The #1 Thing Your VP of Marketing, VP of Sales and CEO All Have to Agree On

The simplest forcing function to help your first VP of Sales and Marketing work well together is for you all to agree on what the #1 core metric in the funnel is.

And then what the core goals are there for each month and quarter of the year.

Is it X leads per month?

Is it a certain number of MQLs? Or is it SQLs? Or is it SQOs by number?

Or is it Y $$ of opportunities?

Or is it simply Z $$$ of closed/won business?

I.e., pick >one< phase/stage of the funnel as Priority #1 for the Demand Gen+ Team Goals. (This of course is in addition to your MRR growth goal).

And have your VPS, VPM, and CEO agree on that stage as your core marketing KPI. And then your VPM will know exactly what she or he is accountable for delivering to sales. And report against each month and quarter.

So we’re almost there!! 

2024 SaaStrEuropa.com is June 4-5 in London!

Join us for 2+ fun-filled days, great parties, 100s of braindates and workshops, 1000s of connections, and so much more!  And meet everyone from Harry Stebbings to the CEO of Gong!

Be in the front row for these top 5 sessions:

1. Lessons Learned from Scaling to Billions with Gong’s Co-Founder & CEO

2. Lessons Learned from Scaling GTM Teams and Ops at Notion, Asana, and Dropbox with Notion’s GM

3. Mastering the Customer Lifecycle: Strategies for Hiring, Retention, and Growth with Retool, OpenAI, and 20VC

4. How to Implement a Customer-First Strategy and Structure with Dashlane’s CPO

5. From 0-50,000 Customers: How to Build a GenAI Company for the Enterprise with Synthesia’s CEO 

Get 20% off LAST CHANCE tickets:

I’ve re-learned something about marketing every year working on the SaaStr Annual for 10+ years.

And that thing I’ve learned is that you can take two brutally competitive products, that are very similar, give each a booth at SaaStr Annual, Europa or at one of our digital events… or each can try a podcast ad or do a newsletter ad … and one can walk away with more leads than you can follow up on.  And the other can walk away thinking they have no real leads at all.

How is this possible?

Well, the learning is to focus your marketing efforts primarily on what your VP of Marketing is good at.

What I’ve learned from sponsors at the Annual is that folks that know how to do field marketing well — crush it with 10,000+ SaaS CEOs, founders, VPs, etc. in attendance.  Brex, Looker, IBM, Hook, Stripe and many other both established and up-and-coming SaaS leaders told us it performed as well or better than anything else they’ve done. And yet … seemingly very similar companies told us the event last year didn’t perform that well.

We’ve seen the same thing with our digital events.  Most marketers we’ve talked to don’t really believe in the ROI.  But then a few that have done ours have told us they performed better than anything similar they’ve done.

The difference? Their VP of Marketing.  If you haven’t done trade shows, steak dinners, driven prospects to a booth, figured out how to connect with customers at an event.  If you just “show up” and sit and wait.  Events don’t perform.

But if you know how to do them … they are magic.

I had to brute force it, at least the second time at EchoSign / Adobe Sign.

When we launched we had a small but decent number of sign-ups, and once we had a paid product in a few months, a small number of reasonably happy paying customers. Not many. But at least a few that were happy. Enough to say “push on”. But it wasn’t enough.

We only got to about $200k in ARR by the end of the first year, and were running low on cash. We had something for sure — but not enough, and not growing fast enough, for true product-market fit.

In the end, we had to go more enterprise, and have a richer product, and develop more critical integrations (Salesforce, etc.) to find true product-market fit for real, which in the end took probably 18 months from Day 1. At that time, there wasn’t a big enough market for the simple, horizontal product we launched with.

But we didn’t know. We weren’t in agreement if going up-market was a good one. We weren’t in agreement on how aggressively to push our API, or our freemium vector, or different expressions of our product. We weren’t in agreement on our target verticals and markets.

In the end, we tried everything. We closed big customers like Dell, BT, GE, Comcast, etc. in Year 1. We did every integration. We took the customer feedback we did have, and kept adding as many features they’d pay for as we could. We tried leading tradeshows in different verticals. And in the end, it probably took 3.5 years to have the product it would have been nice to have on Day 1.

Sometimes you know. But sometimes, you get 10 customers however you can, then 15, then 20, then 100, then 200, etc. And you sort of brute-force it. Because, sometimes it may take until 100+ customers and $500k in ARR before you really know.

So as Slack was crossing 1,000 employees and its first 150 enterprise customers, we were lucky to have Slack’s CEO and Co-Founder, Stewart Butterfield, back to SaaStr Annual.  Alongside Forbes reporter, Alex Konrad, Stewart and Alex took center stage as our opening keynote to have an open discussion on the workplace of the future.

It was really special for us to have Stewart back since he was one of the closing speakers at the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 conference, right when Slack was beginning to gain momentum.

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

Join 2,000+ peer SaaS finance leaders, such as Jeff Epstein from Bessemer Venture Partners and The SaaS CFO, for this exclusive virtual event on June 5, 2024.

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My very first sales deal was for $6,000,000.

In my first start-up, I was mostly hunting whales — seven-figure and eight-figure deals.

I had no experience doing any of this.

For our First Big Customer, we’d been negotiating a $6m/year contract for quite some time (they always take time). We finally had the “all hands” meeting with all the C-level and VP execs involved. And they told us the deal was completely approved, AND they’d back us in the market, AND they’d even give us $1m in debt financing to help us. At 0% interest! And that we didn’t even really need to pay back for a long time!

We’d be on the map, and in business. But. There was a but.

The effective price would have to be 60% of what we’d been discussing for the past 8 months.

I couldn’t get the model to work in my head. Yes, it was a huge contract, and we’d make payroll, and we’d have a business — but at that pricing, we’d never ultimately have a sustainable company.

I >> politely << walked. I told them I was 1000% committed to their success, and the relationships. That I would do whatever it took to make them win in the market. But at that price point, I couldn’t stay in business. I needed them, but still, I had to politely decline.

March 2020 changed everything in SaaS, albeit we’re still working through all the changes on many levels. And it’s now a long time ago. In many ways, it’s just a different world. We’ve gotten used to closing bigger and bigger deals over Zoom. Prospects and customers aren’t really expecting face-to-face meetings anymore in most cases, even for the biggest deals.

And yet … now we’re all back to seeing deals close faster, win rates go up, and customers buy more, when we actually meet them again in person.  But should you, if you don’t have to?

So as a rough rule, who should you take the time to go meet? Because it does take time. The answer really is — meet as many as you can in person.

But some rough rules to think about:

• Meet every local customer that you can Uber/drive to in the early days … if they’ll take a meeting (a lot won’t want to). Try to meet every single of your first 100 customers in person that are local, no matter how small the deal size.
• The more your product is a “solution” vs. just a tool — the more meetings you should take. To learn how your solution is really being used.
• Meet with ALL your top 10, or top 10% customers. So if you have 50-70 today … if nothing else … meet in person with at least the Top 5 or so.  It will dramatically increase the odds they deploy, expand, and stay.  Customers love to meet with the CEO. You owe it at least to your top customers.
• If nothing else, try to spend 20% of your time with your existing customers. Everyone spends too much time on prospects, and not enough time with closed customers.

Having said all that, what’s clearly changed is when you meet your prospects and customers in the funnel. 

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