principle seven HIRE FOR CUSTOMER GROWTH Selling to the enterprise requires a bigger sales and marketing team than selling to consumer companies does — including sales reps, marketing, and customer support or success staff. As with engineers, hire based on your vision for where you want to be in a year or so, knowing that expertise takes time to acquire. Be especially careful not to underinvest in customer success staff. If you are making your app a subscription-based app, which has proven to be the most successful model, you’ll need a post-sales team to ensure the customers are happy enough to renew. If there is one axiom that is true in Software as a Service (SaaS), it is that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new customer. Given how much sales commissions can cost, it’s key to focus on keeping customers — in addition, it creates a truly rapid revenue growth model, each year compounding on the previous.