SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2023

Where Founders Demo Founders SaaStr Demo Day will be a completely immersive, live digital event for Founders and Revenue Leaders to discover new products. All day we’ll get 25 of the Best Apps and Best Vendors in SaaS together live with the SaaStr community to show hundreds of CXOs and thousands of SaaS execs why to use your app.

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User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

Wondering how to scale customer success in SaaS and drive product growth ? An effective customer success team can, thus, drive revenue growth, reduce churn, and increase customer satisfaction. This article discusses ten tips that can help you to effectively scale customer success teams in SaaS. Book a demo today to learn more!

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 80%-100% YoY growth) to the next phase — Initial Scale. That’s the power of compounding SaaS revenue. Because it will get so much better once you are at Scale, say $8-10m in ARR, say 50+ employees.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

How to interview salespeople ? How to scale your sales org ? Hire a VP of Sales to help you scale from three sales reps to 300 reps. Unlike building a product team, there is no efficiency when building a sales org: half of your headcount will be in sales at $10m, $50m, or $100m in revenue. How to comp your salespeople ?

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SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

To solve this, Deel interviewed 200 founders seeking answers to the question, “If you’re open to hiring internationally and remotely, what are your biggest challenges, and what kind of product can we build to solve them? Manage scaling issues by using data to plan ahead and being team and customer-obsessed.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

at this scale (!!) At SaaStr we’ve been super fans for a long time and a little ways back we did an amazing interview with CEO Andrew Bialceki here: Our 5 Interesting Learnings here: #1. Klaviyo said theirs even at this scale is a relatively short 14 months. #5. 36% of Revenue Outside the U.S.

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SaaStock

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Away from the crowds for two days and nights, founders exchange stories about their journeys, the triumphs, failures and the challenges of scaling a SaaS business. Smaller at scale, bringing 20 founders together, it will be an even more intimate experience for attendees. Tailored content for the scale stage. Make friends.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

At the time, they were less than a billion or two in revenue, and now, they just crossed over a $30B revenue run rate. Google Cloud has matured a lot over the last couple of years, invested in AI for such a long time, and being a part of a company that’s strongest in GenAI is what’s important for startups scaling in this direction.

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SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2024

Not only do you have to pass the hiring interviews as a Founder, but everyone on your team does, too. Brett has seen deals where the founder and a couple of employees are great, but most of the team failed the initial interviews. 2 Talk to Product: D eals that go through M&A teams have an extremely low success rate — less than 1%.

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ChurnZero

JULY 22, 2022

Whether it’s greater efficiency, increased revenue, cost savings, or achieving compliance, every customer has a reason for purchasing your product. But when it feels like each customer has different goals and definitions of success, how do you create an onboarding program that caters to these individual needs and at the same time can scale?

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Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

They also talked about the difficulties — and potential advantages — of selling into small businesses, taking alternative approaches to interviewing candidates, and the importance of keeping culture a vital part of a company as it scales. One of the criticisms of SMB software is that each customer can only provide so much revenue.

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Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 92

Valuize Consulting

AUGUST 2, 2021

Unfortunately, some software leaders still struggle to make the case for Customer Success as a bottom-line business imperative and showcase its ROI to the overall organization, missing out on the opportunity to drive unparalleled revenue growth. It was truly a consulting experience and I wanted to be a part of it.

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FastSpring

AUGUST 3, 2022

I spoke with FastSpring’s former VP of Revenue Operations about this, and you can stream our entire conversation at the bottom of this piece. Another place to get fresher takes are industry thought leader interviews and posts. Note: FastSpring helps companies scale with fewer company resources. Learn more here.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2023

(Updated) The Top 10 Questions to Ask a VP of Marketing in an Interview (Updated) Around Year 5, You’ll Have to Build Your Third Management Team Top Podcasts This Week: 1. SaaStr 635: CRO Confidential: How Customer-First Focus Drives Retention and Revenue With Brex GM of Startups Lucas Fox   3.

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SaaStr

MAY 27, 2022

On average, you got a 33%+ boost in revenue when you hired your first VP of Sales. Hire a great VP of Sales, and revenue goes up. In the scaling phase, I vote for leaving existing customers be. #9. 41% of you saw your win rates go more down than up as you scaled. A classic SaaStr post, turned into a poll! Do better.

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OpenView Labs

JANUARY 8, 2021

Great interview questions tell you who a person is, what motivates them, how they think and solve problems, and what they’d be like as a teammate. To help us all conduct better interviews, we asked some of the smartest leaders in SaaS to share their favorite questions. Leandra Fishman, Chief Revenue Officer at Intercom.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

They aren’t just a strategist, they actually own the revenue or pipeline commit. They come in for 3-4 months and help, yes, but they also make sure they put a full-time team in place that can scale. That’s not as good as full-time but it can work if the person is truly strong. But anything else from a “Fractional” CRO or CMO?

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SaaStr

MAY 4, 2022

So a top theme across SaaStr CEO interviews since 2017 or so, and across our 5 Interesting Learnings series with public SaaS companies, is … when should you go multi-product? Roughly: By $100m ARR, you probably have to be multi-product to scale at top-tier rates. Each did 40% of its revenue. jasonlk) April 29, 2022.

