How Vercel Surpassed 105% Net Dollar Retention with BoostUp

About the company

Vercel’s Frontend Cloud provides the developer experience and infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. Customers like Under Armour, The Washington Post, and Zapier use Vercel to build dynamic user experiences on the web.

Headquarters

San Francisco, CA

Founded

2015

Key challenges

Access | Manual Data Management

Leadership used to spend an entire week reviewing spreadsheets and manually pulling data for QBRs and board reports. This process was tedious, inefficient, and prone to errors. It involved multiple bottlenecks as leaders had to wait on others' feedback and confirmation of inputs, diluting reliability and making it difficult to access the right numbers in a timely manner.

Visibility | Fragmented Team Insights

With three teams handling different aspects of customer relationships, there was a lack of unified visibility. This made it difficult to track renewals, expansions, and ongoing contract payments cohesively and led to a process that could negatively affect churn, renewals, and the business's bottom lines.

Accountability | Delayed and Imprecise Forecasting

The team struggled to provide timely and accurate forecasts despite having Salesforce reports. Precise figures were often only available post-quarter once reports were shared by the finance team, making it difficult to make informed decisions during critical periods. This challenge became more crucial as Vercel navigated shifts in their GTM model.

"Without visibility, you can't take action."

With BoostUp, Vercel gained better visibility into their NDR numbers before the quarters closed. This newfound transparency allowed the sales and CS teams to identify risk areas earlier, take action when there's a better chance to change outcomes, and rally internal resources to improve results.

Solution

BoostUp replaced Vercel's manual spreadsheets with a unified customer success forecasting platform. The solution integrates data from Sales, Renewals, and CS teams, while incorporating third-party data like NPS scores and license utilization. This helps Vercel forecast flat renewals, expansions, and potential churn with AI-driven accuracy. The platform automatically calculates total forecasts and NDR, identifies at-risk accounts, and enables proactive customer management. By tailoring forecasts to their team's workflow, Vercel reduced error margins from 5% to less than 1%, gaining faster and more accurate reporting on customer revenue.

BoostUp was up and running in just four weeks. For a system this powerful, that's impressively quick.

Paul Staelin

Chief Customer Officer

Key results

Visibility | Single Pane of Glass

BoostUp provided a single pane of glass for viewing data from three different processes managed by separate teams. By tracking custom objects, it offered visibility on target attainment previously inaccessible to sales and CS teams. This unified view significantly improved decision-making speed and efficiency across the entire customer lifecycle.

Action | Proactive Intervention

BoostUp enhanced visibility into customer interactions across all teams, enabling leadership to identify risk areas earlier and take timely action. This improved insight allows for more effective allocation of internal resources to influence outcomes, shifting from reactive to proactive account management strategies.

Accuracy | Granular Forecasting

BoostUp improved forecasting precision, allowing Vercel to predict their NDR numbers down to decimal points. This level of accuracy enabled the team to differentiate between critical percentage points in their renewals and expansion forecasts, providing leadership with highly precise projections for informed decision-making.

BoostUp took our CS forecasting from a 5% margin of error to less than 1% as we near the end of the quarter. This precision makes a huge difference in our NDR predictions.

Paul Staelin

Chief Customer Officer

"A 5% difference in NDR can make or break your quarter."

Vercel streamlined its forecasting process by unifying visibility across Sales, Renewals, and Customer Success teams. BoostUp's consolidated view enables more accurate NDR predictions, allowing leadership to make data-driven decisions and proactively manage customer relationships.

How Vercel Surpassed 105% Net Dollar Retention with BoostUp

Paul Staelin, Chief Customer Officer at Vercel, the leading front-end cloud provider, shares how BoostUp changed their approach to customer success and renewal forecasting.

Before BoostUp, Vercel struggled with manual processes using shared Google Sheets. Their forecasting involved frustrating two-way V lookups and weekly data updates, which took a lot of time and often led to mistakes. With Sales, Renewals, and CS teams handling different parts of customer relationships, they lacked a clear view across renewals, expansions, and ongoing contract payments.

...

"Without visibility, you can't take action," Staelin said, highlighting how hard it was to give accurate Net Dollar Retention (NDR) numbers to leadership on time. The team often had to wait until after the quarter ended to get exact figures.

The implementation of BoostUp was surprisingly quick. "BoostUp was up and running in just 4-6 weeks. For a system this powerful, that's impressively quick," Staelin noted. This speedy setup allowed Vercel to start seeing benefits almost immediately.

The transition to the new system was smooth. "Within a couple of weeks, our team was fully on board," Staelin said. "BoostUp's UI is intuitive and easy to navigate. It's refreshing to use a powerful tool that doesn't require a steep learning curve."

BoostUp changed things for Vercel by giving them one place to see data from the three different processes managed by separate teams. This clear view made forecasting much more accurate, cutting the margin of error from about 5% to less than 1% near the end of the quarter. "We're down to plus or minus less than a percent. It matters now for forecasting 123.7 or 124.2," Staelin explained, showing how precise their NDR predictions had become.

BoostUp also made it easier to see customer interactions across all teams. This helped leadership spot potential problems earlier and act quickly. They could now use their resources better to shape outcomes, moving from reacting to problems to preventing them. One feature Vercel found really useful was seeing all interactions between their team and the customer on one account page. This full picture of customer engagement helps leaders decide when and where to step in, making their account management and customer success strategies work better.

As Vercel continues to evolve, BoostUp is proving to be a flexible partner. "As we shift our go-to-market model, BoostUp has been flexible enough to support our changing needs," Staelin commented. Looking to the future, Vercel sees even more potential with BoostUp. "We're excited about integrating our usage data into BoostUp. It's a platform that can grow with us as our needs evolve," Staelin concluded, highlighting the ongoing value they expect to derive from the platform.

BoostUp's UI is intuitive and easy to navigate. It's refreshing to use a powerful tool that doesn't require a steep learning curve.

Paul Staelin

Chief Customer Officer