SaaStr

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Everyone in Your Org Should Listen to 1 Customer Call a Week. Every Week.

SaaStr

So years ago on SaaStr, I wrote a post on how everyone in your company should do customer support once a month. I learned this from Intuit, brought it back to my startup, and forced everyone to do it. Even engineering, which at first strongly resisted. More on that here: Everyone in SaaS Needs to Do Customer Support. At Least Until You Have 50-100 Employees.

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5 Interesting Learnings from Blackline at $600,000,000 in ARR

SaaStr

One of the most powerful things in SaaS is having a visionary founder-CEO. Nothing against an outside CEO. Sometimes, the time comes to hand the baton to someone else. But, but — only a founder CEO can execute a vision over 20+ years. Only a founder CEO knows the why. Only a founder CEO is always, forever, a founder. Jobs come and go. But whatever company you found, you are its founder forever.

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Dear SaaStr: When Is It Too Soon to Target Enterprise Customers in SaaS?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: When Is It Too Soon to Target Enterprise Customers in SaaS? It too soon to target enterprise clients when you can’t support their needs 90 days after you close them. It’s sort of OK in the enterprise to promise features and functionality that are sort of there … so long as you deliver them fairly promptly after the deal closes. In fact, it happens all the time.

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64% of You Are Growing Your Sales Teams in 2024

SaaStr

So layoffs still fill the headlines in 2024. Even now. I thought we’d be behind them by now, that the cuts were sort of a one-off. But now everyone is focused on getting more and more efficient. To $300k-$400k+ per employee at scale. So cuts continue. But don’t the headlines obscure what’s really happening, because they tend to shout out quieter trends.

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Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense For Your First Marketing Hire Be a Product Marketer?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense For Your First Marketing Hire Be a Product Marketer? Strong Disagree. It does not make any sense, 99 times out of 100. Generally, the CEO or another founder will hack being both the head of product, and head of product marketing, at least until $1m-$2m in ARR, often longer. You definitely need do need senior product marketing experience as you truly scale, often at least by $8m-$10m ARR.

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2024 State of SaaS: Trends and Predictions with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Recently at Pavilion’s CEO Summit, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, took the stage to do something. a little bit different. Typically on SaaStr.com, we try to focus our content on mistakes to avoid, lessons learned and how to scale faster, but for the CEO Summit, Jason addressed the audience with what’s most top of mind for him at the start of 2024. “I really think we are in a new world as managers and as leaders,” Jason said to kick things off. “2023 was nuts,

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From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Founders Fund on CRO Confidential

SaaStr

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. Together they discuss: Scaling outbound sales and SDRS (sales development representatives) from 0 to $100M and beyond How to hire the right outbound sales team The SDR interv