SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 182

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 182

CustomerSuccessBox

JUNE 7, 2022

The capacity to forecast that a specific customer is at a high risk of churning while there is still time to do something about it is a major new possible revenue generator for any company. We, at CustomerSuccessBox , spoke to some of the Top Customer Success Influencers to know how they manage churn! Out of Business.

Churn 52

Churn Management Retention Customer Success 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2020

There’s a set of questions I get asked all the time: Should you pay sales reps on renewals? Should you pay sales reps on upsells a long time down the road? Should you pay sales reps on … ? I am a huge proponent of paying sales professionals well. for the sales team. Pay closers on closing. Not renewing.

Scale 228

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Scaling 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale 217

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 217

ChurnZero

MAY 31, 2019

Churn Monster #12: Championless. It’s now been a full year since we first launched the churn monster blog series, can you believe it? Over the course of the past year we have featured a new churn monster each month and taken a look at a life-like scenario involving that churn monster (i.e. Upcoming Webinar.

Churn 75

Churn Customer Success Trends Retention 75

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

A CMO might come in saying they generated 1200 MQLs last quarter, yet sales feel like they’re starving. For example, if you ask your VP sales for their commit and they say “$4.3M How you really want your VP Sales to answer (and the answer you want to receive) should be the answer/number that you have a 90% confidence level in.

Metrics 287

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 287

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 28, 2019

A great partnership between product and sales needs to be based on shared definitions of success and an agreed upon process to collaborate. Product teams that don’t understand the first list will never connect with sales. Sales teams that don’t understand the second list will never connect with product.

Sales 193

Sales Software Review Consulting Leadership 193

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 1, 2018

Churn… ya boring. I’m so over talking about churn and if you really understand what Customer Success is all about , you should be, too. Churn is so easy to get rid of… you just have to do five simple things. Once churn is a non-issue, you can focus on growth. You can’t hack churn away.

Churn 129

Churn Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Customer Success 129

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

Sales Recruiting 323

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 323

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2022

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. 10 Tips: CMO + CRO = Love… Building Lasting Leadership with Gusto’s CRO Tolithia Kornweibel. Are You Fundable in 2022? Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

Sales Hiring 197

Sales Hiring Leadership Innovation Retention 197

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. Turning over a sales team is very hard on the organization. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in gold. They have low attrition.

Sales Hiring 309

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 309

User Pilot

DECEMBER 10, 2023

Are you a product-led or sales-led kind of SaaS? Or perhaps you’ve managed to marry the two strategies and embraced product-led sales? Ben Williams talk on product-led sales. Ben Williams talk on product-led sales. In the sales-led model (SLG) , it’s the sales reps who nurture leads and close deals.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Software Review Retention 103

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Building revenue operations to support sales Deel had onboarded nearly 100 clients, reports showed good traction, and it was time to leverage this opportunity. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up. Support sales early.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 219

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2020

This is important to project churn rates, assess timing of software payments, and estimate the impact on cash flows/burn. It might be worth reverting to an earlier stage of the 4 sales commission structures. Alternatively, it might be worth moving sales teams to monthly goals or management by objectives (MBO). Sixth, leadership.

Startup 209

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods 209

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 13, 2020

Sure, customer success (CS) teams are on the front lines of preventing churn. Here are 8 things that can really move the needle on churn: 1. Target your sales and marketing to the right ideal customer profile (ICP) rather than attempt to sell to everyone and their brother. Selling to the right customer.

Churn 57

Churn Customer Success Advertising Retention 57

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2024

But … but: A sales rep that can’t hit quota in a few months = cash drain. A customer success team that can’t drive down churn and drive up NPS = cash drain. You don’t need ROI in sixty minutes, you can be a little patient in getting the returns. You gotta move on. They spend so much on stuff that doesn’t really work.

Sales Hiring 187

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Venture Capital 187

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2020

.” But the bad news is, many can’t really do the job a start-up needs at a leadership level. In particular, being an individual contributor customer success professional does not always breed leadership. How do you think Customer Success should work with the Sales and Product teams?

Customer Success 255

Customer Success Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 255

ChurnZero

MARCH 20, 2023

We put these two questions to respondents in our most recent 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study published late last year. GRR excludes expansion revenue which can mask churn and the true performance of the Customer Success team. said sales; 8.9% said sales; 20.3% Who owns customer renewals? said other. said other.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Management Sales Leadership 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 20, 2023

We put these two questions to respondents in our most recent 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study published late last year. GRR excludes expansion revenue which can mask churn and the true performance of the Customer Success team. said sales; 8.9% said sales; 20.3% Who owns customer renewals? said other. said other.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Management Sales Leadership 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

By going upmarket, you can land bigger deals with more opportunities to upsell and lower churn. As Managing Director of Salesforce Ventures, Nowi Kallen , shared at last week’s Workshop Wednesday, there are five main challenges of moving upmarket and tips to follow if you want to succeed at Enterprise sales in today’s macro environment.

