https://www.flex.io/blog/just-binge-listened-95-saastr-podcasts/

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-001-how-we-achieved-3m-in-sales-without-1-on-marketing-with-tiago-paiva-founder-talkdesk

Saastr 001: How We Achieved $3m in Sales without $1 on Marketing with Tiago Paiva, Founder @ TalkDesk

Welcome to Episode 1 of The Official Saastr Podcast, the show will delve behind the scenes of the latest and greatest SaaS rocketships talking to the founders and operators themselves. We will also be chatting with the investors and VCs funding these hyper growth companies to reveal their tactics and strategies when it comes to deciding whether to invest.  To celebrate, we have a very special guest: Tiago Paiva. Tiago is the CEO and Co-Founder of Talkdesk, the world's leading browser -based call center software solution and in today's show with Tiago we discuss: The Origin Story For TalkDesk How Tiago achieved $3m in Sales without spending a $ on marketing When is the right time to hire your VP of Sales?  How important is it for SaaS startups and founders to be in SF? How did Tiago choose his investors?  In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: The biggest challenge Tiago has faced to date? Tiago's favourite SaaS resource? What role is the hardest to fill in a SaaS organisation? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Tiago Paiva

500 Startups; $3MM in sales w/o sales team via key partnerships and word of mouth; every six months of growth their customer changes (upmarket);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-002-behind-the-scenes-at-the-worlds-fastest-growing-saas-company-with-andy-lark-cmo-xero

Saastr 002: Behind The Scenes At The World's Fastest Growing SaaS Company with Andy Lark, CMO @ Xero

Joining us today, I am thrilled to welcome, Andy Lark, CMO at Xero, the world's fast growing SaaS company making accounting software beautiful. Prior to joining Xero, Andy work with the likes of Dell, Sun Microsystems and The CommonWealth Bank Of Australia and in today's show with Andy we discuss: How Andy came to be CMO at the world's fastest growing SaaS company? How Andy structures his team? What does Andy make of the expansion of the traditional marketing role? How to approach branding with regards to competitors? How did Tiago choose his investors? What are the main differences of the old enterprise world compared to selling SaaS to SME's today? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: What lesson has Andy learnt recently that changes the way he works? Andy's favourite SaaS resource? How does Andy approach the issue of work life balance? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Andy Lark

Where to put the next dollar and where to take a dollar out; do we have the right people and talent

SaaStr; Tim Ferris; Harvard Business Review Entreprenuer; Rich Roll

Brand is particuarly important in SaaS; orchestrate and optimize the brand/experience across relevant platforms; Best Mktg ROI? -- changes every 3 months; a mix is best; New frontier marketing: integation of marketing and product to automate virality and engagemnet in the product (biggest point of yield as a marketer); work/life balance is bunk; bring 'em together and integrate them; build remarkable products (and generate customer love)

Saastr 003: Scaling From A 50 to a 500 Person Company with Mark Geene, CEO @ Cloud Elements

Joining us today, I am thrilled to welcome, Mark Geene, CEO @ Cloud Elements the cloud API integration service that uses uniform APIs to connect your application with entire categories of services. Prior to joining Cloud Elements, Mark has had over 20 years experience in the industry including executive roles with IBM and Oracle and in today's show with we discuss: What was the origin story behind Cloud Elements and how Mark became CEO? What does it take for a company to transition from a 50 person company to a 500 person company? How does Mark apply lean startup methodology to SaaS? When is the right time to really invest in sales and marketing? Does the lack of SaaS exits greater than $500m concern Mark?  Why have we seen the rise of the API economy and what does the future hold? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: What lesson has Mark learnt recently that changes the way he works? Mark's favourite SaaS resource? Vertical vs platform SaaS play? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Mark Geene

keep focused -- not chasing every deal that comes along

3rd Startup; For early hires critical to get folks that have the same core values are important; hire slow, fire fast; proponet of lean startup throughout the different functions; for sales, get a repeatable process before lots of sales hiring; 6-9 months to get their sales process down; if you can, channel partners and OEMs are more efficient than building out the expensive sales org; don't spend money on stuff until you have them figured out (most capital efficient); think about APIs first (e.g. salesforce)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-004-indexs-shardul-shah-on-why-reducing-time-distance-to-value-is-so-important-and-how-to-sell-to-csos-effectively

Saastr 004: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Reducing Time Distance To Value Is So Important and How To Sell To CSO's Effectively

I am thrilled to welcome, Shardul Shah, Partner @ Index Ventures to the show today. Shardul is the sole member of the Index team to have worked in all Index's offices around the world in Geneva, London and SF. Now in SF, Shardul focuses on security, software and infrastructure with investments in the likes of Squarespace, DropBox and Adaloom, just to name a few. Discussed In Today's Show: How Shardul made his unorthodox approach into investing? What Shardul really looks for in early stage SaaS products when investing? Why is reducing time distance to value so important for a SaaS product? How can startups effectively sell to CSO's in this new wave of cyber security? What are the risks and flaws of the open source community?  How can enterprise SaaS products create true customer stickiness? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: What is Shardul most concerned about in the SaaS space? Shardul's favourite SaaS resource:  Which public markets SaaS companies is Shardul most impressed with? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Shardul Shah

SaaS Space Concerns: People confuse great companies for good companies; difference is growth v capital efficient growth

Saastr; Jason Lemkin, David Skok; Bessemer

Great investor can form conviction quickly and support companies long term, the common denominator: network; to be an investor, how to maximize probability that you have a dense network?; Beautiful craftmanship: obsession for minute details from a product-oriented team a recipe for creating a beautiful, highly usable product; things I look for to identify stickyness: products that reduce time-distance to value (biz models that benefit from enabling customers to identify utility very quickly, e.g., squarespace); metrics such as 8-minute POC; 30 seconds to value; SaaS businesses I like: system of record or core to workflow; Underhyped segements / themes: security (labor supply, new attack surfaces, attack driven mindset to security); devops (meaningful to their daily life and introduction to the company);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-005-social-capitals-mamoon-hamid-on-changing-the-way-we-work-and-the-rise-of-the-bottoms-up-sales-strategy

Saastr 005: Social Capital's Mamoon Hamid on Changing The Way We Work and The Rise of The Bottoms Up Sales Strategy

It is a huge honour to welcome, Mamoon Hamid, Partner @ Social Capital. One of the world's best performing funds with investments in the likes of Slack, Box, Intercom, Yammer and many more incredible companies. Prior to joining Social Mamoon was a Partner at US Venture Partners (USVP) and in today's show we discuss: How Mamoon made his way into the world of investing and VC? What were Mamoon's biggest takeaways from seeing the rocketship growth of the likes of Slack and Box? What were their challenges faced? What is the distinct value proposition of Social over other VC funds? How do you look to differentiate? What has been the effect of the rise of the bottoms up sales apprcach and what role will this play in the future for selling to enterprise clients? Which company will be the first to make a million on Slack?  In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Biggest challenge facing Mamoon and Social Capital? Mamoon's favourite SaaS resource? Biggest piece of advice to SaaS founders? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Mamoon Hamid

Core customer: think a lot about high bar on respectufl timely constructive feedback

Came from cap intensive to SaaS; Box first investment; like to invest in 10 people not a lot of revenue with a use case customres can't live without (dozens/100s of customers); struggles in hypergrowth - sales is usually not in the DNA of founders; Social Capital pitch -- internal growth team to help investees scale; Overhyped areas: Analytics, Business Intelligence, Predictive Shit, AI/Machinelearning bullshit; under-hyped: non-US focused needs; vertical software (gnarly industries like shipping, oil & gas);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-006-why-the-best-saas-companies-are-founder-led-and-taking-adobe-from-40m-to-1bn-with-russell-fujioka-us-president-xero

Saastr 006: Why The Best SaaS Companies Are Founder Led and Taking Adobe From $40m to $1bn with Russell Fujioka, US President @ Xero

Joining us today, I am delighted to have Russell Fujioka, US President at Xero, the world's fast growing SaaS company making accounting software beautiful. Prior to joining Xero, Russ was the Global Vice President of Marketing at Dell, EIR at Bessemer Venture Partners and held executive roles at the likes of Adobe. In today's show with Russ we discuss: How Russ came to be US President at the world's fastest growing SaaS company? How has Russ seen the SaaS industry change over his 25 years? Why does Russ believe all the SaaS best companies are founder led? What were the determinants that allowed Adobe to go from 40m to $1bn? How does Russ view the current competitive landscape for accounting software? What were the main benefits of experiencing the VC industry with Bessemer? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Which pubic markets SaaS company does Russ most respect? Russ' favourite SaaS resource? Is accounting software a winner take all market? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Russ Fujioka

Grew up in valley; starting in semiconducters into software (with Adobe); you can tell the diffrence between a mission led company (inherent in founders) to those that need a mission slide in their deck; Successsful SaaS -- more than category, how does it work for the customer and integrated with their data sets; SaaS is cheap - you can have full compliant shopify and xero accounting for $50/mo; 30 million small businesses in the US; 10 million true operational businesses; lots of churn (~150K per month); Biggest advice to saas founders: ask questions don't do it alone;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-006-what-it-takes-to-get-series-a-investor-interested-and-guidelines-to-manage-your-burn-rate-with-doug-pepper-partner-shasta-ventures

Saastr 007: What It Takes To Get Series A Investor Interested and Guidelines To Manage Your Burn Rate with Doug Pepper, Partner @ Shasta Ventures

I am thrilled to welcome, Doug Pepper, Partner @ Shasta Ventures to the show today. Doug is a master when it comes to SaaS investments with his companies generating over $500m in revenue in 2015, having funded the likes of Marketo, Optimizely and Flurry. In today's show with Doug we discuss:  How Doug made his approach into investing? What metrics are required for startups to get Series A investors interested? What are the guidelines for a startup to manage their burn rate? In future tough markets, we will see greater consolidation? How can startups stand out when selling to CIO, CEO's and VPs?  In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: What has been the scariest moment of Doug's VC career? Why Doug is so excited for the future of mobile SaaS?  What the main effects are of the rise of bottoms up sales strategies? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Doug Pepper

Most common issues for portfolio companies -- would have said hiiring, but now would say fundraising

Entry into VC from biz school; focus on enterprise marketing technology; comapnies will never stop optimizing their relationships with their customers; now a crowded sector, which is a little confusing for customers; advice to startups: identify a very clear problem and create a product that clearly solves that problem in an efficient and quick manor, which then earns you the right to become a bigger platform; big opportunities, enterrprise on mobile; big data and predictivate analytics and AI; used to be that you couldn't get fired for buying IBM, but now you can get fired for buying a hard to use product; For investing, like to look at team, product, market, but if they have customers, want to hear from those customers and what drove them to adopt; Series A: need 50-150K MRR; Series B: consistent growth and sales model $300-$500K MRR

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-008-hiring-101-with-keith-rabois-opendoor-khosla-ventures

Saastr 008: Hiring 101 with Keith Rabois @ OpenDoor & Khosla Ventures

This episode was recorded at Saastr Annual 2016 and it is an incredible conversation whereby Jason Lemkin deep dives into the career and wisdom of Keith Rabois. For those that do not know, Keith is a legend of the tech industry having helped build some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley including Paypal, Square and Linkedin. He is also a very prominent VC with Khosla Ventures and has recently rejoined the world  of operations, looking to disrupt the world of property with OpenDoor. For your chance to win a signed copy of Jason's new book 'How Hyper Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue', we would be so grateful for you to upvote the episode on ProductHunt! In Today's Show We Cover: Why Keith rejoined the world of operations having been a VC with Khosla? Is domain expertise a good or a bad thing to have when entering an industry? When hiring, how do you achieve the balance of experience and potential? When is the right time to hire a COO? What are the signs? How Did Keith approach hiring in high growth rocketship companies? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Keith Rabois If you enjoyed the conversation with Keith today and want to save your space at what promises to be the best Saastr Annual ever, Saastr Annual 2017! You can buy early bird tickets here!

Open Door & Khosla Ventures

From SaaStr Annual 2016; experience can be a two-edged sword -- good to have exprerience, but good not to have biases; if you are CEO and product (or sales, etc), maybe a COO is useful to help offload day-to-day stuff; leverage what you're awesome at and offload the rest to stuff they're awesome at; hiring: can't go after proven people when you're a startup; gotta get good at evaluating people with upside and give them the opportunity to succeed; hiring: have coffee with the five best people, just so you know what to look for in places that you aren't familiar with (or interview as many as you can until you don't learn anthing new); hyper-growth companies, hire talented people,'cause you can throw stuff at them even if they haven't done that before; safe hires v. high-upside folks: it's a ratio;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-009-what-makes-a-truly-great-saas-ceo-with-josh-stein-dfj

Saastr 009: What Makes A Truly Great SaaS CEO with Josh Stein @ DFJ

This episode was recorded at Saastr Annual 2016 featuring Jason Lemkin, Founder @ Saastr and Josh Stein, Partner @ DFJ. For those that do not know, Josh is arguably one of the most successful investors in the SaaS space having backed the likes of Box, Twilio, Yammer and many more from the very earliest of stages. In Today's Show We Cover: What is the fundamental differing between a great and a good CEO in SaaS? Is it possible to learn to become a great CEO? What did Aaron Levie do to enable Box to scale so successfully? How can startup founders determine whether they have the ability to go the distance as CEO? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Josh Stein If you enjoyed the conversation with Keith today and want to save your space at what promises to be the best Saastr Annual ever, Saastr Annual 2017! You can buy early bird tickets here!

