SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2025

What’s Changing in Sales: The AI Revolution is Here — and Coming Fast After analyzing 139,000+ conversations through SaaStr’s New AI, it’s now clear from the data: AI is about to fundamentally transform B2B sales. This isn’t some distant futureit’s happening right now.

AI 201

AI Underperforming Technical Team Sales Technical Review 201

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

So clearly AI is rapidly changing the way we do sales, but how will it all shake out? Over in the contact center and post-sales space, we can already see 20%+ of customer support execs been routinely replaced by AI. But what about the more personal sales side? But is it working yet, these AI SDRs?

AI 328

AI B2B Engineering Customer Support 328

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How Long Should You Give a New Sales Rep? sales cycles. Sales is tough. And while sales is pretty similar in SaaS at a given price point / ACV, different products are still different to sell.A sales cycles, it rarely works out. sales cycles, I’ve seen that work.

Sales Hiring 179

Sales Hiring Sales Onboarding Pricing 179

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

SaaS pricing isn’t static – it’s a living strategy that grows with your company. In this article we dive into a playbook for pricing across different stages of company growth, inspired by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Tiered pricing models emerge to address these differences.

Pricing 112

Pricing Scale SaaS Technical Review 112

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2025

Dear SaaStr: When Should I Hire Our First Sales Person, and Who Should I Hire? "The "The one cheat code to making your first sales hires. Because as a founder, you need to understand the sales process, the objections, and what resonates with your customers. Look for at least 18 months of SaaS sales experience.

Sales Hiring 191

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Pricing 191

Blulogix

OCTOBER 22, 2024

By BluLogix Team Complex Pricing Models: How BluLogix Simplifies UCaaS Monetization Summary: Managing complex pricing models is a major pain point for UCaaS companies. From seat-based pricing to consumption-based and hybrid models, keeping track of various offerings and ensuring transparency for customers can be challenging.

Pricing 110

Pricing B2B Subscription Payment Features 110

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

Sales Hub, i.e Sales Hub, Growing Almost Twice as Fast as Marketing Hub HubSpot really has become a CRM company even more than a marketing one. A Per Seat Model is Key to Expansion at HubSpot Long live per-seat pricing! 5 More Interesting Learnings then: #1. Although they are of course highly linked. #3.

SMB 317

SMB CTO Onboarding Scale 317

Tom Tunguz

JULY 10, 2024

Pricing an AI product will be a defining question in software for the next few years. We can observe the market trends today across some of the larger SaaS companies who offer AI pricing. Company Product Base Price AI Price Ratio Github Github Enterprise 21 10 0.67 AI products offer productivity gains.

AI 276

AI Pricing Sales Hiring Strategy 276

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2024

Relying on Self-Serve Sales Structure for Enterprise Not everything needs to be a PLG product. Instead, the winning approach is human-AI collaboration: – Trained professionals assisted by AI tools – Human oversight for complex operations – Quality control for critical outputs Let’s use the sales agent example.

AI Search 290

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence B2B 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

At least until you have a dominant brand, remove friction from sales. And that includes pricing. One caveat: if your product requires significant onboarding and business process change, monthly pricing sometimes just doesn’t work. Figure out who you sell to, and why, and offer the options each customer segment wants.

Payment Features 264

Payment Features SaaS Churn Pricing 264

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2024

At this week’s Workshop Wednesday, Lucas Price, former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip and founder and CEO at Yardstick, shares his insights on how to hire and build a high-performing sales team. During that time, he wasted a lot of money on failed sales hires and decided to learn everything about hiring sellers.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 245

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

But it’s clear that it’s still in the investing phase, and increasing spend in sales & marketing. But SMBs in the middle have become more cost and price-sensitive. #10. Today, it’s steadily driving its margins up, now up to 14% non-GAAP operating margins. Just not as quickly as overall revenue growth. #4.

Scale 306

Scale SMB Scaling Enterprise 306

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 165

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 165

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Increase Pricing Again Without Angering Customers? First, plan to increase pricing in general once a year, each year for new customers. So increase pricing annually to reflect that. Try to increase pricing annually for new customers. Don’t increase pricing beyond what you’ve earned.

Pricing 290

Pricing Branding Sales 290

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 299

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 10, 2022

Sales teams hired way, way ahead to hit huge plans, and in many cases, ended up with a tough combo of lower quota attainment and higher comp structures. The post We’re All Paying the Price Now for Massive Overhiring appeared first on SaaStr. More often, they planned for a Series B-F that isn’t coming.

Sales Hiring 325

Sales Hiring Pricing Cloud Startup 325

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. At two different price points. There’s a whole other category of apps SMBs and SMEs can afford that cost $99-$299 a month or so. But how do you get to $100m+ in ARR?

Payment Solutions 264

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 264

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Why Do Most Entrepreneurs Under Price Their Offerings Initially? Yes, most of us at first under-price and then slowly raise prices as we gain confidence. It’s because (1) we aren’t trained sales leaders, and (2) we worry most about not losing the deal. But after that, you need some professionals.

Pricing 290

Pricing Sales Revenue 290

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2022

41% of you have sales do some customer onboarding, not just CS or other specialists. Should sales just disappear once the contract is signed? #5. On average, you got a 33%+ boost in revenue when you hired your first VP of Sales. Hire a great VP of Sales, and revenue goes up. 59% of you have raised prices this year.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Pricing Scale Interviewing 340

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024

9 Easy Sales Concepts People Get Wrong with Sam Blond A classic. Or your sales team is. #2. How to price and package AI SaaS products with Sandhya Hegde at Unusual Ventures Pricing is always a super popular topic and this was a great one from Unusual Ventures on pricing in the AI age. I guarantee it. #5.

AI 331

AI Pricing Scale Scaling 331

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Should SaaS Pricing Be Adjusted for Different Geographical Markets? Your public pricing? Second, your users will see the pricing is “cheaper” somewhere else and get mad. Make the pricing roughly comparable. And you should do this And finally, the biggest “exception” is non-transparent pricing.

Pricing 298

Pricing Marketing SaaS Development 298

Tom Tunguz

JULY 10, 2022

Let me tell you a tale of two software sales processes. Take 1: An ambitious account executive engages a sales prospect and hustles to sell the customer a mega contract that consumes nearly the entirety of a budget. Smaller commission check, but a faster sales cycle. In both cases, the vendor is out.

Strategy 356

Strategy Sales Compensation Retention 356

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2025

Well, first, let’s be clear — it’s tough if your core goal is to get acquired for a big price in most cases. But don’t raise so much that your valuation precludes an acquisition at a tolerable price for certain acquirers. There really aren’t that many good acquisitions done a year.

Strategy 272

Strategy Venture Capital Acquisition Pricing 272

Tom Tunguz

JULY 11, 2024

3x as productive as humans, which would parallel mechanical robots, how does a software company price? Building on yesterday’s post , pricing in software companies may change significantly when AI agents become the norm. This would be a significant increase in price, but the value of the software would be much higher.

AI 240

AI Pricing Software Compensation 240

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2022

By moving from Freemium to “Contact Me” only (albeit with transparent pricing), sales went way, way up. So many sales leaders get frustrated with Free editions, very low-cost editions … and the Long Tail in general. The Long Tail : Distracts sales , with leads that never closes.

Scale 328

Scale Sales Engineering Acquisition 328

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2023

Sales cycles shifted dramatically in 2023. Slower sales cycles create pipeline shocks & startups are feeling the impacts. The average startup saw a 24% increase in sales cycle from early 2022 to 2023. 60 day sales cycles are now 75 days. But the latency isn’t evenly distributed.

Startup 350

Startup SMB Headcount Sales 350

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Price a SaaS Product in a New B2B Market? The simplest answer is usually to copy the pricing from the closest public company or other break-out leader you can find that is vaguely similar. I guessed the pricing almost immediately. That everyone knows, and knows the price points of. I’ve lived it.

Pricing 245

Pricing B2B Scale Marketing 245

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2024

In this week’s Workshop Wednesday , SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 7 things the best sales reps get right and the 8 ways the rest make things worse. #1: The best sales reps solve your problems. When you’re doing so well that you’re in order-taking mode, sales reps don’t have to solve a problem.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Pricing ChatGPT 290

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.” These early conversations helped shape Databricks product, pricing, and go-to-market strategy.

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 182

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 22, 2023

The company’s pricing power at work : limited supply & increased demand pushes prices higher. inventory is relatively flat, but DSI (Days Sales Inventory - the number of days required to sell all existing inventory) has fallen 41% ; another sign of unmet demand.

Pricing 246

Pricing AI Business Cloud 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2024

How to Leverage Pricing and Packaging to Drive Revenue with Miro, Loom, OpenAI, and Splunk #3. How to Train Your Sales Leaders with Michelle Benfer, ex-CRO Bill and HubSpot The post Top SaaStr Posts and Vids of the Week: GitHub’s CRO, OpenAI on Pricing, A16Z on AI in SaaS, and More! appeared first on SaaStr.

AI 263

AI Sales Hiring Pricing Scale 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

I get that most sales teams aren’t structured to really put in the work here, to steal a customer. Well, then give them 18 months for the price of 12. Well, that can be a tough one, but you may need to give them even more than 18 for the price of 12. What about sales commissions? Why do they even bother?

Sales 328

Sales Pricing Enterprise Revenue 328

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Sales up 22%! Owner.com has distinguished itself by consolidating dozens of point solutions into a single, integrated platform that helps small business owners compete effectively online. A huge congrats to Team @owner for a record start to 2025!! New restaurants up +31% in 1 month! Join a rocketship.

AI 227

AI Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Systems Review 227

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2024

Canva Head of Sales and Success for EMEA, Jorge Bestard, and Head of Strategic Sales for EMEA, Daniela Nyarko, share Canva’s journey from PLG to Enterprise, strategies to navigate the PLG trap, and why it’s so attractive. You get traction in the market and raise a round to build a marketing and sales team.

Scale 288

Scale Sales Hiring Sales B2C 288

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

based SMB sales positions. SaaS sales execs with even a little bit of experience at other SaaS companies are looking for higher and higher OTEs, often with lower effective attainment and high support costs. based sales reps often aren’t really willing to work, or excel, at sub-$100k OTEs anymore. for non-enterprise sales.

SMB 317

SMB Scale Sales Hiring Sales 317