SaaStr

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

Our Roundtable Sessions are now live and available to add to your schedule from the SaaStr Scale Agenda. . Join us on Tuesday, December 8th for a full day of interactive Roundtable and Networking Sessions across three tracks – Marketing, Sales, and Product / Customer Success – before the keynotes the next day. .

Scale 237

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Consulting 237

User Pilot

JANUARY 17, 2024

Scaling SaaS is not for the faint of heart. If you do not scale, you will be unable to reach a new pool of customers and your competitors will leave you in the dust. If you scale prematurely, you may struggle to satisfy customer expectations. Provide the necessary training for your sales teams.

Scale 86

Scale Scaling SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 86

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

PST — Former VP of Customer Success and current founder and Managing Partner at Success Venture Partners, John Gleeson, shares his lessons learned scaling customer success from $1M to $300M in ARR. The framework above is a lean canvas to help you understand your customers’ needs post-sale. Renewals.

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 159

ChurnZero

JANUARY 26, 2022

Reducing churn is at the forefront of all marketers’ minds. 82% of marketers say that “active customer retention” is one of the most important objectives for their CRM team , leading many Marketing and Customer Success team members to seek out new ways to understand customer pain points and improve the customer experience.

Scale 97

Scale Churn Scaling Retention 97

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

How CAC targets drive GTM strategies: If Your CAC Target Is Low You’ll likely focus on small-to-medium businesses and use tools like inbound sales and low-touch or no-touch self-service. The sales cycle at this stage may be very short. The sales cycle will be slightly longer at this stage. But over time, things change.

Scale 222

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 222

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 6, 2022

With that in mind, the challenge businesses now face is striking the right balance between personalization and scale – which, historically, has been a tricky line to walk. Great experiences result in increased customer satisfaction, which often correlates to bottom-line results like reduced churn and increased retention.

Scale 230

Scale Scaling DevOps as a Service Communication 230

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

Scale 247

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 247

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

E.g., Sales +Marketing Expenses < First Year ACV = Success ? But maybe not while you are scaling, you can often afford to invest more if you have funding. if Churn > 2% = Bad, Just Terrible. What most matters is that churn is going down , rather than the core absolute value, IMHO. Well — Maybe.

Scale 240

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 240

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Let’s get it going. Times are good.

Scale 206

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 206

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. >> Let’s Start with Churn. Second, most SaaS product have an inherent rate of churn.

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 218

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2022

Companies that spend $500k with us in their first contract may or may not churn down the road, but companies that slowly increase their spend year over year are much more likely to stay with you in the long run, ultimately bringing you more revenue. Improvements for a sales team and process are a ‘no finish line’ business.

Scale 249

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 249

SaaStr

MAY 30, 2024

Sales-Led vs. Product-Led vs. Hybrid What are the pros and cons of different motions? Let’s start with a sales-led motion, which is traditionally how B2B software has been sold. Hybrid combines product-led and sales-led motions, and they work closely together. How does that collaboration and hand-off with sales work?

Scale 225

Scale AI Search Azure AI 225

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

They initially double their ARR each year in scaling post $10M. Although churn and down-sell rates are relatively consistent during growth, this ability to capture new logos consistently can help to avoid client concentration in a volatile market. How do the best-in-class companies perform when ARR is treated as a growth metric?

Scale 199

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Venture Capital 199

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

This is a positive trajectory, but it presents a challenge for your customer success efforts: How can you scale your support and CS while still delivering a memorable, quality customer experience? According to the Totango report, 77% of respondents said that scale was their top challenge. Key Takeaways For Scaling Growth.

Scale 193

Scale Customer Success Scaling Compensation 193

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2019

As you scale your salesteam, unless you are very careful whom you hire and how you train them, incentives being what they are in variable compensation, some negative behavior will creep in. Prospects will be … if not lied to … then told half truths. Many call it “Churn and Burn” or other variants. Train your reps.

Scale 220

Scale Churn Sales Hiring Sales 220

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

Almost every founder regrets using capital to keep a high-burn rate engine going that isn’t scaling rapidly. #2. Not Jumping on High Churn Some types of churn certainly can be addressed over time. But if your churn and retention numbers aren’t at least mid-pack for your category, don’t let it lurk.

Trends 274

Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 274

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2023

So leading growth stage VC Iconiq has published its latest and very detailed Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation here. It’s very detailed and oriented more toward growth-stage scale-ups — but it’s excellent. Corners were cut in the boom times of 2021, but we are back to sane sales models.

Scale 255

Scale Compensation Sales SMB 255

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

A few ideas on how to help the sales team make this your best year so far: Hire dedicated sales / revenue ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations , even up to $10m ARR or beyond. Getting routing the right leads? This will take some of the pressure off the sales team.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Enterprise 241

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 227

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 227

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

Wondering how to scale customer success in SaaS and drive product growth ? If you’re a leading SaaS company, you know that growth is directly tied to helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. An effective customer success team can, thus, drive revenue growth, reduce churn, and increase customer satisfaction.

