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Jay Nathan
Co-founder of the Gain, Grow, Retain CS community and Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic.
Professional Background
Jay Nathan is a highly accomplished professional in the realm of customer success and SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses. With considerable experience and a robust skill set, Jay has evolved his career to meet the unique challenges that come with selling software as a service. He understands that the landscape of customer interaction has changed drastically; transactional sales and basic support approaches are no longer sufficient. Customers now demand tangible results, recognizable value, and a trusted partner they can rely on throughout their journey.
With an impressive history of holding executive roles in various companies, Jay has honed a customer retention and growth methodology that empowers tech businesses to efficiently serve diverse markets and customers of all sizes. His commitment to driving customer-centric strategies and processes has led to remarkable outcomes such as achieving 90%+ gross revenue retention and 120%+ net revenue retention for his clients.
Jay is the founder of Customer Imperative, a purpose-driven company established to accelerate customer success for B2B SaaS organizations. Under his leadership, Customer Imperative has collaborated with a multitude of subscription-based businesses, crafting and executing effective growth strategies tailored to the needs of their specific clientele. With a focus on enhancing customer experiences, Jay’s team has continuously delivered impressive results that subsequently drive company growth through satisfied customers and sustained engagement.
Jay’s resume includes an extensive range of roles that showcase his ability to scale operations, improve customer retention, and foster lasting relationships between clients and service providers. His broad spectrum of experience includes being the Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic, an interim Senior Vice President of Client Success at RainFocus, and an independent consultant to JMI Equity. Notably, he was a significant player in the successful exit of PeopleMatter, acquired by Snagajob in 2016, where he served as both Senior Vice President and Vice President of Customer Success and Services.
Throughout his career, Jay has been committed to leading teams that prioritize customer satisfaction—recognizing that a happy customer is not only likely to stay but also to advocate for the brand.
Education and Achievements
Jay Nathan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a specialization in Information Systems from Appalachian State University. This academic foundation provided him with a well-rounded skill set, laying the groundwork for his future endeavors in technology and customer service.
As he forged his path in the tech and SaaS industries, Jay has consistently sought out new learning opportunities and professional growth, always striving for excellence in his field. His strategic insights and innovative thinking have allowed him to develop methodologies that contribute significantly to customer onboarding, retention, and overall satisfaction.
In addition to his entrepreneurial work at Customer Imperative, Jay shares his knowledge and insights through platforms like the Gain, Grow, Retain Podcast. This initiative serves as a hub for discussions on how companies can effectively retain and grow their customer relationships, emphasizing his commitment to nurturing the business community and creating value through shared knowledge.
Achievements
- Founder of Customer Imperative: Launched a company dedicated to helping B2B subscription businesses enhance customer success.
- Successful Exit of PeopleMatter: Played a pivotal role in the acquisition of PeopleMatter by Snagajob, showcasing his leadership in customer success strategy.
- Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic: Instrumental in shaping customer experiences and success in this reputable organization.
- Development of Proprietary Customer Retention Methodology: Created a proven system that supports companies in achieving exceptional customer retention rates and revenue growth.
- Contributions to Professional Community: Regularly engages with industry peers and thought leaders through his podcast and consulting efforts, promoting best practices in customer success management.
- Extensive Leadership Roles: Held senior positions across several organizations including Blackbaud and Snag, further establishing his expertise in customer service and tech solutions.
- Active Community Involvement: Beyond the professional sphere, Jay is a dedicated husband and father, as well as a community member of Seacoast Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC, where he engages in local initiatives and support programs.
- Personal Pursuits: Jay is also an avid music enthusiast, being a student of the guitar for 30 years and aspiring to one day lead a Jimmy Buffett cover band, reflecting his creative side and passion for music.
In conclusion, Jay Nathan is a forward-thinking leader i
Highlights
I'm fired up about customer success in enterprise SaaS after a couple of conversations I've had this week.