From SaaStr Annual 2016; long term trend in SaaS is solid; what's a great CEO; early on your job is to be a magnet (hiring, talent, etc); sometimes they can scale, sometimes they can't; if technical, as you grow, often the people-centric nature of the job is a big surprise; for a young founder, a lot of it is force of will, much can be learned; how to avoid burning out: not being a hero leader, CEO breaking points: 40 people, 200 people, 1000 people; CEOs gotta think 6-12 months ahead to be ready; all amount whether your committed to learn

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-010-mathilde-collin-on-the-evolution-of-content-marketing-and-life-as-a-young-enterprise-founder

Saastr 010: Mathilde Collin on The Evolution of Content Marketing and Life As A Young Enterprise Founder

Welcome to Episode 10 of The Official Saastr Podcast. To celebrate this milestone, we have a very special guest: Mathilde Collin. Mathilde is the CEO and Co-Founder of Front, one of the world's most innovative young SaaS startups working in the space of email collaboration and in today's show with Mathilde we discuss: Mathilde's experience as a young founder and CEO in the enterprise space? How did Mathilde manage to attract some of the world's top talent and hire effectively? What were her biggest takeaways from her time at YC?  Why did Mathilde decide to raise US funds rather than European? How has the evolution of content marketing altered Front's sales strategy?  In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Hiring Your First VP of Sales: When and What Questions To Ask? Mathilde's favourite SaaS resource? Compare UK to US investor mindsets? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Mathilde Collin

YC takeaway: everyone is struggling every day, even successful folks. Building a company is hard. Youth ins't as important as how quickly you learn; Front: Land and expand, bottom up sales and keep sales cycle short; US: can it be big, will I regret not investing; EU: do you have a product, can I help you scale; for first hires - could this person be a co-founder; Content marketing #1 source of signups; not a lot of great content out there; so to create it, takes a ton of time to create a valuable piece, but then gets a lot of shares; miimum of two posts per month; content categories: 1) something about the industry 2) our journey 3) use cases, tips, etc for customers;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-011-4-questions-to-determine-whether-you-have-product-market-fit-with-ajay-agarwal-bain-capital-ventures

Saastr 011: 4 Questions To Determine Whether You Have Product Market Fit with Ajay Agarwal @ Bain Capital Ventures

I am thrilled to welcome, Ajay Agarwal, Managing Director @ Bain Capital Ventures, where he focuses on early stage application software and SaaS investing. Included in his immense portfolio are the likes of Optimizely, SendGrid and GainSight, just to name a few and prior to crushing the world of investments, Ajay was an early employee at Trilogy, where as Head of Sales and Marketing he was instrumental in growing their annual revenue to $300m.  Discussed In Today's Show: What is the difference between SaaS and Enterprise Software? (there is one!) How does the introduction of cloud software affect the sales cycle for startups? How can startups know when is the right time to release their MVP without having significant issues with churn? What does product market fit really look like for SaaS startups? Once product market fit is achieved, is it merely a case off during money into the machine?  Why has customer success become such an integral part of SaaS and what can startups do to optimise customer success? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Why is the system of record the easiest way to build a $bn company? The $10bn opportunity in marketing?  The future of zenefits? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Ajay Agarwal

Started in startup world in college; sales and marketing at Trilogy; bulk of time at bain in early stage saas; sales process - demoing real software instead of a demo, time to value is shortened dramatically, customer success critical, where value is delivered always v perpetual; learn startup/mvp & churn: get the product out early but set expectations and achieve product-market it; after that, work on quality before ramping up; product-market fit questions they ask: 1)can every person in the company in 1-2 sentences explain the value prop?; 2) customer sees real value that is highly differentiated from other products, i3) s your initiative a top 3 priorities, 4) amount you get paid v. the effort to sell it; System of record is easiest way to build a $1B company; sales cadence: can you transition between founder to a repeatable sales product;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-012-optimising-your-talent-acquisition-strategy-with-daniel-chait-founder-ceo-greenhouse

Saastr 012: Optimising Your Talent Acquisition Strategy with Daniel Chait, Founder & CEO @ Greenhouse

Joining us today, I am delighted to have Daniel Chait, Founder & CEO @ Greenhouse - software that gives people the power to build great companies. Greenhouse automates and simplifies the best practices for recruiting top talent, continuously monitors your recruiting activity, and automatically suggests improvements. They have backing from the likes of Social Capital, Benchmark and Felicis Ventures and in today's show with Daniel we discuss: How Daniel views the hiring funnel and how you can get a consistent stream of high quality incoming candidates? How can individuals breach the knowledge gap of not knowing what to look for in a iOS developer, for example? How important is a strong company culture when interviewing candidates? How can recruiters test candidates to ensure that their culture and skills align with the company? When did Daniel hire his first Head of Sales and what was the catalyst for causing this hire? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: The Candidate Experience: How Can We Optimise It? Who Does Daniel Most Respect & Admire With Regards To Their Recruitment? What Is Daniel's Fave Hiring Blog Resource or Newsletter? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Daniel Chait

Started as a developer, everyone has a desire to hire great people, but pretty much a trainwreck everywhere; funnel: where to they find them (folklore), interview: grab some person without experience or scorecard; need to have a cohesive thesis going into the hiring process; if you can't ask an interview question for it, your attributes are too vague; what do you desire v. what do you need; people underestimate the importance of fit between person and job; debug your hiring process; the big consulting firms tend to hire the best (systematic and rigorous process)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-013-how-new-ceos-can-make-their-mark-and-what-it-takes-to-raise-later-stage-funding-in-todays-environment-with-mark-woodward-ceo-invoca

Saastr 013: How New CEOs Can Make Their Mark and What It Takes To Raise Later Stage Funding In Today's Environment with Mark Woodward, CEO @ Invoca

Joining us today, I am delighted to welcome Mark Woodward CEO @ Invoca - software that helps marketers drive revenue with call intelligence. Invoca has built a platform that addresses the top concern for enterprise CMOs today — delivering personalized customer experiences across devices and channels. They have backing from the likes of Upfront Ventures who wrote this on Invoca's recent $30m raise (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2016/03/30/inside-scoop-funding-environment-might-mean/)  and in today's show with Mark we discuss: Question from Mark Suster: How does Mark feel taking the contrarian approach that phone calls are alive and growing? How was Invoice's journey to raising $30m in funding? What were the challenges? What was unexpected? What all new CEOs must know coming into a new role? How can a new CEO implement a new company culture and management style without disrupting the existing one? What does IPO ready look like in a company? What are the requirements before you consider that newt step? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: The most crucial characteristic of all good CEOs? Biggest lesson from being a 3 time CEO? If Mark could start the process again, what would he do differently? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Mark Woodward

Customer Success (Call Intelligence)

Fate of the telephone - customer support automated; but want prospects on the phone; 88B phone calls made to businesses per year and growing; messaging/chat is great for customer support, but not customer acquisition; current hole -- analytics around customers, but no analytics for prospects after they abandon their digital search; single platform for everyone, smb, medium and enterprise support teams to handle very different needs; pricing: base platform fee + subsciption based on number of phone calls; transition from SMB to Enterprise, brought in experienced CEO to help that transition; biggest lesson from taking companies public: you need to select the investors that understand you and your market (not just take money from whomever); realize you are a product for investors;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-014-its-the-whole-enchilada-why-data-is-crucial-to-effective-content-marketing-how-to-use-it-to-decrease-customer-acquisition-cost-increase-basket-size

SaaStr 014: 'It's The Whole Enchilada', Why Data Is Crucial To Effective Content Marketing & How To Use It To Decrease Customer Acquisition Cost & Increase Basket Size

On the show today I am thrilled to welcome Russell Glass, Head of Products For LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Formerly founder, president and CEO of Bizo, a B2B audience marketing and data platform which he, from founding in 2008 to $50mm+ revenue run-rate and over 150 employees before being acquired by LinkedIn for $175mm in August of 2014 he really is a Serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. If that wasn’t enough he is also the Co-author of The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits  In today's show with Russell we discuss: What did Russ and the Bizo team do effectively that allowed them to scale, leading to their acquisition by Linkedin? Is customer focus a constraint on long term growth and how can you communicate this long term vision to your investors? How important a role will data play in the future of content marketing? How can SMB marketers determine which platforms will be most effective for them? To what extent can content marketing reduce customer acquisition? What are the other benefits? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Who Is Doing SMB Marketing Most Impressively At The Moment? The Biggest Leanring Curve From Being Acquired By LinkedIn? What SaaS resource or blog is a must for Russell? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Russell Glass

Head of Marketing Products

Founder of Bizo, bought by LinkedIn; Focus (keep product focus even if you might leave money on the table) and Culture (hire only people we liked being around); Focus can be a constraint on short-term growth, lack of focus can be a constraint on long-term growth; content creation: 1000s of choices - you gotta simplify your problem (define your customer), then you can narrow down your content you'll create; content relevance: understand the lifecycle of your cusomer persona information needs, you become relevant as a marketer if you can meet them when they have those needs; content marketing now has to replace what the sales person used to do in the sales process; difference between small and large company is the speed and testing associated with course correction; hiring: instead of asking what, as why questions

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-015-nicolas-dessaigne-algolia-on-prioritising-company-culture-and-empowering-your-team-to-be-owners

Saastr 015: Nicolas Dessaigne @ Algolia on Prioritising Company Culture and Empowering Your Team To Be Owners

Welcome to Episode 15 of The Official Saastr Podcast. Joining me today, I am delighted to welcome, Nicolas Dessaigne. Nicolas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Algolia, Algolia are a brilliant case study for the successful pivot, having started off life as an offline search engine for mobiles but really took off by helping companies deliver an intuitive search-as-you-type experience on their websites and mobile apps. They participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch and raised $18.3M in May 2015 from the likes of Accel Partners, Point Nine Capital, Storm Ventures and many more incredible investors. and in today's show with Nicolas we discuss: Why is company culture so important and was it fundamental for Nicolas and Julien to have this outlined from the beginning? How did Nicolas implement the vision for the company future when founding the Algolia? How does Nicolas look to balance the scaling of the business with maintenance of company culture? What were Nicolas' biggest takeaways from his time at YC?  How can SaaS startups optimise the fundraising process to also be a source of business development? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Hiring Your First VP of Sales: When and What Questions To Ask? Nicolas' favourite SaaS resource? What would Nicolas do differently if he were to start the journey again? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Nicolas Dessaigne

Market to enterprise, while keeping our developer identity

Move from SDK to SaaS; need to find a good balance between vision and what customers ask for; user experience, developer experience and infrastructure gives credibility for large customers; hustle: solve one problem and do it better than anyone; able to grow without much of a sales and marketing culture (due to strong dev community); cheap product isn't a good thing (hurting them for larger customers); transparency is critical for developers; some marketing, did some viral hacks by providing search for open source docs, etc; 10 years ago, a CIO would make the choice; but now developers make the choice; content marketing is critical; 95% inbound sales today, much to do on outbound still; solution v tool: more on tool today (api economy building blocks); apis are eating software to help devs get to market faster;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-016-kris-duggan-betterworks-on-why-quarterly-public-goal-setting-should-be-an-integral-part-of-your-company

SaaStr 016: Kris Duggan @ Betterworks on Why Quarterly Public Goal Setting Should Be An Integral Part Of Your Company

Joining us today, I am delighted to have Kris Duggan, Founder & CEO @ Betterworks, a cloud platform that allows the enterprise to set and manage goals. By applying goal science thinkning, Betterworks drives companies to become operationally excellent and provides powerful insights about how work gets done. Betterworks has raised funding from true legends of the valley with their last round being led by John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins. In today's show with Kris we discuss: How Kris came to be Founder & CEO @ Betterworks, following his previous founding of Badgeville? Kris has previously emphasised the importance of focus, so how did Kris apply that focus with Betterworks, following his previous founding experience with Badgeville? How did Betterworks approach customer acquisition in the early days? Does it have to be the CEO connecting with prospects in the early days? How did Kris approach the balance of inbound vs outbound in scaling Betterworks? Kris has previously said, ‘2 by 2’ approach is key with outbound, why is that? In a goal setting environemnet how do you prevent disincentvisation if goals are not met and targets are not achieved? Why is customer success such a fundamental focus for Kris as a second time CEO? What were the other big realisations of being a second time CEO? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Biggest challenge in growing Betterworks? If Kris could start the process again, what would he do differently? Kris’ favourite SaaS resource? What CEO skill is Kris most proud of? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Kris Duggan

saastr; Bessimer 10 laws of Being SaaSy; Redpoint Tomasz Tunguz

Software for setting goals; less about competition than more about meaning of your work; quarterly, public goals (social contract); avg goal shelf life is 40 days; public cheer v. nudge; suggest decoupling financial and goals (encourages conservative goal setting); goals often end up just "the things we need to get done this quarter": pricing: every customer was a paying customer to test value prop; Customer success: large part of top-line can be from renewing and growing existing customers

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-017-why-fellow-founders-make-the-best-advisors-a-transparent-pricing-model-is-fundamental-with-laura-behrens-wu-co-founder-ceo-shippo

SaaStr 017: Why Fellow Founders Make The Best Advisors & A Transparent Pricing Model Is Fundamental with Laura Behrens Wu, Co-Founder & CEO @ Shippo

Joining us today on The Official Saastr Podcast is Laura Behrens Wu, Laura is the Founder & CEO @ Shippo, the API and dashboard for all your shipping needs. They have raised from the likes of SoftTech, 500Startups, SLow Ventures and many more incredible investors. In today's show with Laura we discuss: What are API’s and what do they allow us to do? With API’s developer adoption is crucial, what has worked for Laura in terms of finding developers, onboarding them and ensuring developer retention? How much of a role does content marketing and education play in a complex product and tech stack, like Shippo? What strategies have been the most successful in educating potential lients? Why does Laura believe transparent pricing is so fundamental? How does Laura harness the freemium model while attempting to onboard large corporate clients What do the next 20 years hold for Shippo? What will it take to reach the milestones? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Most challenging element of building Shippo? Biggest advice to SMB’s on shipping options? The fundraising process: What was it like? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Laura Behrens Wu

personal discussions with other founders, incl 500 startups

Shipping APIs; When building out an ecommerce store, found out how annoying shipping was; how can Amazon offer free shipping, but SMBs can't; free shipping is a competitive advantage; API play - connects ecommerce to shipping companies; developer adoption: by making the API modern, it is far better than the rest of the industry; not looking for APIs, looking for lower price/faster shipping; modeled API based on Stripe (so simple); multi-carrier api; ecommerce wants better shipping, but doesn't know they need APIs -- so SEO based on operationals needs and then education on API + seek out devs looking for a shipping API; developer: product marketing, ops people: content marketing; pricing: shipping industry is traditionally opaque, so transparency is key - API metering (simple, pay as you go); next steps; looking to go upmarket & looking at data passing through the system

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-018-the-benefits-of-account-based-marketing-the-biggest-takeaways-from-co-founding-marketo-with-jon-miller-engagio

SaaStr 018: The Benefits Of Account Based Marketing & The Biggest Takeaways From Co-Founding Marketo with Jon Miller @ Engagio

Delighted to welcome Jon Miller to The Official SaastrPodcast today. John is the Founder & CEO @ Engagio, the all inone account based marketing platform that allows you to accelerateyour move to account based marketing, streamline account basedreporting and analytics and map salesforce leads to targetaccounts. Prior to Engagio, Jon was the Co-Founder and CMO atrocketship, Marketo. Intoday's show with Jon we discuss:Whatreally is account based marketing and how does it differ to otherforms of marketing?Whatwere Jon’s biggest takeaways from co-founding Marketo and watch itscale into hyper-growth mode?Howcan startups determine whether account based marketing is the rightmarketing solution for them? How can startups accelerate theprocess of moving to account based marketing?Howcan startups communicate with their ideal customers in a nongimmicky, personalised fashion? What can be done to show personaland effective touches?Towhat extent does account based market intersect with account basedsales development? How much of a role will this integration play inthe future? In a round we call the60 Second Saastr,we also hear:Themost effective ABM channels?Thebiggest mistakes startups make in ABM?Thehardest element of growing Engagio from scratch? If you would like to find outmore about the show and the guests presented you can follow us onTwitter here:JasonLemkinHarry StebbingsSaastrJon Miller

Co-founder of marketo; lession: build everything in balance if you can; would have paid more attention to building culture; marketo - fishing with a net (did I catch enough fish); engagio - fishing with a spear (highly targeted); sub-$25K annual - fish with a net; 50K+ fish with a spear; can't send generic messaging to any of their very few people in the world that they want relationships with; best sales people teach & tailor; account-based marketing envelops selling and customer success and prospecting -- will become account-based everything;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-019-david-cancel-on-hiring-people-not-skills-the-importance-of-investing-in-relationships-and-being-scrappy

SaaStr 019: David Cancel on Hiring People Not Skills, The Importance Of Investing In Relationships and Being Scrappy

