SaaStr

MAY 22, 2024

We’re almost there!! SaaStr Europa 2024 !! And half the fun is meeting new work friends and colleagues. We’ll do 100s and 100s of braindates, roundtables and more at the venue, but parties after are another great chance to meet new friends. A current list: June 3 : VIP Opening Reception at Il Bacino Across The Street From The Venue This is a great outdoor venue literally across the street from the venue.

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SaaStr

MAY 22, 2024

OK Gartner is NOT a SaaS or Cloud company. But — it’s one that is very important to many of us that sell into the enterprise. Its research and reports in enterprise software are critical. And … 92% of its revenue is from subscriptions. So while not SaaS, it is “Research as a Service” Or something like that. Given how critical its research is in selling to the enterprise, I wanted to take a look at its business.

Revenue 251

Revenue Enterprise Cloud Pricing 251

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2024

So every week, Wednesday at 10am PST, we do an amazing, free, live Workshop Wednesday with the top SaaStr speakers, from CEOs to CROs to CMOs and more. And we do live, open Q+A at the end! Sign up here. Some of the great upcoming ones include the CRO of Salesloft, G Cabane, ex-VPM at Segment, Drift and Gorgias; Logan Barlett of Redpoint Ventures, and so much more!!

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SaaStr

MAY 6, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Should Founders Do To Get Noticed By An Established Company’s M&A Team? Don’t bother too much with trying to get “corporate development” or the M&A team’s attention. That’s not their job. Probably the most important thing to understand is that in 95%+ of tech companies, the “M&A team” does not drive M&A.

Acquisition 253

Acquisition Development Investment Business 253

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Motivate a Sales Team Working Commission Only? It is really, really tough. While I am sure there are examples of “1099 reps” that have done extremely well, I haven’t seen it work in SaaS. Pay the reps at least a small base salary, with a large commission. It’s what folks are used to. Otherwise, they sort of drift off when they don’t get a big commission check the first week or two … The reality is, almost anyone working “commission only” basically tries a

Sales Recruiting 223

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 223

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2024

Dear SaaStr: what are your thoughts on incentivizing reps to handle repeat business vs focusing solely on new business with an account management team for repeats (when you are still under $10m)? At the end of the day if your product is SUPER sticky and doesn’t need a big procurement battle to renew, then just have finance or ops handle it. Basically, automate it as much as possible.

Sales 202

Sales Finance Churn Customer Success 202

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Why Do Some People Loathe Sales? People loathe sales because they are making the mistake of mapping their experiences as, essentially, Very Small Businesses, as the general experience of a corporate buyer. Yes, you and I just want to buy in one click, on a website. I rarely if ever want to talk to a salesperson. Just think about buying a car.

Sales 248

Sales Business 248

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

So it’s been a long IPO drought since HashiCorp was the last IPO of the Boom Times in December 2021. Since then, we’ve had just one — Klaviyo. But now a second SaaS security leader has filed to IPO, Rubrik. They’re still transitioning from onprem / appliciance model to cloud, which makes some of the metrics a touch confusing.

Scale 246

Scale Pricing Scaling Cloud 246

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You don’t. Instead, you drive it down. Each quarter. You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., by signing multiyear contracts). And you can drive it down. But you can’t eliminate it. My top suggestion is: Measure churn carefully, and consistently.

Churn 244

Churn Revenue Sales Business 244

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2024

So we’ve probably covered HubSpot more than any other SaaS and Cloud leader on this 5 Interesting Learnings series, but there’s a good reason for it: First, HubSpot is a lot like most of us. It sells sales, marketing, support and more tools. And second, so many of us use HubSpot. The majority of the SaaStr community uses HubSpot! So it’s very … tangible.

Scale 257

Scale Cloud Scaling Pricing 257

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Did it ever take you a year to close a sale? Absolutely. This is pretty common in the enterprise. It took me about 18 months to close Google, for example. And that was just for the initial group of users: Need identification and discussions with project manager over several months About 6 on-site meetings to review need identification and discussion with a broader group RFP Prototype of workflow Ensure integrations could be connected to custom apps Wait for new feature to ship A

Scale 259

Scale Enterprise Branding Scaling 259

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Welcome to the latest installment of our “ What’s New ” series where SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin sits down with some of the top leaders and founders in SaaS and Cloud to discuss What’s New and what should be top of mind for fellow founders. 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.

