The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 209: The 3 Components To Successful SaaS Pricing, Lessons From Seeing Zendesk Scale From 12 to 2,000 and How To Ensure Successful Cross-Functional Communication with Amanda Kleha, Chief Customer Officer @ Figma

Jan 28, 2019

37:30

Creator website

Episode guests

Amanda Kleha

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Quick takeaways

Balancing hiring top performers who can scale with the business is crucial for growth.

Clear communication and customer-centric pricing models are essential for successful product marketing.

Deep dives

Customer-Centric Approach and Career Progression at Figma

Amanda Clear discusses her accidental entry into the world of SaaS, starting from her desire to get closer to customers in tech, leading her to roles at Postini, Google, and eventually as Chief Customer Officer at Figma. She emphasizes the importance of appreciating good service and customer perspectives, as well as embracing a positive attitude towards career progression and roles within companies.

Leaders, Fillers, and Killers: Understanding Bundle Pricing

01:18

Introduction

4min

How I Got Started in SaaS

2min

The Importance of Time to Value in Customer Experience

2min

The Importance of Candidate Mindset in a Startup

5min

How to Run an Interview Process

2min

The Importance of Reference Checks in High Growth Environments

5min

How to Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration in a Company

4min

How to Create a Culture of Risk Taking and Ambition in SaaS

3min

How Zendesk Developed Pricing and Packaging

5min

10.

The Importance of Customer Support in SaaS Pricing

3min

11.

The Importance of Not Knowing Everything

2min

12.

How to Achieve Success With Integrated Payments

3min

Amanda Kleha is the Chief Customer Officer @ Figma, the startup that allows you to turn ideas into products faster through design, prototyping and feedback gathering, all in one place. To date, Figma have raised over $42m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and former guests on 20VC, Daniel Gross and Adam Nash. As for Amanda, prior to Figma, she held numerous roles at Zendesk including SVP of Marketing and Sales Strategy. Amanda joined Zendesk as the first marketing hire and over the next 7 years Zendesk grew to over 2,000 employees. Before Zendesk, Amanda worked on the marketing team for Google’s Enterprise SaaS businesses. If that was not enough Amanda is also an advisor at Airtable and Smartling.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

How Amanda made her way into the world of SaaS and came to join Zendesk as their first marketing hire seeing the company scale to over 2,000 over the next 7 years?
What were some of Amanda’s biggest learnings from seeing Zendesk scale from 12 to 2,000? How does one determine those that can vs cannot grow with the business? What is the sign a stretch VP is a stretch too far? How does Amanda balance between a culture of risk taking but also not accepting failure to easily?
How does Amanda like to run the interview process? Why does Amanda like to not show emotion when interviewing a candidate? What are the benefits of this for the brand of your company? What single question does Amanda find most revealing in showing the abilities and character of a candidate in an interview?
What does Amanda mean when she says “pricing is made up of 3 components”? Where does Amanda believe most people go wrong with pricing? Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing? How does Amanda think the go-to-market has to change with every stage of development? What are the challenges with this?
How does the structure of decision-making change with scale? What are the inflection points? When does both decision-making and communication tend to break down? What can be done to ensure seamless cross-functional communication across the org? Where do most people fail here?

Amanda’s 60 Second SaaStr:

What does Amanda know now that she wishes she had known when she started in SaaS?
Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing?
How to ensure customer support is strategic and not just reactionary?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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