SaaStr

MAY 29, 2025

At SaaStr + AI Summit 2025, Jason Lemkin and Kyle Norton CRO of $1B+ vertical SaaS leader Owner (where Jason is on the board) did a deep dive on AI in Sales today. This isn’t about being an AI expertit’s about demonstrating active engagement with AI tools and genuine interest in how they can transform sales outcomes.

Sales Hiring 231

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team AI Scale 231

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 1, 2020

Simultaneously, support teams are struggling with spikes in conversation volumes. A proactive customer support approach is the key to regaining control. The typical support “strategy” is to let common issues roll in for support reps to address. What is proactive customer support?

Customer Support 239

Customer Support Scale Education Onboarding 239

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

2025 is year that AI takes over all of support and customer success that isnt sales. A lot of support is questions and problems from existing customers. But, where support is really sales, humans will handle it still. And the rest is being handed off to AI, support, etc. It still is today.

Customer Success 156

Customer Success Customer Support AI Trends 156

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How will Ai Change Sales in The Next 12 Months? It’s already fundamentally remade the contact center and post-sales. And it’s just getting there in sales. This will take sales calls from 10% being great to 95% being great because the AI will always be prepared and accurate.

AI 152

AI Scale Sales SMB 152

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2024

AI-powered Customer Onboarding and Customer Support We’re seeing a lot of companies using either AI tools they built themselves or through 3rd-party AI SaaS vendors have success helping users understand a new behavior or use a product for the first time. What’s Currently Working in AI for SaaS 1.

AI Search 278

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence B2B 278

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Customer support has never been a walk in the park. To keep up with these changes, last year we released our first Intercom Customer Support Trends Report. To keep up with these changes, last year we released our first Intercom Customer Support Trends Report. Last month, we published the second edition.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Trends Technical Review Headcount 211

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2020

Help desk metrics are measurements that allow you to track your performance and effectively adjust your strategy to provide better customer support. They’re vital for gauging whether or not your current customer support solutions are meeting the needs of your customers and your organization. Resolution Time.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Metrics Technical Review Scale 211

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

How Much of Customer Support Will AI Replace? How Codeium /Windsurf Built A Billion-Dollar AI Company and a Winning Sales Machine #2. The Y Combinator Guide to Perfectly Pitching Your Seed Stage Startup with Michael Seibel #4. Gartner Says 80% #5. Top Pods and Vids: #1.

Scale 156

Scale AI Sales Customer Support 156

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

During the holiday season, both your customers’ and your support team’s stress levels are often at an all-time high. Armed with the Conversational Support Funnel , you can empower your team to deliver personal, efficient support at any scale, without increasing your headcount, budget, or hours logged.

Customer Support 228

Customer Support Technical Review Scale Headcount 228

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2020

I’m not sure it’s something your sales reps would ever use if they didn’t have to sell it. The answer: everyone in a SaaS company has to do a 2+ hour stint on customer support (chat, phone, whatever) once a quarter, minimum. It worked its magic with the sales team (believe it or not). So what do you do?

VP of Engineering 220

VP of Engineering Customer Support PayPal Healthcare 220

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2024

The Future of AI in Customer Support While many vendors are achieving similar baseline results with AI customer support, Brian believes we’re still early in unlocking its full potential.

AI 278

AI Marketing SaaS Interviewing 278

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

If you want to hire your first sales rep and close more deals, you need to understand how the sales process works, what tools your team needs to be successful and learn to speak sales. Sales definitions you should know. CRM objects — Represent the sales relationship you have with a specific person or company.

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Startup Sales Outsourced Development 312

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

As a sales exec, you may not know actually the product well. A few recent examples: Example #1: I was recently chatting with a VP of Sales about a job position, which I get he wasn’t 100% sure he wanted. Watch at least some customers care. Or to get a demo? You may not know how to create urgency.

Sales Hiring 309

Sales Hiring Sales Customer Support Startup 309

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2020

I recently put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn on folks’ top tip to take friction out of their sales processes. “Presumptive close in a transactional sale. “At “We added slack for customer support and on boarding” — Adam Livesay, founder, Elevat. “Simplicity. “Listen.

Sales Hiring 342

Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development Technical Review 342

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2024

What if an AI-powered customer support agent needs to be able to manage very technical telecom queries? The generic tests probably won’t work, which translates to slower sales cycles as prospective buyers understand the system’s performance in their own context. Or with particular performance characteristics in mind?

Sales 212

Sales Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Benchmarks 212

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2025

The B2B Reality : You’re no longer selling to innovation teams with small budgets—you’re competing for the same enterprise IT dollars as traditional software, which means enterprise sales cycles, security requirements, and procurement rigor are now table stakes.

Enterprise 206

Enterprise AI Benchmarks Innovation 206

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy shares his journey to more than $100M and the lessons he learned along the way for building a PLG motion and an Enterprise sales motion. They didn’t initially envision being a large Enterprise sales organization. Let’s first start with how Cloudinary came to be. The takeaway?

Scale 306

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 306

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Agentin: Autonomous Agents for Customer Support What They Do : Agentin has built an autonomous agent platform that handles complex customer support workflows from end-to-end without human intervention. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter.