AWS 223

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 223

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2024

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Look, No VC Wants to Fund a Startup With So-So Growth. Except Maybe Your Existing Investors. In 2024, Maybe It’s Best Everyone Starts as an Individual Contributor.

AI 218

AI Customer Success Startup SaaS 218

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

So we had an action-packed 52 weeks of Workshop Wednesdays this 2023! It’s been a big hit for us with over 4,000 of you attending our Live, FREE Workshop Wednesdays every … Wednesday! Sign up here to join (and bring your questions) So which were the most popular in 2023? A few great ones to catch up on: #1. 5 Metrics Every SaaS Company Should Care About with Salesforce Ventures A hands-on, practical session on the top SaaS metrics #2. 10 Things That Always Work in SaaS Marketing wi

Scale 248

Scale SMB Generative AI AI 248

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

So is it possible to be too efficient in SaaS and Cloud? Maybe. And if so, maybe that’s Digital Ocean. If you haven’t heard of Digital Ocean, ask your developer. Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. Growth has slowed the past year, but profitability? It’s gotten crazy good.

Scale 245

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 245

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Going from nothing to $1B is a massive undertaking. Alessio Artuffo, President and COO of Docebo , shares lessons learned, misconceptions, and what he would have done if he could do it all over again. The image above is a glance at Docebo today. 70% of customers are in the Enterprise and mid-market space, and 30% are SMBs. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable.

Sales Hiring 215

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 215

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2023

Insights from SaaStr Annual from one of our top partners, IBM. To partner with SaaStr, contact us here ! …. AI adoption has grown exponentially over the past year and it has likely doubled from its more than 2.5x growth in the last few months alone. At SaaStr Annual , IBM’s VP of Software and Technology Raj Datta and Director of Startups Kylie Rutherford shared how AI is changing the game for companies of all sizes.

AI 256

AI Technology Scale Startup 256

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

So the Wall Street Journal and Bamboo HR put out a great eNPS survey of 1,600 companies, a large part of them in tech. They found: Comp is higher Work-life balance is better Benefits spending has gone up 20% More freedom And yet: Employees are the unhappiest they’d been at least since 2020, and probably longer 34% of employees now dread the start to the workday — up 11% from 2020 (!

Retention 256

Retention Data 256

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2023

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. Last week we had a great one with Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at Lacework, check it out here. This week we have Samyutha Reddy, Head of Enterprise Marketing at Jasper.ai!

Enterprise 242

Enterprise Generative AI Marketing AI 242

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What is The Best Way to Hire Your First Sales Rep? I’ll tell you the trick. It’s going to sound simple, but it isn’t, because almost everyone gets it wrong. For at least your first few reps: hire someone >>you<< would buy >>your product<< from. Period. I.e., Do not hire someone just because they worked at Facebook or Salesforce or even Datadog or Shopify in “sales”.

Sales Hiring 314

Sales Hiring Sales 314

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

Startups only have a limited amount of resources with an unlimited amount of experiments they can try. So, how do growth teams discover and prioritize those resources most effectively? In last week’s episode of Workshop Wednesday , held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST, Lavanya Shukla , VP of Growth at Weights & Biases, shared a data and experimentation-driven approach to creating exponential growth systematically.

Scale 234

Scale Scaling AI Search Social Media 234

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

So it can seem sometimes like SaaS spending has crashed recently, but really that’s not right. Every single year, SaaS spend goes up. A lot, in fact. Gartner is even predicting enterprise IT spend will accelerate in 2024. But different years and different times benefit different vendors. The past 18 months, it’s seemed like price increases and consolidation on core vendors has consumed more and more of SaaS IT budgets.

Pricing 248

Pricing Enterprise SaaS Software 248

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

Non-founder CEOs get fired all the time — and these days, are quitting more often than ever. Founder-CEOs getting fired seems rarer these days, though. Ubers and WeWorks aside. Two that would be hard to imagine happening today: Pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple. Pushing Sergey Brin + Larry Page “down” to bring in an Outside CEO. A few that we don’t hear about too much: Elon Musk pushing out the first CEO of Tesla.

Technical Review 262

Technical Review CTO SaaS Scaling 262

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What does a US-Based SaaS company Need to Know Before Expanding into Europe? Let me simplify it all to 4 simple pieces of advice: For most U.S. companies: Start marketing, supporting and talking to European customers as a distinct segment once you have 10 of them. If you can get 10, you can (of course) get 100. It’s OK to let the first 10 find you, though.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring SaaS B2B Revenue 255

SaaStr

OCTOBER 8, 2023

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: How Is AI Impacting The SaaS Landscape with a16z GP Kristina Shen What To Do if Your TAM is Too Small for VCs Making Less, But Working Less. Is It Part of the New World of SaaS?

