SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

What you do in product today will help you in revenue 2-3 years down the line. Once you have product market fit in the first product and revenue is coming in, that’s when you’ll have time to invest in a second product. The average SMB customer would buy 4-5 seats of Freshdesk. Why is this important?

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Scale SMB AI 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

The four key pillars he lays out are: Product market fit & expansion. Go to market approach & expansion. 1 Product-Market Fit and Expansion. Is your product sound, and does it solve a big problem for customers, enough for you to scale? Competitive differentiation. Building a stage-specific team. #1

Scale 322

Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 322

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

Right now, you may have 3-4-stage sales processes that work for SMB customers. Get product and product marketing involved in those calls early on because you will need to evolve the product quickly to serve upmarket customers, which takes a while. You’ll also need to look at your sales process.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2022

But you’ll need someone to manage a diverse team of professionals — demand gen, field marketing, customer marketing (to existing customers), product marketing, brand marketing, event marketing, analyst relations and marketing, growth hacking, and press, media, and PR.

Scale 69

Scale Sales Hiring Growth Hacking SMB 69

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer. Head of Marketing. Positions Needed: Demand Gen, Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, Events/Community. Team Size: 5 – 6. Director of CSM. Team Size: 4 – 8.

CTO Hire 284

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 284

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. Blosser comments, “The big thing I want to share with everyone is just stick with it if you feel like you have product-market fit. WorkRamp shifted its focus to a different segment –– the mid-market and SMB side.

Scale 246

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

Hire a truly great product leader from here, ideally a Director or above, and they’ll know how to add or improve your self-serve and product-led features. That’s Aaron Levie’s argument here: * Hire a great VP of Marketing with a strong SMB and growth background. Arguably, PLG is just freemium with better instrumentation.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Acquisition 273

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2016

What are the attributes of the ideal SMB SaaS company, an entrepreneur asked me recently. There are product, marketing, and sales attributes to that ideal company that successful SaaS business have exemplified in the past. A beautifully designed, simple and elegant product is the first and most important thing.

SMB 100

SMB SaaS Acquisition Education 100

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

In Marketing, it can vary based on outside vendors, but I’m guessing 4-8 employees: VP Marketing. Director, Field Marketing (events, etc.). Content Marketing. Product Marketing. Probably, marketing’s own lead qualification reps to manage the MQLs (2-3). Director Demand Gen.

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 349

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Finding product market fit Moving from SMB to Enterprise or vice versa Achieving Enterprise repeatability Strategic expansion Borland has experienced all four stages at three different companies and knows what teams and functions look like for each stage of growth.

Enterprise 291

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 291

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2019

And they were broken down roughly a third, a third, a third by targeting the SMB, the mid-market, and the enterprise. And what you’ll notice is that looking at the heat map, what we’ve got is, in the mid-market, the vast majority of respondents actually use an annual contract. What does this mean? This surprised me.

Scale 252

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Payment Services 252

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I had also worked in customer service and e-commerce in the past and knew this market was prime for disruption.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2023

But there’s a single metric that can reflect market demand, product market fit, how well a GTM engine is executing, and the quality of the product- and that is the CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback period. There’s a really important third segment, the mid-market, a powerful scaling element for Samsara.

Scale 306

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Over time, they realized the product value was best spent with high-complexity organizations. They started via SMB and are now serving the Amazons of the world. When considering product market fit and seeing value back when Docebo got traction in 2012, they gave away a ton of value with ridiculously low ARR.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 277

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Next, think about product maturity. When Giancarlo started at Zapier, its product maturity at the time on the upmarket side was still new for them. They had been building toward an SMB audience, so hiring 50 people in sales against a product that wasn’t ready for a specific audience would’ve been a mistake.

Scale 317

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 317

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2024

Jason’s earliest investment had strong product market fit, but it took them four years to come out with their mobile app. Another issue is when a CEO doesn’t know what to do, especially in a high-churn model like SMB. Then, they hire 20 or 50 reps, scale the marketing budget, and churn remains 3-6% per month.

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Startup Scale SMB 301

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

If you don’t want your company defeated by change, you need to adapt your Go-To-Market strategy at every stage of growth. Managing Partner of CIPIO Partners, Rolan Dennert, shares how companies need to readjust and rethink GTM fit — and even product market fit — from time to time. How did they solve the issue?

Scale 246

Scale Scaling Strategy Outbound Sales Team 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

In the early days, UserZoom struggled with deciding whether its target market should focus on enterprise or SMB. This focus can be a risk because it is shrinking your market. Sales and marketing are still significant, but consider dedicating more research and design to the user experience. Know how to market your product.

Scale 246

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Businesses must effectively evolve their strategies, operations, and overall product-market fit to target and win those enterprise accounts. How can businesses manage the complexity of enterprise sales with a focus on product and consumer delight?

Scale 245

Scale Enterprise Scaling Management 245

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

This rivalry causes four major responses: Verticalization - compete with a horizontal player by picking one customer segment and building a product better suited to them. Trades market size for better product market fit. Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present.

