SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Why The Greatest Sales Teams Just Kill It On Dec 31. SaaStr 617: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents: Rippling VP of Sales Matt Plank on How to Ramp Up Sales in the Early Days. When Everyone Else Has Gone Home.

Scale 205

Scale Venture Capital SMB Scaling 205

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Enterprise reps tend to close more ($1m+), and SMB reps less (maybe $500k), with $750k net new bookings per year the median. That sounds high to me, but still useful to see the data: One thing I’ve never really had much data on is exactly below what level of attainment sales reps typically are at risk of losing their jobs, however.

SMB 289

SMB Sales Hiring Enterprise Metrics 289

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

LIVE from Annual Stage A Masters: How Revenue Leaders at Box, Calendly, and Lattice Created Sales Acceleration Moments The post Top SaaStr Content for the Week: Craft Ventures’ Founder & General Partner, QED’s Partner, Y Combinator’s Managing Director and lots more!

Scale 224

Scale Management SMB AI 224

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

So in theory, SMB SaaS is better than enterprise, at least 9 times out of 10: Deals close much faster. Don’t need as much sales experience on sales team. SMBs often force you to build a better product, as they lack a deployment and IT team. SMBs go out of business, and quickly. Endemic churn.

SMB 359

SMB Churn Payment Services SaaS 359

SaaStr

OCTOBER 2, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Why Your Cost of Sales Generally Doubles As You Scale. The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated).

Cloud 263

Cloud Scale SMB B2B 263

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated) The 8 Signs of a Failing Sales Rep. Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma’s VP of Sales, Scott Pugh 2.

Scale 204

Scale SMB Sales Scaling 204

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 1. BowtiedCocoon: Top SaaS SMB AEs have $125k OTEs. Don’t Hire a VP of Sales Everybody Loves. SaaStr 548: How to Build a Super High-Retention Sales Team with Twilio SVP & GM of North America Sales, Alice Katwan.

Sales Hiring 276

Sales Hiring Revenue Scale SMB 276

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The 48 Types of VP Sales. SaaStr 645: Why GUIDEcx is Betting Big on In-Person Events with SaaStr Head of Partnerships Poya Osgouei and GUIDEcx Co-Founder and VP of Sales Todd White   3. Make Deadly Sure You Hire the Right One.

AWS 194

AWS Scale Sales Hiring SMB 194

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2020

Even once you hit just $2m-$3m ARR — fairly early — the trade-offs start to become clear for startups with customers both Smaller and Larger: Small customers consume just as many sales, success, and marketing resources. 1000 small customers may be a death of small cuts to your sales and success teams. Probably more.

SMB 352

SMB Sales Hiring Marketing Enterprise 352

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2023

Well, fast forward to today and it’s truly an SMB powerhouse. How is SMB SaaS doing today? Most SMB-focused businesses need shorter CACs to make the model wok, but with 111% NRR, Bill can invest at > 12 months here. Sales & Marketing, Engineering (R&D), and G&A expenses actually all went up in 2023.

Payment Services 296

Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 296

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: As You Scale, About Half Your Team Will Be in Sales and Marketing. The 4 V’s of Sales: Volume, Value, and Velocity with Waze Head of SMB Sales Fernando Belfort and Head of Sales Enablement Kendra Wrightson.

Scale 252

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Sales Enablement 252

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Split Sales Team Managing SMB Accounts Into 2 Teams, One on New Business and One on Upsell It’s interesting to see Okta do this a bit later in life than some, but it makes a ton of sense given the current macro environment. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales. And a few other interesting learnings: #6.

Fractional VPE 224

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 224

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot, has many insights on how to serve SMB customers at scale. The Challenge of Digital Expansion for SMB. When the shift began in 2020, everyone wrote off SMBs as unprepared for the necessary changes that lie ahead. HubSpot only made direct and partner sales for the first eight or nine years.

Scale 232

Scale SMB Scaling Innovation 232

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Coupa, Marketo, And the Great Coming Rebound in SaaS. SaaStr 616: Secrets to SMB at Scale with Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan and SaaStr Founder & CEO Jason Lemkin. . 4 Recent, Very Bad, Truly Terrible Customer Success Experiences.

