How CS can prepare for VC investment

In the last few webinars we’ve discussed what metrics matter for customer success (NRR in CS), and how to drive them for business and career growth (The CCO role). On that journey you’ll likely come across venture capital (VC) investment, so we at Planhat wanted to prepare you for that as well.

To do so we’ve brought in one of the world’s leading customer success focused investors, Rav Dhaliwal, as well as two CS leaders that have been through the investor journey themselves on the CS side: Trevor Ticehurst and Teri Bayrock.

Watch the session to learn:

1. What VCs expect from companies at each round of investment (Series A, B, C…) and what other factors play a role

2. How you can be prepared, and how you can prepare your team to scale post-investment

3. How an investment round affects the CS organisation

4. The importance of demonstrating the value CS generates and how you can accomplish this

5. And much more...

Moderator:

Christian Jakenfelds has had multiple different customer-facing roles. He joined Tessian as one of their first CSMs and this is where he saw how CS is the engine for growth in SaaS businesses. He now works with Planhat in the UK market and has been named one of the top 25 CS Influencers in 2021.

Speakers:

Rav Dhaliwal is a Venture Capital investor and previously held a number of executive positions in various Enterprise Software companies over the last 20 years, most recently at Slack where, as the first UK employee he established the London office and founded the global Customer Success team. No stranger to hyper growth start-ups, Rav has also built and led customer focused business units at Zendesk (now valued at over $10 billion) as well as Yammer (which was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion). Rav has published several books on Enterprise Software Deployment, is a regular public speaker, angel investor and regularly advises the portfolios of Venture and Growth Equity backed firms.

Teri Bayrock is originally from Vancouver and currently based in London, and has spent over 10 years building client-facing teams within quickly growing tech companies. Her experience spans multiple industries and includes a variety of B2B, B2C, B2B2C businesses. As one of the founding members of Hootsuite CS, she helped navigate the team through a series of funding rounds and hyper growth, establishing the team as a high-calibre global support presence when she left in 2017. Since then, she’s been focused on growing world-class client teams in the UK and has recently joined WeGift as Head of Customer Operations.

Trevor Ticehurst has more than 25 years experience in customer centric roles within the software industry, having previously worked for Accenture, SAP and Centrica. With a wealth of experience of building and leading high performing teams, he is responsible for the delivery and consulting functions across Basis Technologies’ global customer base. Most recently Trevor has taken on responsibility for transforming Basis Technologies’ CS operations as Chief Customer Success Officer.

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