Claire Hughes-Johnson: Build, Break, Stretch, Repeat Lessons from Scaling Google & Stripe (Video + Transcript)
Jason Lemkin sits down with Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson to discuss what it’s like to scale a fast-growing company and how to manage hypergrowth. Having over 10 years of experience with Google and being intrinsically motivated by Stripe’s mission certainly helps. When you’re the COO of a global company that only continues to expand across […]
The SaaS Rule of 40
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an “appropriate” balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what’s appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What’s the rule of 40? Growth rate + profit should be greater than or […]
Detecting and Eliminating the Rolling Hairballs in your Sales Pipeline
Quick: what’s the biggest deal in this quarter’s sales pipeline? Was that the biggest deal in last quarter’s pipeline? How about the quarter before? Do you have deals in your pipeline older than your children? If you’re answering yes to these questions, then you’re probably dealing with “rolling hairballs” in your pipeline. Rolling hairballs are […]
How to Train Your VP of Sales to Think About the Forecast
Imagine a board meeting. Director: What’s the forecast for new ARR this quarter? Sales VP: $4.3M, with a best case of $5.0M. Director: So what’s the most likely outcome? Sales VP: $4.3M. Director: What are you really going to do? (The classic noob trap question.) Sales VP: I think we can come in North of that. […]
Outbound Always Works
These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Emails get blocked, spam filtered. No one even has voice mail anymore. 50 calls a day feels awfully dated. Everyone gets […]
Fred Stevens-Smith & Farlan Dowell (Rainforest QA): Morphing into a Rocketship: Learning to Love Sales (Video+ Transcript)
(Only 30 days to SaaStr Annual 2017. Do you have your tix yet?) We talk a lot about sales here at SaaStr (obviously), but that doesn’t mean that everyone is in love with sales funnels, hitting quotas, and nurturing MQLs into SQLs. A lot of SaaS companies struggle with building sales teams that bring in […]
What Marketers Can Learn from Donald Trump
While we won’t go into my views on the election here (see my Twitter account if you want color in that department), I will say that all marketers and solution sellers can learn one “yuge” lesson from Donald Trump: understanding your audience and talking to them in their terms will take you a long, long […]
Lead Rich vs. Lead Poor Environments
So last month, two companies I’ve invested in: both crossed $5m in ARR both also grew at the exact same rate last month MoM both also have basically the same ACV (~$50k) both have about the same number of folks on the sales and marketing teams, respectively both have a somewhat complex sale one difference: […]
How to Manage Your First Sales VP at a Startup
One of the hardest hires — and one of the hardest jobs — is to be the first VP of sales at a startup. Why? There is no history / experience Nobody knows what works and what doesn’t work The company may not have a well defined strategy so it’s hard to make a go-to-market […]
“Talk to You in 2021”: When There Isn’t Budget
“Thanks for the discussion, but we’ve have 4 years more on our contract with your competitor. Talk to you in 2021.” — email forwarded from SaaStr community CEO this week _______ Once you’ve been selling for even a little while, you’ll start to assemble a list of the common “objections” to buying your app. These […]