Scale 182

Scale Enterprise readiness compliance Enterprise 182

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

But what I learned, after years of procrastinating on tough moves for our leadership team, is that the leaders’ teams suffer greatly through that inaction. Instead, I set a big sales number for each of those years (based upon the biggest trap ever—a sales rep capacity model) and totally missed each time! And guess what?

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 255

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv. Have a bias toward “yes”.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In leadership, there’s a great expression that “to those who much is given, much is expected.” This is a common mistake founders make — getting a new Head of X when you get to a certain point in business, missing a sales number, the product isn’t what you want, there’s too much churn, etc. Your average sales quota is $1M.

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 227

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2022

Many founders find themselves confident in one area of their business, whether it be the product, customer success, or, in Schuck’s case, sales. Early in the company’s life, he was more willing to allocate funds to the sales team than to any other department. Mistake #8: The Power of Positive Thinking . Key Takeaways.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Acquisition Investment Leadership 219

Frontegg

MARCH 17, 2022

But what about the traditional Sales-Led Growth? Let’s dive into the Product-Led vs Sales-Led comparison and learn about the main differences. What is Sales-Led Growth? Sales-Led Growth is all about marketing and sales teams. Likewise, if the sales team has poor leadership, leads can’t be handled.

Scale 105

Scale Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Sales 105

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 98

BrightBack

JUNE 5, 2019

Simply put, you have to know your numbers if you’re going to reduce churn and grow your subscriber base sustainably. During the webinar, I polled the audience about their churn goals and learned some interesting things about the state of churn ownership. Question 1: Does your company have a published churn goal?

Churn 58

Churn Scale Systems Review Leadership 58

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2020

— Masterclass: Churn is dead. — Doing Freemium and sales-driven sales at the same time – Lessons learned from Mixmax. — Juggling People, Processes, and Priorities: Leadership Lessons from Intuit, SurveyMonkey & Stitch Fix. Mar 11, 1:15pm – 1:55pm. Mar 10, 1:15pm – 1:55pm.

Scale 191

Scale Leadership Churn Benchmarks 191

Teamgate

OCTOBER 10, 2019

Reducing sales churn is the holy grail of every sales director. . The more customers you lose – churn – the less likely it is that your company is going to grow significantly any time soon. If your business is churning customers more frequently than you would expect, you need to find out why, and fast.

Churn 40

Churn Sales Software Review Sales Funnel 40

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

Oh, Sales and Customer Success, you are my two favorite disciplines! My career started in Sales, or rather, I was slowly talked into a Sales career by a string of managers who knew I had the drive to be a great salesperson. As a consultant, I often see Sales and Customer Success teams battling over little things.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Compensation Churn 98

ChurnZero

JULY 22, 2021

By creating healthy boundaries, Customer Success and Sales don’t have to spend their days assessing and arguing over every expansion situation. Your rules of engagement should be based on which team is genuinely the best fit in each scenario and has the greatest likelihood of gaining sales traction. Product and process complexity.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Engagement Sales Acquisition 98

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 19, 2022

Sales compensation planning can be a tricky beast to tame — but know that you’re not alone. I asked 12 incredible sales leaders across the SaaS industry to share their biggest challenges with comp planning and how to overcome them. Related: New to sales compensation planning? Top 10 sales compensation challenges.

Compensation 94

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Finance 94

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Author Geoffrey Moore describes the chasm criteria this way: Demonstrate market leadership. Along with a higher growth rate, leadership should also pause to review their retention and churn rates. Have you moved across the chasm between the early market and the mainstream market? Dominate 1 – 2 vertical markets.

Revenue 235

Revenue Sales Hiring Leadership Scale 235

Mucker Capital

APRIL 2, 2024

In this Mucker Growth session, Mike Genstil with ValueCore delves into the concept of value selling and its application in enterprise sales. As a founder, ideally you want your sellers, marketers, and product leaders aligned in transforming product features into value-based messages to accelerate sales cycles and secure corporate deals.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Enterprise Cybersecurity 52

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

Many frameworks exist to build messaging and sales enablement. Without showing customers what your product, service, or solution will look like in the future, it is hard to close the sale. Many companies are great at bringing in prospects and closing the deal but have churn issues later. Leadership education.

Outsourcing Services 196

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 196

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 ? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale). In fact, great sales teams are accretive. Why was Netsuite?

Scale 279

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 279

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2023

ELG-sourced customers are 58% less likely to churn. He has seen tremendous advances for augmentation with AI as effective across reducing sales reps’ time spent manually putting information into the CRM and reducing the amount of time spent preparing for meetings. Deals close 46% faster using ELG playbooks.

Scale 98

Scale Sales Hiring AI Generative AI 98