The Latest from SaaStr: Right Back to Where We Were 3 Years Ago

So I firmly believe the market has over-discounted SaaS and Cloud stocks, that they are trading just too low.  They shouldn’t be at almost historical lows, given the still epic growth rates at so many leaders, from MongoDB to Cloudflare to Monday to ZoomInfo. 

Some are growing more slowly than earlier in the year, but still, in absolute terms, the growth rates are jaw-dropping.

But it’s crazy times with interest rates in one year going from zero to closer to historical norms, and inflation like we haven’t seen in a very long time.

Where does that leave us, going into the end of 2022?

So there’s a moment in time I’ve gotten pretty darn good at spotting in SaaS startups. It’s the moment in time when … a VP of Sales just doesn’t believe. 

A few moments when you see it:

• When about 60 days into the role, they see that it’s so much harder than they thought. Things just aren’t closing. That’s on you for hiring them, but it happens. A lot. This is especially common when you hire a VP of Sales from a Very Big Tech Company.
• When times get tougher, and they haven’t leveled up the playbook. You just have to when things get harder.  The best VPs of Sales have almost all done this this year, in fact.
• When the competition starts to pull further ahead.  The best take it as a challenge, but the rest often just … get scared. They think it will compound, and it will only get worse.

So this year at SaaStr Europa, we had our highest SaaStr NPS event ever and had more than 2,600 SaaS CEOs, Founders, Revenue Leaders and VCs. And for the next edition of SaaStr Europa in London - we've already surpassed our 2022 attendance records, and are now expecting 3,500-4,000 to join us in June. 

It'll be the biggest SaaStr Europa yet! We'll be at the Tobacco Docks for 2+ epic days of content, networking, workshops, connections and much more. 

Anu Muralidharan, COO at Expensify, says, “When a company is small, every single employee in your company is collaborating nearly perfectly with everyone else. Everyone is constantly questioning the value of what they’re doing because no one has time for busy work. So they always prioritize the most high-ROI projects, the most high-ROI tasks, and because there is a small group of people working on a multitude of things, they have a very 360-view of business strategy. So their output is also really high-functioning.”

By contrast, when a company grows larger and teams grow siloed, it becomes much harder to achieve that same level of collaboration and quality output. Based on her experience and success at Expensify, Muralidharan shares a helpful approach for growing your company that maintains productivity and performance. 

Cooley is one of the top law firms representing startups, and so they have data that no one else quite has. They know exactly what venture deals are priced at, exactly how many are happening, and exactly what is happening across 100s and 100s of leading startups.

Other data sources are great, but law firms have a unique access to the exact, real data. Everyone else is scanning public filings and making some educated guesses.

And what Cooley has seen for later-stage VC rounds is pretty brutal. More brutal than I thought, in fact. You can see the simply massive decline in the total amounts of VC capital raised this year here.

So when things get tougher, and deals get harder, it’s natural to reach for almost anything to close deals.  There are only so many levers sales can pull. 

And discounting is one.

And while Atlassian and a few ones hold the line on never discounting at least some of their products, most of us need to employ discounting as a routine part of bigger deals and enterprise sales. 

But discounting has to be done right.  It’s mainly a tool as part of the quid-pro-quo of getting a deal over the finish line.  If you use discounting for anything else, it rarely gets you anywhere.

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

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