Scale 266

Scale Sales AI Startup 266

SaaStr

OCTOBER 8, 2023

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. Last week we had a great one with Sean Falconer, Head of Marketing of Skyflow, check it out here. This week we have Frank Dale, SVP of Product at SalesLoft!

AI 237

AI Innovation Communication Revenue 237

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

So this post is, in some ways, a repeat. I’ve made this point before. But never in its own post. And I’m making it again because it’s something between all these Calendly invites, and side hustles, and more that everyone has gotten worse at. We’ve all gotten worse at getting back to prospects and customers — fast. Contact Me has its place, perhaps.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Customer Support Startup 263

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. This week we have Sarah Scharf, VP of Marketing of Vanta! #1. What’s your core stack of apps today? I’m using Asana , Google (Docs, Analytics, Slides, etc), Webflow , 6 Sense , Salesforce , Hubspot , ReferenceEdge , Slack , and probably many others. #2.

Marketing 262

Marketing Scale Mobile Branding 262

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Top 10 Mistakes Founders Make After $10m ARR How The Strange and Odd World of Financial Accounting Drives Tech Acquisitions and Investments The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated) ChartMogul: The Best in SaaS Get to $10m ARR in 3 Years.

Scale 234

Scale SMB Management AI 234

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2023

Discover how three breakout SaaS companies scaled from an idea to hundreds of employees and $1B+ valuations, all while living their values along the way. Notion COO Akshay Kothari, Motive CEO and Founder Shoaib Makani, and CEO and Co-Founder of Incredible Health Iman Abuzeid share the secrets of ensuring their company-centered values and purpose remained an anchor amidst hypergrowth.

Company Culture 220

Company Culture Scaling Interviewing Startup 220

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2023

So times haven’t been tough for everyone in SaaS the past 12-18 months. If you were in AI, if you were in hospitality, if you were in parts of e-commerce, if you were in mobile … things mostly have been Pretty Normal. But other segments have been hit with a sledgehammer. In particular, folks impacted by The Great App Layoff, where 10% or more of many orgs’ app stack was cut.

Venture Capital 229

Venture Capital AI Startup Mobile 229

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2023

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. Last week we had a great one with Carin van Vuuren up, CMO of Greenhouse, check it out here. This week we have marketing guru Sydney Sloan, previously CMO at Salesloft and now CMO at compliance leader Drata!

compliance 233

compliance Engagement Strategy Marketing 233

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How are Funds Invested by Venture Capital Firms? It varies of course, but roughly for bigger funds: Funds tend to invest in 20–40 startups over 2–4 years. Big and tiny funds may do more, but in general, this is the sweet spot. Funds use about 40% of their fund for initial, first checks They earmark another 40% for follow-on checks into later rounds in those investments over the next 2–10 years And 20% of the fund is used for fees and expenses, at least initially So a $200m VC fund m

Venture Capital 205

Venture Capital Investment Startup 205

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2023

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Irreplaceable But Toxic Employee SaaStr Annual 2023 Will Return Sept 6-8, 2023, SF Bay Area The Official Guide to SaaStr Annual 2023 Parties and Side Events!

Startup 231

Startup Scaling Metrics SaaS 231

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2023

One of our most popular additions to SaaStr content has been CRO Confidential, hosted by ex-Brex CRO and now Founders’ Fund Partner Sam Blond. We’re getting one of the most popular guests, Jameson Yung, SVP Sales at Gong together with Sam Blond to do it LIVE with tons of time for Q+A and deep dives at SaaStr Annual 2023 in SF Bay Area Sep 6-8 !!

Sales 226

Sales Enterprise Revenue Development 226

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Are the Exit Options for VCs That Fail to Make It in The VC Industry? There is probably no better business to fail at than to be a failing General Partner at a sizeable VC firm. If you fail as an associate, principal, etc. … that’s just like any other job. But a little better. You’re managed out, although usually slowly and gracefully.

Management 224

Management Business 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2023

So there are plenty of lists everywhere but Lead411 tracks a superset of folks on LinkedIn to see who has the most followers, and the most growth. We came out at #4. To me though the thing that stood out the most is how little growth there is in the very top accounts. Only 3 of the Top 10 accounts are growing, and we were the only one of the Top 5 to be growing.

Sales 220

Sales B2B 220