Following our meeting at SaaStr Annual 2016, I am thrilled to welcome David Cancel. Now David really is a serial entrepreneur having founded 5 companies, with the last, Performable, being acquired by Hubspot, resulting in his taking up the position as Chief Product Officer at Hubspot. Now David is the CEO @ Drift. Drift allows you to talk to your website visitors and customers in real time. David is a master when it comes to hiring, company culture creation and maintenance and team building and we dig into all that in today’s episode, as well as: Why David’s golden rule to recruiting is hiring people not skills? Why is cultural fit so important for future employees? How can you test for it in an interview? Can you hire a team of all A team players without having insane competition and friction? What does David mean when he says it is important for candidates to be scrappy? What signals are there that the person is an insane hustler?   What questions does David pose to get the candidate out of the standard interview style answering? How does david push them out of their comfort zone? Why does David believe it is crucial to never hire PMs who have done it before? What is the benefits of this? How does David view success? What commonalities does David se in thementiality fo those that have and have not been successful? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Must read books for startup CEOs? What are the 3 biggest lessons you learnt the hard way? What is David’s approach to learning? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr David Cancel

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz; Made in America by Sam Walton

Previous chief product officer at hubspot (started 5 startups); a shift from making something to managing teams; hiring; moved from hiring based on individual talents to based on team/culture qualities; culture - is this someone the team wants to be around; filter not just for a-grade players; scrappyness/grit -- what are you trying to learn? (then what have you done to learn it)? Product managers - usually found that most people with experience don't correlate with success (skills usually stage-specific); interview process: try to break them off script by redirecting the conversation; why questions better than what questions; big lessons: 99% people, 1% everything else;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-020-what-do-salesforce-look-for-in-potential-investments-with-john-somorjai-executive-vice-president-of-corporate-development-salesforce-ventures

SaaStr 020: What Do Salesforce Look For In Potential Investments with John Somorjai, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures

To Commemorate the 3 month anniversary of the best conference ever, SaaStr Annual 2016. We thought we would take a trip back to the conference with one of our favourite discussions featuring Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr and John Somorjai, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce Ventures invests in the next generation of enterprise technology. The Salesforce Ventures portfolio includes companies such as Box, DocuSign, Dropbox, Evernote, GainSight, MongoDB, MuleSoft, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, and Xactly. Salesforce.com has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups in 11 countries since 2009. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What have been the fundamental determinants for the growth and acceleration of Salesforce in the last few years? What gave Salesforce the conviction to deploy $500m back into startup investing? With the success of Salesforce Ventures, how have John’s investing goals changed since 2009? Why should founders raise with Salesforce, what is the value add? What is John attitude to the recent pessimism in the valley? How does John approach the dichotomy of growth and reducing burn? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr John Somorjai  

VP Corporate Development

From SaaStr Annual 2016; salesforce investment program, able to pick winners that are strategic to salesforce + reasonable financial return; investee needs champion within SF; have source by biz sponsor and half from SF ventures; 10-15 investments per quarter, no board seats; Of 150 companies in the portfolio: 50% series A, 30% series B; info transparency market-to-market each quarter & first right of refusal; invest only in companies relevant to SF; 2016: conserve cash and get burn down; investment in sales is still critical; gotta get product to market asap, even if not perfect, lest you miss your opportunity; companies need to focus on attrition, rather than just product & growth; key metric, what is your attrition rate; for SFV, need to be > $3MM ARR; for successful exit, best to develop an executive relationship (dating v. marriage); be transparent for corporate dev: "can't tell you how many companies won't tell me their revenue, who the hell cares? There is nothing confidential about your revenue";

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-021-crossing-the-chasm-from-b2c-to-b2b-with-johnny-chin-founder-ceo-bannerman

SaaStr 021: Crossing The Chasm: From B2C To B2B with Johnny Chin, Founder & CEO @ Bannerman

I am so excited to welcome Johnny Chin, Founder & CEO @ Bannerman to The Official SaaStr Podcast today. Bannerman is the company that provides on demand security staff and bouncers to some of the world’s biggest companies including Spotify, Y Combinator, Weebly, Optimizely and many more incredible firms. Bannerman are also an alum of YC having been in their YC S14 Class. In Today’s Episode You Will Discover: Why did Johnny decide to transition Bannerman from B2C to B2B? WHat metrics suggested to Johnny that product market fit had not been achieved with the B2C model? How did the transition affect the product? What does Johnny mean when he discusses ‘Wizard Of Oz’ moments? How did Johnny go about developing and establishing a sales process? What were the inherent challenges and how did JOhnny combat them? At what stage did Bannerman reach profitability and what does this allow Bannerman to now do and focus on? SHould it be a priority over growth for other SaaS businesses? How Johnny approaches brand building at Bannerman? Why brand is so important for B2B companies? What are the must do’s and the must not’s when it comes to B2B branding? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Most challenging element of the journey? Fave SaaS resources and reading materials? Competitive landscape for on demand security? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Johnny Chin

From Impossible To Inevitable by Aaron Ross

Platform to hire/manage security guards; originally a B2C, but limited resources so focused on B2B; same day security coverage compared to traditional players; listening to customers: "if you had a magic wand, what would you want"; try to solve problems with engineering; $40B on security guards spent on US alone; Advice to building brand in B2B: listen to customers and then you'll pull out your brand

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-022-what-makes-a-great-sales-leader-how-to-detect-bs-in-sales-reps-with-russ-hearl-datahug

SaaStr 022: What Makes A Great Sales Leader & How To Detect BS in Sales Reps with Russ Hearl @ Datahug

I am so excited to welcome Russ Hearl, Head of Sales @ Datahug. Datahug is a pipeline management and forecasting solution within Salesforce and backed by the likes of DFJ and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to Datahug, Russ was the VP of Sales at DoubleDutch where he built a sales machine that delivered over 1,500 new customer wins and took the business from $0 to over $20 million ARR in less than three years.  A true thought leader in sales optimization and selling velocity. In Today’s Episode You Will Discover: What makes a great SaaS sales leader? How can you spot the BS and the façade of someone who does not have what it takes? How do the best leaders run 1 on 1’s with their reps? How can leaders optimise this time and interaction? Is there anything they should avoid in the process? ? How can sales leaders go about introducing elements of competition into sales without disincentivising the loser? What is the buddy system and how does that work? Why do SaaS founders need to make pipeline velocity optimization a priority today? What are the biggest opportunities in improving pipeline velocity? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Biggest opportunities in improving pipeline velocity? Fave SaaS resources and reading materials? What are the biggest mistakes people make in pipeline velocity? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr

Used Datahug in previous company; liked the results and moved to their VP of sales; when hiring sales managers, can they articulate the science, not just coaching, do they understand sales velocity; trend has gone toward inbound sales, which allows for much better analytics, sales is becoming much more data-driven; one-on-one, old school: pipeline, ask same 3-4 forecast questions; and try to understand based on gut feel, so more of an interrogation; new school: sales manager should already know that info, so one-on-one would be be more collabtorative/coaching; hardest things -- when sales reps are single-threaded (rather than go around and do the "producttive conflict" within the cycle); inspire competitiveness like a sibling rivalry (tie some compensation to how they do as a tandem) then switch out tandems; some younger sales reps are reticent to making phone calls, but after testing, phone was 2.5x better results than just emails; big arre for automation -- opportunity management (not just top of funnel); "time kills all deals";

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-023-what-it-takes-to-make-it-from-seed-to-series-a-in-saas-with-nakul-mandan-partner-lightspeed-venture-partners

SaaStr 023: What It Takes To Make It From Seed To Series A in SaaS with Nakul Mandan, Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners

Joining us today on The Official Saastr Podcast is Nakul Mandan, Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he focuses on early stage SaaS investments. At Lightspeed, Nakul led the firm’s investments in Gainsight and Reflektive. Previously, Nakul worked at Battery Ventures, where he helped lead the firm’s investments in category defining companies such as Marketo, BlueJeans Networks, Gainsight, Intacct, 6Sense and Yesware. Prior to Battery, Nakul worked at Blue River Capital, a growth stage investor focused on India. In today's show with Nakul we discuss: How Nakul came to be one of the leading SaaS investors in the US? What will the 2nd phase of the consumerization of the enterprise entail? What innovation will we see in business model? How important is predictable revenue for early stage startups? Hoe can they mitigate the circumstances of losing it? What more needs to be done to ensure the continuation of consumerising traditional enterprise software? What does Nakul hone in on when considering investing in a SaaS startup for Series A? What are the metrics and requirements that matter? At this stage are there large data sets and metrics to rely on? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Fave SaaS reading material? Greenfield Opportunities in SaaS? SaaS Founder Nakul most respects and admires? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Nakul Mandan

Focus on early stage; productivity geek; 2nd phase consumerization of enterprise, ease of use 1st phase, 2nd phase is more about business model; can there be a network effect in enterprise (one winner takes all); starting to see that now; models: enterprise marketplace; zenefits, contently, building vertical network (e.g., lawyers or doctors) and can monetize that data, like github, building connected, etc; leveraging network effect; early signs: engagement, weekly active usage (if not daily), referrals and communication across network, greenfield: non-traditional industries, mfg, hourly labor, construction; system of records (marketo, gainsight) quite powerful position; Looking for in an investment? metrics are important but qualitative factors can count for more esp in early stage: team, why now v. 3 years before or later; how mission critical is the tool in the biz, market size (current + extensible), efficient go-to mkt strategy (is there already a need or do you need to educate); defensibility of business;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-024-nick-mehta-ceo-gainsight-on-why-customer-success-is-the-new-sales

SaaStr 024: Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight on Why Customer Success Is The New Sales

This week on SaaStr we are celebrating the rise of GainSight with a special feature week dedicated to Gainsight and joining me today we have Gainsight CEO, Nick Mehta. Since Nick has been at the helm of Gainsight, it has experienced a meteoric rise to the top of the world of SaaS having practically created the category of customer success and revolutionising business work processes in doing so. Due to this, Gainsight has raised funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. In today's show with Nick we discuss: What were the solutions before Gainsight? Why were these inefficient and what the market opportunity for Gainsight? Why has the power shifted from the hands of the vendor to the hands of the customer? What can vendors to do optimise this shift? Is the proliferation of available tools and the resulting competition not dangerous as there is only so low prices can go? To what extent does Gainsight have a monopoly over the customer success market? How much should startups spend on customer success in the early days? How can one measure that success and return on investment? What does the hiring of a customer success officer look like for Nick? How can we optimise this process? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: ACV is everything: Explain? Being a specialised CEO: Right or wrong? On again, off again hiring in sales? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Nick Mehta

Solving needs of recurring revenue company; biggest challenge at previous company was managing existing customers; system at previous company: excel + weekly meeting; old model: post-sales didn't really matter, but that is opposite in SaaS; how to you drive the most value possible to the customer; too many choices for customers and no lock-in; early bet, not software but community + job function; customer success - early stage: insight and learning (becoming a very early higher), what is target acv per customer... changes everything; hiring: have a great pipeline for everyone, but particuarly for sales (always be hiring); not "A Players" but more the right person/fit for the situation; what are saas companies getting wrong with customer success? - 1: not only about churn reductionn, also about upsell, expansion and advocacy (so your customers become your best salesperson) 2: hire the wrong person, maybe passionate, but not operationally focused 3) they put it under another exec ("this will be the part time responsibility of marketing or sales"), 4) make it about people and heroics vs process, 5) think about it as just the CSM team's responsibility, but they're just the quarterback that the rest of the company rallies around; new world: much more of the LTV of customer is post-initial-sale;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-025-how-every-startup-can-build-their-brand-through-events-with-anthony-kennada-vp-of-marketing-gainsight

SaaStr 025: How Every Startup Can Build Their Brand Through Events with Anthony Kennada, VP of Marketing @ Gainsight

I am delighted to present Part 2 of our feature of Gainsight. Joining me today I have Anthony Kennada, the founding VP Marketing at Gainsight where he is responsible for managing the company’s global marketing strategy, from demand generation to brand marketing, and is credited with creating the “Pulse” community of Customer Success leaders. Anthony began his career as an early employee at Box. He later joined LiveOffice and managed their OEM partnership with Symantec from contract signature to acquisition for $115M. Prior to joining Gainsight, Anthony led the Emerging Cloud Products division at Symantec, and was responsible for the first organic product development effort that spanned both consumer and enterprise market segments. In today's show with Anthony we discuss: How Anthony came to be VP of Marketing at one of the hottest startups in the valley? Being the founding VP of Marketing, how did Anthony look to grow the team? What were the actual steps Anthony used to scale the marketing at Gainsight? How has B2B marketing changed, from Box to today? With this evolution, what are Anthony’s marketing learnings in creating new categories vs. new players in existing categories? How should we be thinking about marketing, both Demand Gen and Corporate, differently in crowded spaces? ? How can marketing help support going up market and driving ACVs up?  Both Box and Gainsight did this. How should CEOs and VPMs think about, and budget events?  What if they don't have all the capital Gainsight does? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Billboards: Stupid or effective? Fave SaaS resource and why? 3 Biggest Tips For Running a Successful Event? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Anthony Kennada

deal cycles are long in an evangelical market (when you overinvest in thought leadership)

SaaStr, Both Sides of the Table - Mark Suster, mehtaphysical - Nick Mehta

Product manager > VP Marketing; two types of marketers - creatives (growth hack) and analyticals (demand gen): need both; in early days you can ride passion and hustle, but ultimately need to build out with experienced hands; third-wave of B2B marketing: sales-field-driven model with mktg doing corporate brand, then content-marketing, now moving toward account-based (but mktg is embedded with sales); how do you rise above the deluge of spam emails - events, thought leadership and programming channel; category creation app generates 76% of market value; conference based on best-practices around customer success; local chapters - goal to build community and customer success market, not just doing a classic sales pitch; marketing automatiion probably over-invested in -- human side can be brought back from events; had first conference with less than 10 customers; first event -- your speakers really matter, also sell tix; tips to run a succesful event, push value and boundries, while paying attention to budget constraints: 1) invest in experience (people want to have fun) 2) content value - drives return attendance 3) listen to attendees, surveys plus live feedback during conference

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-026-how-to-hire-motivate-the-best-sales-team-with-bill-binch-former-svp-of-sales-marketo

SaaStr 026: How To Hire & Motivate The Best Sales Team with Bill Binch, Former SVP of Sales @ Marketo

Bill Binch is a leader and expert in the SaaS sales industry. Bill was the senior vice president of worldwide sales at marketo for 8 years and he joined when it was a small venture backed startup with a mission to reinvent marketing automation, it was his sales leadership and expertise that formed a critical component in building Marketo into one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world. Recognized through his being awarded worldwide VP of sales in 2011. In today's show with Bill we discuss: What were Bill’s biggest takeaways from his time scaling the sales organisation at Marketo?? Why did Bill find it enticing selling to sales and marketers with Marketo? How can startups go about approaching the topic of the sales cycle? What does the right cadence look like? How can sales leaders look to establish a quota that is achievable and confident? Why is it about deal frequency not dollar size? How can we optimise the hiring process for sales professionals? What are the benefits to over hiring? Is this sustainable in a downturn? Does Bill agree that customer success will be the new sales, as Nick Mehta stated? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: SaaS tools that Bill could not live without? Creating your own scorecard? What does Bill know now that he wished he had known at the beggining If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Bill Binch

marketo -- at launch, no big companies in the space yet; startup go-to-market: get logos on the board (rather than focus on $), will provide confidence to sales team; key job of sales manager to make sure sales people have equal footing so 80% of them can achieve; by having quota on logos rather than deal size to start, you can back into avg sellign price/cycle/etc... then move to $ quota; not sure an exact model on best sales person to hire; be self-aware (ie, if you can't get top talent due to pay plan or lack of experience); so, at start, give sales folks lucrative incentives to "rig the recruiters" and improve odds; If you have an extra $ to spend in the org, spend it on sales reps; if you have 10 headcount, hire 11; customer sucess & sales are becoming intertwined with SaaS - customer switching costs are just not that high any more; biggest mistake by saas companies: spending too much on sales & mktg while not being capital efficient; traits you look for in a sales rep: self-awareness and humility;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-026-the-benefits-of-bootstrapping-your-saas-startup-with-laura-roeder-founder-ceo-edgar

