SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2024

At SaaStr’s AI Day, George Kreitler, Global IBM Embeddable AI Sales Leader, talks about the paradox of AI, three equations that relate to the world productivity and AI, a little math to help guide the next decade, top use cases, and the importance of responsible AI. That leaves one variable we can leverage — productivity growth.

AI 215

AI Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Government 215

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

With the turbulence in the market in 2023, sales cycles have only been getting longer and a lot more complicated. Sales has gotten harder, and those cycles take almost one more month to close than before. The sales cycle is even more critical now more than ever since every buyer is much more cautious about budget.

SaaS Payments 208

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Features 208

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

Who will be looking for this product? Know where you’re going for faster, more effective market movement. Lapeyre explains, “What’s interesting in the case of Gorgias is that even though it’s very high-velocity, our customers love to speak with people who understand the product.” Who is the likely and ideal buyer?

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 157

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2023

Vendr SaaS Consultant Katie Oates and Vendr Vice President of Customer Team Jeff Swank share eye-opening data and insights into buyer trends from 2023. SaaS Market Snapshot In Q1 of 2023, Vendr gathered data on SaaS Spending and yielded some pretty interesting results. Why is this? Why is this? Well, they’re sticky.” The bottom Line?

VP of Engineering 231

VP of Engineering Trends Cybersecurity Sales Hiring 231

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I quickly learned that the people in this company were incredibly motivated, smart, focused, and data driven. I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below.

Scale 254

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 254

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

A great product, while necessary, isn’t sufficient to build a market leader and eventually a public company. Companies that win a market are just as good at Go-to-Market as they are at building great products. But to develop a GTM strategy, you must have Product Market Fit. Without it, you don’t have a business.

Scale 224

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Won big in a category that’s complicated (data). Along with more PLG efficiency on low end. Zoominfo’s been hit hard by customers looking to spend less for the same data, and its sales team has focused on $100k+ deals to stablize things. It’s a product basically all of use and need.

Scale 201

Scale Cloud Scaling Subscription 201

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2023

She joined a team of two, and there was a lack of product-market fit beyond small groups of researchers. From there, the pace picked up even more, releasing ChatGPT, Whisper, and GPT4, the state-of-the-art seminal model. The reality was product market fit wasn’t quite there yet. How did they get here?

ChatGPT 227

ChatGPT AI Search Scale Sales Hiring 227

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

If you want to increase your odds of getting a deal done: Send the world’s best cold email Create the world’s best deck Have customer references ready to go Don’t play games Be clear on how much you want to raise, when, why, and where you’re at. #2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” It never works, folks! Although, it does happen.

Part-Time VPE 174

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 174

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2023

Existing customers remain happy, and if they are doing well, will buy more. And I think it’s also telling, as it summarizes what has happened all across SaaS sales in the past 24 months: Their top reps are still closing, and closing well — at 129% of quota. And their productivity is only down 1%.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Scale Cloud Sales 253

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2023

B2B buyer cycles continue to evolve, and more and more SaaS companies will embrace RevOps to drive profitability. Product-led growth (PLG) is taking center stage in response to these changing buying patterns and flipped the sales funnel we’ve come to know. Let’s dive into each of these for more context. Not anymore.

Enterprise 217

Enterprise Sales Sales Funnel Compensation 217

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2021

“[You] have to get some sort of dollar commitment for pilots in Mid Market and Enterprise deals. Usually they are a sign of a weak VP of Sales (who can’t close), or founders just trying everything possible (which isn’t all bad). to grow deal size vs. blanket price increases. Unpaid pilots almost never work.

Pricing 278

Pricing Scale Enterprise Onboarding 278

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Waze sales executives Fernando Belfort , Head of SMB Sales, and Kendra Wrightson , Head of Sales Enablement, discuss optimizing sales processes for four essential data points: value, variety, volume, and velocity. You’re not the only SMB asking this question as you navigate perpetual pitches, closing clients, and growth. .

Scale 219

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 219

SaaStr

APRIL 29, 2021

Well, there are probably at least 3 core true-isms with customer buying: For a product much more than $299 a month, most prospects want to talk to someone before they buy. For almost any product that requires real business process change, most prospects will want to talk to someone before they buy. So for those products: Yes.

Scale 263

Scale Scaling Enterprise Pricing 263

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Deal With Investors That are Unhappy With The Company? And show them an honest, data-driven path to a better future. And founders tend to hide things more when times are tougher. So … share more: Make sure you send a monthly investor update out ASAP after the month ends. And speak with data.

Finance 248

Finance Data 248

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

” — Tyler Hogge, SVP Product, Divvy. You just close more, and churn less, and upsell more, when you show up. “For large enterprise customers, your stakeholder map is almost always too small” — Alex Farmer, VP CS, Cognite Data. . Never let your top customer be more than 10% of rev 2.

CTO Hire 268

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 268

SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2022

Or when you don’t end up having the product they actually need. Just ask if they need more data, more information, more help, more time. Time is bad for almost all deals in sales. You can’t get upset when you miss the plan in sales if there aren’t enough deals in flight.

Startup 286

Startup Investment Sales Data 286

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

What you actually end up with is quite an unprofitable business operating with -25% operating margin despite having a revenue scale of more than $600M. A low magic number diminishes your ability to drive profits and growth and makes the path to profitability that much more challenging. What does this mean?

VP of Engineering 213

VP of Engineering Scale Marketing Benchmarks 213

User Pilot

DECEMBER 10, 2023

Are you a product-led or sales-led kind of SaaS? Or perhaps you’ve managed to marry the two strategies and embraced product-led sales? If not, but you’d like to learn more, then why not watch the talk that Ben Williams , known as the Product-Led Geek, delivered at the recent Product Drive hosted by Userpilot?