Scale 139

Scale Venture Capital SMB Forecasting 139

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2021

Top Blog Posts This Week: Why The Greatest Sales Teams Just Kill It On Dec 31. Why Your Cost of Sales Generally Doubles As You Scale. Top Vids This Week: How to Scale a Successful SaaS Sales Team with Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin. The State of Software Buying From SMB to Enterprise with G2’s CMO, Amanda Malko.

Scale 236

Scale SMB Scaling Retention 236

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. Shifting from an operator and loving operations and data to a sales and revenue leadership role felt like a big jump.

Scale 247

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 247

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2024

Shrav added that if you want to close bigger deals, not just Enterprise, but mid-market and SMB as well, that the moment you’re ready to Go-To-Market, you need to become compliant. “A lot of the messaging on the SMB side is around, ‘Hey, let’s get you SOC-2 compliant.’

AI 148

AI SMB compliance Sales Hiring 148

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2021

Top Blog Posts This Week: Even With Just “Pretty Good Growth”, You Can Build a Unicorn After $10m ARR. Why The Greatest Sales Teams Just Kill It On Dec 31. The State of Software Buying From SMB to Enterprise with G2’s CMO, Amanda Malko. When Everyone Else Has Gone Home. It Depends. A Tale of Two Trends.

SMB 244

SMB Cloud Trends Enterprise 244

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2023

E.g.,: CAC of < 12 months is Good-to-Great Paying sales reps 25%-30% of what they close is Good A burn ratio of 1 or less is Good These metrics do sort of work, if you have some capital to spend (i.e., SMB SaaS often has much lower than 100% NRR, especially to start. can invest in marketing that takes a little while to pay off).

SaaS Payments 211

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments SMB 211

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

60% of Asana’s customers come from self-service, 40% from sales. This is trending to 50/50 now that Asana has crossed $400m in ARR, but still a reminder a self-serve motion combined with sales jumping on the bigger deals can scale very, very far. A reminder that you don’t need to settle for sub-100% NRR from SMBs.

Scale 351

Scale SMB SaaS Scaling 351

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If a sales rep closed a deal, A customer success manager should take it over. Find a way to fund both, even with SMBs. I’d suggest a few basic thoughts and rules: If you have sales involved, then you need customer success, too. Just assign a certain amount of ARR per each SMB customer success manager.

Customer Success 329

Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 329

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2022

Driving up sales rep efficiency is key to driving up margins. SMB sales (most of Toast) is very tough to do without a highly efficient and effective sales force. Many SMB leaders have to get very, very good at outbound because of the limited deal sizes. 20% of new customers / locations come from referrals. .

SaaS Payments 296

SaaS Payments Scale SMB Payment Solutions 296

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2022

Per LinkedIn data, SMB AEs at some of the top SaaS and B2B companies have: an average base salary of $70k, an average OTE of $125k, and. SMB AE | TOP 30 Sales Organizations. Sales Organization 1 Miro 2 Okta 3 Arctic Wolf 4 Sprout Social 5 Google 6 Clickup 7 Cisco Meraki 8 Microsoft 9 Klaviyo 10 AWS 11 Rippling 12 Fivetran.

SMB 285

SMB AWS SaaS B2B 285

OPEXEngine

JUNE 11, 2020

Every few months I take a look at the top read blog posts on OPEXEngine, to make sure I have a solid understanding of the topics that you are looking for more insight on. As a result, I decided to share with you a few of our Not-to-be-Missed blogs. Best SaaS Blog Posts You Shouldn’t Miss. What are some of your faves?

SMB 59

SMB SaaS Benchmarks Subscription 59

SaaStr

JUNE 8, 2022

ARR, Zoom was an SMB powerhouse, with Enterprise growing. SMB is now saturated at $4B ARR and not growing, but Enterprise is picking up the slack and growing faster than ever. Sales & Marketing Spend Still Tiny at 25%, But Up From 20% As Zoom Goes More Enterprise. ARR … which it did in just 1 year (!!)

