Hey SaaStr Community,

2024 — the year we’ll be fully in the New Age of Efficiency. Sales folks will have to truly bring in 4x-5x what they take home, marketers are on budgets that seem too tight, and customer success has been transformed into agents of upsell.

Here are 15 ways to help the sales team make 2024 your best year so far:

Hire dedicated sales / revenue ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations, even up to $10m ARR or beyond. Who’s making sure the reps have the right collateral? Getting routing the right leads? Are being trained properly? Are being paid properly? If that’s you, or your VP of Sales, or even your VP of Marketing … it can sort of work for a while.  But the thing is, that’s a bad use of time. Hire a director+ of sales ops to take the administrative side of sales off the plate of folks that should opening and closing.  Get them more leverage to do what they do best.

Invest (more) in training and onboarding. While we’ve gotten better since we all went distributed, sales teams often still do some of the worst onboarding of almost any function. They throw new reps in the mix, give them a ramp-up period, but training usually is weak. Do the opposite. Invest heavily in training your reps. Build a “bible” and update it quarterly. Make it at least an 8-part course. If you force yourself to build an 8-step new rep training course, that alone will likely be 8x better than what you do today.  Start off with a buddy system, if you can make that work. Listen to tons of Gong or Chrous or Salesloft calls of your new reps (whatever tool you use).

Specialize. If you haven’t done this yet, specialize more next year. This will take some of the pressure off the sales team. Hire more folks to acquire, manage and qualify leads for your reps. Let your closers be closers.

Have sane quotas. Make sure the majority of your reps can hit quota. If they can’t, even today, something’s wrong.  No one can succeed when they know they are set up for failure.

So no question many folks, especially selling sales and marketing tools, are having a pretty tough time of it.  Leaders we admire and look up to from ZoomInfo to Zoom to Box have had tough years on the stock market, no doubt.

But not everyone. 

Not by far.  Overall, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is up 22.97% this year.

I went further and put together a quick list of 25+ SaaS and Cloud leaders to see how their share prices are doing. On average, their share prices are up a stunning 68.50% and they are worth on average $26 Billion!

As we approached $10m ARR, we were doing very well: growing 100%, cash-flow positive, with 100%+ NRR.

But I did see that certain of my weaknesses still were impacting how well we could do:

• I didn’t get on enough jets. I didn’t visit enough of our biggest customers in person. The ones I did visit, we never lose.
• I remained a serial recruiter. You have to move to parallel recruiting. I was too slow in recruiting VPs, and only did it one VP at a time. You have to become a parallel recruiter by $2m-$3m ARR or so.
• I needed to do better at Biz Dev follow-up. I was very good at initial partnerships and biz dev, but less good at all the details in following up in the months and years to come. I should have built out a true Biz Dev function as soon as we had a handful of partners to manage.
• I thought an IPO would take like forever. I was right in that it would be many years off, but I was wrong in that that was OK. It is supposed to take a while in SaaS.
• I worried too much about dilution. I had scar tissue from too much dilution in my first startup, so I swung the pendulum too far the other way. We only spend about $6m net to get to $10m in ARR and became cash flow positive at $4m ARR. That was great, but having too tight of a balance sheet inhibits some investments. I should have just raised another $20m and not worried about the dilution. 

As the festive season twinkles upon us, we're sending you warmest wishes and an exclusive invitation to the UK's most awaited event of the year - SaaStr Europa 2024!

SaaStr Europa is more than just a conference; it's a celebration of innovation, learning, and connections. In 2024, we're decking the halls with:

• Insightful Sessions: Learn from the brightest stars in SaaS
• Networking Opportunities: Mingle with fellow SaaS enthusiasts in a collaborative atmosphere 
•  Exclusive Workshops: Unwrap new skills and strategies to skyrocket your business

Whether you're a startup elf, a seasoned reindeer in SaaS, or someone new who loves the spirit of innovation, this event is for you!

Register during our Holiday Savings event to grab your Europa tickets at a jolly good discount!

So Fastly is a public Cloud company you may not have heard much about in a while.  It started off with a ton of PR and attention as a next-generation, super fast CDN, and had an early IPO, but for the most part, has quietly been heads down since then.  Customer count isn’t really growing anymore, as we’ll see below.

For a while, its market cap dipped to a tough low — but 2023 was good for Fastly. Its stock is up a stunning 122%!  That’s second only to Palantir. A good part of the gains are from finally getting EBITDA positive.

Still, it’s not all such great news.

So the Wall Street Journal and Bamboo HR put out a great eNPS survey of 1,600 companies, a large part of them in tech.

They found:

• Comp is higher
• Work-life balance is better
• Benefits spending has gone up 20%
• More freedom

And yet:

• Employees are the unhappiest they’d been at least since 2020, and probably longer
• 34% of employees now dread the start to the workday — up from 11% from 2020 (!)

This is what I’ve certainly observed. Paying less hasn’t really even helped much. And work from home and hybrid may be valued, but it doesn’t seem to make folks happier than we used to be.

The OpenAI board coup.  Elon yelling at his advertisers.  Is anyone happy these days?

Perhaps it’s all just part of the 3+ year rollercoaster of change we’ve all been on. One thing the WSJ points out is that many employees now see their roles as increasingly transactional.  That seems to be my experience.  

You’ve got to hunt for the Pirates & Romantics. 

Despite economic headwinds, optimism remains for the future of B2B SaaS. Klaviyo’s IPO was one recent bright spot, but what will it take for this type of activity to become a trend?

SaaStr's very own CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, will lead a panel of investors, exploring the current state of investments, the trends fueling growth, and what they anticipate for the years to come.

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. SaaStr’s own Jason Lemkin shares the top 10 mistakes he sees during the hiring process during Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST. 

Jason has written about the cheat codes for hiring VPs of Sales since 2012 and realized it was worth a deeper dive. 

Read the Ultimate Guide to Hiring a Great VP of Sales ebook or What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One blog post. 

The last 18 months have seen the biggest changes in the VP of Sales in his SaaS career. We’re still learning what world we’re in — some people interview over Zoom, some are focused on how to build teams in the current age, and many are dealing with a weird overhang from the SaaS explosion of 2021, quiet quitting, layoffs, and team turnover.  While this topic isn’t new, you want to avoid getting this hire wrong. So, let’s look at the top 10 mistakes Jason sees in the VP of Sales hiring process. 

• SaaStr 704: CRO Confidential: The Hangover's Over: 5 Ways to Get Your SaaS Revenue Back On Track with Gong's SVP Sales, Jameson Yung, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund         

• SaaStr 703: Who Will Win the Go-to-Market AI Race — Startups or Incumbents? with Stage 2 Capital's Managing Director and Co-Founder Mark Roberge         

• SaaStr 702: Hitting Hypergrowth: How to Take Your SaaS Company from $25M to $100M+ and Beyond with Amplitude CEO, Spenser Skates    

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

You really can only focus on 1-3 core things 

The biggest problem with mediocre hires is they force you to spend so much time on 4-400

When things are tough,

It's OK to feel sorry for yourself ...

For a week.

Then pick yourself up, and ... 

Go improve something

Go close a deal

Go make the hire

Go ship something great

2016, FedEx CEO: “The idea Amazon could be a threat is fantastical”

2023: Amazon is #1 biggest delivery carrier in U.S.

© SaaStr 2023

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