SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Signs That Your SaaS Marketing Programs Won’t Scale Well? Most SaaS companies, once they have a mini-brand, start to get some amount of organic, “free” leads. Paid lead services at $100 a lead? Adwords at $5 a click, and $1000 an effective lead? You need to invest there, too.

Scale 214

Scale Scaling Marketing SaaS 214

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B cash Second was Algolia leading U.S. cash Second was Algolia leading U.S. Since then, I’ve made some pretty good other investments as well.

Investment 268

Investment Scale Churn SaaS 268

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. By the time he left to join Google Cloud as EMEA VP of Operations and Customer Growth, Salesforce had around 17 billion dollars in revenue and almost 50,000 employees.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

You might feel confused about where to begin, how to scale up, which mistakes you should avoid, and things you should consider before expanding. Now, let’s look at ten learnings that Dorian gathered while scaling Grammarly from a Consumer to an Enterprise brand with B2B offerings. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

Scale 203

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 203

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2022

Scale-ups are exciting. Scaling to satisfy customers’ demands depends on innovation and foresight combined with enterprise-ready technology and the right partners. On top of considerable dedication, creating a scale-up requires a functional edge—a unique and unreplicable capability compared to the players in the industry.

Scale 218

Scale Scaling Marketplace as a Service Entrepreneurship 218

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 251

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Monday has gone from $7m in 2017 to over $700m in revenue today, showcasing the sheer power of compounding revenue. Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Big Brain was an internal tool to track revenue, marketing expenses, and usage of the product.

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 159

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

How CAC targets drive GTM strategies: If Your CAC Target Is Low You’ll likely focus on small-to-medium businesses and use tools like inbound sales and low-touch or no-touch self-service. The sales cycle at this stage may be very short. The sales cycle will be slightly longer at this stage. But over time, things change.

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Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 226

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

How do you scale a company based that can be collaborative for everyone in your org — from finance to marketing? Ultimately, they developed a more hybrid sales approach because there are good parts to each experience. Lastly, as a platform business, he had to avoid the temptation to optimize visible, short-term metrics such as revenue.

Scale 192

Scale Software Review Scaling Sales Hiring 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Check out the session here: Algolia also summarized their Top 5 take-aways here , and below: Most SaaS founders start out the same way— armed with ample expertise of the technical details that go into a product and with limited experience of other aspects of scaling, such as sales. On finding product-market fit in the early stages.

Scale 225

Scale Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Scaling 225

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2022

Usage was there, but revenue wasn’t tracking the usage growth. By moving from Freemium to “Contact Me” only (albeit with transparent pricing), sales went way, way up. He got into conversations with top prospects, and got them to buy bigger, better editions. Competes with sales’ desire for Urgency.

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Scale Sales Engineering Acquisition 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

E.g., Sales +Marketing Expenses < First Year ACV = Success ? But maybe not while you are scaling, you can often afford to invest more if you have funding. This is pretty much where most of us end up at, at scale. say $300-$500k in customer revenue per segment). I.e., keeping the Magic Number at or above 1.0.

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Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

If you’ve raised $10m-$15m, I’m assuming you are somewhere between $2m and $10m in ARR (revenue). Tiny experiments are OK, and investing in segments that are just starting to take off is good. Hire more sales reps, to sell to the same basic segments that you already have customers in. Upgrade the management team.

Scale 252

Scale Sales Hiring Banking Engineering 252

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

First, you hire your sales team. Finally, growth occurs when sales, product, and marketing can come together. Co-founder and CEO of Insider , Hande Cilingir, talks about what it takes to write a successful revenue growth story. Call their previous employers and find out whether your prospective hire was hitting their quotas.

Scale 213

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Marketplace as a Service 213

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Doug Pepper, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth, has invested in software and SaaS companies for 22 years, from seed to growth stage. They initially double their ARR each year in scaling post $10M. On the other hand, the sales expenses form a larger share of operating expenses as the GTM motion is leveraged.

Scale 203

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Venture Capital 203

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Additionally, they had to figure out how they would sustain the revenue stream to retain the staff. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. They also hired a VP of Partners who knew how to scale B2B software. Partner: investing in different partnership channels.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 192

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot, has many insights on how to serve SMB customers at scale. But because SMBs are rarely digital-first, their recent challenges allowed HubSpot to leverage their years of experience in marketing automation, as it became a core feature of how these companies worked to scale.

Scale 220

Scale SMB Scaling Innovation 220

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

A Burn Rate That is Too High Venture capital is meant for investing, for sure. But there’s a fine line between investing and keeping a leaky boat and set of metrics afloat. Almost every founder regrets using capital to keep a high-burn rate engine going that isn’t scaling rapidly. #2.

