Why It’s Never the User’s Fault; Plus Weekly SaaS News and Updates

So GitLab is one of those ones that always was doing well. It was exciting at YC 2015 Demo Day. It was exciting as it scaled to be a more “enterprise” product. And the engine really never stopped running, and this week it IPO’d at $250m in ARR, growing a stunning 69% year-over-year, with 3,600+ customers at $5k or more in ACV.

Do your best to optimize your VP of Sales hire around your target ACV. If your average customer is $50,000 in ACV, and you hire a great VP of Sales with lots of experience at that price point … then they may not be as good at $5,000 and $500,000 deals. But at least they're optimized around your core deal.

As you scale your sales team, unless you are very careful whom you hire and how you train them, incentives being what they are in variable compensation, some negative behavior will creep in. Many call it “Churn and Burn” or other variants. Salespeople, often intentionally, but sometimes through poor training and/or product ignorance, often way oversell a SaaS product. It’s bad for everyone.

Getting customer success right is one of the most powerful levers in SaaS. Upsell + expansion with existing customers costs 62% less than acquiring new customers ($0.63 upsell + expansion CAC vs $1.67 new customer CAC, per KeyBanc 2021 Private SaaS Company Survey). Here are five of the customer success talks from the conference.

At SaaStr Annual 2021, Byron Deeter, Mary D’Onofrio, and Elliott Robinson of Bessemer Venture Partners share a state of the cloud economy, tactical lessons and case studies for early-stage founders, private market analysis, alongside key predictions and trends driving innovation.