ex-Salesforce Customer Success Director, and ex-Oracle Value Selling Director. Expert at building a viable and scalable cloud business. Leadership roles in 3 countries/continents and advised customers across APAC and EMEA.
I have across the entire IT Industry Value chain with 11 years in Sales and Post Sales and 7 years in Product, Advisory and Programme Management. This experience can help an early stage startup with the functions and processes that can help them be operationally efficient and following best practices.
Build current cash flows in a SaaS business by focusing on multi year enterprise deals. Maintain healthy future cash flows with high renewals and customer success.
Help scale a cloud business by setting up for growth with setting up and building new capabilities and improving processes such as Value Selling and Customer Success.
The answer varies based on which country you are thinking of. If your focus is India or China, then the game is completely different to say Singapore. I can speak for India, having spent last 5 years there in a sales overlay team and then in customer success. As a result I have seen both the selling side as well as the retention side. Key things that come to my mind: 1) Product maturity - think scalability, availability 2) Pricing - think flexibility 3) Market - think not only competition but also how crowded it is 4) Customer service - think customer retention and ease of switching. 5) Selling - think size and local partner strategy.
A lot depends on what is your product, but this was my attempt to broadly identify some of the key things.
In both my roles in India, I faced challenges across all these areas and am happy to get on a call to discuss these in detail specific to your company and product.