SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Do SaaS Companies Typically Pay Their Sales Reps a Bonus on Renewals? Simple answer: almost no SaaS companies pay sales reps on standard renewals. You want each rep only selling into the segments they are best at so you segment your team into Small, Medium and Field/Large prospects. More leads close, faster.

Scale 275

Scale Sales SaaS Cloud 275

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Former Head of Revenue at BILL and HubSpot Americas leader Michelle Benfer recently joined us on a SaaStr Workshop Wednesday share her insights on one of the most critical roles in any SaaS organization: the frontline sales manager. “At HubSpot, I had over 100 frontline sales managers reporting to me.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 264

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team. Colin joined Wiz in February 2021 when the company was near zero revenue.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 192

SaaStr

MARCH 29, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Best Ways to Transition From The Founder-Led Sales Stage? Transitioning from founder-led sales to a commissioned sales team is one of the most criticaland trickysteps in scaling a SaaS business. You Never Get to Leave Sales. This is non-negotiableeven if you hate sales. Be specific.

Scale 206

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Compensation 206

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

From Sales-Led to Product-Led: How Apollo.io This analysis examines their journey from a struggling sales-led organization to a successful product-led growth company, resulting in over 880,000 paying customers and substantial revenue growth.

Scale 166

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 166

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

You can talk about the roadmap or sales strategy until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t have the team to do it at scale, there’s no point in talking a ‘big game.’ ” The best sales leaders are the ones that are even better recruiters than the CEO. Nothing else matters, right?

Sales Recruiting 311

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 311

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2025

So what gets you more high-quality leads and ultimately business — smaller, more “intimate” industry events? And your top prospects? There is no question the ideal event in theory is just you and you alone … and 50-100 of the very top prospects in the world. But — it’s the wrong question.

Scale 300

Scale Marketing Travel B2B 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Klaviyo dominates marketing in the Shopify ecosystem and in ecommerce, and just keeps on scaling. But it’s clear that it’s still in the investing phase, and increasing spend in sales & marketing. So the latest SaaS leader to cross $1B ARR is Klaviyo. It was the only SaaS IPO on 2023. The only one!

Scale 307

Scale SMB Scaling Enterprise 307

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2025

We’ll hear from the CRO of $3B Clio (legal SaaS), the CEO and CRO of Flock Safety (police and safety SaaS), and dozens of others on how to scale their vertical SaaS industries and platforms. It takes getting out in the field, and creating a ton of true value — before the sale. #2. See you there! How Kyle does it here: #3.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling SMB 189

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Lucid is the leading provider of visual collaboration software with over 70M users worldwide. Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. This is where product-led sales comes in.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy shares his journey to more than $100M and the lessons he learned along the way for building a PLG motion and an Enterprise sales motion. They didn’t initially envision being a large Enterprise sales organization. Let’s first start with how Cloudinary came to be. That’s huge!

Scale 317

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 317

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

If you are sales-driven, youll usually stall out at $1.5m-$2m in ARR or so if you dont start growing the team to the next level, The First 50. Theres just physics here to get to $10m in ARR in a sales-led model, even a partially sales-led model: After $1.5m Youll need another sales rep at least per every $500k in new ARR.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 265

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

There’s always someone a few years ahead of you on the scaling journey who can share their lessons learned. Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Timing is also essential.

Scale 314

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 314

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Force them to go annual, and you are just adding friction to the sales process. Here’s a subtle but very important mistake so many VCs, blogs, social media, etc. Yes, as you scale you do need to maintain efficiency in sales and marketing. Give that VP of Sales / Marketing / Engineering more time.

Scale 303

Scale Social Media SaaS Acquisition 303

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? In the early days, it’s simply that you have a few more leads than you can currently handle. Plus — following up on the 50 qualified leads from the month before. To a point. appeared first on SaaStr.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Sales 307

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales. This isn’t new.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 297

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

These outcomes might include: Driving user growth Maximizing revenue Ensuring user satisfaction Scaling adoption A different outcome would lead to a different pricing choice. Scaling stage: Reduced to single-user plans to maximize accessibility. And if you’re enterprise or sales-led, that volume is not going to be there.”

Payments 291

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 291

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. The 5 Key Elements of Codeium’s GTM Scaling Playbook 1. What is Codeium and Windsurf?

