SMB SaaS companies have to be at least twice as efficient in almost every sales & marketing motion as Enterprise ones Why? Enterprise ones can sort of coast on weak sales and marketing efficiency with their 120%-140% NRR — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) April 13, 2022 When you go to hire a…
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“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. This week we’re focusing on Andrew Steele, Partner at Activant Capital!

Dear SaaStr: How Many Hours a Week and On The Weekends Did You Work as a Founder? The first time I worked at a start-up, I was confused. I came in that first Saturday to the office to work, and no one was there. Right before that first start-up job, I had been a young…
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Now that we have 40+ acres for the SaaStr Annual 2024 in SF Bay Area, Sep 10-12, we’ve been able to run a new initiative: building an Executive Briefing Center, and letting our top sponsors do their own meet-ups and even mini-events in our Executive Briefing Center. The benefit was getting all of the vibe…
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So Datadog remains one of the most iconic Cloud and SaaS leaders of this generation. Growth is still epic at almost $2.5 Billion — it’s still growing 27% a year (!). But like Snowflake, it’s a bit less of a mind-bending rocketship that it used to be, and has focused on efficiency as well. Today…
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SaaStr Founder, Jason Lemkin, answers community questions and shares hot takes on SaaS metrics, growth, and efficiency.

Does outbound still work? It’s one of the questions so many sales leaders are asking out loud these days. The outbound playbook from the past 5-10 years in SaaS clearly … isn’t. Hiring 10, 20, 50 SDRs straight out of school to send the exact same email sequences to try to get meetings for an…
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Dear SaaStr: What’s a Resonable Discount for an Annual Contract? How About a 3 Year Contract? First — you don’t want a true net discount at all. What I mean what you want is a pricing structure that anticipates discounts so the net effect is revenue positive. Later, when you implement a CPQ and other…
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AI is a force multiplier for human capital. Here’s how Runway CEO Siqi Chen uses no-code prompt engineering to improve sales, email copy and finance.

So every week, Wednesday at 10am PST, we do an amazing, free, live Workshop Wednesday with the top SaaStr speakers, from CEOs to CROs to CMOs and more. And we do live, open Q+A at the end! Sign up here. Some of the great upcoming ones include the CRO of Salesloft, G Cabane, ex-VPM at…
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So long time friend of SaaStr Tomasz Tunguz, now heading his own VC fund Theory Ventures, has again summarized a lot of data into a few great charts. This time, on Mergers & Acquisitions. My biggest take-away: there are barely more than 50 acquisitions of $50,000,000 or more, at least disclosed one, in software of…
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Dear SaaStr: What Should Founders Do To Get Noticed By An Established Company’s M&A Team? Don’t bother too much with trying to get “corporate development” or the M&A team’s attention. That’s not their job. Probably the most important thing to understand is that in 95%+ of tech companies, the “M&A team” does not drive M&A….
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Dear SaaStr: what are your thoughts on incentivizing reps to handle repeat business vs focusing solely on new business with an account management team for repeats (when you are still under $10m)? At the end of the day if your product is SUPER sticky and doesn’t need a big procurement battle to renew, then just…
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The top SaaStr content you might have missed for the week of April 1st, 2024.

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Motivate a Sales Team Working Commission Only? It is really, really tough. While I am sure there are examples of “1099 reps” that have done extremely well, I haven’t seen it work in SaaS. Pay the reps at least a small base salary, with a large commission. It’s what folks…
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