Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 2, 2016

Channel distribution represents one of the biggest and most important changes in customers acquisition for SMB SaaS startups in quite a while. One of the most interesting examples is Microsoft’s Office 365 SMB business. It’s the most successful SMB SaaS acquisition channel ever built. by Thomas Hansen.

Outsourcing Services 108

Outsourcing Services SMB Acquisition Scale 108

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Enterprise sales is hard, which is why most businesses start as an SMB org and grow into an enterprise org. And those that do often struggle through the transition, leaving behind a churn of leadership and sales resources after every funding milestone. 2 rules for transitioning from SMB to enterprise. Invest in a community.

SMB 73

SMB Enterprise Strategy Compensation 73

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments. David Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorn companies, including Airbnb, Bird, ClickUp, Facebook, Slack, and Uber. Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates. billion in 2012.

CTO Hire 246

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

From an R&D perspective, they invested in what they called vertical solutions to support those new use cases. So, Calendly decided to invest in going Enterprise. From a process standpoint, you have to be ready to invest in Enterprise sales and build infrastructure to make sure sales can be successful.

Scale 228

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 228

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one. Measuring Usage Since Day One Since the beginning, monday.com built and has used a BI tool called Big Brain — a major investment for that size of company. How do you get over 100 for SMB? Zinman calls this a gradual discovery.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 161

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

In the early days, UserZoom struggled with deciding whether its target market should focus on enterprise or SMB. UserZoom invested in a model where they didn’t just provide software, but services, in a model known as SaaS++. Define and focus on one target persona. This focus can be a risk because it is shrinking your market.

Scale 216

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 216

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. But a great head of demand gen (or maybe growth hacking if you are SMB) should be very accretive at even $20k in MRR. IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. More here: [link].

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Team and Leadership at NP Digital. Our leadership team is made up of people who embrace that idea. Most of the leadership team have previous experience working with some of the biggest global brands, so the agency was well-positioned to make that shift. Team and Leadership at NP Digital Small Business.

VP of Engineering 126

VP of Engineering Marketing Marketplace as a Service Social Media 126

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2019

* How does Andrew advise founders on the question of whether to start in enterprise or SMB? What are the benefits of starting in SMB? How does the product and what you invest in proactively need to change as you move into enterprise? I had Jason VandeBoom of ActiveCampaign on the show, and he said SMB first works.

Sales Hiring 143

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 143

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

You’re a big part of their tech stack, you’re a big part of their investment strategy, you’re a big part of their spend. Of course, we always excelled in SMB at Slack as well. Since then, you’ve spent over 12 years in post-sales leadership. . “Upmarket customers have different demands of you.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hacker

JUNE 9, 2020

Of course, we’re talking about what’s going on during the pandemic, but also just about his leadership skills and his experience. This was the first time that I was really focused on the SMB market and had a great experience there. It’s a discussion among the whole senior leadership team, for sure.

Leadership 78

Leadership Scale Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering 78

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Less and you under-invest. At $8m in ARR, if you have $2m of cash in the bank, you get real nervous investing much more than $500k-$750k, $1m max. It’s subtle, but in SaaS I’ve learned you under-invest if you have < 50% of your ARR in the bank. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early. That was wrong.

Part-Time VPE 265

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 265

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 2, 2021

RYG events started as local Customer Success meetups (now called RYG Leadership Hours ), which provided a casual and intimate setting for Customer Success leaders to talk shop. Get Sales invested in NRR by conducting weekly deal reviews and stipulating sales commission based on Customer Success acceptance of customers.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Technical Review Scale Compensation 98

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2019

We also invested around those field account executives, more technical sales, pre-sales and eventually, customer success and post sales. When we were SMB focused in the early years, our sales cycles were quick. And for that, you need leadership and the right kind of leaders. So that changed a lot. We had our own roadmap.

Scale 174

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 174

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2023

Then the Boom happened, and everyone could justify insane investments, and it warped everything. That works for a hyper-SMB model. Even up until 2018-2019, when values were smaller, you could only raise so much over the lifetime of your company, so you had to be efficient. The only thing that mattered was revenue. And it’s possible!

Metrics 195

Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Finance 195

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Sam Taylor: On my first leadership role, I was the first enterprise sales rep, a manager of mid-market team. And so I was their first sales leadership hire. ” But we also get people going on SMB leads regardless of the segment that they’re there to sell, just so they can get some at bats under their belt as well.

Scale 171

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 171

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

Having a predictable pipeline enables more effective decision-making, from headcount planning to strategic investments in technology and beyond. As the week progresses, different levels of sales leadership will review forecasts and inputs and provide feedback to the account teams. Don’t just drive a weekly cadence.

Forecasting 242

Forecasting SMB Technical Review Sales 242

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 18, 2021

Three-quarters of SMB (small and medium business) decision-makers understand that using digital technology effectively is key to business success in today’s digital era. SMBs already executing on digital transformation are also more likely to expect revenues to rise compared to other SMBs.