SaaStr 027: The Benefits of Bootstrapping Your SaaS Startup with Laura Roeder, Founder & CEO @ Edgar

Laura Roeder is the Founder & CEO @ Edgar, the social media automation tool that essentially allows your social media queue to fill itself up. Now Edgar is not the usual startup story we are all familiar with as Edgar has taken some unusual steps, they have not raised VC funding, they do not have a sales team, their founder, Laura, was pregnant on launch and after all this, Edgar is a startup that actually makes money at 2.9m ARR. In Today’s Episode with Laura We Reveal: How did Laura come to found Edgar? What was the a-ha moment for Laura? How did Laura assemble and build the team, with te restraint of being pregnant during launch? How did this hiring mindset benefit the process? Why does Laura deliberately not have a sales team? How does the SaaS math differ for bootstrapped vs venture funded SaaS startups? HOw does the exit strategy change when bootstrapped? Why should SMs approach social media platforms one at a time? How can startups measure their social media performance and engagement? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Fave SaaS resource and reading material? Hardest hire in the Edgar process? Going up the enterprise funnel: Potential or not going to happen? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr  

Started with SMB consutling: leveraging and repuposing content, but spreadsheet centric; smb + bootstrapped means math for sales team doesn't work; 5000 customers, $3MM ARR; short-term LTV formula - 3 month value; no free trial (instead, they do a refund); social media as a marketing channel where you can improve and iterate on your content library; twitter/facebook still the biggest communities; SM not responsible for your funnel, more an amplifyer of your content; biggest smb issue: burnout

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-028-eloqua-influitives-mark-organ-on-scaling-eloqua-into-a-global-business-why-customer-success-is-the-bed-rock-for-all-saas-businesses

SaaStr 028: Eloqua & Influitive's Mark Organ on Scaling Eloqua Into A Global Business & Why Customer Success Is The Bed Rock For All SaaS Businesses

Super excited to welcome a heavy weight of the SaaS industry today as we have Mark Organ, Founder & CEO at Influitive. Influitive helps B2B companies mobilize their army of advocates for more rapid and profitable revenue growth. Prior to Influitive, Mark was the founding CEO of Eloqua, growing the business to over 150 people, hundreds of clients and a major presence around the world in 7 years. Eloqua was eventually bought by Oracle in 2012 for a reported $810m. In Today’s Episode with Mark We Discuss: The founding story behind Influitive? What was the a-ha moment behind the concept? What were Mark’s biggest takeaways from watching Eloqua scale into the global force that it became? Influitive are creating a category, so how is that for Mark? What are the inherent challenges?  What are the commonalities of successful category creators? What is the difference between good and bad competition? Why does Mark try and encourage good competition? Why are brand advocates crucial to the success of a business? Is it a really scalable solution? How did you figure out the model for making customers successful?   In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Mark’s fave SaaS resource and reading material? Thought leadership: Fundamental or unnecessary? Target Markets; Go large or be specific and niche? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Mark Organ

Saastr, David Skok, Mark Suster, Ben Horowitz, Fred Wilson

Founded eloqua (marketing automation); a takeaway was that most customers came from advocacy (referneces, reviews, etc); new category of "planned advocacy"; if category succeeds, then business succeeds; challenge is having "no enemy"; scalability of brand advocacy - advocates are polymorphic, part of the value chain: lead nurturing; "advocates are magical remarkable beings"; customer success is a bedrock of a company; churn is iceberg above the water line, the 5/6 of the iceberg is below the water; proponent head of customer success as first hire (early days customres are buying roadmap, buying team); UX research should be built into every phase of the product; advocates commonality - make them feel good (various reasons: competition, achievement, social)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-029-having-jason-lemkin-as-an-investor-selling-sexy-saas-to-the-legal-space-with-andy-wilson-founder-ceo-logickull

SaaStr 029: Having Jason Lemkin As An Investor & Selling Sexy SaaS To The Legal Space with Andy Wilson, Founder & CEO @ Logikcull

Andy Wilson is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Logikcull, where he really is the visionary behind Logikcull’s product and marketing strategy focusing on simplifying and democratizing the discovery process into three simple steps: upload > search > download. Andy leads the company it its mission to put an end to eDiscovery with the use of Discovery Automation. In Today’s Episode with Andy We Discuss: The origin story of Logikcull for Andy and what a-ha moment was for him? How did Andy approach the transition from service based business to SaaS business? Does the increase of customer success not transition the customer into the client? What was the effect of having Jason as a investor and what are the biggest value adds that Jason provides? On outbound vs inbound, how did Andy increase outbound in such an established space? Where did he find the major breakthroughs? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Andy Wilson

SaaStr, David Skok, Tomasz Tunguz, Christoph Janz

Inefficiency within legal and paralegal (truckloads of papers); started with services before moving to saas, client driven company v customer driven company - customization v product; wished got funding sooner, as it brought focus; hardest position to hire: sales; product-market fit, partly gut but also quantitative measures like NPS (find out that some issues they hate are really easy to fix); use customers to help differentiate themselves; crusty and old markets, you have the opportunity to turn that upside down and be sexy;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-30-building-training-a-non-technical-sales-team-why-a-heavy-inbound-model-is-like-driving-a-racecar-with-harry-glaser-co-founder-periscope-data

SaaStr 030: Building & Training a Non-Technical Sales Team & Why A Heavy Inbound Model Is Like 'Driving A Racecar' with Harry Glaser, Co-Founder @ Periscope Data

I am delighted to welcome my first ever Harry to the show today in the form of Harry Glaser, Co-Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data, the worlds fast analysis suite providing data analysts with the tools they need to improve their analysis by over 150X and an astonishing fact here they have doubled their revenue every 3 months ever since launch. Periscope’s investors include Ellen Pao, Matt Ocko @ Data Collective, Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures, Wes Chan @ Felicis, Benjamin Ling at Khosla and many more. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In Today’s Episode with Harry We Discuss How Harry came to be the founder of Persicope Data and what the a-ha moment was for him? How did Harry look to establish a pricing model with Periscope Data as a first time SaaS founder? What are Harry’s learnings of hiring and building out the initial sales team? How did Harry build out the institutonal training program to allow non technical people to sell a very non technical product? What are the inherent pros of having an inbound heavy model and what are the fundamental problems? Why are companies suddenly seeing the need for data analysts and what are the opportunites that data analysts present? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Harry Glaser

Saastr, Jason Lemkin on quora, Predictable Revenue, The Sales Acceleration Formula

Periscope was a side project at first, but got more attention than our main product; first pricing was to think about the highest price without being offensive, inbound: wrote a viral post "optimizing sub-queries in postres"; inbound was a revelation; content marketing still provides highest quality leads plus evergreen, content and paid SEM have been strong channels; inbound - 1/3 of revenue that month aren't in CRM at start of month; machine-learning to qualify leads (filters and ranks); cons with inbound: missed opportunities, daily standup to talk through lead value; ability to talk to sql literate person on chat after 5 seconds is a key competitive advantage; charge by data volume, which self-selects; greenfield in saas: back-end data munging & accounting; advice for early stage founders: stay in the game, one foot in front of the other; rise of the data analyst: because it is now feasible to process and store all the data, start to see people have to answers questions on a daily basis; organize them by making them a core function/sit together with one leadership team and then house them with the biggest customer (e.g., marketing)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-031-is-product-market-fit-customer-value-binary-the-importance-of-product-led-growth-with-blake-bartlett-openview

SaaStr 031: Is Product Market Fit & Customer Value Binary & The Importance of Product-Led Growth with Blake Bartlett @ OpenView

Blake Bartlett is a Partner @ Openview Ventures where he helps identify value and lead investments in product-led businesses driving market dislocation. Prior to joining OpenView, he was a Vice President at Battery Ventures, where he focused on growth-stage software and Internet businesses. Blake joined Battery in 2009 and helped lead 10 investments including  the likes of Wayfair, Optimizely, Sprinklr, and Glassdoor. In Today’s Show We Discuss: Why Blake decided to invest in SaaS over other sectors? Whether the rise of the bottoms up SaaS sales model means customer fickleness for SaaS products will increase? Does product led growth contradict tradition SaaS sales beliefs? How can they work in unison? Is product market fit and customer value a binary result? Are there varying degrees of customer value? How important is time to customer value? How can startups look to pull product-led growth off? What were Blake’s biggest takeaways from watching the likes of Optimizely and Expensify? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Blake Bartlett  

Started in VC with hardware and consumer but eventually fell in love with SaaS; consumer can be sexy, but it can be quite fickle; with consumerization of SaaS, may begin to see some fickleness within enteprirse in certain sectors; product-led companies: why did you start this business? "I had to solve this problem", important to begin with because you can't incorporate it later (at DNA level); "you should be embarressed by your first product' -- about speed v. perection (ideally driving fast iteration); product-market fit for lightweight tactical value (e.g., many of the side projects on product hunt) is different from strategic, long lasting value that can turn into a business; determined by cusomer willingness to pay; then willingness to pay more and more; time-to-value: if product-led growth strategy, then time to value is imperative - not one size fits all, but based on market; product-led & sales can be religious debate, in-field v. inbound v. anti-sales -- in reality not so dogmatic... an extension of customer success (sales is being proactive to people who are not yet customers); customer success: melding of what existing before (consulting/implementation, account managment, customer support); biggest advice to early stage: focus hard on the core problem; how to pull off product led growth: data is key - what are people doing in our product; can talk to users, but doesnt' scale like data, when you can nail the product and price it correctly, your customers will never outgrow you;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-032-scaling-operations-from-10-to-130-in-a-year-the-fundamentals-of-what-makes-a-great-saas-business-opportunity-with-luke-kervin-co-founder-patientpop

SaaStr 032: Scaling Operations From 10 to 130 In A Year & The Fundamentals of What Makes A Great SaaS Business Opportunity with Luke Kervin, Co-Founder @ PatientPop

Luke Kervin is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ PatientPop, where he has scaled the team from 10 to over 130 in just 12 months. As a result, PatientPop recently raised their Series A led by Toba Capital, allowing them to further ramp up their customer base and expand the employee ranks to over 200 people. In Today’s Show with Luke We Discuss: How Luke came to found his first SaaS business in PatientPop? What is Luke’s criteria for selecting a potential business idea? What does the idea need to have? What elements of an idea will concern Luke? How did Luke go about validating the idea for PatientPop? What are the most common methods founders get product validation wrong? Why did Luke build a fake product, a fake website and fake business cards to validate the idea? PatientPop has grown from 10 to 130, so how did they scale so fast? What are the inherent challenges of company culture maintenance with such hyper-growth.  If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr

overcoming bottlenecks: hiring, onboarding, training and building a mgmt team

Third startup, but first SaaS, during pregnancy, a mess of appointments and tests, terrible coordination; but, biggest frustration was piecemeal solution to web front-end/analytics; select a biz opportunity: huge market/ huge painpoint/ firstmover or highly fragmented market/ high valuation/ clear wayto validate opportunity; hard to get good data when you interview your friends; created a fake business and then sold based on that; then MVP after that; last biz, took 6 months to do an MVP with bells and whistles that in retrospect weren't necessary, this one took 8 weeks; hired a cfo early with saas experience; for series A, need $100K mo rev, strong growth, and idea of churn/metrics; co-ceos is tricky; need to have clear lines and small egos; within 7 months had full exec team; to manage a team need proper ratios (middle managers 1 to 8-10 people); clear metrics with SF; then make things scalable; define product-market fit then repeatable, scalable sales process critical -- then customer success thereafter;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-033-the-fundamental-challenges-of-saas-ma-with-villi-iltchev-partner-august-capital

SaaStr 033: The Fundamental Challenges of SaaS M&A with Villi Iltchev, Partner @ August Capital

Villi Iltchev is a Partner @ August Capital and prior to joining August Villi was a member of the leadership teams at Box and Lifelock. Before that Villi was a Vice President @ Salesforce where he led the strategy and acquisitions teams; being directly responsible for over 30 investments in the likes of Hubspot, Box, Mulesoft and many more amazing companies. In Today’s Show with Villi We Discuss: How Villi made the transition from the world of operations to investing with August? What were Villi’s biggest takeaways from working with titans of SaaS; Box, Salesforce? What was the M&A environment like back in the 2000s? What was the driver behind mass consolidation? What did the on premise perpetual license business model enable companies? Where did customer success lie in this environment? Multiple Clouds: What is the challenges of this? How will this evolve over time? What are the current solutions? Customer success lies with the vendor: What do you think caused this pivotal transition? How central should customer success be to an early stage SaaS company’s strategy? What are the main benefits of customer success to you? SaaS distribution: Why do reseller arrangements not work? How would you like to see this evolve in the future? Sales productivity: What is the productivity effect of giving another product to sales? What happens to aggregate sales? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Villi Itchev

Started in investment banking; then to HP, then salesforce, then box; inherent nature of saas: democratization of software was inevitable; today have barely scratch the surface (maybe 20%); corporate development / m&a very different across companies; smaller companies like box more strategic; how to make saas sales effectively: hard to support lots of infrastructure stacks; which is the downside of saas; hard to make saas m&a scalable; certain ecosystems where there are no buyers and not a big enough market to be an IPO, so exit not a key criteria for investment, but maybe insight into something to stay away from; a key challenge is customer success, for oracle/peoplesoft, customer doesn't care who owns it, but very different for saas vendors; private/public saas multiples: media often misreport as well as preferences (round is different than FMV); scarcity of assets drive returns down and prices up; some investors in SV aren't as sophisticated as other investors (multiples are derivative of many other metrics); linkedin, caught between consumer and enteprise company but underperforming, biggest advice to early stage: get companies to pay you early; near future of M&A - big companies and small ones, not the $50-100MM market so much; application software in next 10 years: brought this to the cloud and made available to all sizes of customers, but software itself does mostly the same things; future -- that software will get smarter and users more productive;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-034-how-to-master-the-freemium-model-learnings-from-being-the-1st-sales-hire-box-dropbox-the-integration-of-sales-and-engineering-with-fronts-new-head-of-sales-cailen-dsa

SaaStr 034: How To Master The Freemium Model, Learnings From Being The 1st Sales Hire @ Box & Dropbox & The Integration of Sales and Engineering with Front's New Head of Sales, Cailen D'sa

