OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

2021 has proven to be the year of usage-based pricing. . 45% of expansion stage SaaS companies now say they have a usage-based or consumption-based pricing model, according to data from OpenView’s forthcoming 2021 Finance and Operations benchmarks report. . Product: Treat product investments as a revenue-generating expense.

Pricing 64

Pricing Customer Success Scale Compensation 64

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

What sales investments should you focus on in 2022? When a global social media platform wanted to measure how successful its holiday ad pricing promotion was, it needed to know whether customer service associates were promoting the relevant products to customers and if their doing so led to a boost in sales. Sales engagement.

Scale 89

Scale Investment Sales Forecasting 89

OpenView Labs

MARCH 16, 2021

The usage-based pricing model almost feels like a cheat code —it enables SaaS companies to more efficiently acquire new customers, grow with those customers as they’re successful, and keep those customers on the platform. But the shift from pure subscription to usage-based pricing is nearly as complex as going from on-premise to SaaS.

Pricing 52

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 52

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

The discipline of customer success varies widely depending on price point. At the lower price points, some organizations combine the role of an account manager and the customer success person into a CSAM (customer success account manager). In these scenarios, investing in larger post sales teams drives account growth.

Compensation 111

Compensation Scale Benchmarks Customer Success 111

FastSpring

AUGUST 3, 2022

This is why it’s so important to be able to test the ROI of any investment you’re making as quickly as possible. Note: FastSpring helps companies scale with fewer company resources. If you’re accustomed to measuring the ROI of new product investment after six months, change that to six weeks. Learn more here.

Scale 109

Scale Revenue Sales Compensation 109

Clouded Judgement

JULY 21, 2023

Investing in growth is not only normal, is essential. But there’s a downside to investing in growth: FCF is generally negative. Here’s a great graphic from the Scale Ventures team on Box’s transition. The challenge is when you have a majority of reps who are ramping, FCF takes a hit. So FCF takes another hit.

Cloud 130

Cloud Software Sales Hiring Scale 130

Neil Patel

JANUARY 10, 2021

Investment options for a 401(k) are determined by the plan the company chooses. Employees may get some say in where they invest the money, though they will most often be choosing from a limited portfolio of options. They have varying degrees of support, charge fees according to their own rules, and offer different kinds of investments.

Compensation 115

Compensation Government Investment Pricing 115

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

Over Leyla’s incredible 11 year journey with Salesforce she has seen the team scale from 1,800 to over 40,000 and revenue scale from $500m to over $16Bn. What were Leyla’s biggest learnings on people and business model through seeing the first hand hyper-scaling of Salesforce from $500m to $16Bn?

Scale 136

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 136

Neil Patel

JULY 23, 2021

It’s tempting to think of negotiation only in terms of price, but the term represents many possibilities beyond money. Improve Operations: Negotiation can help you find the right compensation package for your employees, get discounts from your manufacturers, have a successful fundraising round, and help you scale your business faster.

Pricing 144

Pricing Scale Compensation Communication 144

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Price the Product Between $1k to $25k Annually to Optimize Growth. On the same sales investment, a startup may be able to hire three or four inside sales reps for each field sales rep. I’ve written about When to Hire Your First Sales Person and what a hypothetical compensation plan for sales people might look like.

Benchmarks 111

Benchmarks Startup Sales Hiring Compensation 111

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. Jyoti Bansal : And then he started talking about sales and Dev during the breakfast he convinced me if you can marry the right kind of sales scaling and execution then that’s when your business will really, really take off. That fundraising is easier.

Sales Recruiting 256

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 256

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

As for pricing, how do you know you’re not leaving value on the table? Speaking of, we go beyond the typical discussion of product-market fit into the concept of product-market-sales fit, and what that means for product design, to services, to pricing and packaging, to product management, and more. When should companies offer services?

Product Marketing 80

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 80

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Hear about the early days of Glassdoor; tactical lessons on scaling—from building a business model and recruiting an all-star management team to advice on building a compelling, innovative company culture; and learn whyGlassdoor’s $1.2 Yes, it does not scale, but the beauty is the product. Krish Subramanian: I wouldn’t say that.

Scale 133

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 133

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

It now matches sales and marketing spend at the average SaaS company as folks continued to put significant investments into R&D during the pandemic. Meanwhile, companies that have experienced more moderate growth than anticipated ( Slack , SAP ) have seen their stock prices get slashed. Become a process-driven GTM team.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Scale Technical Review SaaS 52

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 9, 2022

No digital tool can compensate for a lack of discipline at the front line. By benchmarking critical go-to-market KPIs, like the Magic Number – which measures how many new dollars of revenue growth are obtained getting from your sales and marketing investment compared to your competitors. Raise the game in pricing.

Scale 59

Scale VP of Engineering Payment Services Underperforming Technical Team 59

OpenView Labs

MAY 14, 2020

What complicates it even more is the current macroeconomic environment—the hesitancy of many venture firms to make new investments, and the lack of clarity around what a “market correction” might look like in terms of pricing venture deals. First things first: Not every business is a venture-scale business . Growth expectations.

