Transforming and Scaling B2B SaaS Companies for Maximum Success

About

Ainslie Harris - Transforming and Scaling B2B SaaS Companies for Customer Success

CEOs of B2B SaaS companies trust me to help them scale quickly and efficiently.

I specialize in quickly bringing order to chaos at early-stage startups ($0-$50m ARR / Series C or earlier), challenging the status quo, and designing and implementing strategies that enable lean and efficient scaling. Customer Success is at the heart of my approach because it’s deeply integrated with every part of your business.

With 20+ years experience working with high-growth start-ups to Fortune 100s, non-profits, and management consultancies in Europe and North America, I’m an expert in quickly defining, refining, and delivering collaborative strategies that increase top and bottom lines. I grow revenue, increase productivity, slash churn, and build strong cross-functional relationships to achieve ambitious growth and business transformation targets for my clients.

How am I different from other consultants?

I design and deliver a tailored plan for Go To Market, scaling your Operations, and Customer Success that fits your business instead of forcing your business to fit into a generic plan. With me, you get a focused, pragmatic approach that delivers results significantly faster because I’ve actually done the jobs before: from testing, to product development, marketing, sales, strategy, operations, customer success, and billing. I focus on the things that actually make a difference, not the latest buzz words and trends.

I’ve delivered countless successful technology and business transformations, and have the rare skill of being able to design and successfully deliver the Triforce of strategic, operational, and tactical strategies. I’m well known for paying attention to detail that’s often ignored, and for my ability to break down complex projects into immediately achieveable steps. I can tell my clients what’s likely to fail before they make key investment decisions, and I design for success and maximizing existing runway.

I understand what VC and PE investors are looking for and the importance of your company’s valuation through each funding round. As a partner and advisor to C-suite and board stakeholders, I know how to translate strategic needs into to day-to-day operational requirements so you can meet your investors' targets.

Services: What I can do for you

Improve communication and engagement between teams.
Optimize employee and customer behaviour to minimize barriers and maximize productivity as you scale.
Streamline and automate processes, controls, and operations so your people can be focused on growing your business.
Quickly implement a data-driven way of working for smarter, faster decision-making, ensuring you have a system of record that’s fit for purpose and being used as the single source of truth.
Challenge the status quo where needed and drive meaningful change everyone can rally behind.
Improve governance, direction, and focus without adding extra work for your teams.
Deliver a complete go to market plan, customer onboarding plan, customer segmentation strategy, success plan and account plan templates, and playbooks for retention, growth, and renewal.
Reduce costly data and operational errors that require days or weeks of investigation and rework.
Design and deliver strategies that reduce, deflect and avoid support tickets.

What benefits can you expect?

An extended runway, higher ARR, and higher valuation for your next funding round.

Better cash management: Avoid hiring people or buying systems too early or too late, or investing in things that don’t deliver business value as you scale.
More accurate data: Improved reporting, forecasting, and audit transparency, so you can spend less time figuring out where your numbers came from and more time growing your customers.
A more capable team: with a more efficient and productive team, you can minimize headcount costs as you scale, freeing up more cash for fewer but more capable hires.
Better Customer Engagement: Deeper customer relationships give you better insights for your product roadmap investment decisions, positioning you as a strategic partner instead of a commoditized vendor.
Higher Customer Satisfaction: Improved CSAT scores and more references so you can win new business and investment.
A reputation for excellent business management: Investors and strategic customers do their due diligence, so it's important for your leadership team to demonstrate best practice and transparent financial management.

Should we work together?

If your executive team or board needs to answer these questions, we should talk:

How do we get people interested in our product?
How can we deliver a great customer experience at scale without significantly increasing costs?
How do we streamline or automate our ways of working to improve productivity and control costs as we scale?
How do we set up scaleable functions without using up all our cash?
What KPIs should we be reporting on, and how can we generate accurate, high quality reporting at all levels of our business?
How do we prove value to customers so they renew/grow?
How should we onboard and engage with customers, and how can we provide a consistent/repeatable experience?
How do we identify and save accounts that are at risk of churn?
How do we get our customers to see us as a true partner and not just a software vendor?

Testimonials

"What makes Ainslie great is that the more difficult the problem, the more she excels. She’s a tremendous team player and highly effective in communications across all the different business units. What I find most impressive is the way she has been able to dissect so much disparate and incorrect data and create accurate stories on what has impacted our business both positively and negatively. She is masterful at articulating these findings to the executive level and pushing the team on actions to improve our business."