I am delighted to welcome the new Head of Sales @ Front App, Cailen D’sa, to The Official SaaStr Podcast today. Cailen might just be the Head of Sales every SaaS startup founder is dreaming of having previously been the first sales hire @ Dropbox where he launched Dropbox’s first B2B product, prior to that he was a director at Box where he helped pioneer and operationalize the freemium land-and-expand sales model, which is now a core SaaS sales methodology. Now if you enjoy the episode with Cailen today and want to hear more from him then you must headover to Front’s blog where you can find Mathilde’s written interview with Cailen. In This Episode With Cailen You Will Learn: How did Cailen come to be the first Sales hire @ Dropbox? What was it about Front that enticed him? What were Cailen’s biggest takeaways from his time at Dropbox and Box? How does the Sales process differ when selling a freemium product like Dropbox, compared to an enterprise product like Front? What does Cailen look for when hiring sales reps? What are Cailen’s sourcing strategies for new sales reps? How does Cailen incentivise the best talent to choose Front over other options? With the rise of data and it’s role in sales, to what extent does Cailen still believe sales to be an art and not a science? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Cailen D’sa

Spent time at box and dropbox both as early employee; like early stage, product market fit, how to hire the best talent, etc; how to integrate sales & engineering: bug-tracking/support (everyone does support at least 1 hour per week); communication around features gaps; freemium: free product is marketing vehicle (can work for SMBs); but make sure you have strong limits without watering down the product experience; box gave all features, but people didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade; recruting pitch, get new folks excited about the the cool things at whichever stage you're at; keep bar very high for hiring in early days and then mine their relationships for next hires; leverage network first, then recruiters; ideally hire up (ultimately they could be your boss); reason you join a startup is to have your hands in lots of things; advice for founders: find revenue/business model early and be able to build a recurring revenue model yourself before hiring sales folks;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-035-matt-garratt-on-the-strategy-behind-salesforce-ventures

SaaStr 035: Matt Garratt on The Strategy Behind Salesforce Ventures

Matt Garratt currently runs Salesforce Ventures with the mandate to build out salesforce’s ecosystem of partners with equity investments. Matt has led key strategic investments at Salesforce in companies such as former guests Gainsight, and Invoca as well as Anaplan and Insidesales.com just to name a few. Prior to salesforce Matt was a VP at the prestigious SaaS investor Battery Ventures. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In This Episode With Matt You Will Learn: How Matt made his entry into the world of VC and came to run Salesforce Ventures? What did Salesforce do right to give Matt the ability to formalise the fund? What did Matt learn in the less formal stages of investing? What are the benefits that startups receive from being portfolio companies of Salesforce Ventures? How does matt view Salesforce Ventures in the early stage investing landscape? Does Matt like to co-invest with other prominent funds? How does M&A work within Salesforce Ventures? Are you willing to sell to your competitors? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Matt Garratt

scale of what we're doing - global & huge product line

M&A at salesforce, high growth and made transition to venture fund; SF platform makes it natural for companies to partner and collaborate; 3 key benefits to investees: credibility, access to executives, tactical advice; venture is different than M&A -- more creating an ecosystem of partners; some have been acquired but others have gone public -- m&a is not key desire; enterprise software needs experience to handle the cycle; companies are now balancing growth and burn; still early days in movement to the cloud; biggest opportunities: predictive intelligence, that should unlock mobile in a new way;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-036-point-nines-christoph-janz-on-the-war-for-talent-when-to-move-to-the-us-the-importance-of-local-investors

SaaStr 036: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on The War For Talent, When To Move To The US & The Importance Of Local Investors

Christoph Janz is the Co-Founder and the Managing Partner @ Point Nine Capital, one of Europe’s best early stage venture funds and Christoph himself specializes in all things SaaS at Point Nine and has made more than 20 SaaS startup investments. Prior to Point Nine, Christoph co-founded two Internet startups and in 2008, became an angel investor and discovered Zendesk, which was his first angel investment. Also if you would like to congratulate Jason for the raising of the incredible new SaaStr Fund then you can click here to send him a congratulations tweet. In Today’s Episode with Christoph We Discuss: How did Christoph make his way into the world of early stage SaaS investing? When should startups consider making the move to the US? Is it always necessary? How important is it for SaaS startups to have a local US investor? What are the benefits? Where are there talent gaps in European SaaS? What can European founders do to find those experienced VPs of Sales and Marketing? Question from Jason: What made Zendesk seem like such a winner and what did that teach you? Where does Christoph see the next wave of the consumerisation of SaaS? Is it harder to get funded as a SaaS startup in today’s environment than in previous years? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Christoph Janz

limitation of bandwidth; focusing time on best opportunities in an ocean of limitless possiblities

jason lemkin quora, saastr, david skok, Tomasz Tunguz

Specialized VC in Berlin; history: first entrepreneur, then angel investments, then join forces to develp VC firm; angel v VC: no one to be responsible to, no specific fund model; higher bar for valuation; for saas, need to have aspirations to be a global player; engineering talent plenty in EU, but sales and marketing is less so (fewer role models); early days hire young, passionate hungry people, later stage hire experience folks; hardest folks to hire: sales; consumerization of the enterprise - maybe biz models, maybe mobile-first, maybe for biz apps to be smarter; early stage bet -- founders to great manager; early stage advice: think very carefully about who your customer is and if possible to find sales/mktg strategies for ACV at reasonable cost... at large scale (what type of animal do you want to hunt);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-037-why-the-whole-saas-pricing-model-is-going-to-change-with-quang-hoang-co-founder-birdly

SaaStr 037: Why The Whole SaaS Pricing Model Is Going To Change with Quang Hoang, Co-Founder @ Birdly

Quang Hoang is the Co- Founder @ Birdly, Birdly are convinced by the power of messaging within organizations, they decided to build a broader service that connects your favorite business softwares to messaging apps. It is this vision that has led to them being named one of the hottest startups from YC Winter 2016 batch and has led to funding from some of the best in the industry including our own Jason lemkin, Slack, previous guest Nicolas Dessaigne and prestigious french investors Alven Capital and Partech Ventures. In Today’s Episode with Quang We Discuss: How did Quang come to found Birdly? What was the a-ha moment? What did Quang learn from pivoting to Birdly? What is it important for founders to consider before a pivot? How does Quang approach the challenging topic of a business model for bots? Why does Quang believe that the whole pricing model for SaaS will change? What were the main benefits of the YC experience and how did it impact his fundraising? When is the right time for European startups to make the move to SF? How important is it to be close to your customers? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Quang Hoang

Started as an expenses app with mobile app but transitioned to slack bots; birdly is idea to make all data avialable via slack bot; worked for few months on mobile app, but not a lot of traction; thought about doing expenses in slack; 30 seconds to install the bot; build something you feel comfortable using; when pivoted to slack, everyone used it right away; belief that slack could be "the next" platform; business model for bots: know it isn't priced per user; saas pricing is currently is ridiculous; expect to change to "per usage" or "size of database", "# of queries per month"; consumerization of saas - anyone in the comapny can install the bot; no need for permission (no friction); YC most important things - talk to users, building your product and growth; in EU, hiring engineers is easier than the US;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-038-rainforest-qas-fred-stevens-smith-on-firing-fast-the-transition-from-founder-to-ceo-why-you-should-spend-the-most-time-with-your-highest-performers

SaaStr 038: Rainforest QA's Fred Stevens-Smith on Firing Fast, The Transition From Founder To CEO & Why You Should Spend The Most Time with Your Highest Performers

Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn: How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC? How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software? What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle? Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers? Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people? How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Fred Stevens-Smith

Choose passion or choose wealth; open eyes to world of startups - you can do it both; failed startup, then YC, then Rainforest; "what would you pay $1,000/mo for?"; product-centric folks have no idea what enterprise pays, but as you get more mature, you find out pricing is too cheap; changed price 5x past 18 months (now $10K/mo); not much competition, so they set the price; grandfather in existing customers; you can get quick feedback; hard to test the price (you need meanigful numbers); but in enterprise don't get enough traffic; segment of the market has remained the same -SMB (despite increase in price); big customer success team that own the customer experience cause pricepoint means it really has to work; category creation -- need to educate customer and define the market; advice: best to be in an open market; question to customer managers: what do you always repeat to customers (turn that into docs); content mktg - hubspot and kissmetrics and moz "how do I ____" goes right to their websites; don't hire any sales guys until you sell a bunch of software first; sold 30-40 customers and $300K ARR and then built sales team from there; spend the most time with the highest performers to make them most successful; 3 false starts before sales person stuck (fire quickly -- positive thing as it provides insight into needs and strengths); sales is an art (just listen to a sales call); investor selection -- do we benefit from their brand or do they benefit from our brand

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-039-the-unwavering-power-of-predictable-revenue-and-why-we-will-see-further-consolidation-in-saas-with-cindy-padnos-founder-and-managing-partner-illuminate-ventures

SaaStr 039: The Unwavering Power of Predictable Revenue and Why We Will See Further Consolidation in SaaS with Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner @ Illuminate Ventures

Cindy Padnos is the Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures where she focuses on all things Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors. Prior to founding Illuminate in 2009, she was one of three investment professionals at Outlook Ventures responsible for committing the firm’s $140 million fund. Cindy also has extensive experience in the world of operations, where she founded and sold one of SaaS’ first on demand startups in the form of Vivant. In Today’s Episode with Cindy We Discuss: How Cindy made her way into the world of SaaS and later SaaS investing? Why does Cindy think SaaS is a democratiser for entrepreneurship? Is the proliferation of Sales and Marketing tools not a challenge for startups in terms of competing for the same VC dollars? Is it easier or more challenging for startups to raise VC funding today than in previous years? If so, why? How does Cindy assess product market fit with her portfolio companies? When is the right time to put pedal to the metal? What does Cindy make of the Micro VC market at the moment? How prominent are party rounds? Will we see consolidation? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Cindy Padnos

Started in corporate work and then mgmt consulting; then to the entreprenuerial world and tech industry; then venture; then a shift due to public cloud; strategies have changed - inbound sales, self-serve; cost of sales orgs have changed dramatically; believed in the predictibilty of the subscription revenue stream: you need to care deeply about the customer (not shelfware); keeps everyone responsible; business users often prefer annual pricing (if not multi-year pricing); one of the biggest challenges for startups -- when is it time to scale; frequently first few sales are false positives (is it really a repeatable sales model?); micro-vc, more than half the funds are new (avg size 10-15M); pretty different/broad strategies;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-040-gainsights-allison-pickens-on-scaling-your-customer-success-team-managing-churn-and-segmenting-your-customer-base

SaaStr 040: Gainsight's Allison Pickens on Scaling Your Customer Success Team, Managing Churn and Segmenting Your Customer Base

Allison Pickens carries the customer success torch as the VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at the category leaders, Gainsight. Allison’s organization @ Gainsight includes all post-sales functions: CSMs, Support, Onboarding, Services, and Operations. Prior to Gainsight, she started her career in management consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at Boston Consulting Group and later worked in private equity investing at Bain Capital.  Allison decided that she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work at Gainsight when Bain Capital led the Series B. In Today’s Episode With Allison You Will Learn: 1.) So let’s start with managing customer churn and I think the first and most important thing is assessing what is regrettable vs non-regrettable. How do you approach this? What is the internal post mortem? How do you identify why they churned? Is there a blame game that follows? How do you instill ramifications but not fear? How do you then look to fix the original problem that caused the churn? 2.) To do the above we need to have a great customer success team so iw ant to talk about the process of building this out and with CS being a new category this is an aspect a lot of founders are addressing at this time. So starting with the obvious? When do you need a customer success team? Where in the organization should the team sit? What's the playbook for rolling it out? How big does the team need to be? Does this vary on sector or funding availability? What are the levels of seniority within the team? What's your budget? How do you account for the costs of your team? What teams sit within the customer success umbrella? 60 Second Saastr produced by Nick Mehta: What surprises you most about customer success now vs a year ago? Importance of fast iterating team? Fave SaaS material, book, blog, podcast? What element of the journey have you found most challenging? Carrying the CS torch? What is it like do you feel the pressure? 3.) Now I want to finish today by discussing the segmentation of your customer base, so at what point in the company's life do you begin segmenting the customers? Why is it important to segment customers? How do you decide the best way to segment them? Should these segments align with the sales team?   If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Allison Pickens

change managment (lots or reorganization in hypergrowth)

managing customer churn: every churn is regrettable, should cause a root cause analysis that ends with action items; 8 different categories of risk, like adoption risk, sentiment risk (NPS), product risk (enhancement request), implementation risk (onboarding time to value), etc.; default should be that CSM isn't necessarily the fault of churn and why you need to do root cause analysis; CSM content (all post-sales functions): onboarding, technical success and operations within the CSM umbrella; when do you need a CSM team: startup that is a big part of your time and creating a tight feedback loop; then create awesome customer advocates; first CS person: early on need a very diverse skillset (jack of all trades and learn very quickly; create struture from ambiguity), the sales learning curve "the renaissance rep"; a way to eventually specialize -- onboarding (different workflow) and then operations (analytics); CS has been adopted very quickly in non-saas companies (everyone is becoming a tech company); important to observe differences around customers and see how they group together (and determine their key needs), then boil down to a key attribute;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-041-hubspots-dharmesh-shah-on

Today we bring you a highlight from SaaStr Annual 2016 featuring a conversation between Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah and SaaStr's own Jason Lemkin. Prior to founding HubSpot in 2006, Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”,Dharmesh published HubSpot’s Culture Code, which has garnered over 2.5 million views on SlideShare. Named an Inc. Founders 40 in 2016, he is an active member of the Boston-area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 60 startups, and a frequent speaker on startups and inbound marketing. In Today's Episode wth Dharmesh You Will Learn: What were the biggest growth catalysts in the scaling of Hubspot from Day 1 to IPO? What were the biggest mistakes made and lessons learnt by Dharmesh and the team throughout the journey? How does Dharmesh think about churn? How does he define pre-churn? What is the customer happiness index and how can it be implemented? How can founders inform prospects their product is a must have not a nice to have? Why has the SMB space been so difficult for so long? Why is that changing now? Why Dharmesh and Hubspot focus on consumer behaviour not consumer feedback? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Dharmesh Shah

Saastr Annual 2016. Review of hubspot; how can startups increase their odds of success...; a great product is essential with saas, but just a part of it; hubspot went against conventional wisdom -- founded by mbas, focused on SMBs, did everything, not just one thing; everything in early years was to mitigate market risk, not product risk (test by having people pay money); they were selling a new type/category of marketing, creating a category called inbound marketing; creating a category -- super expensive and not likely to work; free tool (website grader) to determine how good you were on marketing... freemium without the downside (adjascent tool that validates your solution); if people aren't churning, doesn't necessarily mean their happy - developed customer happiness index (pre-churn indicator): don't wait until they cancel to do a post mortem, you already have most of the data; don't look what they say, but what they do (have they no logged in for X weeks, etc.?), to get breakthrough success -- need more than just technology. hard to break through the noise; if you have a few different customer categories, how do you tease out where to go; hubspot --putting energy in medium; will take money from small and big (often a dept within a large company);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-041-why-now-is-the-time-for-aggressive-growth-monetisation-models-are-the-most-exciting-element-of-the-consumerisation-of-saas-with-david-yuan-general-partner-tcv

SaaStr 042: Why Now Is The Time For Aggressive Growth & Monetisation Models Are The Most Exciting Element Of The Consumerisation Of SaaS with David Yuan, General Partner @ TCV

