SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2024

And if it helps you survive to win another day, do it. They are expecting 10x-100x returns, even if they haven’t officially converted to equity yet. 2021: “Just raise the extra capital! We don’t need it, but at that price — it’s basically free” 2024: “Free? What were we thinking. Other are deeply struggling. We’ll get to that next.

Finance 223

Finance Payment Solutions Payments Pricing 223

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

That info could be: high volumes of text like blogs contracts how to respond to a customer images video We’re in the early innings of what it means to generate or have GenAI. How is AI going to impact the software and SaaS landscape of the next couple of years and also the next 5-10 years? There’s never been a better time to build a company.

AI 254

AI Generative AI Venture Capital SaaS 254

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2023

As buyers grapple with expanding technology, higher prices, and a need for efficiency, SaaS companies need to deliver what their audience is looking for to win in the market. 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. Why is this?

VP of Engineering 240

VP of Engineering Trends Cybersecurity Sales Hiring 240

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

First, importantly — first vendors that didn’t win that big budget for the year often still have champions. Second, the winning initiatives need attached solutions to make them work. Fourth, champion change can magically make budget available you weren’t expecting — even in struggling prospects and customers.

Sales Recruiting 254

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 254

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2020

We’ll dribble out the sessions on our podcast, the blog and YouTube, but for now let’s also highlight the Top 5 most upvoted session. This was even better than I expected. SaaStrScale.com 2020 was a big hit! Thank you to the 20,000+ that attended and tuned in! On how to recruit in the early days, when not everyone gets it.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SMB 174

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2022

The demographic, environmental, and behavioral attributes of companies you expect to be your most valuable customers make up your ideal client profile (ICP). The demographic, environmental, and behavioral attributes of companies you expect to be your most valuable customers make up your ideal client profile (ICP).

Payments 186

Payments Payment Methods Embedded Payments Scale 186

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Many Hours Per Week Do VCs Expect Founders to Work? So what is important is not the hours worked, but the signals that you are doing everything possible to win. Most investors don’t care how many hours you work, per se … all they care about is that you get it done. Grow the company, hit the plan, etc.

Banking 231

Banking Investment Communication Marketing 231

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

How to Approach the Expectation of Tracking Effort Gong is unique because they have a lot of visibility. The minute you walk through the door, you’re expected to fight and push. The minute you walk through the door, you’re expected to fight and push. What setting expectations for effort might look like?

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 199

Totango

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

The elusive C-suite is a powerful and exciting place to be. It’s a difficult level to reach and perhaps even more difficult to remain at – especially in the role of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). According to research by SpencerStuart , CMOs have the highest turnover rate in the C-suite, remaining in the role for only 3.3 years on average.

Leadership 97

Leadership Investment Branding Customer Success 97

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

They see it as a key differentiator to win as you scale. It's not just FTX. Every VC I catch up with has a quiet story of fraud in their portfolio. Numbers that were sort of made up usually. Most won't ever be discussed or end up public. — Jason Be Kind Lemkin (@jasonlk) November 10, 2022. The main issue is price. The Googlers.

Scale 339

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 339

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 248

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Before conducting the survey this year, the expectation was that the napkin could look like this… “If you’re in AI, we’d give you money at any valuation. Given the massive downturn that started 18 months ago, many SaaS founders are nervous about what it takes to raise capital in SaaS in 2023 / 2024. And if not, probably difficult,” says Janz.

AI 194

AI Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Strategy 194

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2024

They also actively encourage users to trial competitive apps either alongside or directly against their product and have found success in winning these trails. When you know the value you have to offer, that’s how you win. How do you sell against the competition or become a market leader in a very crowded space? How do you do that?

Scale 190

Scale Sales Hiring Pricing AI 190

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

Frictionless sign-ups and proactive support are now essential for winning over users. 14 user behavior trends for 2024 To keep your SaaS platform engaging and attractive for users, it’s important to meet user expectations. Users expect friction-less sign-up processes Nothing puts users off more than seeing a long sign-up form.

SaaS Payments 102

SaaS Payments Trends Payment Solutions Payment Methods 102

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

We’ve talked about Toast a bit here on SaaStr – most recently we wrote up the 5 Interesting Learnings from Toast at $1.1B Toast is the latest SaaS leader to get much more efficient in the past 12-18 months, along with monday.com, HubSpot, MongoDB, and many others. Jonathan joined Toast as the SVP of Sales in 2017. and across the globe.

Payment Methods 193

Payment Methods Acquisition Scale Payments 193

SaaStr

OCTOBER 7, 2022

With public market valuations down more than 50%, it’s very hard to raise a unicorn round in SaaS, and, thus, very hard to raise massive amounts of capital to play to win. The public markets still expect you to ultimately grow 40% or more at $150m-$200m ARR (or more) when you IPO. — Sal Rodriguez (@sal19) October 6, 2022.

Finance 252

Finance Software Investment Strategy 252

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2023

Hypergrowth in today’s highly competitive and budget-constrained SaaS world may be less frequent now, but Vanta, the software tool empowering security companies to achieve compliance and manage risk, has defied the odds. With a multi-billion dollar valuation and a trajectory to double growth annually, Vanta is seizing the spotlight.

Strategy 216

Strategy Scale Sales Hiring Startup 216

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

At a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday, he shared a behind-the-scenes look into what this process looks like and five key takeaways for other founders who are want an inside look the process. But then growth flatlined for a couple of years, and it was time to talk about selling. It’s about the $50-$500M bread-and-butter, classic startup exit.

