This is post four of a multi-post series with Ershad Jamil, former Chief Growth Officer at ServiceTitan. Ershad shares his experience in launching embedded payments for ServiceTitan to guide similar Vertical SaaS companies.
Over the course of this series, my goal has been to help other vSaaS operators think strategically about how to optimize their Payments business and drive embedded payments adoption. Even better, I hope that by sharing many of the pitfalls I encountered while building ServiceTitan Payments, you can avoid the same mistakes.
I’ve covered How to Drive Customer Growth with Embedded Payments, How to Choose the Right Payments Partner, and How to Structure Pricing to Maximize Value and Customer Adoption. It’s time to shift gears from foundational strategy and decisions to GTM execution.
Think like a business owner
When I first started building out payments at ServiceTitan, I planned the Go-To-Market (GTM) approach like I was building my own business, not adding on a product to an existing platform. By thinking about our embedded payments like its own P&L, I considered four core functions and roles:
- Sales and Marketing
- Research and Development
- G&A
- Cost of Revenue
It’s likely that you have many of these functions and roles within your SaaS company already. It’s worth asking who you can tap into and who you hire net new. To answer those questions, I always recommend stepping into the prospect’s shoes. Will your existing product marketers be able to help prospects understand embedded payments? On the sales side, are there existing AEs who could upsell this new product? Will they understand the nuances that come with payments and be able to drive embedded payments adoption? Do you expect to drive more adoption from your install base or net new customers?
At ServiceTitan, we emphasized hiring sales and customer success team members who were from the payments industry. They already understood pricing and knew the lingo (like calling customers merchants!). One of the most common mistakes I see with other companies adding in an embedded payments offering is making the assumption that their current AE team can handle the selling. Selling embedded payments is not as easy as it sounds. Don’t overlook your first, core GTM team members. Remember, you want payments to be a significant part of your business.
It’s also critical that you identify a team leader who will act like a business owner. This payments leader needs to know payments inside out. If your leader is not from a payments background, make sure they invest in understanding the space. They need to build cross-functional buy-in, establish key metrics, and manage the initial team of 3 to 12 people.
Flex your GTM team structure
When I was building out ServiceTitan’s GTM team for payments, redundancy and flexibility were key. The first three hires were sales, onboarding and support. They were all from the payments industry – they knew the lingo and processes to allow us to move quickly. Even better, each team member could each step into each other’s roles. The cross training approach gave us greater ability to scale and provided redundancy for a small team.
Of the team, the first hire focused on sales and onboarding. Once we gained traction, our next hire focused on implementation. It wasn’t too much longer after that point that we realized it was time to hire a dedicated support role. While this support specialist could sit within your company’s greater support org, it’s imperative that they work closely with the payments team. Embedded payments adoption requires specialized support – someone who knows how to handle very specific payments questions. A success manager trying to onboard a customer on payments as just 10% of work means you won’t get the right focus or adoption. And, in this ideal GTM launch team, support works in tandem with the sales and onboarding leads as one unit.
Landing your first customers
Start with the team that’s closest to your customers: Customer Success. Working closely with the existing customer success team at ServiceTitan, we identified customers who would be willing to test out our new embedded payments product. Identifying these first customers wasn’t hard, but convincing them to adopt the new offering was a little more challenging than we anticipated.
You’ll learn a lot from a small, focused customer group (just 6 at ServiceTitan!) and by dedicating almost full-time support from setup to answering ongoing questions. We discovered there were a lot of nuances in workflows that we wish we had thought about more. And, we had a few product hiccups we had not anticipated. By identifying and working with a core group of customers early, you can get more feedback, make quick changes and continue to move fast.
I would also highly recommend that you invest in support. A lot of times, we think about the product, about the sales motion and we don’t think about support as an important part of the solution. Keep in mind your end customers, especially SMBs, might already have an existing payments solution and they are likely not satisfied with their support. You want to provide a better customer journey. Give your customers the best Tier 1 support you can. Keep in mind that responsiveness matters. Invest in measuring not only NPS for your product, but also CSAT for support.
By investing in support with our first payments customers at ServiceTitan, we created strong customer advocacy. Our customers were willing to participate in webinars, be quoted in blogs and more. Your first customers are your greatest asset to win new customers.
When do you ramp for growth?
Back when I launched ServiceTitan payments in 2016, there were not a lot of benchmarks. To evaluate if we were ready to increase our GTM team investment, we asked ourselves the following questions:
- Did we have a decent understanding of average volume of month of credit card, ACH or check size in general?
- Were we making these customers successful?
- How stable was the product? What was the volume of support requests?
- What percent of our existing customer base had adopted embedded payments? Could we accelerate that adoption rate?
After nine months, we decided to double-down on our investment in ServiceTitan Payments. It was a hard decision to make. We were going to take a risk. Hire 10 more people. We might over hire, but we also knew payments could be a significant percentage of company ARR soon enough. Also, we had a strong conviction that every dollar going to our platform, not on integrated payments experience, was a dollar that could have been monetized and a customer that could have had a better experience and received better service.
It’s always a careful evaluation and balance of risk and reward when you make the decision to invest in your GTM team. Do you hire one more person as planned or go beyond plan? How much are you leaving on the table? Luckily, we had enough validation with our GTM team structure and early customer signals to double-down. Keep in mind today, you could leverage more AI and automated tooling to supplement your hiring plan.I highly recommend that once you have some data, if the opportunity is there, double down. Growing your GTM team will not only drive acquisition, but helps with gross revenue retention too.
When is the right time to talk to customers about payments?
At ServiceTitan, we made payments part of the core platform implementation lifecycle. A company goal was to get customers to adopt payments during onboarding. Part of the onboarding sequence was to schedule a conversation with a payments specialist. During this conversation, our payments team scoped their needs, gathered info, and could begin to set custom pricing. Getting customers to sign up for payments during this initial implementation period was a win for both – as it increased our payments velocity and ensured smooth onboarding success for the customer.
My top 5 keys to GTM success for embedded payments?
- Be Nimble. We always thought of operating like a startup within a startup.
- Dedicated, single threaded focus
- The company has to be all in. Embedded payments must be adopted by all to be successful.
- Sales teams and payments teams need to be aligned.
- “Don’t make payments optional” during the implementation process
Stay tuned for the next & last article in this series, where I’ll cover how to continue to innovated with embedded payments, as well as layering on other Fintech to your vSaaS.