David Yuan is a General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, where he has enjoyed no less than 4 IPOs and 5 acquisitions. Some of David’s investments include the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, Exact Target (acq by Salesforce), Splunk and many more incredible companies. He also sits on the board at Act On, App Nexus, Merkle and Site Minder and is an advisor to Pinterest. Pior to TCV, David had stints at JP Morgan and Bain & Company. In Today’s Episode with David You Will Learn: How did David make his way into the investing world in 2000? How has David seen the evolution of SaaS revenue multiples over the last decade? How can VCs balance the drive for profitability with their need for big wins over a short 5-7 year investment cycle? How does David approach investing cadence in correlation to market cycles? Does his strategy alter according to down-turns and booms? Why does David find the monetisation models of the consumerisation of SaaS to be the most exciting? Does David agree that the original hires might not be the hires as the stages progress? How can founders transition them out without a lack of respect and gratitude? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr David Yuan

Technology Crossover Ventures

Got into VC around 2000 with enterprise software, started getting up and running in SaaS around 2005, private markets have been changing, revenue multiples v profit multiples; growth v. profitibility; growth at all costs to, now, profitibility at all costs... but depends if you can control your destiny with cash balance; consumerizatoin of business product to consumerization of product model & monetization; consumer platform model, build customer base but then add third-party apps (and indirectly take a piece of revenue); future looking: can you leverage web-scale data (facebook data) into personalization (REI); start with direct response marketing (fulfilling demand), but eventually (50-200MM) need to push into brand (creating demand); greenfield in saas: ai and machinelearning; IPO - do it when your ready; just a highly-branded financing event, a milestone -- a lot of overhead; ultimate job of the founding CEO is to manage a team;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-043-why-you-should-focus-more-on-upsell-than-customer-acquisition-forget-the-mba-take-a-psychology-degree-with-kirsten-helvey-coo-cornerstone-on-demand

SaaStr 043: Why You Should Focus More On Upsell Than Customer Acquisition & Forget The MBA, Take A Psychology Degree with Kirsten Helvey, COO @ Cornerstone On Demand

Today we bring you one of the highlights from SaaStr Annual 2016 with Jason Lemkin talking to Kirsten Helvey,  COO of Cornerstone Ondemand, a cloud-based learning and talent management solutions provider. in the episode Kirsten discusses her 11 years of experience with rising up in the ranks from employee #30 to her current position in the company, which is now 1500-strong, it is a phenomenal scaling story and so many insights nuggets of wisdom from Kirsten here. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: Why you should always be thinking about building, no matter the scale? Why we should all stop talking about company culture? Why you should forget the MBA and take a psychology degree? How to give direct and consistent feedback with employees in order to get the most out of them? Why we should focus more on upsell and less on customer acquisition? How to build, integrate and scale a customer success team into a 1,500 person organisation? You can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Kirsten Helvey

Saastr Annual 2016. Ran customer success to COO; as a startup, you're building -- but that never (should) end; employees are the culture; how to create a great culture - acknowledge it and then maintain it; how to deal with great people not ready for the next level (career path and mobility is critical); you often have a lot of individual heros, but that ultimately can become a detriment; individual contributor v. manager - forget the MBA, get a psychology degree; how do you top an existing employee; no one tells you all the crap you have to deal with in the startup world; not personal -- not about the indvididuals failings or weaknesses, but where the business is going and what it needs to succeed; transparency is important --- need people, your biggest asset, treat them with respect; customer success was "save the account", make your customers success, they *are* your business; costs a lot ot upsell than acquire new business; outcome of customers is what your biz hangs your hat upon; client success manager is biz dev for the sales team -- they are the ones uncovering the needs for upsell; how to promote yourself: "do a good job" doesn't work -- you need to be able to articulate/translate your value and build relationships; a little bit of luck helps -- so look out for luck;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-044-mattermarks-andy-sparks-on-how-to-hire-train-incentivise-your-sales-team

SaaStr 044: Mattermark's Andy Sparks on How To Hire, Train & Incentivise Your Sales Team

Andy Sparks is the Co-Founder and Head of Sales @ Mattermark. He was previously the Technology Editor at Referly before the company pivoted to become Mattermark. Andy joined the Referly team via an acqui-hire of his company, LaunchGram, by Referly in February of 2013. Now I am going to leave the bio there as Andy does a much better job of it in the show than I do! In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Andy came to be a 1st time Head of Sales with Mattermark? What are the requirements for stretch VPs to be successful? How can Head of Sales clearly and efficiently communicate with their reps? What are the 3 things all sales reps have to be trained on? What are the must haves when looking at sales reps? Are there different types of reps for different stages in the business? How to effectively establish a compensation structure for your sales team that is incentivising to them and to the company? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Andy Sparks  

Mattermark daily, How to Castrate a Bull by Dave Hitz

Refurly became mattermark; scaling a sales org as a newb: go find other people who know how to do it and get feedback; interwtined relationship between marketing, sales and sales development; sales will get a % from inbound, but need to know the other % on their own (important to know those %); first hiring sales -- looking for people of closing deals and hitting quota for a few years; onboarding sales people still wild west for Mattermark - certain ramp up period, sitting with other reps - some structured training, but a lot of unstructured -- would eventually like to get better training, initial sales structure (based on jason's blog): generous - ~25% commission.. lucrative comp when they're achieving; hire fast fire fast - easy to say yes, but a hard thing to do in practice ("I screwed up") -- to do it, be very clear on critieria or it will always be your fault; what do you look for in a sales rep? - agency: when you run into a challenge, what are you gonna do...; tactical discussion on sales communications/meetings;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-045-atlassian-president-jay-simons-on-the-inside-story-behind-atlassians-5bn-ipo

SaaStr 045: Atlassian President, Jay Simons on The Inside Story Behind Atlassian's $5bn IPO

As VP of Sales and Marketing at Atlassian for three years before becoming President, Jay Simons has a broad perspective on what it takes to build a successful company. Sometimes, ignoring conventional wisdom is what will differentiate you from the competition. Bootstrapping from day one, launching and supporting multiple products, and doing it all without traditional Sales team - Atlassian's approach (and wild success) has always been a curious anomaly in SaaS. After 13 years of being an exception to every rule, Atlassian went public in late 2015 with a total market capitalization of $4.37B at the time of the IPO. In this session, Jay answers our burning questions:  1.) Why does Jay believe in most cases the best run companies are public companies? What does being public bring to the organizational structure of a firm? 2.) How important is it for early stage startups to have board members and outside perspectives? How should they select those inputs? 3.) How important a role does customer support and success play in the conversion of customers from trial to paid versions?  4.) How does Jay focus on 4 products with such a differentiated suite of products? Does this not contradict the often cited fundamental, focus. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Saastr Annual 2016; 13 years to IPO; could have probably gone earlier, but wanted to get into the rhythm of how it works (quarterly calls, etc); IPO gets employees liquidity; great branding amplifier; best run comapanies tend to be public ones; bootstrapped but have taken secondary capital to give employees some liquidity + network; non-traditional sales model - fortune 500,000 -- sell to everyone; sell team software - land and expand; price for affordibility; as little friction as possible for customers (full transparency of price); build back into the product to improve/refine; we spend twice on R&D than we do on sales; most times SaaS companies are inverted -- meaning you can pull value forward in the short term, but at higher cost... and possibly lower LTV; "Atlassian is the new basecamp"; Can a founder do this? Depends on your market; big partner sales channel tha act as unpaid sales people all around the world; One product or branch out... in hingsight, better for atlassian to have made more products; team collaboration stool - jira, confluence, hipchat; natural network effects given that it is a team collaboration tool; end user NPS is a predictor of future growth; priorities will shift around -- think about the quantum that a product will contribute + size that will grow over time; used snowball rolling down a hill metaphor -- you either launch more snowballs or you increase the slope (automation, marketing, etc); more you steepen the slope the more snow you accumulare; we don't drop snowballs that aren't gonna turn into big ones; on-premise, saas, services, due to the way it started; figured out how to thread the needle without slowing them down; what inning are we in in the saas-ification of the market: very early; 1st inning.

http://saastr.libsyn.com/predictable-revenues-aaron-ross-on-the-importance-of-sales-specialisation-and-how-companies-scale-into-hyper-growth-mode

SaaStr 046: Predictable Revenue’s Aaron Ross on The Importance of Sales Specialisation and How Companies Scale Into Hyper-Growth mode?

Aaron Ross is the author of the best selling book, Predictable Revenue, providing the framework for the outbound process & sales team Aaron created for Salesforce.com. During his time at Salesforce as Director of Corporate Development and Acquisitions, he added an extra $100 million in revenue in just a few years. In today’s show we discuss his and Jason Lemkin’s fantastic new book, From Impossible To Inevitable, which outlines how hyper growth companies create predictable revenue? If you are a founder asking why aren’t we growing faster, how do we go into hyper-growth mode and then how do you sustain growth then this book really is for you. In Today’s Episode with Aaron You Will Learn: How did Aaron enter the world of SaaS and come to be a Senior Director @ Salesforce? What were his biggest takeaways from seeing Salesforce scale into hypergrowth mode? WHat does Aaron mean by saying ‘nail a niche’? Does this mean go small? How much of a role does iteration play in this process? How does Aaron assess product market fit? How do you really know when you have that focus? Are there any clear signs that suggest you have achieved product market fit? Aaron has said before “people at the company will always be busy. they just might not be busy on the right things”? How important is sales specialisation? At what point does the original generalist sales team fragment into specialised elements? What are Aaron’s thoughts on ownership and how you ensure that a sense of ownership is instilled upon the team to enhance productivity? I have never heard a Founder on the show before saying ‘my team is just achieving too much!’. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Aaron Ross

Wrote predictible revenue about outbound sales process created for salesforce, also From impossible to Inevitable with Jason Lemkin re how hypergrowth companies predict revenue; learned sales at Salesforce; nailing a niche - biggest reason they don't grow (who do you start with, what are the baby steps; how can you focus and double-down quickly); a common story: great product, anyone could use it and get value from it, but no one is buying it; where are you a need to have v. a nice to have? It's hard to have discipline in the early days to focus on the ones that need to buy (enough of a pain) to evaluate, buy and deploy; product-market fit - 10 unaffiliated customers, you've nailed a niche; don't confuse niche v. vision -- you want to rule the world, great go rule a city first (focus on next steps); should inbound or outbound work for you; later stage you have way more data; early days you tend to overanalyze; 6 months to make content marketing work; specializing sales people (inbound and outbound fragmentation); one person can specialize (based on calendar) -- all about focus; employees rent, not own, your job (emotionally): single public ownership (and own decisions) a starting point;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-047-how-to-increase-leads-conversion-through-optimising-your-marketing-funnel-with-meagen-eisenberg-cmo-mongodb

SaaStr 047: How To Increase Leads & Conversion Through Optimising Your Marketing Funnel with Meagen Eisenberg, CMO @ MongoDB

Today’s episode is taken from SaaStr Annual 2016, featuring Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB and former VP Demand Gen at DocuSign, sharing her playbook for optimizing the funnel at every stage and converting leads into real, paying customers. If you want to join me and Jason @ SaaStr 2017 then head to saastr.com where you can buy tickets. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:   Why you need to think about more than just pipeline? What are the other elements of the funnel you should focus on? How to optimise your forms for data capture to allow your sales team to follow up successfully? How marketing can provide support to sales to attract new customers? How does nurturing align the buyer with your sales team? How do you accurately measure success within email marketing? How can startups on a tight budget maximise exposure through content and social media?   If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Meagen Eisenberg

Saastr Annua 2016: leads & quality leads; front of funnel > education > people talking to people; who to hire first: product marketing; web dev; creative; sales want to talk to C-suite instead of devs; majority of leads come from website (90% at MongoDB); without much budget, focused on website and consistely double leads; forms are critical to get the leads -- five things: name, title, email, phone, then technology to get the rest (more you ask, less people will fill out); if you're only asking for email -- it limits your sales team; need a mktg database to warm up to send to sales (not buying lists); dynamic website changing based on who is visitng; should be paying attention to campaign tracking to learn mktg ROI; leadflow -- map out mktg to sales flow -- often very broken (what are the rules did all the leads go from mktg to sales); feebback loop -- does sales feel like your leads are qualifited properly? marketing/qualification/sales rep -- need to undestand full waterfall, not just the final pipeline (a lot falls to qualification team); lead scoring critical to make your sales team efficient; nurturing programs work in partnership with sales -- imprortant to automate that; plus follow up x months out to make sure they're happy with the other vendor they chose; for startups, what can I do -- relevant content and test small bits and see what works; webinar with larger partner who can help draw people in; targeted email marketing; can you get people referring you; can you trade tech to someone for something they give you? Can you automate? Can you get your website working for you? Track your numbers, know what's working and be transparent; normal 3 emails and 3 phone calls -- but if truly high scoring lead, call them 10x;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-048-vidyards-michael-litt-on-building-an-internal-sales-organisation-how-to-assess-value-based-pricing

SaaStr 048: Vidyard's Michael Litt on Building An Internal Sales Organisation & How To Assess Value Based Pricing

Michael Litt is the Founder & CEO @ Vidyard the video intelligence platform that allows you to create, measure and strengthen engagement of your video content. Vidyard are based in Canada and have raised over $60m in VC funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, Bessemer, SoftTech, Salesforce Ventures, some incredible names there and the list goes on but I would like to say a  huge thanks to Matt Garrett @ Salesforce Ventures for making the intro. In Today's Show with Michael We Discuss   How did Michael come to found Vidyard, as Paul Graham described, ‘The Google For Business’? How does Michael assess value based pricing and how has his views transition with the growth of Vidyard? What does Vidyard’s internal sales organisation look like? How does Michael look to optimise this structure? How does Michael view the utility of the freemium model? What are the inherent advantages and disadvantages that need to be considered? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Productivity tips and tricks? Cool hobbies, what are they? Fave SaaS material? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Michael Litt

saastr, tomaz tunguz, Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff

Out of university; determined that there was an opportunity in video; if $50K in 4 months, we'd stick it out (project xmas); video embeddable player + hosted; value-based pricing from learning from customers; stopped the video production business, built analytics platform (saas) on top of this; validate the market by calling around and determine the pricing (150 calls per day); pricing model is always in flux; if we lose was it tech, was it budget, if budget, could we offer something else, etc; early on, useful to have a lot of people using your software to get feedback; freemium -- difficult to do, no revenue, lots of support; free trial is great though, to offer value, but too soon and they can be a big distraction; VCs rely on founders, if you can make money you can talk with people with money anyone in the world; switch mindset from fundraising to building a company

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-049-its-all-about-facilitating-adoption-short-time-to-value-with-ryan-fyfe-founder-ceo-humanity

SaaStr 049: It's All About Facilitating Adoption & Short Time To Value with Ryan Fyfe, Founder & CEO @ Humanity

Ryan Fyfe is the Founder & CEO @ Humanity, the employee scheduling software that allows you to value your employees. Ryan has built Humanity to serve more than half a million users across 87 countries, with a team exceeding 100 people and continually growing across 3 continents. They have raised funding from our friends at Point Nine and a huge thank you to Christoph @ Point Nine for making the introduction today. In Today’s Episode with Ryan We Discuss:   How did Ryan come to be founder and CEO at Humainty? How does Ryan and Humanity use data to affect the marketing decisions they make with regards to customer acquisition? How does Ryan look to integrate customer success into the pre-purchase period to facilitate adoption? How does Ryan view free trials with Humanity? How do they A/B test free trials to optimise for conversion? How can startups ensure efficient time to value in a trial period and what is the role of customer success in this? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Ryan Fyfe