Underperforming Technical Team 164

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 164

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. You can’t expect epic improvement, but if you don’t see it in ONE sales cycle or less, you’ve made a mis-hire and need to course-correct. Bad advice is everywhere these days. Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS.

Part-Time VPE 181

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 181

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2020

I recently put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn on folks’ top tip to take friction out of their sales processes. I put together an excerpt video here of a few of my thoughts … but even better, we got great #1 top ideas from everyone from the GM of Shopify Plus to the CRO at Brex. “Presumptive close in a transactional sale. “At

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development Technical Review 337

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2021

Are you both willing to do what it takes to win? And expect more from each other. And expect more from each other. Q: What are the qualities of a good co-founder? Life hack: partner with someone better than you that still finds you charming. You spend all your time together. Are you both 100% all-in? Someone has to sell.

Sales Recruiting 273

Sales Recruiting Engineering Product Marketing Marketing 273

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 271

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 271

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2020

small, medium, and large) and through multiple processes (in-bound, out-bound, upsell, channel, partner) … you can’t expect your VP of Sales to be perfect at everything. And dealing with the same set of issues, and honing the answers, and winning. And winning fast. From Stretch VPs to stage-appropriate VPs.

Sales Hiring 304

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Customer Success 304

Totango

JANUARY 22, 2024

Most expect to see CS emerging as a growth engine. We polled our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) at the end of last year to gauge which way they saw the pendulum shifting for CS in 2024. Additionally, our CAB members are buzzing about AI. Retention is the new acquisition. Retention is the new acquisition.

Customer Success 94

Customer Success Generative AI AI Scale 94

Totango

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

This is why we are so proud to have received multiple leadership awards from TrustRadius in the customer success category, including: TrustRadius Best Relationship: Highlights companies that follow through on their sales and marketing promises, deliver on implementation expectations, and identify customers who would buy again.

Customer Success 112

Customer Success Software Review Technical Review Enterprise 112

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

Perhaps the one exception is when they are silly enough to try to win the meaningless Inc. The second SaaStr post ever, way back in late 2012, was “ Everybody Lies: SaaS Revenues in the Inc. 5000 “ It was a fun one, analyzing the only public source of data on just how much ARR a lot of SaaS companies had. generation.

SaaS 271

SaaS Technical Review Scaling Software Review 271

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2023

These methods are hit or miss—they’ll produce short-term wins but can’t be replicated on higher levels. To do this, adopt the formula for designing delight, which is actual experience minus user expectation. These experiences don’t just happen when customers unlock your product’s value without jumping through several hoops.

Growth Hacking 214

Growth Hacking Social Media SaaS Business 214

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Don’t expect miracles, but you should see some improvement. There is a lot more elasticity in pricing than one might expect. We’ve recently been posting polls on SaaStr’s LinkedIn account to get a feel for what SaaS companies are doing in the current environment. More Than a Good Rep. #2.

Sales Recruiting 212

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 212

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2022

Investors will take notice, and you are more likely to win in a competitive environment. Conversations about the state of the SaaS market in 2022 are everywhere, and it can seem overwhelming for entrepreneurs and business leaders to make sense of everything. Says Blond, “Unit economics broadly matter much more today.

Sales Recruiting 204

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 204

Totango

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

GRR provides a long-term outlook on how much revenue you can expect to make without assuming your customers increase their spending. To make it to the Super Bowl, a football team must have two things: a strong defense and a strategic offense. What is gross retention? Calculate it!

Retention 108

Retention Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Churn 108

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2022

At an almost $6B market cap, it’s a huge win, with a strong multiple at $400m ARR, growing a stunning 51%. Commercial open source in many ways is a classic PLG strategy, and one might expect lower sales and marketing costs at COSS leaders. The product is there, the market is strong, the founders and CEO are great.

Scale 240

Scale Cloud Scaling Revenue 240

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2023

Winning a deal vs. a competitor by getting the prospect to worry about the competitor. So just a few thoughts here: Expect FUD and Lies from the Competition. So one of the parts of sales that will drive you a bit nuts as a founder is FUD and Counter-FUD. What’s FUD, if you haven’t heard the term before?

Sales 203

Sales SaaS 203

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

The CMO and team at Algolia did a session with me a while back on the top mistakes founders make in the early days. While some of it was familiar territory, I thought it was a pretty fun discussion with a different perspective in many cases than we’ve touched on before. On finding product-market fit in the early stages. And then boom!”

Scale 232

Scale Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Scaling 232

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2020

And here, it’s entirely possible to be a Director of Sales or even beyond in a large tech company without ever building a team yourself, without winning a tough bake-off, and without even ever visiting many companies. A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 363

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Being open about mistakes helps others see that you can win at business while still being human-first. In leadership, there’s a great expression that “to those who much is given, much is expected.” At Gainsight, you’re expected to do a lot, and it’s hard. For leaders, be clear about expectations. Or are the most critical?

Scale 236

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 236

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 12, 2023

Outside of the company wins she’s starting to see just a year in, Allison believes the skills, knowledge, and relationships she’s gained along the way will add value to her life in so many ways. Allison Ullo’s life took a significant turn almost a decade ago when she decided to stop consuming caffeine.

Sales Hiring 108

Sales Hiring Business Scale Consulting 108

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

It’s great teams that win. It forces you to have the tough conversation up front * It protects the ones that stay from the ones that quit * It better aligns expectations. My top list: Don’t start a startup if the founders aren’t 100% aligned, especially on how committed you all are. Having a long vesting schedule for the co-founders.

Scale 256

Scale Startup Scaling Business 256