So some SaaS and Cloud leaders have seen big impacts from the post-Covid hangover, but others have just kept accelerating. 

MongoDB is one of those that just has never stopped, although as we’ll see below, even they have seen more cautious buying from their customers.

But even macro challenges haven’t slowed Mongo much.

It’s now at a stunning $1.5 Billion in ARR, growing 29% overall, and it’s worth a stunning $29 Billion.

That’s about as good as it gets in SaaS and Cloud!

No one’s had a bigger exit in a shorter amount of time than Divvy. How did they do it?

Let’s find out the go-to-market models Divvy used to go from zero to a $2.5B exit in just four years with the former CRO, Sterling Snow. 

There’s this idea in rowing called swing, where the oar or paddle of each person in the boat hits the water at the same time and pulls back with the same amount of force. 

Anyone out of sync means the boat veers off course. And when everyone is in perfect unison, it’s magic for a GTM leader.

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At our first big digital event, SaaStr Summit: Bridging the Gap, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, shared a funny story. 

He said with work-from-home, he was able to talk to a lot more customers.  

A lot more. 

And that he was Zooming with a smaller enterprise customer they’d just closed, who told him “She was worried about Slack.”

“Why are you worried about the company?” Stewart asked.

“Because the CEO has time to talk to me! That’s always a bad sign!”

Ok, laugh. 

But there’s a bunch of interesting points in that story. 

Stewart had more time to talk to more customers — and go further down the list and talk to customers he didn’t have time to before we were all working from home. Instead of 2-3 big meetings a week, and maybe a few in-persons a month …

CEOs can now talk to 10+ customers a week if they want, or even 20. That is so many more customer conversations.

Do it.

Roughly, when Demand Gen is no longer the core function of marketing. This also often is the time when you are ready to expand beyond a core small, effective, efficient marketing team:

When you have enough of a lead generation engine going, AND enough of a brand, that brand and corporate marketing strategy and positioning are more important than finding new leads and helping search out raw new opportunities.

Once most of the potential buyers in the industry have some awareness of you already.

Put differently, once you truly have an established brand in an established category, the game changes.

It’s then less about letting folks know you exist than letting them know why now is the time to buy. And reminding them why to buy from a/the leader, not some upstart, or some large player that does everything.

Often this is roughly around $20m-$30m ARR.

Until then, maybe focus first on a VP of Marketing whose #1 job is being VP of Demand Gen. Otherwise, you’ll see a lot of activity that isn’t mainly focused on building pipeline.

You can add the rest on top of that engine.

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We’ve written this point before, embedded in other posts.  We’ve talked about it in many presentations.  But it’s time to call out One Simple Hack to getting sales going in your SaaS start-up, in the early-ish days.  One of the best there is in SaaS.

I’ll tell you the trick.

It’s going to sound simple, but it isn’t, because almost everyone gets it wrong.

For at least your first few reps: hire someone >>you<< personally would buy >>your product<< from.

Period.  Do Not Violate This Rule.

I.e.,

Do not hire someone just because they worked at Datadog or HubSpot or Shopify or Box or Salesforce in “sales”.

Do not hire someone that Talks the Talk because you think “I don’t know how to sell” and they do. You do know how to sell if you have even 1 or 2 paying customers, and especially if you have even 10 paying customers. You just aren’t great at it.  But you know what works.  You’ve done it after 10 paying customers.

Do not hire someone because of their “experience in sales”, per se. Experience is good, but 95% of that experience will not be on point.

Instead … realize sales in the early days is different, especially for one reason: Every Lead is Precious. Every single one.

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