Venture Capital 189

Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 189

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

For SMB-facing companies, over 110% should be your goal. If people love your products, they should stick with you. Burn Multiples Showcase Efficiency Why do burn multiples matter in today’s market? This number should always be great than 100 and is typically measured as a percentage. And how do you determine yours?

Metrics 261

Metrics Marketing SaaS SMB 261

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Someone bringing in 20 reps when you have no customers or product market fit won’t change the world. SMB is more transactional, and Enterprise reps need to be subject-matter experts, know the industry, the workflow, the competition, etc. Many founders have profound stories like this one. There is no sales magician.

Outsourcing Services 285

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 285

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 17, 2023

On Thursday, November 2nd at 9:30 AM Pacific, Office Hours welcomes Raj Sarkar to talk about Unleashing Outbound Marketing Fury. Raj started his career as a marketing manager at Cisco focused on the SMB market. He then jooined Google to become the lead product marketing manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 143

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Marketing SMB Cloud 143

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2014

Bill Macaitis, the former CMO of Zendesk, described Veblen goods behavior when he and the Zendesk product marketing team began to address enterprise customers to complement their booming SMB (small-and-medium business) business. The product marketing team initially charged a modest premium for the enterprise product.

Pricing 152

Pricing SaaS SMB Enterprise 152

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. What does this mean for product design and product management? the night before it was to IPO).

Product Marketing 78

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 78

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Kate has a simple framework for going upmarket: Product, People, and Process. From a product standpoint, you might think you have product market fit. Scaling Enterprise vs. Mid-Market Sales: Key Takeaways from Calendly It’s a common blueprint to start with SMB and mid-market accounts as your ideal customers.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

Finding Superfans Early On Jason starts by asking the meta-question: “You’re at $900M of ARR, growing 35%, 112% NRR from SMBs, and 14% free cash flow. They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. Is there a downturn?”

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hacker

APRIL 15, 2019

He also gives us a framework for how to move upmarket, and the requirements for taking a company from the SMB space all the way to the enterprise. Strategies for moving upmarket, and how to transition from SMB to enterprise. RELATED: Moving From Mid-Market to Enterprise. What You’ll Learn. The first is Chorus.ai.

SMB 71

SMB Enterprise Scale VP of Engineering 71

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

If your sales team is broken up between SMB, Mid-Market and Enterprise, you might want to include one rep from each segment. Does 90% of your revenue come from SMBs? Additionally, Product can pose potential solutions and gauge their viability. Before you start shooting invites, ask yourself a couple questions: 1.

Scale 192

Scale Sales SMB Data 192

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one. In retrospect, if they had an amazing salesperson that could sell a mediocre product, they might have got the wrong signal. But because people convert by themselves, it creates a healthy product market fit.

Scale 176

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 176

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2016

Mid-market companies span $10,000-$100,000, and SMB companies generate less than $10,000 per year per customer. The more important consideration is ensuring that your product, marketing, and go to market strategy aligns with customer base. Enterprise companies average contract value is greater than $100,000.

Outsourced Development 147

Outsourced Development SaaS SMB Enterprise 147

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

And, the second system is what I call the product marketing system. What I find is that if you think about the product marketing calendar this way, it makes it a little bit more like the sales finance calendar where sales is about selling to customers, sales don’t work unless a customer buys what you’re selling.

Startup 293

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 293

Aaron Beashel

MARCH 9, 2018

Obviously Product/Market fit is a big factor here, but assuming you have a relative level of Product Market fit, I think the next thing key factor is having the right Go To Market model. Campaign Monitor (Channel) – Campaign Monitor is an email marketing tool that leverages a Channel model acquire customers.

Scale 192

Scale B2B SaaS Payments Strategy 192

Sales Hacker

APRIL 10, 2018

5 Steps To Building Your Go To Market Strategy. The SMB segment—going upstream vs. downstream. Where Can You Apply This Go To Market Strategy? Vertical markets such as Healthcare, MarTech etc. Markets have very specific requirements—think of Governments. This may require a specific product.

SMB 97

SMB Strategy Outsourced Development Marketing 97

OPEXEngine

MAY 18, 2021

SaaS metrics are viewed differently at different stages of growth and for different sales models, primarily whether a company is selling into an SMB or enterprise marketplace. The growth stages are defined as: Early Stage – Product/Market Fit Stage, . Growth Stage – Scaling the Business, and .

SaaS Payments 98

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments Payment Services 98

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

Both of you sell into SMBs, which is a notoriously difficult segment. One of the holy grails of SMB software is, how are you going to acquire customers? Immad: I find it funny that everyone complains about the difficulty of SMB and consumer customer acquisition, but ironically, SMB and consumer companies are some of the most valuable.

Payments 110

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Sales Hiring 110

Hitenism

DECEMBER 26, 2016

Brian Balfour , You’re Too Focused on Product/Market Fit. SMB-focused companies often find growth by going upmarket. You have to constantly keep a pulse of their needs and iterate your product, marketing and sales accordingly. “What animals are you hunting?” The animal is your customer type.

Scale 152

Scale SaaS Marketplace as a Service SMB 152