SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2025

. > Or put differently, the economics with your investors get challenging if, as a rule, you sell for less than 8-10x the amount of capital you’ve raised. << And they’ll often quietly rule out anyone that’s raised too much more than $5-$10m in funding, unless it’s a fire-sale situation.

Strategy 272

Strategy Venture Capital Acquisition Pricing 272

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2024

A great VP of Sales. Venture Capital is out in force for the hottest AI companies — but in many cases, it’s checked out in other categories. 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. Stop doing it all yourself.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring SaaS Venture Capital Healthcare 286

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Large Audience: Considered the biggest SaaS conference with a large number of attendees from leading SaaS companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

Software 246

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Top Posts: #1: The Top 10 Mistakes SaaS Startups Make: The 2025 Edition #2: When You Raise Venture Capital, A Clock Starts Ticking. At First, Softly. Then Louder and Louder. #3: 3: What Works Better for Field Marketing: Small, Intimate Events? Or the Big Mega Industry Events? #4: 4: AI is the Best Thing to Ever Happen to SaaS.

Sales Hiring 227

Sales Hiring Venture Capital AI Startup 227

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. Either higher quotas, lower attainment, or for a while, even more venture capital.

Scale 345

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 345

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2024

Selling stock is sales. The Three Months of Strong Growth Rule in Raising Venture Capital # 6. Dont Be a VC Snob There are definitely risks raising capital from non-standard investors. Because it says it isnt a priority. 95% of the best founders I work with schedule the meetings themselves when its important. #

Venture Capital 279

Venture Capital Investment AI Metrics 279

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2023

He is the CRO and CO-Founder of Atrium, a data-driven sales management platform that helps sales managers, sales leaders, and sales ops pros use data to improve rep and team performance. Since 2016, he prefers to make about three or four investments per year, usually within the $1 – $4 million range. .

Venture Capital 242

Venture Capital Investment Sales Hiring Entrepreneurship 242

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

During an enlightening session at SaaStr Europa 2022, Zach Coelius (Managing Partner at Coelius Capital) and Tiffany Luck (Investor at GGV Capital) share the secrets and lesser-known players in the world of venture capital. Sales Efficiency. VC Associates. Important ones include: ARR/Growth. NDR/Gross Retention.

Venture Capital 246

Venture Capital Management Metrics Investment 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2022

Even with late stage VC capital much harder to get now, and the IPO markets still frozen, I see many folks on my LinkedIn feed saying Sales and Customer Success are underpaid. Well, for most of time, about 10% of the “profit” on a deal has done to sales, and about 5% of renewals have gone to customer success.

Scale 288

Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales 288

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2023

Later stage venture capital has evaporated, and budgets are at least under more scrutiny. Well at a practical level, many SaaS companies are doing a Strategic Sales & Marketing Retreat. What’s a Strategic Sales & Marketing Retreat? What’s a Strategic Sales & Marketing Retreat? So what do you do?

Scale 333

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 333

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2020

Q: What don’t they tell you about venture capital firms? A few things that aren’t obvious when you raise venture capital: Your VC partner may leave. Even a $400m “exit” (sale) may not even move the needle for a larger fund. There has been much more transition in VC firms in the past 5+ years.

Venture Capital 364

Venture Capital Investment SaaS Sales 364

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

“How Would a Person Start a Venture Capital Fund?” More details on why and how here: How would a person start a venture capital fund? A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan. What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One. Even if you don’t know how to grow sales per se.

Venture Capital 336

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 336

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc. This will allow you to be much more targeted with your messaging when reaching out and will help you optimize your sales funnel. Pricing is always evolving.

Sales Recruiting 325

Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 325

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

Companies like Atlassian and Qualtrics have cruised past nine-figures in ARR (and IPO’d in the case of Atlassian) without needing any venture capital. But the sales cycles are longer, and generally, you need more experienced sales and marketing talent to acquire and close these deals. It happens all the time.

Sales Hiring 361

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 361

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 328

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 328

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2022

A mediocre “business guy” that can’t really marketing and sales won’t really get you those key early customers. Raising venture capital is really, really hard — and only available to a small subset of founders. You can’t get mad or frustrated that you can’t raise VC capital. A bit more here.

Venture Capital 317

Venture Capital Startup CTO SaaS 317

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2024

A great Head of Sales will move the needle. That placeholder for the VP of Finance never gets the financials done, and the VP of Marketing talks and talks but hasn’t ever worked with a sales team. Folks are sensitive, and sales folks don’t want to be told they have to hit quotas, and founders are more prickly about advice.

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Fractional VPE 311

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2021

If things continue as they are, the venture capital ecosystem will mimic the stock market, which marks companies to market every minute. At the same time, venture capital fundraising sets records each year. The most recent innovation: the venture capital index fund. Just kidding.

Venture Capital 278

Venture Capital Innovation Startup Acquisition 278

SaaStr

JULY 17, 2024

Venture capital is the same as before but different. It’s always been hard to raise venture capital, but if you’re in the group of folks VCs do want to fund, it’s like 2021 in some ways. It’s capital you can’t access unless it’s a second or third check, which creates confusion in the media and markets.

Venture Capital 309

Venture Capital AI Cloud Scale 309

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2022

Where Venture Capital Really is Right Now, With Accel, Iconiq Growth, and Salesforce Ventures at G2 Reach. 8 Ideas On How to Motivate The Sales Team After a Rough Patch. If things are tougher for you right now, here are some ideas to rally the sales team through it. It’s brutal at the moment. Take a watch.

