SaaStr

MAY 3, 2025

Heres how Id break it down: 0 t o $ 1M ARR: Founder-Led Everything Sales : Founders should lead sales. No VP of Sales yetdont even think about it. 1 M t o $ 3M ARR: Build the Foundation Sales : Once you have 2 reps consistently hitting quota, its time to hire your first VP of Sales. A head of Product.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Scale 253

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.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Can a SaaS Business Reactivate Churned Customers? This may sound simple, but the #1 thing you can and should do is create a series of marketing campaigns targeted only to churned customers. And also send that to your “lost” and churned customers. The hit rate is low, but this also works.

Churn 318

Churn Business SaaS Mobile 318

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2025

It begs the question: is the sales and revenue acceleration space back? It shows budget remains in the sales acceleration space where and when its earned. Gong in the early days of this wave was often hurt by consolidation, but today it seems to be benefitting as it itself has become a much broader platform and multi-product.

Engagement 221

Engagement Sales AI B2B 221

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

Don’t need as much sales experience on sales team. But beyond all the other Pros and Cons of SMB vs enterprise, there’s one looming issue with SMB SaaS: Churn. Endemic churn. The type of churn you almost can’t do anything about. And then 3% a month churn cuts your growth in half.

SMB 363

SMB Churn Payment Services SaaS 363

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. >> Let’s Start with Churn. Absolutely, getting your churn trending downward is important.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 279

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., My top suggestion is: Measure churn carefully, and consistently. And set a big annual goal to drive churn down say 20%.

Churn 279

Churn Revenue Sales Business 279

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2021

We put out a call on Twitter the other day for folks’ best tips on what has really lowered churn for them this year. Pay sales reps on renewals (enough to keep them from overselling year 1). “1/ Divide your churn into manageable and unmanageable areas 2/ Strip out definable areas of churn reason (e.g.

Churn 329

Churn Sales Hiring Headcount Technical Review 329

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

Annual contracts combined with prepaid cash are a huge benefit, when done right: You get all the cash up-front (this is how I went cash-flow positive in fact) — IF you can collect it a timely fashion; and Your churn almost by definition goes down, at least nominal churn. And that includes pricing.

SaaS 265

SaaS Payment Features Churn Pricing 265

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

Though it seems counterintuitive to maximize revenue, Miro intentionally set the threshold high enough that when someone bought Miro, they were getting the collaborative value because the users needed to use the product as a team vs an individual (which early data showed the highest churn in). That’s the real goal here: customer segmentation.

Payments 291

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers? And you have sales especially follow-up twice. The post Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers? You put them into a Get Them Back bucket and re-market to them with a dedicated program. at no cost to them. And then again in about 8-9 months.

Churn 279

Churn Marketing Data Sales 279

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2025

It combines renewals, churn, and upsells. And be very careful if you have Customer Success report to a CRO or to sales. From product to sales to marketing, every department should be aligned around making customers successful. Track metrics like churn, NRR, time-to-value, and customer health scores. Be careful here.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Retention 236

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

The average churn rate for the software industry as a whole is 14%. Thats actually one of the lowest churn rates across all industries. That said, industry experts agree that your SaaS companys goal churn should be below 2%. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Q: Why are sales jobs the worst? Here’s why sales is tough: Can’t hide — not for long. But ultimately, just becoming a more senior individual sales rep has a limit. It’s easy to see in many SaaS companies, but overall in the world, many people don’t really value the large contributions sales professionals make.

Sales 355

Sales Churn SaaS Management 355

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2025

Building a commission plan for Account Managers (AMs) is a bit different than for AEs (Account Executives) because AMs are typically focused on retention, expansion, and upsells rather than net-new sales. The key is to align their incentives with the outcomes you want: happy customers, low churn, and growing accounts.

Scale 198

Scale Management Churn Finance 198

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2023

As a VP of sales at early stage SaaS companies, what’s your best advice for reducing churn rate? A few things that always work to drive down churn in the early days — and later: Make sure you have a strong Head of Customer Success … whose #1 goal is reducing churn. And lead to unnecessary churn.

Churn 242

Churn Sales Hiring Customer Success Onboarding 242

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

The good news is, you can support these price points effectively with a very efficient inbound sales team, and/or a mix of self-serve and sales-led. Churn is all over the place with SMBs. There are a ton of apps that end up being $3k-$6k a year. But how do you get to $100m+ in ARR? You need at least a reasonably large vertical.

Payment Solutions 265

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 265

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2025

Look don’t throw money away on sales & marketing. If your sales team can’t close anything , you need to part ways. But more often, sales and marketing is closing some deals, just not enough. Fixing churn is often the fastest way to make CAC more reasonable. Should We Cut and Marketing To The Bone?

Marketing 165

Marketing Scale Churn Content Marketing 165

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Should I Pay Sales Reps When Our Customers Pay Monthly? Each and every month, until the customer churns. The second is to pay annualized commissions, with an allowance for churn. If you are worried you are paying for churned deals, just clawback a pro-rated amount of the $4,800. And maybe add clawbacks.

