Inc - The Death of Feedback

So I’ve made the decision this year to no longer provide any feedback, with a very few narrow exceptions.

• Tell a sales rep you wished they’d made the interview on time? They go on blast.
• Tell a contractor they didn’t actually finish the project? At all? They quit.
• Tell most VPs they need to step it up? They blame you. You didn’t give them enough resources.
• Tell a VC their founder just isn’t followed enough for a session at SaaStr Annual?  You’re wrong.
• Tell all but the best founders they are falling behind? They lash out.

It’s 2024.

All but the best want participation points.

Even on the revenue side. It is what it is. Everyone is “doing their best”.

I’ll keep keeping it real with the very, very, very best founders and VPs. The very, very, very best.

The rest? I’ve moved on to saying nothing, or telling them “good stuff.”

THANK YOU! to the 10,000+ that attended SaaStr Annual 2024 with some of the very best speakers in SaaS and AI. We had so many great interactions & fun across the 3 days. 

We'll be back in MAY of 2025!! 

So you may have noticed there are now a ton of events in September. 

It was great for 3 years, but we’re going back to out roots, and Annual 2025 will again be earlier in the year, now May 13-15 at our 40 acre campus at the San Mateo County Events Center. 

LOCK IN THE LOWEST RATE EVER

Book your early bird tickets now to lock in your attendance at our best rates possible!

At this year’s SaaStr Annual, Rippling’s CRO, Matt Plank, chats with Sam Blond, host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential and former CRO at Brex, about Rippling’s top 3 growth tactics, which have led to the Rippling becoming a $14B company with several hundred million of ARR.

A few years ago, Matt was making cold calls from CEO Parker Conrad’s basement … and he’s helped bring Rippling to where it is today. All the way to CRO today.

The three growth tactics that worked for Rippling can be categorized into three different stages:

1. Outbound
2. Increasing closed-won revenue rates
3. Serving customers and expanding revenue in the base

Let’s start with outbound, where most of Rippling’s revenue comes from attribution-wise.

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The 9th All Star SaaS Conference is November 20 in Tokyo and we’ve been meaning to go for a while.  The stars aligned this year and I’ll be there speaking, including an AMA, along with several other top SaaStr speakers:

• Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, and now GP at Iconiq Capital
• Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe
• Jay Simons, former President of Atlassian, now GP at Bond Capital

I’ve never seen a marketing agency get a startup qualified leads, especially at the earliest start-up phases.

The only value I’ve really seen in agencies is helping you with positioning (sort of, but not too much), branding (yes, if you really need this so early), and messaging.  And managing online marketing and advertising for you — once you’ve proven you can get the basics working yourself.

But leads?  And true customers?

No way.  At least not from 99% of agencies.

So if you’ve been around startups for a while, and especially sat on any boards, you’ll see a VP of Sales answer a slow Q1 and even Q2 with this:

“We’ll make up for it in Q4.”

And many variations thereof.  In fact, in so many sales plans, you often see Q4 bookings at 2x-3x or more Q1!   Even when growth overall is slow.

Q1 was supposed to be $1m in bookings, but we only hit $300k?  Just add the delta to Q4!

It may look possible on a spreadsheet, but I’ve almost never seen a sales team magically make up for a weak Q1 or 1H with an insane Q4.  In fact, maybe never.  It just doesn’t work that way.

The other day in fact we looked at a decade of SaaStr Annual ticket selling data.  We’ve literally been selling tickets to SaaStr Annual for 500+ weeks, almost every week, for a decade.  Phew.

And that gives us a massive dataset across $30,000,000+ of ticket sales and much more.

And one thing is clear, and many counter-intuitive: we — and you– can’t make for a missed campaign, for a missed week, for a missed quarter.  It’s just too late.  

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

It’s a pivotal moment for the customer service industry. Join 1,000+ CX professionals at Frontlines on October 8th to learn how to foster a customer-first company culture and leverage AI to grow your business.

The top mistakes I’ve learned from:

You can do OK with a so-so founding team, but you can’t do great. And great individuals do not necessarily make great co-founders. So slow this part down. We’re all in a rush, but you can go so, so much further, and with so much less stress and drama, if you truly have a great co-founder.   Especially, “business” founders — make 100% sure you have a truly great CTO.  

Always Be Recruiting. Nothing matters but the team, ever, and especially once you have product-market fit. When in doubt, be recruiting. Drop other things.  If after $1m-$2m ARR, you aren’t spending 20%+ of your time recruiting … you are doing it wrong. 

Budget More Time. Some of the worst decisions I’ve made were because I felt under pressure to deliver before “time was up”. This pressure is real. But still, somehow, budget more time.

Spend More In-Person Time with Customers, Partners, and People. The internet is not an excuse to not meet people. In fact, it’s a reason to meet up with them even more. There were many business relationships I should have spent more face-to-face time with. They would have been much stronger.

© SaaStr 2024

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