several product release and customer-impacting projects, providing guidance on change management plans, licensing models, beta recruitment and messaging
- Led Extensiv’s Customer Advisory Board for four years, disseminating insights to product and customer-facing leadership to improve the customer experience
- Collaborated with Revenue Operations team to comprehensively redesign the Salesforce experience for the Account Management team
Work Experience Highlights:
Optimizing the Skubana Renewal Process :
After Extensiv acquired Skubana, I assumed leadership of the Account Management team along with the company’s quota for upsell and customer retention. Skubana serviced a customer base in a different vertical, had a completely different licensing model and customer success structure than the incumbent Extensiv Customer base. (Side Note: learning to successfully lead two teams with meaningfully different structures and parameters was a major step in my professional growth.) One of my first observations was that there wasn’t much transparency in the legacy renewal processes, creating distrust and artificially high churn in the customer base. By relicensing the platform and optimizing the renewal process to include pricing transparency and structured negotiation process for the Account Managers to follow, we realized a 30% improvement in upsell and a 8% improvement in net recurring revenue. The success of this initiative allowed us to expand account management coverage to the full customer base, spin up a professional services practice, and enhance the support experience.
Relicensing Our Platform API
Extensiv offers the ability for our customers to write to our API, integrating their systems into our platform. Historically, we charged a flat fee for access to our “Platform API.” In Q2, 2020, We did a customer profitability analysis and determined that the cost to support this capability at a flat rate compromised our profitability for a significant portion of our customers. I was tasked with relicensing this product to a consumption based model. The first step was to partner with our product team to understand the usage patterns and set the appropriate pricing tier structure. Equally important was to make sure that we built mechanisms to provide our customers with visibility into their consumption and insights to control their usage. Next was to develop a go-to-market plan, including a customer migration motion, training for the Account Management teams and forecasted revenue. We successfully migrated our entire customer base with 12 months of the program launch, resulting in a 36% increase in upsells. Platform API continues to contribute meaningfully to our subscription revenue and has become our 2nd highest upsell product.
Customer Advocacy during Change Management
From cloud migrations and platform transitions to Salesforce redesigns and team reorgs, we have made countless enhancements to our customer experience, many of which involve significant change management efforts to maximize value and minimize impact. I have been involved in every major project that impacts our customer base and over the years we have evolved our project management structure to be more comprehensive repeatable. My role is to understand the project’s scope, educate the project team on relevant aspects of the customer experience, evaluate impact to customers, drive the communication strategy and to litigate project parameters with other stakeholders to find the optimal balance between customer value, impact, cost ad timing.
Takeaways:
