Background: 

The B2B SaaS space is getting more crowded by the day, meaning the need has never been higher for these companies to identify who their advocates are, keep existing customers happy, and generate more quality leads from their advocates. It used to be that sales were focused on pitching specific accounts or companies, but now the key is selling to a specific person, who becomes your champion and helps get you a trusted voice inside the company. The problem is, these people move frequently within their organizations, leave entirely, or are replaced with other staff, creating risk in terms of maintaining client satisfaction and missing an opportunity to upsell or resell as they change jobs and companies.

This has led SaaS providers to increasingly look at their customer success teams not just as a cost for filling out support tickets and the like, but as a revenue center, too, where happy customers (customer advocates) are made, retained, and potentially upsold along the way. Who better to be your advocate then someone you’ve worked with closely and, hopefully, satisfied? Some have even started rolling out sales-like bonus structures for their customer success teams. Yet this is all relatively new, and as a result there aren’t many specific tools for customer success teams to keep clean customer advocate data and help grow and monetize the customer base. This even though a huge majority of sales—one estimates says 84 percent—come from customer referrals!

Company Specifics:

Warmly helps B2B SaaS providers identify who their advocates are and maintain a strong, fruitful connection with them and their network. Once companies integrate Warmly into their Salesforce, HubSpot, or other CRM, it helps customer success and sales operations teams track advocates as they change jobs so that they can reach out and generate new sales. It also pulls in data from CRMs and various teams like sales to provide real-time monitoring of B2B contacts, customer product usage, and data on that customer’s community of potential contacts it could recommend the product to. Additionally, Warmly offers churn risk alerts when it sees a success team only has one contact at a company, and recommends when it’s time to reconnect with contacts who haven’t been reached in a while, making customer success teams proactive, not reactive. 

Warmly’s business model is consumption based, charging per contact. Natty got to know the Warmly team when they were part of Techstars Boulder 2020. Many of Warmly’s leadership team are ex-Googlers and worked on its Maps suite, where they mastered products based on real-time data-monitoring.