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Blog Posts, Early, Q&AWhen You Are Asked If the Giants Will Put You Out of Business
If you doing something new and novel especially, you’ll constantly get a question for a long title. Why won’t the giants just take you down? Won’t Salesforce, or Google, or…
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Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Early, Growth, Hiring, Leadership, SaaStr Events, Videos5 Things I Wished I Asked Before Switching from Employee to Founder (Video + Transcript)
Co-Founder and CEO at GoCardless, Hiroki Takeuchi and CEO and Founder at Shipamax, Jenna Brown on their switch from the employee role to the founder role and what they learned…
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Blog Posts, Growth, Marketing, SaaStr Events10 Secrets to Putting on a Great Event
So we’ve been putting on events for a while at SaaStr. It started off by accident — we did a meet-up in 2013 as an experiment, with no content. And…
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Salespeople Will Always Exist
Ah, the age-old question of if you really need salespeople these days. Isn’t that kind of … old school? Can’t bots replace them? Well, there are probably at least 2…
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Blog Posts, Growth, Leadership, SalesThe Double-Stretch Hire Rarely Works Out
Over the past years at SaaStr, we’ve summarized a lot of VP-level hiring decisions down to one strategic choice: do you pick a Stretch VP, one that hasn’t quite done…
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Blog Posts, Featured Videos, Growth, Hiring, Leadership, SaaStr Events, Sales, Sales Strategy, VideosWhat to Do Better Next Time – Lessons from 3 Top Current CEOs (Video + Transcript)
We sat down with CEOs of high-growth SaaS startups across the world on what they would do better next time. Featuring: PJ Bouten – Co-Founder and CEO at Showpad Hande…
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Blog Posts, Featured Videos, Growth, SaaStr Events, Scale, VideosFireside Chat with Founder and CEO of Front, Mathilde Collin (Video + Transcript)
Our podcast host, Harry Stebbings, sat down with Mathilde Collin, CEO and Founder @ Front. We talk about her start in SaaS, why she created Front, how she consistently gets…
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Blog Posts, GrowthAssume Your Top Partners Compete With You By Year 4
I note a whole bunch of recent announcements: Salesforce is now competing with a whole ‘nother bunch of its top partners with its new High Velocity Sales Cloud. It adds…
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Blog Posts, JobsGet In Early (GIE) #006: Gorgias
In the early days of SaaStr, we did a “Get In Early” series where you could take a look at the actual metrics, and an actual video, of a break-out…
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Blog Posts, Early, MarketingCorporate Blogs Always Work. But Only If You Do Them Right.
How do you leverage a corporate blog to actually generate leads? There are 100,000,000+ blogs. And “worse” — there are 100,000,000+ new blog posts posted each month! The last thing…
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Blog Posts, Growth, Metrics9 Things I Learned from Elastic’s S-1 (IPO Filing)
IPOs seem like a dime-a-dozen these days in B2B/SaaS/B2D, but Elastic was one I wanted to learn a bit more about. Many of you likely use Elastic and/or Algolia to…
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Blog Posts, Growth, Hiring, Leadership, SaaStr Events, Sales, Sales Strategy, VideosHow to Build a World Class Outbound Team with Aaron Ross, Author of Predictable Revenue (Video + Transcript)
At SaaStr Europa a few months ago, we had Aaron Ross join us in Paris to educate the evergrowing European SaaS landscape. In his session, he talks about growing and…
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Blog PostsMain SaaStr Annual Expo Almost Sold Out, But We are Adding a Secondary Expo Downstairs Soon!
We’ll be close to capacity for the main expo at the 2019 SaaStr Annual by the end of the month, so we’re going to open up an annex on the…
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Blog Posts, Early, Growth, SaaStr Events, Scale, VideosThe Right Way to Build A Unicorn with CEO @ Qualtrics, Ryan Smith and Jason Lemkin (Video + Transcript)
We would all love to have our startup known as the “Unicorn for X.” Think Meltwater or Qualtrics as great examples. To figure out how to build a unicorn, our…
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Blog Posts, GrowthIf You Want to Hit The ’19 Plan … You Gotta Be Making the Hires Now
A few seasons back, we wrote a post on hitting how in SaaS, you have to be putting the resources in place by Q3 to hit the plan for the…
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Popular Q&A
What is the best piece of advice on closing deals for a new, inexperienced salesman?
Add value. Most new salespeople focus a lot on the transaction. What’s your budget? Do you need a discount? How big a discount? Can I give you a bigger discount? What questions do you have? If I give you an even bigger discount, can you sign right now? Your discount...
What is the difference between running a 10 person startup and a 100 person startup?
The biggest structural difference is you have to hire all the VPs by employee 50–100. You won’t be able to scale this far without a full management team — VPs of Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Customer Success at least. But the toughest personal challenge for...
What were aspects of your startup that were easier than you anticipated?
The part I didn’t originally get was how relatively easy is it to grow exising accounts and account size if your customers are happy. We segmented customer retention by Small, Medium and Large accounts after about 24 months and saw a pattern that I now know is fairly...
What should B2B SaaS companies do to ensure the success of their customers and reduce churn?
I know this sounds overly simple, but the answer is: Measure it. Set goals to improve it. Pay people to improve it. Too many start-ups don’t even know their CSAT and NPS. Too many start-ups don’t even visit their customers in person. Too many start-ups don’t know why...
What are some rookie mistakes founders make during VC meetings?
A few that are easy to fix: Not standing (when you present to > 2–3 folks). When you stand, you present better. Period. Standing turns you into the center of the audience, into the owner, the presenter. Sitting is great for a small convo, but sucks all the energy out...
How should I design sales reps compensation plans at $10k MRR?
Figuring out your very first sales comp plan when you don’t have a repeatable process or much revenue is confusing. I was exactly in the place you were (first rep at $10k MRR) and everyone faces some similar challenges: There’s no way this early you can expect a rep...
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