From 100M+ Free Users to $1M Enterprise Deals: The Calendly Playbook for Hybrid PLG Success – Insights from CEO Tope Awotona
When you think about Product-Led Growth (PLG) success stories, few companies exemplify the model better than Calendly. Founded in 2013 by Tope Awotona, Calendly has grown from a simple scheduling tool to a scheduling powerhouse that’s touched “double...
SEM Rush: If You Get In The “Top 10” For SEO, You Probably Will Be There in AI Search, Too. But — Differently.
So does SEO still work in the AI era, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI mode itself? A massive amount of search has already come to the AI leaders, as this latest data from SEM Rush and Sparktaro show: SEO may not be dying, but “GEO” for AI search...
Who Should Marketing Report To? What 3,000+ Companies Actually Do (And Why It Matters)
Where does your CMO sit in the org chart? It’s a question that reveals more about your company’s growth stage and strategic priorities than you might think. New data from Pave reveals the latest patterns in how marketing leaders report across company...
Webinars Almost Always Work. If You Really Commit. Start Next Week.
One thing if you are a first-time founder in SaaS that may seem as boring as you can imagine is … webinars. You think: You yourself as a founder or exec never go to them. And they seem like something you do, well, later. When you are bigger. And so many seem of...
Yes Customer Testimonials — Done Right — Are Super Important
Do customer testimonials really matter in the age of AI? They still do. Maybe even more so. They are incredibly important. We spend so much time marketing and selling to customers. And building stuff for them. But almost no one thinks enough about what a buyer...
The Confounding Logic of Discounting
There can be nothing more frustrating in the middle-early days than when sales closes some great deal for, say, $125,000 a year … but you “knew” they could have gotten $200,000 if they just held the line on discounting. You’d talked to that...
10 Marketing Tactics That Always Work for Early-Stage SaaS StartUps
Dear SaaStr: What are the best marketing techniques for an early-stage SaaS startup? My list of things that almost always work in B2B marketing: Try everything — and Double Down on anything that works. If your price point is very low, this sometimes doesn’t work. But...
At Least 20% of Your New Customers Should Come from Referrals and Word of Mouth. Ideally, 50%.
Dear SaaStr: What Percent of My Revenue Should Come from Referrals and Word of Mouth? "Word of mouth is ultimately the only way you can scale in SaaS." pic.twitter.com/UAsIkG4Ixx — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) December 18, 2024 Ultimately, most...
Dear SaaStr: When Is It “Too Early” To Hire Your First Marketer?
Dear SaaStr: When Is It “Too Early” To Hire Your First Marketer? In a perfect world, you’d learn something about marketing first before you hire someone to take it over. I.e., you’d experiment and at least make some progress in: Content Marketing. Can you...
Is Your Customer Success Team Helping or Harming Your Word-of-Mouth?
So we had another 2025 Customer Success experience the other day. A CS exec at a somewhat dated platform we used pushed us and pushed us to take a Zoom to do a “roadmap review”. We finally did, and it turned out, the agenda was just Yet Another Upsell. They wanted...
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Convince My Customers with Monthly plans to Upgrade to Annual Plans?
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Convince My Customers with Monthly plans to Upgrade to Annual Plans? My advice: Don’t. It’s too many calories expended for not enough benefit. Let me explain what I mean … Large customers only pay via invoices, especially for any deal of any...
70% of Pipeline from Marketing Comes From Just 4 Things
So leading SaaS growth stage VC fund Insight Partners surveyed 100+ of its top later-stage B2B companies to see how they did marketing and demand gen and pipeline creation in particular. What they learned: Marketing drives 48% of pipeline across B2B companies. Sales...
Want To Do a Podcast? More B2B Content? Build More of an Audience? Here’s My #1 Tip
So many people are producing B2B content these days, let me just give my #1 bit of advice: If you think a piece of content great, it may not perform that well. You’ll see. But if you don’t think it’s great, it will bomb. Some of the best of our 1000s...
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Get Sales and Marketing to Work Better Together?
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Get Sales and Marketing to Work Better Together? The simplest way is to get sales and marketing to work together is to (x) align marketing’s #1 goal to a revenue-related “commit” that (y) sales agrees to. Your VP Sales Has a Sales Quota. Your VP...
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