During early work life saw problem of problems with managing employees + saas model; most important thing for marketing is a great product; analytics are critical to optimize to the right things: content marketing is a long term investment; many customers still work with paper or excel and don't realize they'd want a saas product, so content can help bring these to the top of the funnel; ROI on content is tricky to measure effectiveness -- more about quality than quantity; time to value is incredibly important (first 5 minutes that they make the decision); free trial v. pay: high volume and goal is to drive engagement during the trial (after lots of tests, keep landing back on 30 day trials) - during trial need to show them as much value as possible; ensure when you are testing for things you change everything to make sure you get good data (e.g., marketing automation); productivity is mostly about prioritzation; geographical dispersed team, need to be intentional;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-050-why-all-founders-should-do-sales-until-1m-arr-when-is-the-right-team-to-hire-your-vp-of-sales-how-to-approach-the-hiring-process-with-matthew-bellows-founder-yesware

SaaStr 050: Why All Founders Should Do Sales Until $1m ARR, When Is The Right Team To Hire Your VP of Sales & How To Approach The Hiring Process with Matthew Bellows, Founder @ Yesware

Matthew Bellows is the Founder @ Yesware and a specialist in helping sales people close more deals faster. Yesware serves more than 750,000 salespeople at companies like IBM, Groupon, Salesforce, Twilio, Yelp, VMWare, and Zendesk. Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the VP of Sales at Vivox. Before that, he was GM at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga) and Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks). In Today’s Episode with Matthew We Discuss: How Matthew came to be Founder and CEO @ Yesware? What was the a-ha moment for him? Whether sales is an art or a science and what makes Matthew feel this way? Why all founders should do sales until $1m ARR? What were Matt’s personal learnings from scaling the sales team with Yesware? Why a CEO cannot also be a VP of Sales? When is the right time to hire an exec to run the sales team and begin sales specialisation? How Matthew approaches the hiring process? What is the best way to receive high quality candidates? What does his interview process look like? With the array of data on sales activity how can managers balance management with micro-management? What are the inherent problems? 60 Second SaaStr: If Matthew could do the process again, what would he redo? How does Matthew deal with rejection in business and sales? Strategies to optimise email open rates? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Matthew Bellows

Yesware inspired by time of being a salesperson and lack of data; sales is art (relationships) and science (analytics); $1MM in sales before you hire a salesperson; as a founder you have an inherent advantage + need a repeatable process; what is ACV, then based on that you know what sales people you can afford; ACV $50K or more before you have any outside people, need $5K or more before you have any inside sales people; tremendous amount of uncertainy around the sales effort (even in large companies, they are constantly reinventing/reevaluating/testing); sales manager balance enthusiasm + challenge; hiring -- most effective is referrals from our sales team; cold email - 10 minues of research before you send it; wish I was more focused on personas early on; look for sense of humor in startup sales; data/activity management -- person beating quota not doing activity metrics - OK, new person, have to activity metrics, person not doing quota has to do activity metrics -- starting point, not the goal; common correlation between activity and sales

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-051-hire-slow-fire-fast-why-scaling-product-is-all-about-consistency-with-kristin-koh-goldstein-hireathena

SaaStr 051: Hire Slow & Fire Fast & Why scaling Product Is All About Consistency with Kristen Koh Goldstein @ HireAthena

Kristen Koh Goldstein is the Co-Founder @ HireAthena, the on demand workforce specialising in accounting, HR and payroll. Prior to Hire Athena, Kristen was the Co-Founder @ Scalus, where she raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top VCs including Google Ventures and Sherpa Capital. Before that Kristen was the Co-Founder @ BackOps, the world’s fastest growing back office solution. If you enjoy the show with Kristen today and would like to join Jason and I @ SaaStr Annual 2017 next year, then all you have to do is checkout SaaStr and buy your tickets for SaaStr Annual 2017. In Today’s Episode Kristin Discusses: Why it is that the faster you hire, the longer it takes to build your business? How to make the transition from a family to a village with your team? Why it is imperative to hire slowly and fire fast? How to communicate new hires to the existing team to ease onboarding friction? Why hiring outside of your circle is full of risks? What you can do to mitigate those risks? What happens when you wake up one day and realise you are the problem in your own business? What really is scaling with regards to the product? How important is product consistency in the scaling process? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Kristen Koh Goldstein

Kristen Koh Goldstein

Saastr annual 2016; hireathena - outsourced backoffice; once you raise a big VC round, you get a huge increase of complexity -- from build a product to building a company; the faster you try to hire, the more chaos there is (at some point, you can't scale quiickly enough); 80% of the time recruiting post-big-raise; hire slowly, fire quickly; firing fast is realily hard from a people perspective and will crush your soul, but something you need to accept; hiring slow: mythical man month, you believe the faster you get through you can get back to your biz, then fire slow and its a vicious cycle; same time you start hiring out your circle and higher risk - go from family to village dealing with cross-functional disputes; product people - pure truth, sales folks -- aspirational truth -- this needs to be communicated to the engineers that this new wave is coming to prevent distrust between two sides of the house; you wake up and realize you're actually the biggest problem at you company -- what makes you good early, can hurt you as you grow the org; need to systemcatically and consistent give feedback to team and probably get hierarchy (politics) -- a goldilocks syndrome; how (engineer) what (product) why (business person) -- need to communicate to handle this tension/chaos; instill sense of trust and communiate best practices; early stage - quality of product - scale - about making product/delivery consistent (to create repeatable success); have to become a metrics-driven org with hard data or you become a political org; the specialists, the "processesizers" are glass-half empty folks that doesn't mix well with early folks; product/people/process -- process is execution; fire fast hostage (what happens if we lose them) but have to do it; bootstrap as long as you possibly can;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-052-building-scaling-boxs-customer-success-team-with-jon-herstein-svp-customer-success-box

SaaStr 052: Building & Scaling Box's Customer Success Team with Jon Herstein, SVP Customer Success @ Box

Jon Herstein is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Box where Jon works to ensure that all of Box's Enterprise and Business customers are phenomenally successful. Jon has worked with some of the biggest names in the tech world, including Accenture, Informatica and most recently NetSuite, where he served as VP of Professional Services for North America and EMEA. Before NetSuite, Jon led the turnaround of Informatica's European consulting practice during a multi-year expatriate assignment, which eventually led to a 65% jump in revenue. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Jon made his way into the newly created category of customer success? How does Box define customer success and how does that impact their view and approach to the SaaS industry? Box has gone through the definition of private hypergrowth and is now in the next phase as a public company - how has that affected the CSM strategy? Box now have some very large accounts, how do you distinguish between the role of sales vs CS in large accounts? How do they partner to drive expansion? Jon is renowned for prioritizing career paths for his team, how does he accomplish this and balance this with wider operational and strategic goals of box? 60 Second SaaStr: What's the most common question Jon hears from CSM leaders? What's one innovative idea Jon has tested that might be shared with the audience, vis-a-vis Customer Success? What do you know now that you wish you had know when you started? The biggest mistake current saas companies are enacting with their CS process? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Jon Herstein

Started in consulting, then informatica then netsuite -- all consulting; early mantra was "customer delight" but insufficient -- really about customer value (ROI) but -- also a delightful experience; on-premise onus of value was on the customer -- but with saas onus of value is on the vendor; retention is driven by value (regardless of delight); upsell is more than delight -- bringing additional value; csm job is to give value to customer -- but hand over upsell to the sales team; csm, suppport, consulting all under CSM unbrella; implementation/education/support -- but best for customer to not have to figure that out, should be one stop help; when should specialization occur? will depend; notice things like csm inflection points that people are doing the same thing and need to figure out a way to repeatable/scalable; also people are good at different things (training v. support, etc.); customer success jobs are hard -- middleman between the product and customer (something may not be achievable to customer and you can't fix yourself); tough place for people to be for a long period of time; need to give people options for internal mobility (not just CSM path); helpful to have a product background, but not necessary; great CSM person? - always need to be thinking about what is best for customer first, company second; biggest mistake -- thinking that CSM is only an extension of sales -- customer shoudl be thinking you have their best interest in mind (trust); mitigate risk - bad news early is good news; biggest question he gets -- how do you structure the team (particuarly renewals team); big questoin - how do you do customer success at scale, particuarly where you have a broad range of users ($1MM deal v $1K deal)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-053-assessing-product-market-fit-why-customer-segmentation-is-crucial-the-rise-of-the-full-stack-ceo-with-greg-sands-founding-partner-costanoa-venture-capital

SaaStr 053: Assessing Product Market Fit, Why Customer Segmentation Is Crucial & The Rise Of The Full Stack CEO with Greg Sands, Founding Partner @ Costanoa Venture Capital

Greg Sands is the Founder and Managing Partner of Costanoa Venture Capital. Prior to founding Costanoa Venture Capital, Greg was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill, where he was an early investor in the likes of Feedburner, AllBusiness, and Return Path just to name a few. Before Sutter Hill, Greg was the first hire at Netscape after its founding engineering team. As Netscape’s 1st Product Manager, Greg wrote the initial business plan, coined the name Netscape, and created the SuiteSpot Business Unit, which he grew from zero to $150m in revenue. He also served as Manager of Business Development at Cisco where he architected a global channel management plan.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Greg made his way into the world of VC from Netscape? Why did Greg see the opportunity for an early stage B2B fund like Costanoa? Why did this fund not exist in B2B but was becoming popularised in B2C? To what extent does Greg agree SaaS investing is ‘traction capital’? When investing pre metrics, what are the signs of promise Greg looks for? How does Greg assess product market fit? Why is customer segmentation and customer archetypes so important? What does Greg make of the ‘full stack CEO’? Is it better to be specialised or jack of all trades? When is the right time to specialise? 60 Second SaaStr Greenfield opportunity in SaaS? Biggest advice to startup founders in SaaS? Easier or harder to raise money now than before? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Greg Sands

Like product stuff -- steve blank, eric ries, marty kagan, john cutler,

Came to VC from product manager at netscape; move to microvc focused more on B2C, less so in B2B; metrics/traction capital - may be applicable to later stage investors, not metrics may not even be there in the early days (not paint by numbers); product-oriented founders get some intital traction -- but who to hire next, which brick to place first -- sales rep or mktg? How horizontal v. vertical to operate? signal in 3-4 industries, but you're telling me to be focused... which to pick? critical discipline for early stage investors; customer success -- generally should be an early hire; regardless, you need people who can think not just execute -- their critical role is to feed back to product development, what other problems can you solve; the founders are first sale rep and need to invent the process where mere mortals can sell; usually those early people are younger, scrappier and willing to do experiments; what is product market fit? how big is the problem, is it worth solving, how much value is lost/can be created; what are the top 3 things it is doing/not doing; early stage product-market fit is qualitative, but product market fit is about repeatibiltiiy; biggest advice/what do you repeat often to founders: who did you build the product for?; the product-oriented founder needs to become full-stack to be a CEO; greenfield opportunities: machine learning for X;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-054-why-you-should-hire-a-product-leader-from-day-1-how-to-navigate-12-18-month-sales-cycles-with-only-18-months-runway

SaaStr 054: Why You Should Hire A Product Leader From Day 1 & How To Navigate 12-18 Month Sales Cycles With Only 18 Months Runway

Chad Arimura is the Founder & CEO @ Iron.io, where he drives the team to build the world's best cloud infrastructure services. Now they do have some pretty sizeable clients including the likes of Google, Zenefits, Twitter, Whole Foods and they have the backing from the likes of Steve Anderson’s Baseline Ventures, Bain Capital, Matt Ocko from Data Collective and our friends at Sapphire Ventures just to name a few and Prior to co-founding Iron.io, Chad was CIO and founder of AllDorm Inc., a collegiate media and marketing company that provided fundraisers and viral marketing campaigns for clients such as Volkswagen, Domino's Pizza, and Visa. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Chad came to found Iron.io ? With a complex product like Iron, how much of a role does education play in the onboarding process for prospective new clients? To what extent does content marketing play the dominant marketing function for Iron both in terms of educating customers and converting potential customers? How does Chad view the balance of much larger ACV clients with long sales cycles compared to SME’s with smaller ticket sizes and shorter sales cycles? What are the challenges when selling to large corporates and CIO’s in the traditional corporates? 60 Second SaaStr What does Chad know now that he wish he had known at the beginning? What is Chad’s favourite reading material? How does Chad deal with stress as a Founder & CEO? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Chad Arimura

Small person dev shop and collect transform/store in the cloud; "the future is serverless" category creattion aspect, ship a bit of code to cloud and deploy it; early customer - any dev -- serverless environment so they don't have to think about it; content creation -- lots about the tech they use doing cool things; education in onboarding; choosing a product these days is very different than 10 years ago; now bottom up; content provdes best ROI, but gotta continually plow through it; focus on inbound, but also a channel partner for private cloud deployment; challenge for small company -- harder to pitch the CIO with lack of track record; early on ACV was $20 now at $100K ACV; 6-10K range for credit card purposes at high end; above 6 month sales cycle bigger ones 12+ months; advice: hire prduct leader early, build DNA/culture from day 0 (need to architect that, doesn't happen by osmosis); culture - getting people together regularly and understanding the values and celebrate those value successes; fundraising effort is exhausting but critical to develop a market perspective from a wide variety of backgrounds/experience

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-055-new-relics-jim-stoneham-on-why-your-core-exec-team-should-be-senior-experienced-individuals-when-is-the-right-time-to-bring-on-younger-less-experienced-candidates

SaaStr 055: New Relic's Jim Stoneham on Why Your Core Exec Team Should Be Senior Experienced Individuals & When Is The Right Time To Bring On Younger Less Experienced Candidates

Jim Stoneham is VP of Infrastructure Products @ New Relic and Jim joined New Relic when the company acquired Opsmatic, where he was co-founder and CEO. Prior to Opsmatic, Jim was CEO of Payvment, a social commerce platform for SMB sellers that was acquired by Intuit in early 2013. He joined Payvment from Yahoo, where he led Communities (Flickr, Answers, Groups, Delicious) as well as the integrations of Facebook and Twitter into Yahoo products. Prior to that, he spent several years building consumer products at Kodak and Apple. A huge thanks to Cindy Padnos @ Illuminate for making the introduction, without which this interview could not have happened. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Jim came to found Opsmatic and why he decided to sell to New Relic over other acquirers? Why does Jim have a preference toward hiring senior experienced individuals over young talent to the founding team? At what stage should startups look to bring on fresh, inexperienced candidates who are passionate for the job but in need of mentoring and guidance? Question From Cindy Padnos: John is a master of employee onboarding, so how does John look to onboard new employees in the most effective and fast manner? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Jim Stoneham

saastr; tomaz tunguz; Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff

Met new relic in 2013, via Opsmatic aquisition; early days of Opsmatic always shp code and always work driectly with customers; critical to velocity of early days; like more sr hires with experience, but need to get folks who can do roll up sleeves kind of work; early on hiring -- asked to sell pitch back to us to determine passion for mission; one of most important thing a ceo can do -- sit down with new hires to mentor and help people understand the mission during onboarding; built early for remote/time-shift - slack, not secret meetings; wiki; github collabtorartion; gave flexibility to hire remote folks; early team with trust/non-verbal communication critical; one bit of culture - make breakfast every friday morning; decorating tip - white umbrellas to diffuse harsh light; getting customer feebback is crack for engineers; if you can't measure it, don't ship it; short-term focus isn't hard during iteration -- but checking in 90 day plan with the short term work to keep things on track

