SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CMO of Google Cloud, Alison Wagonfeld. They also compete with Microsoft in a big way.

Cloud 230

Cloud Scale AWS AI 230

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does it get easier or harder to scale SaaS as your company grows? Generally, it gets easier to grow at a “good”/modest rate at you scale, but harder to grow at an outsize rate. And that brand generates leads organically, and fairly low-cost leads. Renewals make things more efficient.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 192

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. More on that here. You have to hand in-bound folks leads. They are no good at generating them. A bit more here. Those companies are way, way too big.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are some of the “ultimate sins” in marketing and sales and success in SaaS in the early stages? A bit more here. You have to hand in-bound folks leads. They are no good at generating them. Those companies are way, way too big. With way too strong processes and systems in place.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Can You Grow a SaaS Startup Without Spending a Ton on Sales and Marketing? A few examples: Mailchimp was bootstrapped to $1,000,000,000 in ARR Qualtrics was bootstrapped to a $6B acquisition Atlassian was bootstrapped all the way to … today $30B+ Veeva is very enterprise but only spent ~$3m in true venture capital.

Scale 213

Scale Venture Capital Startup Marketing 213

Sales Hacker

JUNE 23, 2021

There’s more sales content than ever before – how do you sort through the noise? Here are the seven best sales blogs (and five bonus sales newsletters!) Over 2 million annual visitors and more than 18,000 community members contribute with the aim to help all sales pros succeed – from brand new SDRs to the head of RevOps.

Sales 79

Sales Technical Review Outbound Sales Team Interviewing 79

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

In this post , SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shared five super simple ways to generate more leads and grow your company that always work. Now, he has five more marketing strategies that are sure to generate more leads if done right. Pick one or two and do them well. It’s too much.

Outsourcing Services 190

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 190

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want.

Scale 230

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 230

Incredo

JANUARY 21, 2020

Conversational marketing has conquered the SaaS industry long ago. Let’s start with a conversational marketing definition and see what lies under it. “ Conversational marketing is the new way businesses connect with people on their website. “ Conversational marketing is the new way businesses connect with people on their website.

Marketing 313

Marketing SaaS Social Media Customer Support 313

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2021

Many events like Coachella, Dreamforce, SaaStr Annual and more haven’t been produced since 2019 (!). We’ll have more on SaaStr Annual 2021 here soon. SEMA and other more traditional events are already on. But once I started doing SaaS and dealing with much smaller deal sizes, I wasn’t sure.

Cloud 277

Cloud Marketing Enterprise Pricing 277

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Characteristics of a Good SaaS Product? A good SaaS product is one that after 18–24 months at least, propagates enough of its own leads to create a self-sustaining business. If you aren’t, you probably don’t have true product-market fit. You may be close, but not there yet.

SaaS 199

SaaS Product Marketing Customer Success Marketing 199

User Pilot

APRIL 21, 2024

Wondering how to build a conversion path for your SaaS product or e-commerce site? Book the demo to find out more! A well-designed conversion path makes the buyer’s journey more intuitive. How to create an effective conversion path Ready to build a successful conversion path for your SaaS product? Let’s get to it!

SaaS Payments 97

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 97

Subscription Flow

APRIL 18, 2024

Keeping this new development in the SaaS world in mind, we will be dividing the blog into 2 sections to better help you understand subscriber engagement in general, and then explore ways in which you can devise/tweak your own customer engagement models to increase your business’s overall revenue.

Engagement 94

Engagement Customer Lifetime Value Revenue Subscription 94

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Sales-assisted, product-led growth strategies that close Enterprise leads. For context to kick us off, some of the top SaaS companies have 41% lower CAC than the rest. Another example, for them, would be when a company starts using another tool in the eComm SaaS world, either competitive or complementary to their product.

Scale 216

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 216

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2020

Q: What’s the best way to get more leads right now? What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. A handful of real, qualified leads you can add to the team’s pipeline — next month. Ask your customers.

Underperforming Technical Team 165

Underperforming Technical Team Content Marketing Innovation Investment 165

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Check out the session here: Algolia also summarized their Top 5 take-aways here , and below: Most SaaS founders start out the same way— armed with ample expertise of the technical details that go into a product and with limited experience of other aspects of scaling, such as sales. On finding product-market fit in the early stages.

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Scaling 227

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2024

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. We often start speaking with a startup when they have GTM questions rather than seeking capital which then leads to an investment opportunity over time. Check that out here.

Technical Review 265

Technical Review Scale Management Sales Hiring 265

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, and Valuations – understanding market trends and investment patterns is critical. We’ll also examine how public markets currently influence the SaaS industry and unpack the elevated CIOs’ role in budgeting for SaaS products.

Venture Capital 206

Venture Capital Scale Technical Review Software Review 206

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

While the concept may sound old hat to those that have been in the software business for a long time, in SaaS in particular, very little tools, processes, and software are applied to marketing to customers after they are closed. But Customer Success in many ways has been defined as an extension of Sales. Or even longer.

Marketing 246

Marketing Retention Customer Success Content Marketing 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2022

With the exact same / equal leads. And you may even end up with a rep that makes 8x or more than the average, if they can close just a ton of revenue. Especially when leads are relatively scarce and precious. A great rep not only closes a higher % of deals, but she also tends to generate more revenue per lead.