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Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 243

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. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business.

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Scale Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scaling 250

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

APRIL 25, 2019

It’s never remotely easy until you have a steady stream of leads and a decent 1.0 revenue team. Don’t expect a sales magician. You ideally need to close the first 10–20 customers yourself, and then hire sales folks to help. Probably a few prospects will find it. It’s still a great investment. Lots of them.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling SaaS 195

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2024

It sells sales, marketing, support and more tools. Revenue Growth is Up Just 24%. HubSpot’s revenue growth of 24% (21% in constant currency) is basically equal to its net new customer count. So price increases don’t always automatically lead to an ACV / ARPU bump. #4. And second, so many of us use HubSpot.

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Scale Cloud Scaling Pricing 234

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

A few ideas on how to help the sales team make this your best year so far: Hire dedicated sales / revenue ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations , even up to $10m ARR or beyond. Getting routing the right leads? Invest (more) in training and onboarding. Do the opposite.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Enterprise 243

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

As a SaaS veteran who built and sold a software company for nine figures, invested in startups since 2013, 10x-ing his fund, and continues to build a powerhouse community of SaaStr fans, he offers some hot takes on the communities’ burning questions. Sales is much harder than in 2021. How Does That Impact Sales and Marketing?

Metrics 203

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 203

FastSpring

AUGUST 3, 2022

There are several things you can do to prepare your go-to-market teams for changes in your prospects’ and customers’ buying behaviors and priorities. 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. Do your sales teams know how to pivot?

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Scale Revenue Sales Compensation 136

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

A fun watch here: Summary from Pavillion: Let’s dive into this episode’s key topics… The AI Bubble Watch here In 2020 and 2021, we saw tech companies raising a lot of capital, and beginning in 2022, we saw a decline in performance leading everyone to believe that these organizations have been overvalued.

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Investment Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 145

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2023

Carta is a platform that helps people manage equity, build businesses, and invest in the companies of tomorrow. The company is trusted by more than 30,000 companies, over 5,000 investment funds, and half a million employees for cap table management, compensation management, liquidity venture capital solutions, and more.

Scale 194

Scale Payments Payment Solutions Artificial Intelligence 194

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.

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Scale Customer Support Scaling Strategy 178

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

But they are ar $780,000,000+ in ARR, with an 86 NPS and strong revenue growth at 29% overall and 49% in subscriptions (yes, it’s confusing). New Customers Still Growing 22% at Scale. For me, Net New Customer Count has become the metric I obsess the most about at scale. 68% of Revenue in U.S.,

Scale 220

Scale Pricing Scaling Cloud 220

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Gusto is a high-velocity, high-scale acquisition and expansion engine, and one we can all learn from. In a recent Workshop Wednesday, Tolithia Kornweibel, CRO, and Jamie Edwards, Head of Go-to-Market Operations and Tools, share how Gusto maximizes revenue so that you can do the same.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Marketing Construction 205

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Let’s deep dive into how combining innovative demand gen strategies with a modern tech stack and specific team setup can provide a winning formula for scaling B2B growth, even with low budgets of greater than a 2x burn multiple. In this playbook we’ll share: Automated outbound at-scale strategies. No humans involved.

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Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 219

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

But in the end, today, at scale, their small customers churn is at the same high rates as other “grab and go” SMB products. Enterprise revenue is up 5%, vs. total revenue up 3%. #3. It did almost everything right, including investing in a “second act” in voice and contact center.

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SMB Scale Banking Enterprise 226

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 11, 2022

Raise, Sell, Merge, or Scale? In this article, we’ll help you determine the next best step for your business and provide guidance on whether you should raise, sell, merge, or scale your SaaS. The acquirer gets an opportunity to grow market share without doing the heavy lifting of growing and scaling an existing business.

Scale 97

Scale Scaling Technical Review Venture Capital 97

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 16, 2023

However, scaling a business into a seven-figure enterprise is a completely different ball game altogether. So, how could these startups scale while others struggled to find their footing? So how did I scale my PR agency to a coveted seven-figure powerhouse? To scale and truly stand out, I needed to niche down.

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Scale Scaling Strategy Social Media 86

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. Jabari Norton, VP WW Partner and Alliances, Sumo Logic.

Scale 195

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 195

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2021

This was my first venture investment. One of the earliest posts I did on SaaStr was back in 2013 when I made my first venture investment, co-leading the seed round in Pipedrive. I also made a lot of mistakes on this investment I’ll share in another post. Lemkin invest in Pipedrive? Took 10 years to $1.5B

Investment 252

Investment Scale Scaling SaaS 252

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.

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Scale Scaling AI Search AI 109