Inc - The State of SaaS Go-to-Market

When Marc Benioff started Salesforce, he codified the sales playbook. Then Mark Roberge, former Hubspot CRO, wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula with deep insights into quota structures. For the subsequent ten years in software, we’ve optimized every little bit of how we sell it.

But today, it’s different because the kinds of software we sell aren’t the same. It isn’t predictable. Six months ago, security was the number one prohibition preventing businesses and software companies from buying AI. Today it’s ROI. 

Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, shares nine observations from a Go-To-Market survey Theory Ventures did with hundreds of startups, 68% of them early-stage, well-funded, mostly mid-market ACV, and 25% remote. Here’s what they found.

We are gearing up 10,000+ at SaaStr Annual 2025 on May 13-15!! And more details on SaaStr Europa 2024 in the Fall of 2025 soon!  Yup, we’re back earlier in the year for Annual where we used to be, so everything will move a bit faster this time.

And speaker submissions are now OPEN.

What we’re most interested in:

• Founders of well-known SaaS, Cloud and AI leaders — especially those that rarely speak.  If you’re speaking everywhere, that’s great.  But we’re looking for fresh perspectives, voices and leaders to highlight.
• Top CROs, CMOs, CCOs, etc.
• Workshops on highly tactical topics (narrow is OK) from top leaders
• Less-represented speakers are prioritized

A rough yardstick is that most enterprise-focused SaaS companies tend to get about 8%-10% of their revenues from professional services.

A few data points:

• At $800m ARR, Qualtrics was still getting 25% of revenue from professional services. At $500m ARR, OneStream gets about 8% of its revenue from professional services.
• Crowdstrike gets 8% of its revenues from professional services, too, and makes money on them, with 27% gross margins.
• Okta gets about 3% of its revenue from professional services.
• HubSpot gets about 2.3% of its revenue from services. It’s SMB.

Bear in mind, for these leaders, third parties often do the majority of the heavy lifting here. HubSpot has a huge agency and partner program that does deployments for ~ 40% of its customers. Salesforce similarly on the enterprise side has built a huge ecosystem to do the services work for them.  Oftentimes, changing more than Salesforce does itself. But this gives you a sense of what these leaders do internally.

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So we’ve finally crossed 50,000 subs on SaaStr YouTube.  It took a while, but I’m probably on the unparalled quality of our content, especially the past 18+ months or so where we stepped up the editing and more.

So if you want to catch up, here are The Top 10 Most Popular SaaStr YouTube Sessions of All Time. Note I did take out a few that would have made the list but were a bit dated etc.

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