Why 2024 Could be Pretty Darn Good for SaaS IPOs

Founder and CEO of SaaStr Jason Lemkin deep dives into the current state of SaaS and the Cloud. 

Lemkin and David Sacks touched on whether SaaS is making a cautious recovery, and Lemkin shares a slightly different perspective here. 

Solve my problem. Just truly solve my problem.

The beauty to sales in SaaS is as sales professionals, for the most part, you aren’t selling a commodity or a fungible product. You can’t just go down the street, or to another website, to get a better deal on the Ford F-150. Yes, there sometimes is a bit of negotiation on price, but even that is usually within a standard range of discounting.  And yes, there is competition, but even there, the competition isn’t identical.  Every vendor usually is better than another in some way at least.

Sales in SaaS, done well and done right, is about adding true value by solving a customer / prospect’s important problem. Often, a Top 3 Problem.

In the latest Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST, Bo Borland, founder, and CEO of playbuilt, shares four steps for creating repeatable success at every stage of growth, specifically in B2B Enterprise.  Prior to Playbuilt, Bo was SVP of Global Solutions Engineering at Mulesoft/Salesforce.

In startups, founders and teams often wear many hats — figuring out what to prioritize, developing and implementing all types of demand gen strategies, attending events and networking, and founder-led sales.

Let’s look at Borland’s approach to aligning and executing B2B team selling motions for a rinse-and-repeat process for growth.

Interviewing? Looking for your next role? Been through a lay off? Hoping to grab that VP title next? Or CRO or CMO?

One bit of advice:

Please, please, actually research the company you are interviewing at.  For real. At least for 30-45 minutes, ideally more.

I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve done for a wide variety of roles, from SDR to COO, where the candidates literally were guessing what the company really did during the interview:

• Not too long ago, I did a final CRO interview to help a portfolio company. I asked this CRO how he’d handle the fact that 66% of their revenue came from indirect and channel. He said that was the first time he’d heard that.
• The other day I did a similar final, fourth round interview for a VPM. He completely misunderstood the value prop of the startup. He hadn’t watched even the basic 2 minute explainer video on the homepage of the website. I ended the interview (politely) after 10 minutes and told him to watch the video. A week later, he emailed me back — “Aha! Now I see who they sell to!”

It’s so, so easy to stand out in recruiting if you’ve actually done your homework. Invest those extra cycles.

The longer you do SaaS, the more you realize you really can get folks to switch from the competition to you. 

At first, you see it around critical 10x features.  The Bigger Guy may be more established, but you launch some critical integration, some critical workflow, and customers switch to you to get it.

After those initial wins, ripping out the competition, it often gets harder.  

Why?  

Even if your app is “better” than the existing vendor a prospect is using, it’s too much work to switch.  It’s just not worth it.  It might seem worth it in theory.  

The discovery calls, the demos, even a tiny pilot.  But the work is just too much for many customers to switch from one vendor to another.

But if you get great at this .. magic can happen.  And it takes magic.  You generally have to invest a lot to make switching from one competitor to another as easy as one click.

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