SMB 49

SMB Cloud Business Model Technology 49

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

You said before, to me, it’s the believing in kind of participatory leadership over servant leadership. I don’t subscribe to the servant leadership model. Harry Stebbings: I think that participation and leadership is almost like a luxury of later stage companies. Andy MacMillan: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Sales Hiring 197

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 197

Tom Tunguz

JULY 14, 2013

With more than 80% of venture capital investments occurring in enterprise and with the public markets disproportionately rewarding SaaS companies with huge enterprise value-to-revenue multiples ( median is 7.6 ), it’s no surprise that interest Software-as-a-Service is booming. Characteristic 5: Market Leadership.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning 100

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Sales Profile: SMB to Commercial. Sales Profile: SMB to Commercial. Pilots are usually applied in high-value opportunities in key accounts that justify this big investment by the seller. Then, new sales engineering leadership was introduced to the company with a C-suite mandate to improve middle-of-the funnel conversions.

Revenue 74

Revenue Sales SMB Engineering 74

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Why is it so crucial to invest in enablement in the early days? What I have worked on and work with my leadership team, my peers, with Brad and finance as well as our board, is there’s different points in the journey as you go through that. It’s not an SMB where you’re getting volumes of 100 a day. Number one.

SaaS Payments 130

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 130

CustomerSuccessBox

MARCH 4, 2022

Investing in the success of existing consumers will pay off now more than ever. Architecting the customer success organization and solutions to leverage and grow in support of our revenue goals, including finding the correct balance of services and support for our many customer categories – Large Enterprise, Mid-market, and SMB.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value Interviewing 52

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So I think just opening your aperture when you’re thinking about marketplace, not assuming it’s just a small commercial SMB market sales. And it will require a collaboration across the organization at the leadership level. It’s definitely an investment that requires that kind of executive level visibility.

Scale 201

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 201

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

New investment structures are gaining traction in the early-stage SaaS financing market. Bigfoot Capital invests in initial-scale SaaS companies using both RBF and venture debt investment structures. Here’s an example of how an RBF loan facility can work: We invest $300k with a 36-month payback term. This is how it works.

Finance 85

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 85

Sales Hacker

JUNE 14, 2018

When you select the low-cost option, you sacrifice expertise, leadership, and the ability to execute. Is it more important to save a few dollars on a subpar partner or invest in a specialized team that possesses the expertise in a particular channel? Understand the capabilities of the partner you choose to align with.

Outsourcing Services 58

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 58

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2019

Final point about Talkdesk is that we started selling about five years ago in the SMB space. One thing that we have implemented is every time a customer turns now, and I realized this is not scalable if you’re in the SMB space and you have 50000 customers; but for Talkdesk with 1500, any time a customer turns, we do a full postmortem.

Retention 135

Retention VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale 135

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

However, given her CS background, Gabby never envisioned herself becoming a CEO, as she explained during her keynote session, “ The new ‘C’ in CEO ” at ChurnZero’s Customer Success Leadership Summit, BIG RYG. It can be hard to convince PE firms to invest in the customer. We had to say: what does SMB want?

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

Before founding BetterCloud, David was an early employee of Cloud Sherpas (acquired by Accenture), where he led the company to become the leading cloud services partner to SMB worldwide. The leadership sharing how the business is doing, answering questions, the hard questions, the hard questions that people have.

Scale 162

Scale Cloud Sales Hiring Technical Review 162

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

As for Krish, under Krish’s leadership the team has grown to over 300 people and over 5,000 clients making it one of the next generation in truly global SaaS businesses started in India. How does Krish think about purely serving the SMB market? How does he think about the mortality rate of SMBs? Loving our podcast content?

Scale 126

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 126

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.

Customer Success 233

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale AI 233

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2020

What I will say is different than perhaps SMB is that, in the Fortune 500 with enterprise customers, your contracts are either churning, renewing at flat, or expanding. It’s that 12 to 18 month sales cycle versus the two to three month SMB contract. Harry Stebbings: Totally, in terms of that sales cycle.

Sales Recruiting 173

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 173

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

In a company’s early days as a lean, mean, business machine, it’s fairly easy for leadership to stay in sync with their users. Those three together really comprise the entirety of the front office for the SMB. Why customer service is worth the investment. You might say it’s one of the strongest advantages a startup has.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Finding product market fit Moving from SMB to Enterprise or vice versa Achieving Enterprise repeatability Strategic expansion Borland has experienced all four stages at three different companies and knows what teams and functions look like for each stage of growth. Through customer stories. The journey covers three stages.

Enterprise 227

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 227

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

New investment structures are gaining traction in the early-stage SaaS financing market. Bigfoot Capital invests in initial-scale SaaS companies using both RBF and venture debt investment structures. Here’s an example of how an RBF loan facility can work: We invest $300k with a 36-month payback term. This is how it works.

Finance 52

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Unlike when selling into SMB businesses that kind of can go from a demo, to a conversion, to a close in a matter of days, enterprise sales is a lot more complicated and it’s hard to navigate through. So as Lauren sort of alluded to, we started by focusing on SMB’s. It’s not going to work. Lauren A.:

Underperforming Technical Team 152

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 152