Scale 80

Scale Customer Success Scaling SaaS 80

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2023

10+ Actionable Things You Can Do To Scale Faster In The Early Days The Chat GPT Growth Story: How AI is Changing the Way We Work The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated) Dear SaaStr: My Top Sales Rep Made $600,000 a Year — And Just Quit! What Happened?

ChatGPT 226

ChatGPT Scale SMB AI 226

ChurnZero

JANUARY 26, 2022

Reducing churn is at the forefront of all marketers’ minds. 82% of marketers say that “active customer retention” is one of the most important objectives for their CRM team , leading many Marketing and Customer Success team members to seek out new ways to understand customer pain points and improve the customer experience.

Scale 52

Scale Churn Scaling Retention 52

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

Don’t need as much sales experience on sales team. But beyond all the other Pros and Cons of SMB vs enterprise, there’s one looming issue with SMB SaaS: Churn. Endemic churn. The type of churn you almost can’t do anything about. And then 3% a month churn cuts your growth in half.

SMB 350

SMB Churn Payment Services SaaS 350

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

Vanta’s Chief Revenue Officer, Stevie Case, shares lessons learned from leading Twilio’s mid-market team and shepherding Vanta into a mid-market leader as the company’s first CRO. You want to be ready for this to ensure you can serve this market and prevent hitting speed bumps, particularly late in the sales cycle. What do you do?

Scale 178

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 178

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2021

Agile principles can be a North Star for time-strapped support teams, helping them to keep the customer’s needs at the heart of their decisions so they can provide fast, personal support at scale. At WeTravel, we’ve implemented custom bots to capture leads and triage conversations for 24/7 support ”.

Scale 235

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Scaling 235

Subscription Flow

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Next, these subscription businesses need to plan and go for scaling subscriptions. As a subscription retailer, you need to scale subscriptions and grow your business with time. Also Read: Scaling Subscription Business With Easier, Faster, and Smarter Recurring Payments Processing What Subscription Businesses Need to Scale?

Scale 52

Scale Payment Features SaaS Payments Payment Services 52

Totango

JUNE 8, 2022

OK, maybe not the world, but they have become an increasingly important factor these days for helping SaaS companies understand whether their products and services are keeping customers engaged and delivering value, so they can prevent churn, increase expansion and earn higher valuations. Eliminate Chokepoints .

Scale 88

Scale Scaling Revenue Customer Success 88

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2024

Up 2% Year over Year — But Paying Customers Shrank This Quarter DropBox has a big business push, but in many ways at this scale, it’s as much a consumer company as a business software company. Seat Contraction and Churn Remains Elevated DropBox is still seeing elevated levels of customers reducing seat count and elevated churn. #4.

Scale 211

Scale Churn Scaling Pricing 211

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. You need to, to scale in SaaS. for the sales team.

Scale 223

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Scaling 223

SaaStr

DECEMBER 2, 2020

My 7 top tips to increase sales quickly. Hire a great VP of Sales. Hire a great VP of Sales, and even if nothing else changes … she’ll increase the revenue per lead by 20–100%+. In one sales cycle or less. More here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. Leads are precious.

Scale 254

Scale Sales Hiring Sales B2C 254

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

What It Takes To Win With small businesses, you will have more churn and business volatility than with an enterprise. The key takeaways for SMBTech companies to scale in today’s economy are: Now is a great time to build for SMBs. Know Your Customer and be choosy as you scale. SMBTech is primed for growth.

Scale 190

Scale SMB Merchant Services Payment Methods 190

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 24, 2021

After all, whether you’re aiming to drive product-led growth or you’re going with a sales-led strategy, once you’ve brought in those new users, you still need to provide an exceptional customer support experience in order to keep them around long-term. Are the tools you’re using capable of scaling with you?

Scale 129

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 129

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2020

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the LeadDev Together conference about how Intercom sustainably scales its processes to sync teams, streamline workflows, and increase efficiency. Brooks’s Law : increasing the number of people leads to “combinatorial explosion”, with a rise in communication overhead.

Scale 152

Scale Engineering Scaling Systems Review 152

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

Q: What are the common mistakes in B2B sales in the early-ish days? The list could be endless, and it can vary a lot based on type of customer, type of sale, etc. The list could be endless, and it can vary a lot based on type of customer, type of sale, etc. Firing” prospects. Do not fire a prospect. A lot more.

Scale 186

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 186

Sixteen Ventures

MARCH 9, 2024

While traditional approaches often relied on revenue-based customer segmentation, leading to inconsistent experiences and inefficiencies, AX prioritizes individual needs […] The post Beyond Touch Levels: Scaling Customer Success through Appropriate Experience (AX) appeared first on Customer-centric Growth by Lincoln Murphy.

Scale 64

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 64