Scale 300

Scale Sales Payments Compensation 300

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2025

Customer Success has in many cases turned into a weaponized arm of sales, and has stopped being the champion of the customer. It changed support first, and now its starting to change sales and customer success. Especially as AI takes over more and more of the sales process. Don’t Shortchange Second-Order Revenue.

AI 179

AI Onboarding Customer Success Scale 179

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Back in the day, premium comp for some software sales execs made simple and easy sense. Traditional software had 90% gross margins, and the classic enterprise sales reps, the best ones, could close a million or more dollars a year. Sales reps in low NRR and high churn environments got paid almost the same as enterprise reps.

Scale 345

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 345

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2024

So in the earlier days especially, you’ll be tempted to lean on the sales team to do more than just … sell. It has some positives, the more you ask sales to do. Renewals, if they are tough, are sometimes better handled by sales who at least isn’t a brand-new name Customers like continuity.

Sales Hiring 325

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Customer Success 325

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2024

A great VP of Sales. Worst case, they still use it and are happy, and churn less. Go Hire That Missing VP! OK, this has been on our New Years list since inception, but its as true as ever. The best way to get out of a hole is to hire a great VP. Of Marketing. Of Product. Whats your #1 VP hole? Well, stop saying you cant hire anyone.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring SaaS Venture Capital Healthcare 287

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

We land with our Core product, which offers a base-level functionality across all key workflows, including call tracking, scheduling, dispatching, end-customer communications, marketing automation, estimating, job costing, sales, inventory and payroll integration.

Benchmarks 302

Benchmarks Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 302

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2023

So there are 3 things every sales rep I’ve worked with hates: Clawbacks. We won’t dig into this too much here, but sales folks hate it. Everyone in sales hates them. But … here’s the thing … I find clawbacks one of the most powerful tools to mitigate churn-and-burn deals.

Sales 299

Sales Management Churn Payment Services 299

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2025

If you can maintain this pace and improve your metrics (like NRR and sales efficiency), you could still build a significant, valuable B2B business over time. If youre selling to SMBs, churn can be a killerfix it now. Private Equity Sales & Other Exits 35% growth isnt going to get many buyers interested at $3m ARR.

Sales Hiring 203

Sales Hiring B2B Churn Retention 203

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2023

So leading growth stage VC Iconiq has published its latest and very detailed Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation here. Corners were cut in the boom times of 2021, but we are back to sane sales models. Renewals, if they are done by sales, are paid out at about 40% of an initial commission. Everyone should have a read.

Compensation 307

Compensation Scale Sales SMB 307

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

A long-time reader wrote in to ask a question that pretty much everyone asks some variant of: If you had to force rank these items in terms of what we should primarily be looking for in these first sales reps, how would you rank them? And later, your VP of Sales can do the hiring. 150k-350k ACV). Yes, you the founder/CEO.

Sales Hiring 346

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS Churn 346

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

So the best sales reps are just so, so worth it. I‘ve recently asked a bunch of sales leaders about this and their teams, and at first they said everyone followed the rules. A “funny” one, a VP of Sales told me how one of his top reps got around the CPQ system via a software hack to provide slightly higher discounts.

Sales 279

Sales Churn Software 279

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If a sales rep closed a deal, A customer success manager should take it over. I’d suggest a few basic thoughts and rules: If you have sales involved, then you need customer success, too. They’ll adjust their time and strategy to drive churn down and retention up. Find a way to fund both, even with SMBs.

Customer Success 353

Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 353

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2024

How do you build GTM efficiency in SMB sales? Early churn was a massive drag on efficiency. They needed to get their hands on early churn. This led to fairly unsustainable levels of churn of early churn. So Kyle paused the Growth plan that was already in place until they got churn in a better place.

Scale 307

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Sales 307

SaaStr

MAY 30, 2024

Sales-Led vs. Product-Led vs. Hybrid What are the pros and cons of different motions? Let’s start with a sales-led motion, which is traditionally how B2B software has been sold. Hybrid combines product-led and sales-led motions, and they work closely together. How does that collaboration and hand-off with sales work?

Scale 306

Scale AI Search Azure Sales 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

With the turbulence in the market in 2023, sales cycles have only been getting longer and a lot more complicated. At this year’s SaaStr Annual , CEO and co-founder of Capchase Miguel Fernandez and Director of Marketing Rose Johnson share five tips for getting sales right in any market. Lay out the sales process early on.

SaaS Payments 288

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Features 288

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2024

If your renewal rate is high, and the product isn’t so expensive procurement reviews it for cuts every year — maybe just have the finance department send the renewal notice, That’s what I did all the way to $20m+ ARR: if you have high churn, then it’s more complicated. Finance / ops isn’t the right choice.

Sales 282

Sales Finance Churn Customer Success 282

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

Sales Recruiting 334

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 334