One with a friend of mine who leads customer success at a giant, publicly traded company. They decided to move to a paid model because the white-glove customer success model devolved into a "jack of all trades, master of none" situation.
The second with a CX leader in a smaller company building customer success for the first time. Their first hire into this role is already falling into the same white glove trap.
Enterprise customer success teams are usually built with the noble goal of improving customer experience and providing proactive engagement and support.
But all too often, here’s what actually happens:
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CSMs get roped into weekly or monthly “check-in” calls with their customers.
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CSMs coordinate internal resources and teams on behalf of their customers.
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They help to prioritize which support cases are most critical to their assigned customers at any given point in time.
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They handle product feedback and enhancement requests.
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They manage escalations.
All of these are important jobs to be done for the customer. But the combination of all these tasks is not a job, much less a career.
Furthermore, they represent a collection of broken customer service processes within the areas of the company that should own them. For example: Cold sales-to-onboarding handoffs that fail to pass on business case and technical details.
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No formal process for managing product feedback at scale. No closed-loop process for cases that escalate from support to product and engineering.
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Minimal support for anything other than technical, “broke/fix” issues through support channels (e.g. how-to, best practices, etc).
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A one-size-fits-all implementation approach.
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No reengagement strategy for customers who “go dark” during implementation.
CSMs bravely run toward the fire when any of these problems arise. They work to smooth the rough edges of the customer’s experience despite the fact that they have little control and limited influence over the resources who can solve the problem.
This style of customer success management, let’s call it Concierge Customer Success, is an expensive and inefficient way of delivering basic service to customers. Despite the cost, Concierge Customer Success only serves to maintain acceptable customer service levels. There’s little incremental value-add above the customer’s baseline expectations.
But the worst part is this: In the process of covering gaps, Concierge Customer Success management makes customer service mediocrity invisible to the rest of organization. And because these deficiencies are unseen, their root causes are rarely addressed.
What’s the answer? Should we do away with CS altogether?
No.
But we should rethink it.
(Ran out of space👇)
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#saas Jay Nathan
The first time is always special..
Today we held our first customer office hours call. The Churnkey Retention Roundtable.
We had 25 customers join us (55% attendance rate) for open dialog and knowledge-sharing around how to get the most out of self-serve subscription cancel flows.
Here's how we did it:
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We selected a topic we knew would be interesting to the widest possible audience of our current customers - cancel flows.
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We (and by "we" I mean Daniel Hall) created a brief presentation with everything we've learned from four years of helping customers retain customers.
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We used Luma to schedule the meeting (see landing page below). Luma puts an individual calendar invite on everyone's calendar, sends reminders, and tracks attendance. A must-have tool for a community-style events.
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We shared our content and opened the floor for input, discussion, and questions along the way. We invited participation along the way and got lots of it.
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Next we'll send a follow-up survey to gather feedback and input on future topics.
If you've never done this style of engagement before, there are some fears that you'll have to overcome:
- What if nobody shows up?
- What if nobody says anything?
- What if there are competitors on the call?
- What if customers are belligerent on the call?
Let me assure you, the upside will always far-outweigh the downside. Even if three people show, you can have an intimate conversation and learn from your customers.
People always have things to say, you just need to call on them (thanks for teaching this to Jeff and me this back in the GGR days, Nils).
People can use their best judgment on what to share and how to share it. Reality is that we aren't giving away trade secrets on these calls.
Finally, if you put your best foot forward to engage with your customers professionally, people are likely to behave. Be ready to handle any dicey conversations offline and commit to one-on-one follow up calls if necessary to tackle an particularly gnarly issues.
What you will get is: product feedback, peer-to-peer learning, marketing content, and engagement -- the holy grail of customer success teams everywhere.
Have you run an office hours call with your customers yet? If not, what's holding you back?
#saas #profitablegrowth #plg #customersuccess Jay Nathan
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
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Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
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