SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

As companies scale, they evolve, so how should marketing evolve accordingly to add maximum value? PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. The reality is that a lot of things change as we scale. The answer isn’t simple.

Scale 186

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 186

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

and Lenny asked us to join his podcast to talk about building a sales team — from the perspective of a product-first founder or exec. It was a pretty strong conversation and we took a lot of our learnings over the years and focused on how to learn to do sales right if you come from a product-first background: It’s good.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Headcount 236

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

If you’ve raised venture capital, you know net revenue retention is important. 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. Headcount maybe goes from 2 or 4 to 10. Everything!

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 159

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

How do you enter a highly competitive marketplace, carve a niche for yourself, and then scale the business to $100 million+ ARR? Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, joined Matt Plank, VP of Sales at Rippling, to unlock the secrets to exponential revenue growth. Scaling your go-to-market efforts.

Outsourcing Services 204

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 204

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. The VPM giving their all to create leads, opportunities, and more. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic.

Sales Recruiting 294

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 294

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. Some define it by headcount, typically around 200-2000 employees, and others by revenue, generally $10M to $1B annual recurring revenue.

Scale 178

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 178

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? You can back into how many sales reps you’ll need in SaaS. First, figure out how much revenue you need to close in the next twelve months. And they will take at least some time to scale. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals. 60% is OK, too.

Scale 238

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 238

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

That works for a while, but you end up with not enough headcount if you do freeze hiring but still want to grow. Samsara is growing a stunning 40% as it crosses $1B in ARR — and says it needs more and more sales capacity. But it’s still going to hire more slowly than revenue growth, and that’s the key.

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Cloud 272

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Let’s look at nine interesting learnings about this leading company. #1 2 — New Workloads Are Only A Small Percentage Of Today’s Revenue, But Are The Majority Of Tomorrows. This chart shows the awesome power of high NRR and how you have to invest in customers that scale with you over time. #3 Revenue growth. We’ll see. #2

Revenue 188

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 188

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2021

You can back into it: First, figure out how much revenue you need to close in the next twelve months. And they will take at least a tiny amount to scale. I know your first 3 reps are scaled and are crushing it, all hitting 100%. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders are cost centers here.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Hiring Headcount Sales 294

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

First, figure out how much revenue you need to close in the next twelve month s. And they will take at least a tiny amount to scale. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders and sales engineers are cost centers here. Fifth, the more specialized the sales process is, the more folks you’ll need.

Scale 282

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 282

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Do you have to double your headcount to make it from $10M to $20M or even $2M to $5M?

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 242

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. Many investors laugh (and some rightly so) at the fact that software companies’ valuations are often described as a multiple of revenue.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? You can back into how many sales reps you’ll need in SaaS. First, figure out how much revenue you need to close in the next twelve months. And they will take at least some time to scale. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals. 60% is OK, too.

Scale 201

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 201

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

JANUARY 4, 2023

A nice sweet spot for a mix of inside and outside sales. #3. Very Few Professional Services — Only 3% of Revenues. ProServ is only 3% of Okta’s revenues. International Revenue Steady at 22% of Revenues — and EMEA is strong. Customer Count Up 22%, While Revenues Up 37%. It only grew 4.5%

Scale 270

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring SMB 270

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 24, 2018

How do you scale a support organization without breaking the budget or killing the quality of the customer experience? It’s an age old question for anyone leading a customer support organization, the sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its customer base expands. Automation.

Scale 178

Scale Customer Support Scaling Strategy 178

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

HubSpot’s operating margins have scaled into the double-digits the past two quarters for the first time. Revenue Up 30%, but Employee Count Only up 10%, to 7,055. At the end of the day, in SaaS, efficiency really comes from growing revenue faster than headcount. 40% of Their Revenues Comes from Partners.

Scale 240

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 240

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. Growing Headcount, But Much More Slowly That Revenue.

Headcount 193

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 193

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

But to Go Big, almost everyone in SaaS at least eventually adds a sales team. But to scale it quickly added a very effective sales team : Yes, Atlassian for a long time had almost no “direct” sales team, well after the IPO. With, and through, a sales team. You don’t need 100% sales-driven revenue to Go Big.