SMB 285

SMB Enterprise Engineering Scale 285

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

You can see here even in June ’09, the peak of that recession arguably, we doubled sales over ’08: #2. Two things though did get hit harder — SMB Churn and Upsell s. Customers kept buying more SaaS than ever, which masked all-time high churn in SMB accounts. So churn was up in ’09, but so was sales.

SMB 316

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 316

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The 10 Keys to A Successful Board Meeting: How to Make Them Great and Not Something Everyone Dreads from Ajay Agarwal, Bain Capital Partners. SaaStr 527: Acquiring SMB 10,000 Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre.

Scale 200

Scale SMB Sales Cloud 200

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2022

Calendly for example waited until about $50m ARR to build out an enteprise sales team. That journey here: Most of us don’t stay SMB forever. A few other examples: Slack started off almost 100% self-serve with no sales reps, but at $1B was 50% enterprise. PagerDuty was almost entirely SMB at IPO, at $125m in ARR.

SMB 336

SMB SaaS Enterprise Software 336

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling software to SMB merchants and outside of tech like Shopify and Toast and Monday , things are pretty, pretty good, if in some ways still harder than before. If you’re selling sales and marketing software, like Zoominfo, it can seem a lot tougher than 12-18 months ago.

Merchant Services 273

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 273

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2022

“Top 5 Ways to Scale a Sales Team with Zoom CRO Ryan Azus and SaaStr VP of Sales Bryan Elsesser “ A great deep dive on how to go more enterprise and build a sales team from Zoom’s CRO. #3 3 How to Scale Outbound Sales with the CROs of Outreach, Malwarebytes, HubSpot, Seismic.

Scale 210

Scale SMB Innovation B2B 210

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2022

Salesforce: “We’re finally seeing slowdown now in our commerce, media, telecom, and SMB segments”. But, it’s gotten a bit harder, in some segments at least: “Sales cycles can get stretched, deals are inspected by higher levels of management and all of this we began to start to see in July,” Benioff said. Breathtaking.

SMB 244

SMB Scale Cloud Trends 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2022

Average NRR at IPO is 119% — but this excludes a bunch of SMB folks who did not disclose their NRR. Folks that are very SMB with mediocre retention often don’t disclose it. Pretty consistent with what we’ve seen on our 5 Interesting Learning series , but helpful to see it distilled to one average number.

SMB 319

SMB SaaS Retention Scale 319

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2022

Dear SaaStr: At What ACV Can We Afford a Sales Team? Even with a very efficient team, it’s tough to afford a sales team much below $299 a month / $3k a year. Then, to make say $100k a year as an SMB rep, you then have to close 4x that (or more), so say $400k a year, maybe more. At least in the U.S. and Western Europe.

SMB 206

SMB Sales Pricing Revenue 206

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

How To Capture This Global SMBTech Opportunity There is massive market opportunity to sell to SMB businesses. Efficient Go To Market There are a lot of ways to GTM as an SMB. With SMB, you want hundreds or thousands of little merchants to pay you every month. Nail an efficient SMB motion before trying to move upmarket.

Scale 205

Scale SMB Merchant Services Payment Methods 205

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2021

We can see that NRR for tiny customers is probably about 100%, as it is for other SMB leaders. Again, the latest crop of Cloud IPOs shows SMBs seem to have no limit in terms of TAM, with SMB growth at Shopify and Zendesk keeping up with enterprise, and even at Asana, SMB growth is still impressive at $250m ARR.

SMB 347

SMB Enterprise Cloud Churn 347

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s the Best Way to Get Ahead in SaaS Sales? It is important to decide which of 3 life tracks you want to be on: Super-successful sales rep / individual contributor. Successful sales manager. I.e., become a VP of Sales someday. Leverage “sales” to become a founder, business owner , etc.

Sales Recruiting 253

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SMB 253

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2021

Started 10 years ago as “Freshdesk” and a low-end / SMB helpdesk to rival Zendesk, Freshworks has since expanded its product footprint across IT management (Freshservice) and CRM (Freshsales) to a stunnning 49% growth rate at $350m in ARR. Headquartered in the U.S., NRR of 118%. 49% revenue growth from 20% customer growth.

Scale 355

Scale SMB Scaling Subscription 355