saas

Directive (EU) 2024/2853 replaces the 1985 regime and settles a forty-year argument by naming software a product. This lesson covers the new definition and why delivery method is irrelevant, why information is not a product, how components and related services extend the net, where open source sits, and why liability cannot be disclaimed by contract.

This is where customer success converts value into revenue: the renewal as the outcome of a year's work, expansion done as genuine value not pressure, rescuing accounts that turned red, the QBR, how books of business are segmented, and how a career switcher breaks into the role.

Retention is earned across the customer lifecycle, long before the renewal. This lesson covers the proactive craft of customer success: getting customers to first value fast, driving real product adoption, and building a health score that predicts churn early, so a CSM can act on risk while there is still time to fix it.

In a subscription business the sale is the beginning, not the end, and keeping customers matters more than winning them. This lesson explains why: the recurring-revenue model, net revenue retention as the metric that runs SaaS, the leaky-bucket math, and why customer success emerged as a distinct discipline from support and sales.

HubSpot grew from a marketing philosophy: attract customers with useful content rather than chase them. This lesson explains inbound and the flywheel that replaced the funnel, HubSpot's freemium free-CRM model, the Hubs that make it all-in-one, and how its approach contrasts with Salesforce's.

Salesforce is the largest CRM, but it is more than a CRM: it is a metadata-driven platform you configure rather than code. This lesson explains multi-tenant cloud architecture, why configuration beats code, what an org is, and how the clouds (Sales, Service, Marketing, and more) are apps on one shared foundation.