Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Successful SaaS Leaders Without Sales Teams?
Many that are self-serve and SMB-focused can start off without a sales team … for a while.
But almost none stay without a sales team … forever.
- Yes, Atlassian since well past its IPO had almost no “direct” sales team. But it had and has a very large channel that sells its product into the enterprise, and a lot of internal resources that support the channel. Those channel salespeople aren’t employees, so yes, leaning so heavily on the channel is unique. But it’s just third party selling instead of first party. Jay Simons, ex-President of Atlassian, was very clear on this in our convo just after its IPO:
- Yes, Slack started off with no “outside” sales team. But as it went toward IPO, 50% of its revenue came from bigger, enterprise deal. And it staffed up a very big sales team.
- Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. Then to sell Dropbox Enterprise, it added several. And Box’s revenues are now 99% through the sales team, from 0–1% when it started as a pure freemium product.
- Yes, Canva got to $1B ARR with almost no sales team. But it scaled one up as part of its Enterprise product and platform.
- Figma, Notion and more added full sales teams … over time.
You don’t need 100% sales-driven revenue to Go Big. Hybrid models can be great.
Many of Twilio’s bigger customers go through sales, but then a huge amount of the downstream revenue is “automatic” as customers use more. Hence, Twilio has a very high level of sales efficiency (and relatively small headcount). But there’s still a real sales team there. They just only need to directly touch a subset of the total revenue.
Over 40% of HubSpot’s bigger customers today start off on the free and cheap Starter Edition.
It’s just hard to get past $100m ARR without going upmarket a bit, and closing larger deals.
It’s the law of large numbers. And larger deals require a human touch. That can be done without sales. But if it’s only done with support and Happiness Officers … you close less revenue. More on the math here: Why You Need 50 Million Active Users for Freemium to Actually Work and why salespeople increase revenue here: Curse of the ‘Middlers’: Why Happiness Officers Can’t Stand In for True Sales Professionals
So convergent evolution says anyone trying to cross $100m in ARR or so will eventually add a true sales team. Maybe on Day 0. Maybe on Day 3650.
