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.

Scale 270

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 270

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

But what about pricing? 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. Why You Shouldn’t Trust How Your Competitor’s Price.

Pricing 138

Pricing Payment Solutions Payment Services SaaS Payments 138

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2022

Is charging by consumption (usage-based pricing) a superior model for a business? Separately, the startup may have to reinvent its GTM: new AE quotas, sales materials, margin calculations. Selling UBP to a buyer accustomed to buying a flat seat count introduces more friction into the sales process. AppDynamics. CPU Core. $6

Pricing 259

Pricing Scale Banking Startup 259

FastSpring

APRIL 18, 2024

For many SaaS and software companies, international sales are a key part of their growth trajectories. In this article, we focus specifically on price localization: What price localization is. Why it’s so important to optimize pricing for local markets.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payments SaaS Payments Merchant Services 78

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2024

The post The Top 8 SaaStr Tips to Building an Effective First Sales Team (per Perplexity) appeared first on SaaStr. I think it did a pretty good job The summaries we do might be better, but this is a great place to start.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Scale AI Search Compensation 212

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

based SMB sales positions. SaaS sales execs with even a little bit of experience at other SaaS companies are looking for higher and higher OTEs, often with lower effective attainment and high support costs. based sales reps often aren’t really willing to work, or excel, at sub-$100k OTEs anymore. for non-enterprise sales.

SMB 278

SMB Scale Sales Hiring Sales 278

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2022

41% of you have sales do some customer onboarding, not just CS or other specialists. Should sales just disappear once the contract is signed? #5. 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. 59% of you have raised prices this year.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Pricing Scale Interviewing 298

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2022

By moving from Freemium to “Contact Me” only (albeit with transparent pricing), sales went way, way up. So many sales leaders get frustrated with Free editions, very low-cost editions … and the Long Tail in general. The Long Tail : Distracts sales , with leads that never closes.

Scale 300

Scale Sales Engineering Acquisition 300

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. They kept doing it after the economy changed, and they also scaled it. It’s cheap.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 161

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2021

Q: What billing or pricing tactic have you found in the end just wasn’t worth it? Usually they are a sign of a weak VP of Sales (who can’t close), or founders just trying everything possible (which isn’t all bad). “Regular price increases for SaaS” — Benjamin Irvine. Jason, ed. :

Pricing 294

Pricing Scale Enterprise Onboarding 294

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

These two departments are a SaaS company’s most important; without their alignment, there is no growth or scale. We are seeing more agile packaging and pricing methods, dynamic deals, ramp-up revenue, and consumption and usage. While enabling your go-to-market teams, you must be mindful of the future state of scaling.

Scale 213

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 213

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

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. The framework above is a lean canvas to help you understand your customers’ needs post-sale. Renewals.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 161

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 28, 2021

Should you price your SaaS per seat or per use? The first thing to state is that massive companies have been built using both pricing structures: Salesforce and Adobe bill per seat while Snowflake and Twilio charge per use. When to use per seat pricing. Would they switch if the pricing weren’t predictable?

Pricing 266

Pricing Strategy Startup Scale 266

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2020

For most of us, as we build up our confidence, the best initial pricing strategy to start is the Low End of Normal. And you want the least friction possible in sales when you are starting out. There is no commodity pricing in SaaS. Price at 80% of that, to start. If that looks too low, raise the price a smidge.

Pricing 266

Pricing Scale Enterprise Branding 266

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

Few things will frustrate you more in the early days than long sales cycles on bigger deals. You’ll feel like you just don’t have the time for a 6, 9 or even 12 month sales cycle when you’re struggling just to put the first few points on the board. You cannot force 9 month sales cycles into 9 days.

Scale 339

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Pricing 339

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 234

Scale Scaling Marketplace as a Service Entrepreneurship 234

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. Usage-based pricing will be the key to successful monetization in the future.”. Usage-based pricing is in all layers of the tech stack.

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2021

Pricing is one of the most challenging elements to get right for SaaS companies. How much should you charge, and what pricing model works best? In an era of empowered buyers, vendors should take care to remove obstacles from the pricing process or risk losing the customer to a competitor.

Pricing 218

Pricing Scale Retention AI 218

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

Cliff Bockard, Senior Vice President of Revenue at DigitalOcean, joined us at SaaStr Scale to discuss how businesses can serve SMBs and still bring in large numbers of revenue. . SMBs usually prioritize simplicity, ease of use, transparent pricing, and support. Self-serve vs. sales-driven product experience.

Scale 211

Scale Scaling Revenue Enterprise 211

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 280

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing Venture Capital 280

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.

