Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale. Penetration pricing leads to land-and-expand sales tactics. Salesforce sells CRM seats based on an aggregate ROI of increased sales productivity for example. AWS, Twilio, Heroku, etc.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

Head of AI Dialpad: How to Build AI at Scale GTM/ B2B Speakers: CEO HubSpot Yamini Rangan: Going More Multiproduct, Going More AI, and Going More SMB and More Enterprise CEO Dropbox Drew Houston: DropBoxs Third Act: AI & Content Intelligence CEO Calendly, Tope Awotona Open AMA and AI in 2026 CEO Clio, Jack Newton: Reaccelerating Vertical SaaS to (..)

VP of Engineering 204

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 204

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are the best 5 points to improve poor sales performance? Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out. Be more involved as the CEO with sales. They can do it, but it’s pretty awful.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Sales AWS 279

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. But not to figure out if you really have a repeatable sales process.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 280

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product. Similar to most structures of a technical sales team. From the early days, we had a more technical sales team.” Hire early sales reps who are excellent at discovery and customer education. You gotta know the product cold.)

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 183

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

A year ago, AWS, GCP, & Azure averaged 44% annual growth. Amazon: We expect [customer] optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters. So So far in the first month of the year, AWS year-over-year revenue growth is in the mid-teens. Amazon: Net sales increased $21.4

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 314

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Cloud AWS Sales Hiring 314

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%. For many high-growth startups, the juicy 11% improvement in sales efficiency likely isn’t worth the squeeze.

Sales Hiring 266

Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 266

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

3. “Atlassian and AWS Say: Maybe Worry a Little Bit. A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan. 6. “What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One” Another SaaStr Classic that is just as relevent today. What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One. More on that soon!

Venture Capital 336

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 336

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2022

SMB AE | TOP 30 Sales Organizations. Sales Organization 1 Miro 2 Okta 3 Arctic Wolf 4 Sprout Social 5 Google 6 Clickup 7 Cisco Meraki 8 Microsoft 9 Klaviyo 10 AWS 11 Rippling 12 Fivetran. Also consistent with my data and ecosystem. Very helpful to see it this way. — BowTiedCocoon (@BowTiedCocoon) April 14, 2022.

SMB 337

SMB AWS SaaS B2B 337

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. Historically, Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure help with the sporadic needs of renting a GPU for a few hours for training vs. long-term use, which would cost thousands of dollars.

AI Search 294

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 294

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 286

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 286

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 266

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 266

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Are there categories where outbound sales just doesn’t work? The old sales playbooks of 2009 and even 2019 may not work as well in 2021.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. Marketplaces: AWS marketplace, Heroku marketplace, Salesforce marketplace.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? And it’s gone much more aggressive in its sales motions. AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud is one of the greatest case studies of all time. Do they “count” like the scrappy start-ups in SaaS that have now become decacorns?

Cloud 299

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. Customers Just Tried to Optimize Their Spend — Even Tiny Ones You might not think smaller Digital Ocean customers would be putting as much energy into optimizing their cloud spend as say a $1m a month AWS customer.

Scale 298

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

Now if events are a sales function budgeted by marketing, then at first this seems to make sense. Sales wants to use SDRs in their boots to qualify leads. Even if you are deep on AWS, you go to Reinvent. Yes, sales execs are better at follow-up. Just like they do with digital leads. But so many times, this is a waste.

AWS 313

AWS Sales Data Marketing 313

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2023

I’m using Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive), AWS , Vercel , Slack , Figma , Notion , Salesforce , HubSpot , Secureframe , Clari , and Zapier. #2. Last week we had a great one with Luca Penati, CMO & CCO of BEE, check it out here. This week we have Shrav Mehta, Founder and CEO of Secureframe! #1. What’s your core stack of apps today?

AWS 304

AWS compliance AI Startup 304

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling sales and marketing software, like Zoominfo, it can seem a lot tougher than 12-18 months ago. Growth in public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, etc.) If you’re selling cloud infrastructure, for the most part, growth may be down a smidge but is still strong, e.g., MongoDB.

Merchant Services 313

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 313

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: It’s Now Year 2 of the Venture Downturn Clawbacks and Tracking-to-Cash: Two Sales Management Tools to Be Thoughtful With 8 Things That Are Just Harder in SaaS Now Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better. What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 263

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 263

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2022

Its PLG-assisted sales motion has kept it capital efficient, and today it’s worth $2.7 But let’s step back a bit … the damage hasn’t been even, and capital-efficient SaaS stocks in many cases have held up pretty well. A few case studies: * Sprout Social IPO’d in December 2019 at an $800m market-cap. It’s tripled. It’s doubled.

AWS 296

AWS SaaS Cloud Scale 296

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS. Right now, 70% of the GenAI startups are using Google Cloud.

Cloud 314

Cloud Scale AWS AI 314

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Datadog, ZoomInfo, Atlassian, AWS: Epic Growth — But Some Real Headwinds For The First Time. SaaStr 603: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents the Ultimate Guide to Sales Compensation, Quotas and Recruiting with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin.

Sales Recruiting 297

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 297

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2022

The way this public company did it was — awful. #3. In any event, three suggestions to the founders, the VPs of Sales and Success, the CROs, and more out there. . Everyone has gotten good at listening to sales calls through Gong, Salesloft, Outreach, etc. Reporting to sales or a CRO is usually a bad idea.

Customer Success 326

Customer Success AWS Systems Review Software Review 326

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Signal can come from many places (sales team notes, customer support tickets, etc) IT Incident Management: Similar to the security alert example. They each have some of the largest cloud businesses in the world in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud respectively. Group related incidents or tickets by severity to help prioritize.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). Sales Efficiency: Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback Demonstrating the ability to efficiently acquire customers is the fifth aspect of a successful quarter.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

million revenue quarter…In reality, though, we were still the founder-led sales company.”. A few telling signs started to reveal themselves: Sales, Marketing & Accounts Struggled. No matter what VP of Sales they hired, sales consistently failed to meet their quota. Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 313

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

But developers notoriously don’t want to talk to anyone ever, and they’ll still spend six figures and beyond without ever talking to sales. Head of Sales: They don’t understand what SAML means and don’t plan to learn it. 50% of SaaS sales are outside of North America. Some are the same in terms of ease of use.

Enterprise readiness 290

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 290

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

Spending a Hefty 50% of Revenue on Sales and Marketing. They spend a pretty high 50% of all revenue on sales and marketing — and that’s up from last year. Atlassian by contrast spends just 15% of revenue on sales and marketing, one of the lowest of the public SaaS companies. NRR is holding up. #7. A valuation of 4x ARR?

Scale 262

Scale AWS Scaling Revenue 262

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Bonney Pelley, SVP, Strategy + Operations @ New Relic. Farrah B, VP Business Operations @ Cribl. Courtney Pallotta, VP of Marketing @ ChaosSearch. Olga Perez-Bonnelly @ Elastic.

New CTO 268

New CTO Scale CTO AWS 268

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Farrah B, VP Business Operations @ Cribl.

CTO 286

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 286

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2019

” So even in SMB sales in smaller markets, if you take dominant market share — you can get to $500m+ in ARR! They have a sales-assisted SMB sales process, which isn’t easy to make efficient. Sales & marketing costs are going up. But yes, the core market is mature — but at $640m+ ARR.

SMB 270

SMB Customer Lifetime Value AWS Churn 270

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244