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SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

You can’t scale either of those channels or people until you’re happy with the efficiency of those people and processes. However, if you’re scaling efficiently and quickly and sales reps are well-fed but not at a breaking point, you might not want to add more salespeople. That’s the question you should ask yourself.

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CustomerSuccessBox

OCTOBER 31, 2021

This is why we, at CustomerSuccessBox, thought of interviewing CS leaders to understand their perspective of QBR. She’s also the founder of Success Track Enterprise which helps companies define, refine, expand and scale their CS organizations through advisory services. Why is QBR/EBR important? How does it help your customers?

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Valuize Consulting

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

He has worked with world-leading technology companies to refine, optimize, and scale systems and processes while driving optimal value. In this interview, Romain discusses the fundamentals of a strong Customer Success (CS) Operations function and how you can leverage Agile methodologies to champion effective change management.

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FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

When FastSpring’s Chief Product Officer Kurt Smith worked with growth-stage to Fortune 100 companies at Accel-KKR, he consistently saw pricing as one of the most essential growth levers they employed to meet their next revenue goal. Stream both interviews below and see highlights from each. Todd Stellfox, Sales Manager at FastSpring.

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Valuize Consulting

MARCH 22, 2022

Is Your Customer Success Strategy Built To Scale Customer Value? In the race to become the first and best, some organizations have forgotten to lay a solid foundation that not only ensures the current success of the digital-led approach, but also their ability to scale.

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Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

High growth companies like Airtable, Figma, Notion, or Github all have revenue as a top of mind business milestone. In fact, out of a sample of 40 growth stage companies, 50% said revenue growth was their #1 north star metric, according to research led by Lenny Rachitsky for Future. And when there are 30 people it will change again.

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Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

High growth companies like Airtable, Figma, Notion, or Github all have revenue as a top of mind business milestone. In fact, out of a sample of 40 growth stage companies, 50% said revenue growth was their #1 north star metric, according to research led by Lenny Rachitsky for Future. And when there are 30 people it will change again.

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Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

So a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. We had 5,000 employees and $14 billion in revenue. Over the time I was there, we had 64 billion in revenue and about as many employees. So big, big scale. Our customers, our employees, our revenue. Want to see more content like this?

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Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 16, 2021

In this interview, Naz shares her expertise on how to design a powerful CS strategy that equips your team with the right tools and resources to drive an exceptional employee experience and champion phenomenal growth. I’ve stayed in Customer Success Strategy and Operations ever since.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2021

We were fortunate enough to interview CEOs who were in the trenches navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, investors who were advising companies on how best to move forward, and operators who saw explosive growth given the shift to working from home. . Out of its headquarters in Utah, Podium scaled from 5 employees to over 300 employees.

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Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Scaling Your Personalization. AI can help scale this, but we need to be careful not to rely too heavily on it. To scale your outreach you need to build a system to ensure your message gets seen. The system you set up becomes even more important once you begin doing outreach at scale, but I’ll go over that more later.

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SaaStr

JULY 7, 2020

If their revenue is way down now since Covid-19 hit, maybe just keep them. You can monetize them again later, once their revenue is back up. Mixmax as another example expanded their Free offering since Covid-19 hit … making it Free-er … and didn’t take any revenue hit: It probably won’t even really cost you much in the short-term.

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Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Before joining the GTMfund team, she built and scaled GTM at a predictive conversion optimization company. She enjoys advising SaaS companies as they build out and optimize their marketing and overall GTM strategies. By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

But I hadn’t really thought of them as a proxy for all SaaS companies until I saw the CEO’s interview from a few weeks back. Revenues are down in some categories, and not others, Growth is probably 20% more challenging than in the best of times. The companies they own a majority of are collectively at $24B (!)

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Cybersecurity SMB Interviewing Enterprise 290

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2023

But you’re falling, dodging, climbing, and hoping to scale the top of a mountain. With customer research, you can see a 10x increase year-over-year in annual company revenue, customer satisfaction, and a 20% increase in upsell and cross-sell rates. For companies that already have customers, you can conduct interviews and surveys.

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SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company. When do you decide to scale? The steps required to scale aren’t natural to most founders, and they just are not going to be able to take fifty sales meetings a week. How are you going to scale without messing up? Flock Safety does 8!)

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2021

Scaling your product from one specific use case to an enterprise offering with multiple features is a daunting task. Decide on your company model and stick to it as you scale, even if you lose deals because of it. You’ll have everything you need to scale. How do you balance these things while creating a great product?

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SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

We also recommend diving into some of our top articles on how to succeed during the interview process and your first few months once you’ve gotten the job including: How to Succeed as a First-Time VP of Sales. ClickFlow , a SEO experimentation tool, is looking for aVP of Sales to help them scale over the coming year. Apply here.

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SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

Hiring a “VP” of Sales before you have 2 scaled reps and a repeating process. But if they say in an interview they “don’t really care about money” … well … they aren’t sales people. If they’ve never had a true revenue commit (see below), or owned a number, they are too junior. Your revenue per lead just goes down.

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