SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

A little ways back Databricks VP of Sales Heather Akuiyibo joined SaaStr to share unexpected things that work well at Databricks GTM organization as well as some things that havent worked as well. Deep Dive: Unexpected Learnings Time Management as Competitive Advantage Most sales organizations guess how reps should spend their time.

Scale 207

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 207

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

With Databricks now one of the largest pre-IPO technology companies, with $10 billion of expected non-dilutive financing and a valuation of $62 billion, Ron’s insights are gold for any revenue leader looking to scale. His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product.

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 182

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 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 247

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 247

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 205

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Compensation 205

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

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. Of course, though in the early days this is impossible You dont have the scale or the capital or the customer base. If So, How Much is Typica l? Not renewing.

Scale 274

Scale Sales SaaS Cloud 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 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 191

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 290

Scale Sales AI Enterprise 290

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 306

Scale SMB Scaling Enterprise 306

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

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. The takeaway?

Scale 316

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 316

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 289

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 289

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 290

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 290

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

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. It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? For a higher-velocity, in-bound driven SaaS product, most sales reps will have trouble processing more than 50 or so truly qualified leads a month. Before $10m ARR or so, more qualified leads = more sales.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Sales 306

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

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 264

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 264

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

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

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 296

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 296

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

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. “One of the things we did is when we hired a new sales rep, their training wasn’t sales training. Nothing else matters.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review Interviewing 290

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2025

It’s live on SaaStr.com itself and you can also access it here and talk to AI Jason about any of 1000s and 1000s of B2B, sales, SaaS, VC, etc. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring AI Scale Compensation 261

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 297

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 297

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 289

Scale Compensation SMB Cloud 289

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 289

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing SaaS 289

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 232

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Acquisition 232

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 263

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 263

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Force them to go annual, and you are just adding friction to the sales process. Yes, as you scale you do need to maintain efficiency in sales and marketing. Give that VP of Sales / Marketing / Engineering more time. You can bring in 1 or 2 great sales execs to the team. Focus, focus, focus on 1 core product.

Scale 302

Scale Social Media SaaS Acquisition 302