Sales Recruiting 248

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 248

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

A self-reinforcing flywheel where successful customers: Get promoted Tell their network Become champions Drive organic growth 3. Solve Hard Technical Problems Create multiple moats Patent protection Technical innovation Market leadership 2.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 269

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2025

B2B Startups Spend 15% of Revenue on Sales and 10% on Marketing, Per SaaS Capital #4. Built a Bottom-Up AI SaaS Without a Single Sales Rep #5. From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship The Problem with Small But Mighty AI Start-Ups #2. There Are Now 3,000+ Billionaires. 100+ Are in B2B.

Scale 147

Scale Customer Success Scaling AI 147

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2025

But how did they scale so quickly? Here are the five channels that worked for Rupa: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Social Proof and Trust Building Educational Partnerships and Rupa University Conferences and Event Sponsorships Outbound Sales and Data Quality Lets dive into each. Its about creating high-quality content at scale.

Scale 233

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Acquisition 233

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2024

That ties to our overall rough sales cycle data here: Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? Is usually see 15%-20% as start-ups scale, but 25% is probably the right target as you scale. Is usually see 15%-20% as start-ups scale, but 25% is probably the right target as you scale.

Scale 291

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2025

Or a great growth marketer paired with a great sales team will punch above their weight class. In sales, t he more SMB you are, the more you should lean on your bench. ” Pure external hiring loses too much institutional knowledge while pure internal promotion can lead to too much groupthink. Nothing else matters.

Sales Hiring 291

Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review Interviewing 291

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. First, let’s rewind the clock and look at Grafana Labs’ origin story. How did it come to be?

Scale 298

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 298

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2023

At the SaaStr Annual, Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s Chief Strategy Officer and founding chief Product Officer shared five lessons he learned along the way from scaling six products to $100M+. Lesson 1 — The Magic “Scale or Pivot” Metric With so many different SaaS metrics out there, which metric can really steer a business?

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 312

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. When I was running it, it was a lot smaller than that, but scaled that up very, very quickly.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customer success, and post-sales team. But at the start of its expansion play, Checkr’s enterprise motion failed, and sales cycles were slow, taking up to a year for $100k & up deals.

Revenue 300

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

Workato’s SVP of Embedded Sales and Director of Solutions Marketing joined us at SaaStr Annual to talk about how to nurture customers — a great topic in general, but especially for embedded sales and APIs that can take a while to scale. The Second Most Important SaaS Hire? Customer Success. But the results?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Here’s what I see most often, the Top 6 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make: Incomplete understanding of business model, and how it will scale. You have to hire those extra few reps that we don’t really have leads for today. But they also make mistakes we tend not to make with experience. You have to pay folks market.

Scale 313

Scale SaaS Social Media Business Model 313

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2025

One thing is clear is the team that send this isnt the A or B sales team. And a great example of running a very successful outbound program at scale here: And what I’d do better. The email is from Salesforce itself for sure (and an SDR that works there) but it might be a captive agency or contractor working at Salesforce.

Scale 291

Scale Sales AI Enterprise 291

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

A reminder to not stay too reliant on direct sales as you scale. RingCentral has followed, driving SBC down from 23.6% of revenue in 2021 to 15.7% 16,000 Channel Partners A very large percent of RingCentral’s revenue comes from the channel. Billion in ARR appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 291

Scale Compensation SMB Cloud 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2025

Top Posts: #1: 2025 And The Rise of the Mech AE (Account Executive) #2: 2025 Should Be Better Than 2024 For Almost All Leading Public SaaS Companies #3: 38% of Bootstrapped Start-Ups Have Solo Founders. But Only 17% of VC-Backed Ones Do. And 10%-12% of Ones That IPO. #4:

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Revenue 286

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2025

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. Sales drives 33%. Not a shocker but useful to see this across 100+ leading B2B scale-ups. And Partners and Channel 15%. That’s it.

Scale 295

Scale Marketing B2B Scaling 295

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies.

Construction 255

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 255

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. But you won’t scale past $4m-$5m without a true, seasoned VP of Engineering. As are you.

Scale 280

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 280

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

Or didn’t want to do sales. She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. But now, I see that if you can hire a great COO as soon as possible after that, you can scale faster. is one of the top ways to help all of us scale faster. I still believe this.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2024

Start-ups, scale-ups and public companies in 2021 would hire a lot of folks they just wouldn’t hire today. But almost everyone growing even at “pretty good” rates is hiring. And it’s no easier today to find great people than it was in 2021. However, it is true that it’s different today.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing SaaS 290