Scale 237

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 237

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. The sales team only brings in a minority of the lifetime revenue per customer. More on that below.

Scale 251

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 251

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2022

So we’ve got all the amazing sessions from 2022 SaaStr Scale up on YouTube here ! “3 Lessons from Building a Marketing Engine to Grow Pipeline from Millions to Billions with Samsara’s CMO” A great session on marketing at scale, across multiple products — with ton of great Q&A at the end. #2.

Scale 194

Scale Scaling Engineering Acquisition 194

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2023

When a startup is born, founders lead sales. Design partners, pilots, or founder-led sales - they have many names - these customers work with a startup to solve a problem. Conversations about contracts & pricing are kicked down the road until the customer sees value & the path to capture it.

Scale 167

Scale Engineering Outsourced Development Sales 167

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2023

As SaaS founders are looking to scale and raise funding, it can be confusing and stressful to navigate in the uncertain market of the past few years. Profitability, Revenue Trajectory, and Efficiency Metrics Historically, EV/NTM sales were evenly driven by profitability and revenue growth. Every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Sign up HERE !

Scale 233

Scale Scaling Software Review Operational efficiency. 233

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2020

I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting asked about the top mistakes hiring your first sales team so many times over the years, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List. Make fewer of them and you’ll scale faster with less stress. Yes, you may be terrible at sales.

Sales Hiring 321

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 321

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2021

………………… Hiring a VP of Sales in a startup is an incredibly hard thing. And part of the problem is VP of Sales searches center too much around statements like “Jim was most recently the VP of Enterprise Sales at IBM” or “I want to introduce you to this gentlemen, he was the RVP at Salesforce and…).

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Scale Development Team Review Sales 317

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2021

When you go to hire a VP of Sales or even your first sales rep, one of the top qualifying questions I always recommend asking is if they have experience at your deal size, at your ACV (Annual Contact Value). And sales professionals certainly can learn skills and go up (and perhaps even down) a deal size in sales.

SMB 315

SMB Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 315

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2021

I’ve written a lot about this, but for most start-ups, you can boil it down to two criteria any first VP of Sales just has to meet: Has she built at least a small team before? If you can hire 2–3 great ones, you can likely scale and hire 20–30. Has she sold as your price point, approximately ? More here: [link].

Sales Recruiting 271

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Development Team Review 271

SaaStr

JANUARY 1, 2024

So one thing that’s changed radically in SaaS over the past few years if everyone has realized to truly scale, you need to be multi-product. The Average Public SaaS Company has 35,000 Customers So at some point, you can’t just raise prices and add enterprise editions to keep mixing it up and growing.

Scale 301

Scale Scaling B2B Enterprise 301

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2024

It sells sales, marketing, support and more tools. Despite raising prices and selling more products, HubSpot ACV is basically flat at $11,365. Clearly, even SMBs are working to moderate spend, even as vendors increase pricing. So price increases don’t always automatically lead to an ACV / ARPU bump. #4.

Scale 251

Scale Cloud Scaling Pricing 251

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What remarks have a salesperson said to you that lost them the sale? Sales is there to serve. If sales was routed the wrong lead, that’s the company’s fault, not the prospect’s. Wrong / painful economic terms, even if price itself is OK. But a sales rep needs to do it the right way.

Sales Hiring 206

Sales Hiring Scale Sales SMB 206

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Introducing usage-based pricing requires a fundamental mindset shift away from securing cash up front and toward providing value so your customers consume more. The point of usage-based pricing is to create a great experience that encourages your customers to consume, but overages slow down that seamless adoption and usage experience.

Pricing 105

Pricing Scale Forecasting Compensation 105

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Sales is much harder than in 2021. Therefore, sales and marketing practices made no sense in 2020. How Does That Impact Sales and Marketing? In 2021, many sales folks were marginally efficient. If you have a good sales and marketing team, they will respond. It’s a cancer on the sales team.

Metrics 220

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 220

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2020

With SaaS sales, annual price or monthly price that’s billed annually? This removes friction from the sales process, leading to a higher and faster close rate. Small businesses and individuals often prefer to pay monthly, even at a significantly higher price (e.g., Then maybe pricing games are worth it.

Pricing 232

Pricing Payment Solutions Scale SaaS Payments 232

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2024

Leandra has over 30 years of experience leading large sales and revenue teams. Apollo is a next-gen sales tool that combines sales intelligence and execution workflows with AI. What they did for marketers, Apollo is trying to do for sales. Instead, they’re pricing based on the value they provide. No, you don’t.

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring Scale Pricing SMB 198