So we're just about a month out now from the 4th SaaStr Europa.

After two incredible years in Paris, and our highest NPS event ever at the beach last year in Barcelona— many of you have asked for it so this time SaaStr Europa is coming to LONDON.

And we're already trending upwards of 4,000 of your fellow SaaS CEOs, Revenue Leaders, Executives, and Investors joining us for 2.5 days at the Tobacco Docks on 6-7 June. 

Here's a sneak peek of everything this year's event has in store.

Hey SaaStr Community,

A while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days.  I thought it would be worth a quick update of the post.

We’ve all made many of these mistakes ourselves, myself included. I’m even making a few myself again. But if you see yourself making any of the mistakes below, it’s fairly easy to make a course correction. Just do it! It will help.

• 15+ of The Top Sales & Marketing Mistakes SaaS Startups Make:
• Hiring any reps you wouldn’t buy from yourself. This never works out in the early days. Later, once you have a strong VP of Sales, it’s fine, though.
• Hiring a “VP” of Sales before you have 2 scaled reps and a repeating process. Never works out.
• Crazy quotas. You can’t set folks up to fail 100% for sure. Especially the first few months, maybe even make their quota simply equal to their salary. Your sales reps need to eat.  Ultimately, reps need to bring in 4x-5x their OTE.  And your top reps will do much better, even in the beginning.

   

• Hiring anyone for “demand gen” whose #1 job before wasn’t … demand gen. Demand gen is critical. It can’t just be something that once, you sort of worked on. What you probably need is not a VP of Marketing at first, but mainly, a VP of Demand Gen. That has to have been her/his last job. And she has to have done it well.  In any event, whomever you hire to do demand gen — make 100% sure they live and breathe it.  And ideally, at your target ACV / deal size.

   

• Hiring a mediocre PR firm. $8k-$15k a month down the drain for nothing. Only the very best folks (and very best PR) are worth it.  Only a handful of firms can really get you the placements you want.  $15k a month to be in some third-tier blogs you’ve never heard of?  Not worth the soft or hard costs.

There’s a superpower some founders have.  When they are ready to raise the next round, be in Seed-2, Series A or even these days tough Series B, C, or whatever … they just send out a few emails, and in a week or so, have a few offers and even term sheets.  Ok, maybe 3-4 weeks these days.  But still, it seems almost effortless. How did they do it?  What sort of magic is this? 

Well, it ain’t magic.

They put in the time, folks..

But what’s behind the numbers?  If you squint, you can see there’s just a funnel.

Like everything.

So the thing is, you have to approach fundraising a lot like a sales funnel with medium-ish long sales cycles.  At least, until you are so hot investors are tripping over themselves to meet you.  And maybe even then.

And what do we do with a funnel, in sales and marketing?

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Hubilo

So what makes B2B content stand out and make people slow their scroll? Raj Sarkar, startup advisor at Sequoia Capital and a long-time CMO, shares tried & true steps on how to create viral and growth-producing content. Sign up and learn how to create B2B content that drives growth for your business.

So Cloudflare is one of our hero Cloud / SaaS companies and even under tougher macro conditions, still grew a stunning 37% at $1.2 Billion in ARR!

But it’s getting harder for Cloudflare, just like it is for many of us. 

The toughest metric is new customers.

While NRR remains high, new customer growth as slowed to 13%, down from 24% a year ago and 32% in 2021.  That’s probably a good summary of how it is for many of us. 

Existing customers remain happy, and if they are doing well, will buy more.  But new business is a lot tougher than 12 months ago, let alone 24.

Founder CEO Matthew Prince was refreshingly honest about what was happening in sales.  And I think it’s also telling, as it summarizes what has happened all across SaaS sales in the past 24 months:

Their top reps are still closing, and closing well — at 129% of quota.  And their productivity is only down 1%. “The top 15% of our sellers have achieved 129% of quota over the last four quarters.”

But … 100 reps essentially sold nothing.  They only contributed 4% of reps.  Yikes. 

But I’m seeing that at many SaaS companies today, as the best keep on selling … but many of the rest struggle in a world that is no longer order taking.

So Freshworks in another in our line of “hero companies” in SaaS. 

While Freshworks is very much a global SaaS leader, its history as perhaps the first with deep roots in India to IPO in the U.S. makes it one we all root for as a break-out global leader.

