Understanding Client Churn with Kaveh Rostampor (Meltwater)

Client Churn is a topic of conversation we have not really covered yet on the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast and so today we bring on our friend Kaveh Rostampor from Meltwater to help the younger generation of SaaS founders understand how to think about client churn. Kaveh is the Executive Director of the Americas at Meltwater where he runs a 200+ person team focused on operations, client acquisition and success, enterprise sales, and marketing for 14 offices in North America and South America. He joined the company 4 years after the business was founded as one of the early hires and was instrumental in setting up their sales and customer success efforts. 10+ years later and with help from Kaveh, Meltwater does over $200MM in ARR, has over 1,000 employees, 23,000 clients, and offices in 50 countries around the world. Most inspiring, the founding team did not take any outside capital for the first 12 years of operations.

We start with some high level thinking on client churn and how to understand the three metrics that matter most to Kaveh around client churn. He lays out how Meltwater thought about this from the beginning and how they have grown and changed around these three important metrics through the years. We then move on to some very interesting discussion around the various surveys that the company sends existing clients and what they tend to show the customer success team at Meltwater. Meltwater has some interesting approaches to this and we found the discussion incredibly insightful for any early stage company. We then cover the systems, process, and tools that Meltwater and any SaaS company should be using to understand client churn. Kaveh also gives the listeners some thinking about the reports both at the board level as well as internally to your marketing, sales, and product teams to keep everyone on the same page. Finally, we cover some tips and tricks that Kaveh has learned through the years. Give a listen and we hope you enjoy this week's edition of the podcast.