AI Search 167

AI Search AI Startup Scale 167

FastSpring

OCTOBER 11, 2024

Offering widely-used local payment options — such as AliPay or WeChat Pay — helps reduce friction at checkout and boosts customer satisfaction, leading to higher renewal rates. Invest in Customer Support to Drive Retention Retaining annual subscribers requires ongoing support.

Merchant Services 159

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Benchmarks Payment Features 159

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2020

We’ve spent a ton of time on SaaStr talking about how to think about sales and sales teams ; revenue/demand-focused marketing ; and keeping those customers over their lifetime. Slack and Dropbox got pretty far before adding true sales teams, as did Stripe. Can’t I just do that, many founders ask? Well maybe you can.

Sales Hiring 252

Sales Hiring Sales Enterprise Consulting 252

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

FastSpring

OCTOBER 24, 2024

It’s almost time again for Cyber Weekend, and November sales spikes aren’t just for holiday gifts and physical goods — SaaS and software companies also benefit from this annual increase in sales. trends in year-end SaaS and software sales data. Up-to-date global trends in year-end SaaS and software sales data.

Payment Solutions 158

Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Merchant Services Software Review 158

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 25, 2022

Successful sales and marketing teams understand the most important element of the buyer’s journey – the person behind it. A great customer relationship management (CRM) platform is at the core of every marketing and sales team’s tech stack. Provide sales teams access to key HubSpot lead data directly from Intercom messages.

Artificial Intelligence 216

Artificial Intelligence Sales Sales Funnel Technology 216

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

But it also might start to analyze customers’ behavior in online webinars, conversations with customer support and sales teams, and more - all of which is unstructured data stored in video & raw text & audio files.

Artificial Intelligence 316

Artificial Intelligence Software Data Scale 316

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2023

In many companies, the longtime dispute between sales and marketing prevents them from collaborating or agreeing on a goal. In this episode, Snow shares the journey to realizing the strength of revenue alignment through sales, marketing, and customer success and the principles for implementing this structure to yield tremendous results.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Revenue Marketing Sales 246

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Sign up for free.

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 198

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

What we haven’t really talked about is Customer Support. Basic, reactive, customer support. Solve the customer problem. But there are a few things in customer support that you can do that will clearly move the needle, but that may be slightly non-obvious. And your sales folks will tell you: Oy.

B2C 317

B2C Customer Success Customer Support Churn 317

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

Mark Roberge published The Sales Acceleration Formula about Hubspot’s journey. Account executive to SDR ratios, sales cycle lengths, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime values, net dollar retention. The first version of the SaaS GTM playbook was written twenty years ago.

Software 304

Software Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value Scale 304

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. That means understanding your ideal customer profile, developing enablement materials to close those customers, and training new account executives to succeed in that effort consistently. The sales team asks for more leads.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 9, 2022

The chart above is my mental model for modern customer success teams. The x-axis covers the sales motion from self-serve, to sales-assisted in the center, to complex deployments. Self-serve small ACV companies have developed the hybrid CSAM role ( customer success account managers). CSAMs handle it all.

Customer Success 336

Customer Success Outsourced Development Technical Support Startup 336

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2020

A VP of Sales? And he was proud he’d just hired a VP of Sales at a below-market rate. Let’s assume you are at $2m ARR, to make the math simple: You hire a Great VP of Sales. A great VP of Sales, within one year, can easily close 20-50% more business than you would have without him or her. Or A Head of Product?

Sales Hiring 341

Sales Hiring Headcount Engineering Banking 341

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2021

One question I struggled with a lot in the early days was what price points supported inside sales reps. It was clear to me that our freemium offering, priced at from $0 to $19/month, couldn’t really support a traditional inside sales team. Can you really sustain a sales team around a $299/mo product?

SMB 334

SMB Pricing Sales Metrics 334

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2020

The small guys suck up all your customer success and support resources, even though they make up only a small percent of your revenue. At Adobe Sign / EchoSign, the single largest consumer of our customer support resources was our Free users. The second largest consumer of support resources was our $15/month customers.

Sales Hiring 334

Sales Hiring Customer Success Customer Support Revenue 334

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Determine if your growth is product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led. Determine if you want to offer Freemiums or free trials so customers can try your product before they buy. Determine if your company is direct vs. indirect sales-led for tech alliances, channels, and Student Information Systems. Late-stage.

Scale 317

Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 317

Payrix

JUNE 10, 2025

White label merchant processing enables third parties like integrated software vendors (ISVs) or independent sales organizations (ISOs) to customize and sell the payment processing technology and services of a payments provider under their own brands. What is white label merchant processing? It certainly can.

Merchant Services 100

Merchant Services Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions 100

SaaStr

MAY 13, 2021

While age ultimately doesn’t matter — results do — in SaaS, starting off as younger-than-average can create stress in a sales- and customer-driven environment. You may get 1 or 2 bigger customers, but don’t start in the enterprise unless you know the enterprise, 95 times out of 100. Even an 18-year-old CEO.

SaaS 306

SaaS Enterprise Customer Support Sales 306

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. In their first year, they had their first paying customer. They talked to customers and peers in the industry to build an inside sales motion.

Scale 300

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 300