It’s now at $560m in ARR, growing 23% on a constant-currency basis, and while that growth has slowed from the go-go pace of the last 2 years, it still beat Wall Street’s estimates for both revenue and adjusted profit!

Freshworks is doing a lot of things right in a challenging time for many “traditional” B2B segments like CRM, Support, etc. — so a great one to learn from!

A few that I think really do you a disservice in SaaS, especially before you have a huge brand:

• “Be careful of prospects that waste your time.” Yes, your time is precious in sales. But this is backwards. Almost no one wants to waste a salesperson’s time. Talking to sales isn’t fun. It’s not TikTok. A prospect inbounds because they have a need. Maybe they are a smaller business than you’d like, or need more time than you’d prefer. But their business is just as important to them as a larger company. Treat each prospect with respect. Watch your sales go up.
• Selling a feature you haven’t used yourself. There is no excuse, folks. Don’t talk about a product or feature you haven’t used. Don’t be so lazy. This is SaaS. Fire up your web browser and actually try it. And for real. Use it as if you were a prospect / customer.
• Insta-discounting. Yes, discounting is part of most sales toolkits. But you don’t go there first. You go there last. And you do it fairly. A discount does not create a sale. It does not save a sale. It rarely beats the competition. What it really does is create urgency to close.
• Relying on SDRs to always qualify your deals. Yes, SDRs are great. But they aren’t always there, they don’t always do the full job, etc. It’s still your job to own the sale.

Hiring too junior a resource to own product is almost always a huge mistake — 9 times out of 10.

You can take a lot of “stretch” risk in sales. Sales breeds leadership.

But what I’ve seen time and time again is junior individual contribution “product managers” who haven’t actually owned anything. And who certainly haven’t owned enough.

A VP of Product should be a transformational hire.

Someone to take over the informal, unscaleable way you pick, track, and rebuild features; to drive engineering to get there; and also, to live at the intersection of sales, customer success, and dev.

A junior hire just hasn’t done it, and can’t command the respect of the team (nor often the customers).

A “head” of product that sales, engineering, and customer success won’t respect … can’t get the job done.

A “head” of product that hasn’t done at least some of it before won’t command that respect.

You can’t go too junior here.

Better to spend an extra $0Xk a year here, and a few more shares, to get the hire you really need.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Secureframe

Secureframe makes it easy to get SOC 2 compliant. With guided workflows and one-click integrations, the entire process is automated.

Scaling a company comes with all kinds of hiccups and failures. Sometimes the best way to avoid hard-to-fix mistakes is by hearing how other people flubbed it while they were scaling. 

In last week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Weds at 10 a.m. PST, Nick Mehta, the CEO of almost $200M ARR Gainsight, shares the top 10 mistakes founders can make when scaling their start-ups — mistakes he made himself over the last ten years of growing Gainsight.

For a quick rundown, Gainsight is the leading platform for customer success. They are close to $200M ARR with 1200 employees. Their mission is to help companies drive better customer success and improve net retention for businesses through different products like scaling teams, driving better in-app adoption, and building customer communities. 

Nick shares ten lessons learned over the past decade. Growth doesn’t happen naturally, so you have to figure out what works for you. 

Maxio is looking for a Business Development Representative who will work closely with Marketing and Sales to identify and reach out to prospects with the goal of generating conversations.

Consensus is seeking a Strategic Account Director who will establish and maintain relationships with customers from an assigned base in order to protect and expand the Consensus footprint in each customer account.

• SaaStr 657: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta Shares His Top 10 Mistakes in 10 Years of Running Gainsight: Part 2
• SaaStr 656: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta Shares His Top 10 Mistakes in 10 Years of Running Gainsight: Part 1

• SaaStr 655: SaaStr CRO Confidential: Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO at Roam On Roam's Unconventional Approach for Acquiring Their Early Customers with Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

My #1 bit of advice: be confident in fundraising in 2023, for sure

But — also be a bit humble, honest, and realistic

2023 is not the time to be playing too many games when fundraising

You have to spot churn before it shows up in any of the metrics

By then, it's often too late. They're already tried and moved to another vendor. 

I come to believe it's possible for a great CEO to also be a

pretty good investor on the side

I am less convinced 99.9% of even great

CEOs can run 2+ startups at the same time, however

Most of the tech billionaires I follow on Twitter are kinda grouchy

One I saw the other day out to dinner, never spoke, just stared at phone

Not sure what lessons to draw from all that

But something meta on happiness

© SaaStr 2023

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