SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2025

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. Maybe on Day 0.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 274

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 185

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 185

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 162

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 162

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. Growth stage: Introduced business plans with 20-user minimums to provide enterprise-grade features.

Payments 284

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 284

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? And a few other data from the report: Gongs enterprise customers see about a 25% win rate, conversion from Opportunity to Closed. Thats a bit higher than I expected.

Scale 284

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

It’s been around for decades but has continued to iterate, expanding into the enterprise, the contact center, and so much more. Even With a Big Enterprise Push for Years, 60% of Revenue Still From Mid-Market and SMB RingCentral closed 20 $1M+ TCV deals last quarter. A reminder to not stay too reliant on direct sales as you scale.

Scale 284

Scale SMB Compensation Cloud 284

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

The very best companies lead their customers in that dance. 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. Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

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 307

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 307

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 293

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 293

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 242

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 242

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. Building a $100M+ ARR business is no easy feat.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 312

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

On a sales front, how do you evolve past founder-led sales, or together with it, so that you can scale your organization? Founder-led sales can be an immense strength and rapidly become a limiting factor. PST, Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico, shares how to scale beyond founder-led sales on your path to Series B.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 277

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 301

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Sales 301

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Become Successful at Enterprise Sales? If you haven’t done enterprise sales before, the biggest thing to understand: you can do it. Many founders want the customers and leads and users to come to them. Your product will always be deficient in some fashion in the enterprise.

Scale 307

Scale Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales 307

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2025

One thing is clear is the team that send this isnt the A or B sales team. Which makes sense, since Salesforce is mainly hunting big enterprise deals. And a great example of running a very successful outbound program at scale here: And what I’d do better. Its being sent by the C team. This much is clear.

Scale 284

Scale Sales AI Enterprise 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Thread AI’s founder and Palantir alum Maya Gonimah has cracked the code on enterprise AI implementation through their strategic partnership with Google Cloud. Darren Mowrey (Google Cloud) Darren leads strategic partnerships at Google Cloud, focusing on helping startups scale their AI implementations.

AI 189

AI Cloud Enterprise Technical Review 189

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 306

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2024

The Future of AI, Open Source and Enterprise SaaS with Databrick’s Founder CEO Ali Ghodsi: #2. “Lessons Learned in Scaling Databricks, AWS, VMWare and More” with Databrick’s SVP and GM Ed Lenta #3. The Top 5 Lessons Learned Scaling Databricks’ to $1.5B ARR with VP Product Nadim Hossain #5.

Scale 274

Scale AWS Leadership AI 274

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? Grafana Labs still has features and capabilities they hold back that appeal to large enterprises, such as things around security and compliance. But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale.

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2025

The New Rules of SaaS Growth: Whats Next for AI, PLG, and Revenue Scale with HubSpots CEO 2. From Startup to $10B+: Lessons on Scaling, AI, and the Future of SaaS with Dropboxs Founder and CEO 3. How AI is Reshaping Enterprise SaaS: Learnings from Boxs CEO & IBMs GVP of A.I. PLG to Enterprise: Calendlys CEO + SaaStr AMA 9.

Scale 175

Scale New CTO CTO AI 175

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 251

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 251

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2024

Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. Product-led outperformers generate ten percentage points higher in ARR and 50% higher in valuations than sales-led growth outperformers.

Underperforming Technical Team 282

Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise Scale Payments 282

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

For restaurants, it’s the back end, front end, point of sale, payroll, ERP, and workforce management. How to Make Onboarding Work for SMBs While in some cases, selling to SMBs is easier than Enterprise in many ways, one way in which it’s fundamentally harder is onboarding. Most sales reps hate it.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 257

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

How do you scale a product organization quickly? years, has seen massive growth and over 14 different frameworks, trust center capabilities, Enterprise risk management capabilities, audit capabilities, work center capabilities, over 100 plus integrations, and 350 different features. #1: 1: Ship Fast. 1: Ship Fast. Iterate Faster.

Scale 283

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Construction 283

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Offers workshops, networking, and investor matchmaking for startups and enterprises. Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Held annually in the San Francisco Bay Area (usually in September).

Software 243

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 243

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner and CPO Kelsey Stevenson share the three secret ingredients that helped them when scaling to $100M ARR and what they could have done differently. Around 2012, the focus became solely on the Enterprise, which is interesting considering they had a full-blown PLG engine. Bitly had an Enterprise sales-focused team.

Scale 300

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 300

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. Pugh’s strategy is simple, albeit not always easy: Recruitment — how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization. Diversity is really important when scaling.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 273

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 274

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 274

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

100+ scale-ups and start-ups showing you how they do it! With 1:1 Meet-a-VC matchmaking and curated sessions, youll have unparalleled access to the capital you need to scale. From seasoned founders to rising stars, every session is handpicked to deliver actionable insights and real-world strategies to help you scale faster.

VP of Engineering 204

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

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2025

Many of the early break out leaders in AI for B2B and otherwise have been “small but mighty teams” Honestly we’d all love it if that scaled. The Second “Problem” With Small But Mighty AI Teams … Is Enterprise Sales A tiny team can be fairly efficient with a 100% self-serve and PLG motion.

AI 283

AI Sales Hiring Scale B2B 283

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep?

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2025

Cutting Through the Noise: Three Gen AI Pioneers Reshaping Enterprise Technology In a pivotal moment for generative AI, Vanessa Larco, partner at NEA, brought together three visionary CEOs convened at SaaStr Annual to share insights that are redefining the technological landscape.

AI Search 244

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 244

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2025

Today it’s at: $800m ARR Growing 22% 20% Free Cash Flow Margins Modest re-acceleration in revenue growth and new customer count — but not NRR Roots are SMB, but 60% of ARR comes from mid-market and enterprise today And a $4B market cap, so 5x ARR Freshworks is getting a bit of a second wind, which is great to see!

Scale 271

Scale AI SMB B2B 271

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

General Partner Doug Pepper and General Partner and Head of Analytics at ICONIQ Growth, Christine Edmonds, share the art and science of scaling GTM at this year’s SaaStr Annual. Because founder-led sales worked really well for most of the early stages, but you eventually start running out of juice around $15M ARR.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2024

So two of the great leaders in SMB SaaS, Shopify for e-commerce, and HubSpot for sales, marketing and more, are going more upmarket: HubSpot 100+ seat deals are up 55% Shopify now gets 31% of its revenue from “Plus” or its bigger brands and more enterprise product And yet … they are also both going more SMB as well!

SMB 322

SMB Enterprise Scale Scaling 322

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Starting and scaling a software company was really hard. Starting and scaling a software company was really hard. If you wanted to scale users and growth, you needed to scale a physical data infrastructure footprint. ” This used to be how companies scaled! It wasn’t very elastic. What does this mean?

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299

Tom Tunguz

JULY 13, 2022

Yesterday, Office Hours welcomed Lars Nilsson, VP Sales Development from Snowflake to talk about his learnings across 5 companies he helped take public. Throughout the hour, Lars provided insightful perspectives on how to build sales organizations. Teams often overlook storytelling as a critical part of effective lead generation.

Scale 324

Scale Sales Hiring Development Sales 324