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:

#6. The Power of Customer Success: Driving Growth Through Customer Happiness with Asana, PagerDuty, Miro, and Sapphire Ventures

#7. What The Top Founders Do Better to Scale Even Now with Y Combinator’s Managing Director

#8. How AI is Changing the Way We Work with OpenAI’s Head of Sales Aliisa Rosenthal

#9. The Power of Champions: Unlocking 10x SaaS Growth through Community Building with Harness’s CMO

#10. More Deals with Less Budget? How to Enable Your Sellers for Maximum Conversion Rates with Datadog’s CMO

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

What’s FUD, if you haven’t heard the term before?

 Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Winning a deal vs. a competitor by getting the prospect to worry about the competitor. 

Often by stretching the truth a bit, or even a lot.

I remember back in the day DocuSign got really aggressive on this in competing with us.  The had a ton of FUD, and a playbook they’d hand out to all the sales reps.  Of top things to say to prospects to scare them away from using Adobe Sign / EchoSign. 

Top of the list was saying our product was “illegal”.

Now this was 99.9% wrong, but rooted in a hint of something that made a hint of sense, as some of the best FUD is. 

What was actually true is that there are certain disclosures in e-signatures required in certain scenarios, and we allowed more flexibility in the disclosures if the customer wanted based on which scenario they were using.

Vendr has its latest SaaS trends report out here and one metric I find very helpful is the State of Discounting.  Vendr has its latest data here, showing the average discount across its customer base of about 10% — and coming down.

The trends are interesting, and perhaps the opposite of what I would have expected — discounting peaked in the Go-Go Times of 2020, and then have come down since mid-2022.

A good reminder that while discounting is often a necessary part of the sales toolkit, over-discounting helps no one.  It confuses the market and the prospects, and is a sign of a weak sales team.  One without a playbook other than discounts.

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Building your first sales team will be an endless series of mistakes. 

It’s OK.  Plan for it.

But there are a few avoidable, key mistakes I see start-ups making > 50% of the time.  

Just make fewer of these mistakes, and you’ll scale faster, and just as importantly, with less turnover and more stress.

Hiring Early Reps (#1 – #3) That You Personally Wouldn’t Buy From. Don’t hire someone with the right resume. Hire someone you’d buy your own product from. Later, once you have a real sales leader on board, she may hire folks you personally wouldn’t buy from. And that’s OK. But it won’t work out while you are Interim VP of Sales.

Hiring your first VP of Sales from a Fancy Tech Company That’s Actually Not Remotely a Startup Anymore. They almost certainly haven’t actually done before what you need them to do.

Hiring a Stretch VP of Sales Who Has Never Hired Quota-Hitting Reps Before. A stretch VP is fine, but someone who has never hired a few great reps herself … that’s too risky.

We’re less than 60 days out to 2023 SaaStrAnnual.com! We’ll bring together 12,000 of the top Cloud executives, VCs and more together Sep 6-8 in Silicon Valley!! 

Even now you can use this special code to come for the very last discount.

Realistically, any CEO or VP at a post-revenue start-up can afford to come to Annual.

But many others cannot. They don’t have a corporate credit card. They don’t have any budget at all. And we want all of the best in Cloud and SaaS to be at Annual.

So if you don’t have budget, here are 2 ways to come at no cost.

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

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Some SaaS and Cloud leaders have seen big impacts from the post-Covid hangover, but others keep accelerating. MongoDB is one of those that has never stopped. 

Instead of looking at those who are struggling, let’s take a look at the epic growth story of MongoDB, a company crushing it in 2023. 

MongoDB is at a stunning $1.5B in ARR, 29% overall growth, and is worth $29B. That’s about as good as it gets in SaaS and Cloud! 

While many less efficient public SaaS companies are trading at tough multiples of 3-4x ARR, and the average is about 6x ARR, MongoDB is almost 20x ARR. 

Let’s look at nine interesting learnings about this leading company.

Almost never unless you have no choice, or there is fraud, harassment, or other ethical or legal issues, once you have real, happy customers.

See, e.g. Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff (although he had a brief, early stint where he wasn’t CEO at Salesforce), Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

In fact, almost 90% of leading public SaaS companies are still run by their founder-CEO.

And the great CEOs know. They know when it’s no longer their time — if ever.

Let me dig in a bit more in SaaS.

© SaaStr 2023

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