Scale 104

Scale Sales Software Review Retention 104

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2023

G2 CEO Godard Abel deep dives into his original vision for G2, going multi-product, selling with multiple sales teams, demand gen spend, and why AI is the most important thing right now. How do I discover the SaaS products I need? They’ve been in the game for a while, so the product works. All of their data is in Snowflake.

AI Search 188

AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 188

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

Instead, they approached it more strategically. Once they moved beyond warm intros and connections, they moved on to more creative outbound programs. People with connections to the company also downloaded white papers and other things more likely to work than blasting the universe. Asked for intros to portfolio companies.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 239

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

The other day I went to buy a SaaS product. I know this SaaS product well, and have used it for years. I told him I had no budget, but I’d used the product for years and just wanted a trial, and absent that, I was happy to buy today and just get my data in that minute. I was finally ready to buy.

Scale 306

Scale Engineering Enterprise Business Model 306

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2020

But one thing I do know: the best SaaS companies will come out of this time with the strongest products. The vast majority aren’t going anywhere, and may even upgrade to more seats. Even if the leads that haven’t closed yet are slowing way down. It’s much more than a summary page.

SMB 332

SMB Enterprise Innovation Communication 332

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

There is a close parallel between how the internet disrupted society and software and how AI will, too. The premise is that big companies ride the iterative disruptive wave and get so big that they have to sell big products for big profits. Take another three years to test the next market or product and get to $50M.

AI 246

AI Technical Review Startup Management 246

User Pilot

APRIL 21, 2024

Wondering how to build a conversion path for your SaaS product or e-commerce site? From the moment they learn about the product until they complete a desired action, like a demo booking, and beyond. Focus on their JTBDs, pain points , and gains from using your product. Userpilot is a product growth platform.

SaaS Payments 93

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 93

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2022

A ways back, a Naval post on Twitter had my reflecting on the top advice I’d give to my younger CEO self: I missed one of the key Top 10 points — I ran out of 240 characters on Twitter), but thought it might be worth breaking them down in more detail on SaaStr below: 1. But as part of the deal with the VCs, I took stock instead.

Scale 360

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Startup 360

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

And how to do it with available product analytics solutions? TL;DR Marketing funnel analysis is the process of evaluating how customers progress from the moment they learn about your product til they convert to paid accounts , and beyond. Start building your marketing conversion funnels but creating all product user personas.

Marketing 102

Marketing Sales Funnel Forecasting Customer Lifetime Value 102

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

In the new episode, Jason sits down with Drata CMO Sydney Sloan to talk about what’s new at Drata, the role of CMO at Drata vs. Salesloft, partner marketing, customer marketing, and more. Sydney pulled someone from Salesloft with a product marketing background who understands operations, running programs, and being strategic.

AWS 199

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 199

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Cyvatar is a technology-enabled cyber security as a service (CSaaS) provider disrupting a $150 billion industry by introducing and delivering smarter, measurable managed security subscriptions to help you achieve compliance and security faster and more efficiently.

Banking 220

Banking Payment Features Venture Capital Subscription 220

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2023

Secret #1: ‘Build it, and customers will come in’ is not a great approach Early in Cacioppo’s career, she built multiple products with little to no user insights. Even though she thought they were brilliant, most of the products didn’t get the attention of users. Funding can’t create customer demand. Cash is not always king.

Strategy 207

Strategy Scale Sales Hiring Startup 207

Totango

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

A lifestyle maven and a gangster rapper turn an unexpected friendship into lucrative television shows and brand deals. You want that customer to stay with you a long time and potentially become a repeat buyer or an advocate to bring more prospects into the top of your funnel.”

Scale 91

Scale Customer Lifetime Value Acquisition Customer Success 91

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

Extrapolating a bit, ZoomInfo today is probably at close to a $1B ARR run rate! (We’ll ZoomInfo is a sort of quiet leader in SaaS data. ZoomInfo has gotten stronger and stronger in $100k+ deals over the years, and this is now their core. Selling data really works at scale, as ZoomInfo shows.

Scale 224

Scale Acquisition B2B Engineering 224

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. We did a great session at the SaaStr Annual with CEOs and ex-SVP Partnerships at Box on just this topic: 3/ Getting on more jets when we can.

Part-Time VPE 257

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 257

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2021

Many founders are design, product, or engineering-focused and have never hired for sales, marketing, or revenue operations. A recent post by SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin got me thinking more about this common blind spot for the founders of SaaS startups. It also gives you apples to apples to compare in terms of productivity. .

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Sales 171

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

Someone could present the data here, stand up, and say we had a good quarter. Does it mean closing all deals in the pipeline this quarter? More on that one here. #9: Maybe the product isn’t working, so agents are getting more calls. The data will eventually confess anything if we’re determined enough.

Metrics 287

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 287

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2021

It may be X months down the road, once you close a few deals of large enough size ($x,000 ACV) to justify hiring a sales rep. The rep will blame you, your crappy product, your crappy company, your crappy lack of marketing. Does the product sell itself? One, super smart, super eloquent, who explained our product well.

Sales Hiring 323

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Enterprise 323

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

Spending more than 2 slides on “the industry”. If the deal really is closing Friday, then, great be aggressive and transparent. Show me a product I want to invest in — I’m in. Not speaking with data. Always speak with data, if data is there. If it sells the whole deal. Make it easy on them.

Consulting 285

Consulting Investment Cloud Data 285