How ChargeBee weaponized the team’s solutioning expertise to grow 100x

Chargebee is a SaaS that runs the SaaS economy. It is that critical infrastructure which allows subscription businesses to bill their customers on a recurring basis. Today, it serves more than 3000 marquee customers globally.

Since Naven KY joined Chargebee in 2017, and by the time he left in 2022, Chargebee grew its revenues 100x. He saw it all as he set up and scaled the revenue operations team.

We sat with him recently to learn all about it. He identified 4 things that played a critical role in making this explosive growth possible. Any solution-centric SaaS company, which is growing fast, selling to enterprises, and has found product-market fit should take note of his learnings.

4 Key Takeaways from Chargebee's Solution Selling Approach

#1 Discover with rigor

Chargebee takes pride in the solution it sells and delivers to its customers. To ensure that, they do a comprehensive discovery upfront -- a call to get to know the buyers and their expectations, another call to get an in-depth understanding of the pain points, and a third call to go deep into technical discovery.

Sometimes, it frustrates their customers. But it is a tradeoff that they are willing to make.

It allows them to understand the customer better and provide more perfect solutions with a faster turnaround time.

#2 Tap into the team's collective knowledge.

Collective knowledge of the team is critical for converting deals and building successful solutions. Use the ideology of people over process to ensure that a flexible system is put in place to capture and catalog this critical knowledge.

And they used lots of templates, created for various scenarios and situations, to speed up the solutioning process during the deal.

#3 Build in-depth expertise

As they scaled, Chargebee started deploying specialized solution experts for each vertical. With the increased involvement of these experts, the collective solutioning knowledge of the team started getting deeper.

Naven shared an anecdote where they gave a solution consultant the opportunity to own the e-mobility segment. Soon they had white papers, email templates, and other assets highly focused on the challenges faced by e-bike and e-scooter companies. The SC soon started working on a solution handbook and custom solutioning workflows for the segment. The team became really good at solving problems of e-mobility customers and that showed in the results!

#4 Trust the team with increasing responsibility

In 2017, an enterprise customer for Chargebee had an ARR of 5M+. By 2022, they had gone 'upmarket' and doubled the bar for an enterprise customer to be more than $10M.

Selling to enterprise customers needed more resources and more mature selling skills.

By evolving the definition, Chargebee was signaling to its sales and solutions teams that they are maturing with the company. Today, they can handle bigger and more complex deals than yesterday.

Our take: Tribal knowledge can be a superpower

Chargebee's sales and solutions team have created a knowledge and expertise flywheeel that propels their growth.

As they grew, the sales and solutions team accumulated knowledge and skills about solving their customer's true problems in a way that created true impact. They did not let this 'tribal knowledge' stay locked in the memory of the team members. They create a system, which trusts people over processes, to harness this expertise. Each new tactic, problem-solving approach, architecture, value-demonstration, argument enriched the team's collective brain. The brain which was available to help each new cog in the flywheel.