The Latest from SaaStr: 69% Of You Are Seeing Demand Pick Up

So we’re getting closer!!  SaaStr Annual 2023 is Sep 6-8 in the SF Bay Area!  Join 12,500+ of the Best in SaaS and Cloud! 

We’ll have 7 stages and over 300 sessions and super braindates and more, and it’s early.  But what’s trending right now? 

Here are The Top SaaStr Annual Sessions (by registration) — so Far:

1. Our Secrets to Scaling and Growth in an Unpredictable Market with monday.com‘s Co-founder and Co-CEO.
2. David & Jason: SaaS in 2024 with Craft Ventures Founder David Sacks and Jason Lemkin
3. From $5M to $100M: Founder Secrets to Scaling a Multi-Product Startup with Lattice’s CEO
4. Who Will Win the Go-to-Market AI Race — Startups or Incumbents? with Stage 2 Capital’s Managing Director and Co-Founder Mark Roberge
5. Biggest Mistakes of My CMO Career with Databricks, Zoom, Okta, and HyperGrowth Advisors

Come learn the secrets in person at this year's SaaStr Annual!

So Datadog is just the SaaS and Cloud leader that just …

has never stopped.  

It’s now at about $2 Billion in ARR, still growing a stunning 33%, with a $36 Billion market cap.

And it’s gotten pretty darn efficient, with strong cash-flows and operating margins.  And it’s growing new customers as fast as it’s growing revenue. 

It just doesn’t get much better than that.

2023 has been a difficult year for many tech companies. Markets have been all over the place, layoffs occurred, and investors weren’t funding as much as usual.

However, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund & Host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast, believes there are reasons to be optimistic for the rest of 2023.

In a special workshop, Sam shares advice on how to spot bottlenecks, reallocate the right resources, and grow revenue in 2023. 

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

Achieving SOC 2 compliance helps you build trust, raise capital, scale your business, and rise above the competition. Download the checklist to get started.

Not really in SaaS. At least not well.

The classic “Sell Me This Pen” test still has value, even in SaaS. There is no perfect answer to this test, but it does show a salesperson’s ability to think, to convey enthusiasm, to understand a value proposition, etc.  It may have gone out of fashion, but I think it still shows sales smarts.

But I’ve come to learn that in SaaS at least, salespeople can be:

• Good at Outbound, but not so much Inbound. Or vice-versa.
• Good only when selling with a brand to back them, but not so much without one.  This is so important.  The playbook is so different when you are #1 or #2 in an established market.  Because the prospects already sort of know what they are looking for.
• Good when selling — but where they have a lot of processes and support.  Many reps from larger SaaS companies, especially with mid-size or larger ACVs, melt when they have to do their own demos, answer tougher questions, lack the right collateral, etc.
• Good when competing for budget, but terrible when competing with an aggressive direct competitor.  Sales reps trained in an environment without a strong, direct competitor often seriously struggle once there is one. It’s such a different toolkit, to sell against a very similar, aggressive competitor.
• Good at selling products similar to what they know, but struggle to sell more complicated or vertically-focused products.  It’s really hard for most reps to transition into a more challenging or more complicated selling environment.  Be careful here.  As a rule, hire reps that sold something harder to sell and more complicated than your own product. Even if just a tiny bit more.

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

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A few qualities of the best reps:

• They really listen. Mediocre sales reps just start diving into their script, and try not to deviate from it. Great salespeople learn their prospects’ needs, issues, and pain.
• They can adjust the pitch and story to suit the prospect. Every prospect is a bit different, and sometimes, a lot different. The best reps tailor the pitch, the demo, the functionality shares, the case studies, etc. to suit the needs of the prospect.
• Treat all prospects and customers as important. Reps make more money on bigger deals — but the best reps never make you feel that way. Somehow. 
• Help you. For real. The best SaaS sales reps are mini-solution architects. They help the prospect figure out the best ways to use the product to help solve their problem. How to do a pilot. Who to socialize it with, and where to get buy-in.  Enterprise buyers love a truly great sales rep, because they make their life easier.  The rep is their agent.
• Know the product cold. You’d be surprised how many sales reps don’t.

Hypergrowth in today’s highly competitive and budget-constrained SaaS world may be less frequent now, but Vanta, the software tool empowering security companies to achieve compliance and manage risk, has defied the odds. With a multi-billion dollar valuation and a trajectory to double growth annually, Vanta is seizing the spotlight.

In this session, CEO and Founder Christina Cacioppo, and GM of EMEA Andrew Foley, reveal the strategies that have propelled Vanta’s remarkable scaling success despite the constraints of the capital-restricted environment.

The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve invested in (6+ unicorns, 3 billion+ exits) are very different in many ways. Some extroverts, some introverts. Some engineers by training, others in sales or product originally. Some seem to work 100 hours a week, others seem to work hard but with more balance. Some ruthless with competition, some more zen about it.

But a few uniting characteristics of the very best:

• Relentless Recruiters. You have to be constantly recruiting the best. The best founders usually spend at least 20% of their time recruiting.
• No Excuses. Merely “good” founders have plenty of excuses, often valid ones. The vest best founders don’t.
• Neven Run Out of Money. It’s a sign of weakness IMHE when founders allow the company to run out of money, even if the existing investors sometimes bail them out. The best founders are hyper aware of the burn rate and runway and manage to it.
• Can See The Future. Merely “good” founders can see the present pretty well, they are in deals all the time. But the best founders can also see the future in their space pretty clearly, and are working hard to get there.

© SaaStr 2023

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