The Latest from SaaStr: Half of You Aren't Giving Raises in 2023

So raises are a nuanced topic in start-ups.

In the early days, most of your team won’t even have been there for a year. So that’s often seen as no point in raises. And even later, many founders are resistant too giving “across the board” raises. They’d rather focus them on the top performers.

But time goes on, the years go by, and most traditional employees expect an annual raise.

In 2023 though, it’s different.

Because salaries and comp went up so, so much the last 2 years. And because so many folks are doing hiring slowdowns, hiring freezes, and/or layoffs. Yet, at the same time, inflation is at record highs for most of our work lifetimes.

In this session, Attentive Co-founder & CEO Brian Long walks through some of the lessons learned at Attentive on their path to over 5,000 customers in 5 years.

He’ll dig into real-world examples for reducing friction in sales, product, and customer success.

The most important thing that you will learn is how businesses truly scale on the revenue side.

You may think you know this intuitively, but you don’t:

• You may think sales organizations magically create revenue. They don’t. They maximize revenue opportunities.
• You may think sales organizations are a cost center, some sort of necessary but second-tier part of a company. That’s true in the case of many mediocre sales teams and in Very Large Companies to some extent. But once you’ve actually worked with a great one, and you’ll see it’s one of the epic value creators in a fast-growing B2B/SaaS company.

So for many years, I was one of those guys.

I never loved Salesforce the company, nor personally enjoyed using the software.  But I would tell every startup I invested in or worked with to move onto Salesforce — at least once they hire a real VP of Sales.  

Now I just see so many fast-growing startups not just starting on HubSpot, but staying on HubSpot.  

Not leaving once they hire a VP of Sales, or hit $10m, or $20m in ARR.

Now that we have much larger spaces for SaaStr Annual 2023 in SF Bay Area and Europa 2023 in London, we’ve been able to run a new initiative: building an Executive Briefing Center, and letting our top sponsors do meet-ups and even mini-events in our Executive Briefing Center.  The benefit was getting all of the vibe and infrastructure of Annual for your own mini-event for 20-100.  It turned out to work really well.

Mutiny, G2, Google Cloud, WorkOS, and other leaders took advantage to various degrees in 2022, so we’re upgrading and enhancing this for SaaStr Europa 2023 and Annual 2023.  Read more about Mutiny’s 100 CMO meet-up at SaaStr Annual here.

It’s rare and it’s tough in SaaS as a sales rep to earn a fairly stunning $1,000,000 a year.

But … it’s not impossible.

I remember the first time I saw a rep make $1m. I was in the HQ of a well-known SaaS company just passing $100m in ARR. The rep closed his second multi-million dollar, multi-year deal — of the year. The whole management team cheered. He was the first one to hit that milesone.

You can back into the math.

Founded in 2019, Laika (an enterprise-ready compliance platform) closed a $50M Series C by the summer of 2022. Looking back on its explosive growth, however, the company realized just how badly it a Chief Financial Officer.

Eva Pittas (Co-founder and COO at Laika) and Dicken Chaplin (CFO at Laika) discuss the value a well-versed CFO brings to their business as well as a few key lessons they’ve learned along the way.

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.

Need more pipeline and leads?

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Our SaaStr Newsletter media sponsorship opportunities enable you to get in front of the people who have the power to move the needle for your business.

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