Software

Announcing Sturdy Automations 💥

By
Joel Passen
March 7, 2022
•
5 min read

Whether your SaaS business serves 500 or 500,000 users, success hinges on relationships with your users. Unfortunately, listening to users isn't all that easy given the volume of everyday communications and the number of tools in play like email, ticketing systems, chat, video calls, Gong, etc. To compound matters, users are often communicating with multiple people on multiple teams. Deriving value from this data set that is practically hiding in plain sight has been, until now, nearly impossible.

Enter automation. Automation allows you to better understand your relationships with users and provide a better user experience in the process. Automation in this context is the process of using AI and robotic process automation to discover insights and trigger actions at scale.

Introducing Sturdy Automations

Take your workflows a step further with our automations! This new powerful functionality allows you to create your own automated workflows without writing a single line of code. Build out new combinations tailored to the needs of specific teams that want more information about your company’s users. Then extend workflows in the systems they work in the most. Today, Sturdy customers can begin adding custom automations in a few easy steps. 

Step 1. Choose a Signal

The first step in building your automations is to pick a signal. A signal is transmission delivered intentionally or unintentionally by a customer that conveys information, instructions, or insights. Customers send signals that help us predict churn, capture references, get in front of renewals, prioritize features, and just run our businesses better. Our customers are giving us this information every day in email, tickets, chats, calls, and more. In fact, we know that nearly 17% of all user-to-business communications contain a signal.


Step 2: Select a field

Depending on the signal you've chosen in step one, you will then select a field. A field is a set of identifiers and attributes that describe a customer. Common examples of a field may include the customer ARR, segment, territory, support level, even custom fields are pulled into Sturdy. The list of fields is populated via API from your master customer database of record like Salesforce.com. 


Step 3: Set a value

Now that the first part of our automation (signal + field) is ready, it is time to pick a value. Like fields, values are populated from your master customer database sent to Sturdy via API. For our automation, we selected the field Salesforce Account Customer Segment. The corresponding value in Salesforce is a monetary value imported from a pick list in Salesforce.com.


Step 4: Pick someone to notify

Your automation recipe is nearly complete. Now you just need to pick someone or a system to notify. To customize the exact notification that will occur, pick a notification method. Email and Slack are automatically enabled and available today. In just a few weeks, you can add Salesforce, your CSP, Jira, etc. 


What’s next. 

In the next few months, we’ll empower Sturdy users to create longer and more complex automation recipes with multi-step automations. And, later this year, our plan is to create a library of pre-prepared recipes to make it even easier to get started. 



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Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
•
5 min read

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

  • It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
  • It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
  • It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
  • It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

‍

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

‍

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
  • Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
  • Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
  • Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
  • Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
  • Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

‍

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
•
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
•
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

Schedule Demo
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