Venture Capital 64

Venture Capital Scale Compensation Pricing 64

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

When scaling the business, sales typically averages roughly 30% of revenue, so therefore sales spend is one of the biggest investments a company can make. Shorter sales cycles equate to more sales and greater productivity from invested resources. The Key Metric: Average Sales Cycle.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 5, 2021

Software companies that increase their share of revenue from subscription models have stronger growth in share price. Software and other technology deals have been more likely to overperform and less likely to underperform than most investments in other sectors. Boost consumption through investments in customer success.

Software Review 52

Software Review DevOps as a Service Software Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

Matt Turck talks with three hyper-growth stage Co-Founders and CEOs on three roadblocks when scaling past $15M ARR: hiring, culture, and sales. Ticket prices go up March 1st! We invest all over the country and very much in Europe as well including Paris. So, of course, you all know that to scale. Grab your tickets! ??.

Sales Hiring 117

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 117

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

The software company’s stated strategy was to offer great products paired with low pricing and self-service purchasing, a Product Led Growth (PLG) recipe that fueled the company’s sustained profitable growth. Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations. Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2019

This is pretty simple, but when I look at this industry, a lot of times what I see is organizations crafting pricing packages that would enable, for example, an enterprise-wide license, where an organization pays you X amount of money, and they have unlimited seats, unlimited usage. What are these building blocks?

Retention 142

Retention VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale 142

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Spendesk thinks about building its company in three stages: startup, growth, and scale. Now operating between growth and scale, they utilize sales reps, customer managers and account executives in a dizzying structure that’s constantly changing. When I joined we had just an MVP, 10 beta customers and no pricing. Nico: Correct.

Scale 162

Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions Marketing 162

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. Michiel Rauws (@michielrauws2): So, my question is, we’ve been scaling our SaaS business. We can scale accounts, when we get them, very well. Then later as we scale, we converge and we all do the same stuff.

Scale 235

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 235

User Pilot

APRIL 19, 2024

Organizational scale. Offering incentives like financial compensation or vouchers can encourage participation, but it’s important to manage these carefully to avoid biasing the responses. Building a Business Case : Provides evidence and data to justify investment in the new product. Customer demographics profiles.

Market Research 52

Market Research Sales Recruiting Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2020

Some of these businesses, maybe even many of these businesses have started investing more and more in selling online to their preexisting in store customers. But I think that was when everybody had the proverbial partner meeting discussions about what are we funding, why are we funding, what price are we funding. [crosstalk 00:11:49].

Investment 157

Investment Scale Travel Venture Capital 157

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 1, 2019

So ClientSuccess has the ebook to guide you through fostering customer success as a culture , featuring seven leaders sharing strategies to scale, techniques to align customer success across all departments, and the best practices to hire, compensate, and measure your success teams. A Churn for the Worse? Or for the Better?

Social Media 45

Social Media Compensation Subscription Payment Features 45

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

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. Recently at Pavilion’s CEO Summit, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, took the stage to do something.

Sales Recruiting 302

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 302

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

Befofe that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? You can increase prices.

Scale 145

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 145

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. Here’s some intel from our conversation.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2022

Aliisa Rosenthal, VP of Sales at WalkMe , shares her insights on developing a powerhouse inside sales team at scale to succeed in today’s customer-driven marketplace. Investing in a robust CRM software is a must as it helps you consolidate data about customer interactions. Experimentation 2: Average sales price (ASP).

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 245

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2019

SaaS is about creating long-term value for your customer, and being compensated appropriately for that value as a business. Naomi Pilosof Ionita | Investing Partner @ Menlo Ventures. We’re going to talk about matching price to value, and I’m going to share some lessons from my time as both an operator and an investor.

Payments 101

Payments Pricing Compensation SaaS Payments 101

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2019

If you want to build a revenue engine that will fuel long-term growth, you need to build and scale your sales org with intention. Why not simply invest in hiring more engineers and let the targeted end-user virally adopt the product of their choice? Choose a compensation model – salary or bonus-heavy compensation?

Scale 156

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 156

Crafty CTO

OCTOBER 17, 2023

I’m guessing Literary invested at least 15 minutes creating their home on the Internet, maybe even 20. Literary might then create a premium-priced listing on Amazon, and start taking orders. In this case, you would think that the rightsholder gets compensated somehow … but you never know. Not confidence-inspiring.

Scale 52

Scale Compensation Startup Mobile 52

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

More recently, the concept of “fund-strapping,” aka taking outside investment or external funding options with the intention of not having to raise any more funding again, has become another viable option for businesses. Build your startup in a way that you don’t need investment. The primary investment is usually time.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

We’re living in a remarkable era for investing. Enduring business (think Cisco, GE, Walmart) must demonstrate the ability to repeatedly generate predictable earnings – turning the massive revenue scale they’ve achieved into shareholder returns (via share price expansion and dividends). How Do I Know What My Benchmarks Are?

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Data SaaS Scale 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2019

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Justin made his way into the world of Sales and came to be one of the industry’s leading scale up Sales leaders with PatientPop and ZocDoc. * Having seen multiple scaling culture, where do SaaS organisations tend to break down both in terms of culture and process?

Scale 150

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Interviewing 150

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

From there, he helped scale a team of 150 at AdRoll, before becoming CEO and President at TalkIQ, which was acquired by Dialpad. Sam Jacobs: Is there a process or tools or resources you invest in to develop great frontline managers? This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Dan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad.

AI Search 72

AI Search AI Sales Hiring Scale 72