Enterprise 268

Enterprise Branding Revenue Sales 268

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital and 25-year C-level veteran, shares the top 14 signs that you have a SaaS metrics problem, the five reasons those symptoms exist, and a SaaS metrics maturity model with five layers to help you move the needle at every stage. The 15 Types of Misuse and Abuse of SaaS Metrics #1: Bludgeoning.

Metrics 288

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 288

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Does a Typical Day Look like for an Account Executive at a SaaS Startup With Under $1m ARR? Whichever founder was doing sales, likely thinks that may be the way to do sales going forward. You may well not have enough leads to hit quota. You’ll have to find a way to get more leads on your own.

Startup 211

Startup SaaS Sales Hiring Sales 211

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. The days of working a little for big returns are behind us in the Boom of ‘21, so what can you do to start hitting revenue targets? #1: This job isn’t for everyone.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 194

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In SaaS, we talk a lot about hyper-growth, uber-successful companies, but many founders, including hyper-growth founders, make mistakes over and over. Maybe you feel SaaS is crushing it this year, but it’s not easy for a lot of folks. You have to lead the team, live up to the values, hit quotas and targets, and make money.

Scale 228

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

But I thought I’d take a stab at the Top 10 Pieces of Classic SaaS Advice … that, in my experience at least, are usually Just Plain Wrong. We recently did a New New in Venture event and I asked the question of many top VCs including David Sacks, Keith Rabois, Aileen Lee and more. More on that here. Find a way.

Part-Time VPE 289

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 289

User Pilot

JUNE 13, 2022

Are you looking for the best SaaS blogs and influencers to follow in 2022? We curated a list of the best SaaS blogs and influencers to help you learn more about SaaS and increase your revenue. We covered the best blogs on SaaS growth, product marketing , UX analytics, venture capital, and sales.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital SaaS Data Scale 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Often the Great Guy from Salesforce or Shopify or ServiceNow or LinkedIn or whatever other leading SaaS company. Success has many fathers, and many more hangers-on. Or at least generate the lead? Only money.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 273

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2021

For sure this is true in SaaS. If you have mid-market customers but not many in the enterprise or low-end, focus there even more this year. And yet … What tends to happen for most SaaS businesses even as early as $2m ARR or so, is that they get a core engine that’s working. SaaS Compounds (more on that here ).

Sales Hiring 323

Sales Hiring SaaS Outbound Sales Team Customer Success 323

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 10 worst pieces of SaaS advice, excuses, and mistakes founders make, and what to do instead. #1 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” So no, more time does not make a VP of Sales better.

Part-Time VPE 174

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 174

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

While the marketing funnel analysis assesses how well you attract customers , the sales funnel analysis focuses on nurturing marketing-qualified leads and closing deals. Techniques like heatmap analysis or surveys can help you gather more insights about what happens at each stage of the funnel for better-informed decision-making.

Marketing 102

Marketing Sales Funnel Forecasting Customer Lifetime Value 102

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

General Partner Doug Pepper and General Partner and Head of Analytics at ICONIQ Growth, Christine Edmonds, share the art and science of scaling GTM at this year’s SaaStr Annual. A great product, while necessary, isn’t sufficient to build a market leader and eventually a public company. Without it, you don’t have a business.

Scale 224

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

But as time has gone by, I’ve realized in SaaS mediocre VPs do one thing even worse than hire a bunch of B players under them (that likely will quit or need to be managed out later): -> They spend all the money. When mediocre VPs fall behind their plan: A mediocre VP of Sales tries to hire their way out of a miss.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Churn Customer Success Sales 298

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

It’s just at the edge of doing so right now: This despite the fact that LinkedIn in many ways is a partial “walled garden” LinkedIn partially (though not fully) discourages linking to third party websites by giving more of an algorithmic push to content that doesn’t contain links, etc. What about quality?

Communication 223

Communication B2B Engagement Branding 223

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2021

Although, in consultations with founders of many of these SaaS companies, I’m often caught by surprise to learn that they’ve made upward of a dozen hires, but zero are for customer-facing roles. There’s not a demand generation or revenue-related role in sight. . In his piece, Jason recommends hiring VPs in a certain order.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Sales 171

Buffer Resources

APRIL 22, 2024

Research has found that 44% of marketers have generated leads through LinkedIn, 39% through Facebook, and 30% through Twitter. I like to recommend two things for solopreneurs who are just getting started: Cast your net wide : Posting on multiple platforms is a great way to see what sticks. Enter social media.

Social Media 92

Social Media Scale Growth Hacking Headcount 92

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Catch up on part one here , where he deep dives into what he really thinks about AI, Sales and lead Gen for SaaS in 2024. Jason re-takes the stage in Part 2 of the series to answer questions about the right time is to invest in a new product line, building vertical vs. horizontal, multiples in 2024, and much more. They don’t.

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Generative AI 234

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2023

Don’t De-Bootstrap Too Quickly For most normal SaaS companies, when they hit $10M ARR and if their margins are 80 or 90 for real software, it means they’re getting $10M of funding each year, especially if they’re going from $10M to $15M to $22M to $30M. The faster you’re growing, the more you get it wrong. It’s unfortunate but true.

Sales Hiring 226

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success SaaS 226