Scale 332

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 332

ChurnZero

MARCH 23, 2023

Customer Success benchmark: headcount How many people should be on a Customer Success team? However, we are using common benchmarks of one CSM per $1M in revenue, or one CSM per $2M in revenue for companies with mature or scaled Customer Success departments to assess team size. When asked about non-headcount budgets; 8.3%

Headcount 52

Headcount Benchmarks Customer Success Scale 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 23, 2023

Customer Success benchmark: headcount How many people should be on a Customer Success team? However, we are using common benchmarks of one CSM per $1M in revenue, or one CSM per $2M in revenue for companies with mature or scaled Customer Success departments to assess team size. When asked about non-headcount budgets; 8.3%

Headcount 52

Headcount Benchmarks Customer Success Scale 52

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

That doesn’t mean huge enterprise customers, but here it’s their $50k+ ACV ones, which now represent 28% of revenue, up from 22% just a year ago. At least in the short term, it is turning most of us can do more with about the same headcount in SaaS. #4. 47% Of Revenue Outside the U.S., 47% Of Revenue Outside the U.S.,

Headcount 274

Headcount Sales Hiring Scale Cloud 274

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

As sales leaders, most of us assume that many aspects of our sales machine will become inefficient during hypergrowth. As we think of ways to improve sales performance, a number of growth pains may come in the way: High acquisition costs. Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount.

Scale 55

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 55

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. Trust the process.

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 218

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Because SaaS requires so many functions beyond engineering, especially if it’s sales-driven … outbound, SDRs, inbound, field sales, marketing, customer success, support, more complex product management, etc. What will it look like, if it’s a sales-driven model? Talkdesk inside sales team at $10m ARR.

Sales Hiring 344

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 344

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Three overarching learnings from incredible sales leaders who have lived through the ups and downs of growing sales teams at some of the fastest growing SaaS companies is exactly what we’ll dive into today – so you can get the learnings and insight without being in the driver’s seat. This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Flex.

Sales Hiring 106

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 106

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 1, 2023

Sales development, content marketing, & software engineering strike me as the workstreams that will benefit immediately. AI’s contribution to engineering productivity is 5x+ greater than other teams because of the scale of the gain & the company’s team composition. Content marketing 30% 5% 1.5%

AI 310

AI Startup Scale Headcount 310

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Scaling Your Personalization. This is the downside of the modern Sales Assembly Line — both buyer and seller feeling like a cog in the wheel. Instead we need to focus on using our own voices and words to send each prospect a unique message. AI can help scale this, but we need to be careful not to rely too heavily on it.

Scale 109

Scale Scaling AI Search AI 109

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2022

30% New Customer Growth Fueling 37% Revenue Growth. Not having a traditional sales team sure helps. Never let it be said that SaaS can’t generate a lot of cash at scale. #3. I’d argue No until you are at scale. But once you are at scale, they can have a massive impact. #4. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

Scale 284

Scale Marketplace as a Service Headcount Cloud 284

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

49% of Revenue From New Customers, 51% From Existing It’s great to see a public SaaS leader break this out so clearly. Same Sales Commissions for Upsells as Net New Deals Always interesting to see what folks do here. #8. Adding Back Sales Capacity Now. Keeping headcount flat got everyone to be more efficient.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Engineering 224

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 24, 2021

But as your company grows, how do you offer personalized support at scale without burning out your team or budget? Modern self-serve support is key to scaling smarter. At Intercom, we use a framework called the Conversational Support Funnel to deliver efficient, personal support to our customers at scale. Show as well as tell.

Scale 165

Scale Scaling Strategy Headcount 165

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2019

Growing a sales team isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of A players in a room and getting them to start selling your product. 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. 12 steps to build a world-class sales team.

Scale 156

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 156

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

If you’re a leader, he says, don’t try to scale your job. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Here are five quick takeaways: Most sales and support teams talk about their jobs as a funnel. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. But no sales team can afford to grow without intention. While building a sales team, we’ve focused a lot on our sales culture. Here’s how we went about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture-additive.

Scale 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160