SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. However, even the savviest entrepreneurs might be unaware of some of the blind spots that could be costing revenue. . Pothole #1 – Legacy Sales Commission Plans May Yield Low License Utilization.

Sales Hiring 196

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 196

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B run rate business and has made up for an incredible 67% of Amazon’s operating revenue last quarter.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

Sales Hacker

APRIL 23, 2024

Before Common Room, Linda led product marketing for serverless computing at Amazon Web Services, where she saw firsthand the impact connected data and person-level insights had on accelerating product adoption, earning new customers, and expanding account revenue. Tactics for capturing untapped revenue by leveraging existing customer signals.

Sales Recruiting 85

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Management 85

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Not none, just less.

Headcount 207

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 207

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3.

Sales Recruiting 194

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 194

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Are you growing and want to scale? Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? And it’s gone much more aggressive in its sales motions.

Cloud 214

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 214

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. It requires shifts in go-to-market strategy, sales compensation, financial planning, billing, and much more. Then they tell their boss what to buy.

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 280

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 280

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

It was just a little while ago that Salesforce was doing $1 billion in ARR revenue. How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? And it’s better than that, these days.

Scale 211

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 211

Sales Hacker

MARCH 29, 2021

Partnerships are driving more leads and sales than ever before, and this is only projected to grow. PartnerOps (or ChannelOps) is newer than sales and marketing ops , but it is important to driving growth in the age of the ecosystem. The growing role of partnerships in driving revenue. Building your partner tech stack.

Payments 100

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. Marketplaces: AWS marketplace, Heroku marketplace, Salesforce marketplace.

Scale 319

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 319

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. What I do know, is if you leave this position vacant for even a month — you’re putting Second Order Revenue at risk.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 273

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” In it he argues that an eCommerce business with $10 to $20 million in revenues is not that hard to build and also not very valuable. Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

GAAP revenue in Q1 ’19) because it’s in a space filled with strong competitors. We all know this from AWS and Twilio on down, but Fastly is a visceral reminder. It’s an almost 100% enterprise play — they have 227 customers spending over $100k a year, comprising 84% of their revenues. The lesson?

Outsourced Development 215

Outsourced Development AWS Retention Enterprise 215

The Angel VC

MAY 12, 2018

We generate over 90% of our revenue from self-serve channels — users who purchase a subscription through our app or website. Before reading the S1, I didn’t know if Dropbox has become somewhat more focused on enterprise sales over the years. Revenue for 2017 was $1.107B. 3 – It’s a Mouse Hunter! . #3 3 – It’s a Mouse Hunter!

AWS 187

AWS Scale Subscription Payment Features 187

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors. Mid-stage startups.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

Angela: One of the interesting things we notice about CEOs that are able to scale really quickly is that they often sit at the intersection of a few different worlds and are able to bring these trends together. I think we were doing something like $3 billion of revenue a year in software sales.

Payment Solutions 82

Payment Solutions Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 82

CloudGeometry

MARCH 22, 2022

In this blog series, we explore how these three dimensions figure into key technical recommendations which enable scale in pursuit of SaaS business growth. The recurring revenue user model of SaaS demands deep and broad attention at every step, as it empowers you to provide continued feedback on what you are selling them.

DevOps as a Service 130

DevOps as a Service Software Delivery Well Architected Framework AWS 130

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Analyze our performance and identify problem points Highlight the best performing lead sources Run sales forecasting Facilitate strategic decision-making Run our sales process and communicate with customers In addition, ChartMogul teams use various tools to manage go-t0-market functions, including Zendesk, Customer.io, and Livestorm.

Engineering 52

Engineering K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Data AWS 52

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 8, 2023

While many gravitate towards major industry events for announcements, Joseph has a hot take (and we love a spicy take): do not announce a major new feature at a major industry conference (such as RSA Conference or AWS re:Invent). Now organizations can customize demos at scale even easier. You will get lost in the noise.

Sales Recruiting 99

Sales Recruiting Generative AI AI AWS 99

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Alex has deep experience building market-leading companies, having been a major player at QuanticMind (where he helped grow ARR by 800%) and Salesforce, where he was part of a team that doubled revenue from $1.5 growth in the company’s annual recurring revenue. Scaling a personalized buyer experience with automation.

Scale 181

Scale Marketing AWS Machine Learning 181

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2019

Sales Engagement: How the World’s Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale is a labor of love. I’m so proud to be sending it into the world at just the right time, when it can make a big difference for a lot of sales organizations. Why a Book on Sales Engagement?

Scale 58

Scale Engagement Sales AWS 58

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

tech ops, AWS, technical support). the logo stays with you, but they consume less, so their monthly recurring revenue decreases)? Annual recurring revenue (ARR)-based churn (dollars renewed divided by dollars up for renewal) does not. Q: Do you ever see gross revenue retention without contractions? A: Yes, strongly.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

Frontegg

MAY 27, 2021

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a consumer-centric scaling, conversion, and retention philosophy that uses the product itself as the primary growth driver. Also, there is less pressure on Sales. Instead you should focus on Natural Rate of Growth (NRG) to determine the percentage of recurring organic revenue. The rest is history.

Payment Solutions 98

Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments Scale 98

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs. You must build a lean, impactful team to help your business scale.

Scale 179

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 179

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 190

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 190

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

OpenView Labs

JUNE 16, 2021

As a follow-up to The Usage-Based Pricing Playbook , this article hits on why pure usage-based pricing isn’t for every product, and how not all expansion revenue is created equally. The Rise of Usage-Based Revenue. Pricing and Revenue Recognition: Two Sides of a Very Valuable Coin. Usage-Based Pricing 2.0.

Pricing 64

Pricing Scale Forecasting AWS 64

Sales Hacker

MARCH 4, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Dan Fougere , CRO of Datadog. Dan is a 20+ year veteran of technology sales and has seen 4 of his last 5 companies become unicorns. Dan talks about the key qualities of great sales leadership and how to be an effective executive in addition to being a great sales leader.

Leadership 62

Leadership Scale Sales Hiring Sales 62

OpenView Labs

MARCH 16, 2021

And compared to their peers, companies with usage-based pricing trade at a 50% revenue multiple premium and see 10 percentage points better net dollar retention rates. It more closely aligns payment with a customer’s consumption, thereby impacting cash flow and revenue recognition. Get the Usage-Based Pricing Playbook.

Pricing 52

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 52

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 17, 2019

SaaS gross margins have been getting attention lately as investors dig into SaaS cost structures and revenue growth rates going into 2020. Gross margin is simply revenue minus cost of revenue, expressed as a percent. The average revenue for this group was $171M. Have SaaS Gross Margins Improved Over Time?

Scale 40

Scale SaaS AWS Revenue 40

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 203

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 203

OPEXEngine

JUNE 29, 2020

If this is the first time you’re hearing about the Rule of 40, this financial framework helps you weigh up your revenue growth against your margins. Think of it this way: most SaaS companies have high customer acquisition costs, as you have to invest heavily in sales and marketing in order to realize high growth. Enter the Rule of 40!

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Sales Hiring Scale 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Aaron Ross | CEO @ Predictable Revenue. And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : It’s like saying, “Hey, you want a sales rep to carry 10 times the quota they do today. I mean, literally.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 205

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

One thing we’ve learned in helping our founders and operators scale their businesses is that cash is one of their most precious resources. Can also be responsible for PQLs, if there is a sales motion to upsell self-serve. Driving pipeline for sales (SLG). in order to keep a seat at the revenue table.” Efficiency.

Metrics 91

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 91