Scale 243

Scale Venture Capital Sales Forecasting 243

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Can You Grow a SaaS Startup Without Spending a Ton on Sales and Marketing? A few examples: Mailchimp was bootstrapped to $1,000,000,000 in ARR Qualtrics was bootstrapped to a $6B acquisition Atlassian was bootstrapped all the way to … today $30B+ Veeva is very enterprise but only spent ~$3m in true venture capital.

Scale 246

Scale Venture Capital Startup Sales 246

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2020

3: “Shifting Your Sales & GTM Strategy in Uncertain Times with Salesforce” Another top session from SaaStr Summit, senior leaders from Salesforce do a deep dive on how their sales processes have changed since shelter-at-home. The session and the open Q&A after were terrific. #3: It’s really good. #4:

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Scale Cloud Scaling 299

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2021

For the past 10 years, I’ve been a sales advisor for the portfolio companies of early stage venture capital firm True Ventures. It’s fascinating work for a sales mind like mine that’s focused on helping brilliant people turn ideas into revenue-driving businesses. . A Pair of Sales Development Representatives.

Sales Hiring 252

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Sales 252

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2021

The CEO basically is the VP of Sales and Revenue and Customer Success, with maybe a junior resource or two helping. And they realize, now that they’ve gotten here, that — it’s time to Go Bigger: That the CEO, not trained in sales, shouldn’t be the VP of Sales anymore. Maybe a bit more.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Sales 279

SaaStr

MARCH 21, 2023

My list: You have to go twice as far on each dollar of venture capital as in 2021. But a lot of startups that sell nice-to-have products, especially in sales, are deeply struggling right now. Dear SaaStr: What’s Changed in SaaS Today? What’s Harder Now? Discretionary categories are hard hit. Now, they care again.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital SaaS Startup Marketing 347

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

And often, if you are capital efficient, your marketing cost will be close to $0 at this point (you are barely spending anything to acquire most customers), and your sales costs are pretty predictable. Generally speaking, one Director of Sales can manage about 8 closers, account execs, max. Why would this be? Maybe 10 SDRs.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 270

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 22, 2020

When I started in venture capital, one of the questions I learned to ask very early on was competition. Suppose it costs $200M of sales and marketing dollars to create a category. In effect, they pool their capital to create the category. Founders would often reply that competition validates the opportunity.

Venture Capital 338

Venture Capital Education Innovation Technology 338

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2024

If you sell for 3x or more than you raise (no matter what the sale price is, actually), it will all work out well or at least OK financially for the founders. That is how it works. Understand incentives for all your stakeholders. This is part of your job as CEO. Getting this right for your VPs, your engineers. And if you can, your investors.

Venture Capital 297

Venture Capital Pricing Investment Engineering 297

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2024

Often, first-time founders, especially those who had to bootstrap a long-time to get to venture capital, don’t spend the capital they do raise quickly enough. Not always — but more often than not. You pretty much know how much to spend already. And see where it goes. Don’t tell them to spend more.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Investment Customer Success 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2021

We started off offering 5 free courses on scaling SaaS by stage, and on raising venture capital. You can sign up for them for FREE here: We’ve also now added daily discussions on hot topics like what the best reps do better, how to shorten sales cycles, and much more.

Venture Capital 278

Venture Capital Scale Scaling Engagement 278

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, and Valuations – understanding market trends and investment patterns is critical. With market downturns and reduced venture capital funding, some businesses struggle to stay afloat. However, others seem to remain unimpacted by these changes.

Venture Capital 277

Venture Capital Scale Technical Review Software Review 277

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2024

And remember, meeting VCs is a sales job. VCs: Are a pretty ego-driven bunch, in part because they themselves are being judged as a number (their returns) , and in part because that’s the internal culture at many firms (my cos. Often don’t realize they are being rude or arrogant. Just realize that. Mom taught us that.

Venture Capital 286

Venture Capital Startup Investment Sales 286

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

A Burn Rate That is Too High Venture capital is meant for investing, for sure. Almost every founder regrets using capital to keep a high-burn rate engine going that isn’t scaling rapidly. #2. Will marketers really buy your product if sales execs do? ” Let’s make a list: #1.

Trends 317

Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 317

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2022

In the 2000s, when capital was scarcer, founders & VCs would derive round size by debating the quantum of money required to achieve Series B milestones. When capital is scarce, it’s rationed. In the 2010s, US venture capital grew 40x in 10 years. Capital scarcity curtails startup operation.

Headcount 325

Headcount Venture Capital Finance Startup 325

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2021

1% equity considered low as a startup Director of Sales? How stressful is it to run a venture-backed startup? How do Venture Capital Firms really feel about founder salaries? What do partners at venture capital firms do? How is the ‘decoy effect’ used to increase add-on and bundle sales?

Software Review 299

Software Review CTO Coach Technical Review Sales Recruiting 299

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

They usually come in and handle compliance and oversight for an existing finance team that perhaps lacks the seasoned experience to handle models, venture capital and debt, prepare for an audit, etc. For sure, if you have a strong existing sales team that needs some mentorship, I can see a Fractional CRO working.

Sales Hiring 328

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale Finance 328

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2021

How Would a Person Start a Venture Capital Fund? Product-led Growth: How to Execute Across the Full Funnel with Reprise’s VP Marketing + VP Sales. FT: Yamini Rangan’s Top Metrics as HubSpot’s New CEO. 6 Key Signs a VP Can’t Scale Beyond $5m-$10m ARR. Top Videos This Week: 1.

Venture Capital 279

Venture Capital Scale Scaling Metrics 279