SVP Customer Success, Growth-Stage SaaS company

"What stands out about Ainslie is her ability to see problems and challenges from many angles, and then adapt her approach to the situation. Ainslie is full of knowledge in all the best ways, but most especially in how she can apply her knowledge to fit the unique problem at hand."

Senior Director Customer Success, Growth-Stage SaaS company

"We worked with Ainslie over a short period to help set up our CSM function. Ainslie did a great job getting stuck in with the team, gap analysis and delivering what we needed including various tools we can use as a foundation to driving customer success. Above all, great fun to work with! Thanks for the help!"

Lukky Ahmed, CEO, Climate X

"Ainslie’s a superb listener and interpreter of multiple threads of thought and conversation - able to capture and record/document these disparate threads into a cohesive whole. She’s a great collaborator - setting up meetings, facilitating discussions, working with many people, and able to accomplish and make progress working with respect across differing opinions and approaches."

Senior Director, Growth-Stage SaaS company

"Ainslie is a highly respected, positive and influential manager. She is quick to grasp concepts and negotiate commercial alternatives, highly organised, and collaborative, which was critical for the success of the team. In various instances Ainslie would challenge proposed options or deals where they did not adequately satisfy the interests of our company or had not been appropriately qualified, calling this out and saving time on finance input and modelling required. This was greatly appreciated. Ainslie works to a very high standard, influences and challenges where appropriate and is an enthusiastic and high-performing team member."

Senior Finance Manager, FTSE 100 company

"When Ainslie was appointed, things changed considerably for the better and I noticed an immediate improvement in the direction, focus and organisation of the entire project. Ainslie has been instrumental in coordinating Board approval papers with all key disciplines and ensuring that appropriate governance has been maintained throughout, which has been reassuring from a legal point of view. The project has not been entirely straightforward, having been fraught with issues that have needed to be resolved both internally and externally. Ainslie has managed not only to cope incredibly well with such difficulty and uncertainty but has managed to steer the project and the project team quite successfully through all of this. She has remained thoroughly professional, driven and dedicated throughout and has been a genuine pleasure to work with. She will be a very hard act to follow."

Senior Commercial Contracts Manager, FTSE 100 company

"Ainslie was able to make a point quickly, concisely and with clarity. Sometimes it's like "herding cats" running a deal like this one. She chased people when it needed doing and got the people, collateral and deliverables together on time, every time. She challenged thinking and wasn’t afraid to call-out bad decisions or thinking when made."

General Manager, FTSE 100 company

"Ainslie has fantastic attention to detail with a commercially pragmatic approach to problem-solving."

Head of Consumer Law, FTSE 100 company

"Benevolent, motivating and empathetic, she is an outstanding negotiator and a genius for compromise. Our company could not have counted on a better collaborator: her sense of the collective and her attachment to people are obvious and make her a competent and unique professional. She has greatly contributed to the improvement of the company's results."

Technical Support Engineer, Growth-Stage SaaS company

"Ainslie is clearly a very capable and bright individual who is able to quickly grasp and drive forward the most complex components of programmes. Her role has been all about making change happen and bringing our groundbreaking product to market. This has required her to understand how our business works today, how our product fits or doesn’t fit into this model, and establish an approach to address this. This has required her to question many of the ways we currently work today and drive change into existing processes and business rules and ways of working such that it achieves the right outcome for our business unit as a whole. This shows a high level of self-confidence, an ability to be flexible in her approach to a challenge and an ability to effectively negotiate with multiple stakeholders. She is clearly passionate about her role and always strives to get the right outcome whilst being sensitive to the need for alignment with the wider portfolio. All in all, she has been an extremely effective member of the team and will be able to rightly say that a large portion of the success of our product launch was down to her personal contribution."

Head of Retail Product Management, FTSE 100 company

"Ainslie has an amazing ability to build strong stakeholder relationships and drive transformational change throughout the business. The calm and concise manner she dealt with every challenge along the way gave confidence to the wider team and ensured everyone performed to their maximum ability. An extremely challenging project was completed with precision and a one-team attitude, it was a pleasure being part of that team."

Project Director, Tier 1 global advertising agency

Contact

If you need help transforming your ways of working so that you can be more productive, efficient, and scale your business, contact me at consulting@ainslieharris.com.