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-056-what-saas-ceos-are-doing-wrong-with-their-marketing-what-questions-they-should-be-asking-why-b2c-marketers-make-the-best-b2b-hires-with-tim-kopp-general-partner-hyde-park-venture-partners

SaaStr 056: What SaaS CEO's Are Doing Wrong With Their Marketing, What Questions They Should Be Asking & Why B2C Marketers Make The Best B2B Hires with Tim Kopp, General Partner @ Hyde Park Venture Partners

Tim Kopp, Tim is a Managing Partner with Hyde Park Venture Partners one of the leading early stage VCs in the Midwest. Prior to joining Hyde Park Venture Partners, Tim was the CMO of ExactTarget for 6+ years, leading a global team of nearly 300 amazing marketing leaders. Tim helped grow ExactTarget from $47M to $400M in revenue, through IPO, and ultimately to a $2.7B sale to Salesforce. He previously spent 10+ years in consumer marketing with P&G and Coca-Cola. You can follow his advice for startup executives and marketing leaders at his newly launched website:www.cmovc.com. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Tim made his way into the world of B2B marketing and then made the transition into the world of venture? Why does Tim believe marketing in B2B is unbuilt and uninspired? What would Tim like to see change? What are SaaS CEO’s doing wrong with regards to organisation and scaling of their marketing team? What questions should they be asking? Why does the best B2B marketers come from the world of B2C? What makes them more effective than current B2B marketers? Why is ABM the most revolutionary thing to happen to marketing for the last decade? How can startups and CEOs integrate ABM into their current marketing forecasts? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Tim Kopp

how you measure success -- operations is a stopwatch v. VC is a sundial

CMO at exacttarget, started with lots of operation experience - P&G, Coke, then to ExactTarget and eventually acquired by Salesforce; just because you are doign B2B marketing, doesn't mean you should suck and be uninspired; why do you measure leads? because it's easy (meausre of activity, not outcome); marketing plays big role for sales function in SaaS; 50% of biz from marketing/demand gen, then how do we set the right set of activity to get there; sometimes its about improving conversion rates, rather than just driving a ton of leads; early stage - bifurcation right now, some comapnies have a great handshake between CEO/CMO, others don't; CEO that are product driven may not know the right things to ask; CMOs may be driven more toward the shiny objects rather than prioritizing - focus on what rather than how; for many SaaS leaders, marketing tends to be in their DNA; driving revenue then what are the handful things to meausre to succeed; sales and marketing go together like intertwined rope, sometimes hard to see that in the trenches; one thing you see over time, your messaging gets flat and loose and conversion goes down, so as you drive leads, it is wasteful process; freshening message -- you'll get tired of it before the market does -- consistency is critical, but these will be brought to life in different ways depending on context/market; many of the better marketers come from B2C given the marketing path X years ago; B2B marketing,when done well, looks like B2C; hiring athletes that can be train up; early founder mistake - hire a cmo; more important to higher a doer rather than a thinker; then, if thing work, you hire a specialist for that (content, events, etc); ABM has been happening for many years, however, it was a people driven process rather than a technology driven process -- flips marketing on its head -- about outcomes, rather than activity, quality, not quantity, aligning sales and marketing; open-ecosystems are fundamental; biggest takeaway from exact target - talent wins; second wave of SaaS (in general early innings); lots of broad horizontal solutions, what we'll see goign forwrd is saas as a specialty (e.g. health care) and more horizontal solutions (fragmentation)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-057-building-scaling-your-core-execs-from-vps-of-sales-to-csms-with-louis-jonckheere-co-founder-co-ceo-showpad

SaaStr 057: Building & Scaling Your Core Execs from VPs of Sales to CSMs with Louis Jonckheere, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Showpad

Louis Jonckheere is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Showpad, the company that enables sales teams by making content, findable, presentable and trackable. They have raised from some incredible investors including Dawn Capital, Hummingbird Ventures and Insight Venture Partners who more recently led their Series C $50m fundraise earlier this year. As for Louis, Showpad is his second company. He and his co-founder, Pieterjan, founded the mobile development agency, In The Pocket in 2010, where Louis still serves on the board. Prior to In The Pocket, Louis was a Strategic Partnership Manager at Netlog, where he first met Pieterjan. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Louis come to found Showpad? What was the a-ha moment for him? How did Louis look to build out the core executive team? What have been the big lessons learnt? What have been the big mistakes and how has Louis changed his approach since? How did Louis look to scale the customer success team? At what stage did Louis hire his first CSM? Is $2m ARR the right benchmark? Do customer success teams need to be product specialists? How has Louis looked to build a scalable and repeatable sales process with Showpad? At what point did Louis decide to hire sales reps for the first time? What benchmark was this? Did Louis hire the first 2 reps at the same time? 60 Second SaaStr Louis’ Fave SaaS resource? Louis’s biggest advice to SaaS founders? What does Louis know today that he wishes he had known at the start? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Louis Jonckheere

started with app called in the pocket for mobile sales; showpad was the website for it; pricing for a nascent market - googled around, lots of trial and error (way too cheap,but that's how you get started); as a founder you're an exceptional sales person, so you should push price higher; core of three people built out product, then engineers then sales; after funding, built leadership teams in two continents; the best people are never looking for a job; almost all sales folks were from networks; in general, hire for experience, but there are exceptions; customer success team dept is getting as big as engineering; dedicated account mgr with$5K ARR and max out CSM folks at 50 accounts; CSM need to be voice of the customer, not about the contract/upsell; but make sure there is a big difference between CSM and Sales; CSM also needs to be a product expert... cant' sell product unless you know it; hired first CSM at $1.5M ARR; learned -- hire 2-3 people at the same time for marketing and sales (a human A/B test) and secondly to raise more money early; biggest advice - hire 2 sales folks as quickly as possible; early days need some repeatable process, but about the art of selling (objections, aha moment for buyer); as you scale, you need to deal with process and science of sales; bigger you become the more segment experts you have; in addition to sales reps, you need people to support them (engineers, account managers, etc);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-058-intercoms-eoghan-mccabe-on-why-there-are-no-rules-for-building-a-saas-company-how-to-turn-every-challenge-into-an-opportunity-why-you-will-never-have-as-much-empathy-for-others-as-you-do-for-yourself

SaaStr 058: Intercom's Eoghan McCabe on Why There Are No Rules For Building a SaaS Company, How To Turn Every Challenge Into An Opportunity & Why You Will Never Have As Much Empathy For Others As You Do For Yourself

Eoghan McCabe is CEO and co-founder of Intercom. The customer communications platform that has taken the saas world by storm in the last few years with 116m in VC funding from truly some of the world’s best including Bessemer, Social Capital and Index Ventures. He previously founded Contrast, an award-winning software design consultancy, and co-founded Exceptional, a developer tool startup acquired in 2011 and now a part of Rackspace. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Intercom break out in the early days with seemingly lots of competition and an install before you buy process? In terms of category creation, in the early days how did Eoghan convince people of a product that had previously never existed? At what stage did Eoghan and Des stop selling the product themselves? When is the right time to hire your VP of Sales? How did Eoghan establish a pricing mechanism for Intercom? Why is Eoghan such an advocate for value based pricing? Why it is so important for founders and sales teams to have empathy for the customer? How can you practice empathy? How can you cheat empathy? How does Eoghan manage a distributed workforce so well? What does he do to create links and culture between both the Dublin and SF office? 60 Second SaaStr Biggest advice to SaaS founders? Fave SaaS reading material? Most proud moment of Intercom’s journey? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Eoghan McCabe

Communication (Customer Success)

Early days of intercome with install before you buy -- naivity to create a category, hard to do; let's do cool things.. until it become successful; but no real way to describe this blob of a product; intuition and lucky; had to do the hard sell and needed an implementation/integration; before intercom, you'd use half a dozen apps, but they needed to use and see and feel intercom to get it; needed to convince people to try it and relied on word of mouth; no rules on when to get a sales team; later on once we had big accounts contact that needed TLC, made the jump to sales folks (still lots of inbound); value based pricing - how to maximize; most saas companies just copy pricing of other saas companies; had 9 different pricing models at this point; starts cheap and more expensive as you grow; how much value is this person getting from this product; important to have empathy for customers/prospects - some percentage will miinterpet (but still your fault); you either can cheat -- if you solve your own problems or talk to folks; critical, but just a lot harder; biggest advice to startups - care on stuff you care about and understand; war for talent - avoided it by having two offices;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-059-how-to-measure-sales-team-success-test-new-pricing-build-culture-from-day-1-the-biggest-learnings-from-watching-box-scale-into-hypergrowth-with-michael-cardamone-managing-director-acceleprise

SaaStr 059: How To Measure Sales Team Success, Test New Pricing, Build Culture From Day 1 & The Biggest Learnings From Watching Box Scale Into Hypergrowth with Michael Cardamone, Managing Director @ Acceleprise

Michael Cardamone is the Managing Director of Acceleprise, a SaaS focused accelerator based in San Francisco and backed by leading operators. He is also an advisor to and angel investor in early stage SaaS companies. Prior to Acceleprise, Michael was one of the first 30 employees at Box in a business development role and then led partnerships at an EdTech company called AcademixDirect.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Michael make his way into the world of SaaS and then start Acceleprise in SF? How can founders know when is the right time to ship product? Does Michael agree with Reid Hoffman, ‘if you are not embarrassed by your V1, it is too late’? How should startups look to establish a pricing mechanism at such an early stage? What are Mike’s thoughts on freemium? Before Mike has said founders can charge more than they think. Why does he think this and how can founders know when they have reached their price ceiling? Do founders need to sell their own product? How should founders approach the sales learning process? What questions should they be asking How important is it for a startup to have an ideal customer profile? Should founders be looking for influential customers early or just getting as many dollars in as possible? How impactful can big brands and companies be as customers to early stage companies? 60 Second SaaStr Scrappiness: good or not as it just simply isn’t scalable? Most common challenge for Mike’s companies? Fave SaaS reading material? Entrepreneur optimism: Let it run or be wary? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Michael Cardamone  

saastr; tomaz tunguz; The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, From Impossible To Inevitable by Ross/Lemkin

Came from NY to get into tech and ended up at Box at 30 people; started looking accelerator focused on enterprise saas; $50k for 5%; takeaways from box 1 - experience of building culture and starts from the CEO and 2 - punch above your weight - went after big gorilla of sharepoint instead of other file sharing; when to ship - get stuff out quickly and get feedback (particular if they're willing to pay); pricing is tricky in early stages, if SMB, getting some version out for free could work to figure out pricing triggers; if mid-market, then at least start conversation with you charging them; 10 unaffiliated customer paying for it; freemium/trial periods - differs between segment, SMB is appropriate; trials are OK as long as it is clear what the goals are; do annual contract with out clause after 30 days; founders are often timid to charge more and start testing pushing limits with stuff in pipeline to see how high you can go; scaling pricing model - sales rep should book 4x ARR per year - is that reasonable based on price point and abilty to close, if not, need to work those levers; great way to figure out if pricing will scale; $15k-$20k ACV needed for sales team; founders have to sell themselves and need to close at least a few hundred thousand on their own before bringing someone on; who is ideal customer profile -- several assumptions and test -- then figure out what motivates the buyer (the actual person); take time to get really good at sales; in beginning a sale is a sale, but you need to make customers successful -- find influences within those profiles will be more impactful; scrappiness is critical in beginning, then build proceses; hardest thing -- get first 10-20 customers; really important to measure all aspects of sales funnel; in the start hard to do, but gets you into a data driven cycle;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-060-how-to-use-sdr-as-a-growth-engine-a-customer-success-as-a-bridge-for-gaps-in-product-with-lawrence-coburn-founder-ceo-doubledutch

SaaStr 060: How To Use SDR As A Growth Engine a & Customer Success As A Bridge For Gaps In Product with Lawrence Coburn, Founder & CEO @ DoubleDutch

Lawrence Coburn is the Founder & CEO @ DoubleDutch, the category leader for event marketing automation. If you are at SaaStr and have the pleasure of using the SaaStr app, yep that is DoubleDutch! They have raised more than $75m in VC funding from some of the best VCs in the world including Index Ventures, Bessemer, Floodgate and Bullpen. As for Lawrence he is a three time entrepreneur, Lawrence also founded RateItAll, a top ten consumer review property, and LocationMeme, a blog about location based services. Lawrence is also the geo-location editor for The Next Web, is a mentor at IO Ventures, a San Francisco based incubator, and on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Lawrence made his way into SaaS and then came to found DoubleDutch, the category leader for mobile social events? How does Lawrence look to use SDR as a growth engine and does he think it is important to invest in this early to build the machine? How has Lawrence found the transition in terms of moving upmarket from SMB to Enterprise? How does Lawrence look to differentiate himself in such a crowded market? How has Lawrence seen the evolution of the team? Does he agree there are different people for different phases of the growth cycle? How does Lawrence look to use customer success as a bridge to cover gaps in product? 60 Second SaaStr Fave SaaS resource? What does Lawrence know now that he wish he had known at the beginning? What is the biggest challenge Lawrence faces to this day? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Lawrence Coburn

saastr; laws of the cloud bessimer; david skok; tomaz tunugz,

Double Dutch premise - something where mobile would be critical for enteperise; ultimately focused on mobile for live meetings/conferences/events; for founders -- really matters to have focus early and grow from there; hired 6 SDRs and making 70 calls a day a bit of a leap of faith; culture has an organic aspect that is hard to define; early days hiring for culture, horsepower, athletes, with a promise to teach you everything; later needed specialists; recent push to move upmarket; investors not only want growth, but now prioritiing economics of growth; hard to run a SaaS biz with customers of $10K ACV; coined "live engagement marketing" (live app at events); shirt from sem to abm; never thought of DD as a saas compay; but events tend to be recurring things (and companies will throw 1000s of events per year); metrics is really critical, lest you take sales that aren't beneficial long term to the business,

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-061-the-optimal-relationship-between-customer-success-sales-why-cs-is-not-a-playbook-function-why-the-best-csms-are-like-good-parents-with-john-gleeson-vp-customer-success-affinio

SaaStr 061: The Optimal Relationship Between Customer Success & Sales, Why CS Is Not A Playbook Function & Why The Best CSMs Are Like Good Parents with John Gleeson, VP Customer Success @ Affinio

John Gleeson is VP of Customer Success @ Affinio where John was employee #1. 2 years and a half years later, John is the VP of Customer Success following their Series A and has seen the team expand to over 40 people and have offices in New York, Toronto, Halifax and Ireland. John has written a special blog post just for SaaStr listeners today outlining his ultimate guide to customer success reading, it is my go to guide for customer success. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did John make his way into the world of SaaS and more specifically customer success? John has previously described customer success as ‘The Analogue of Sales’, what does he mean by this? How does it affect the way he views customer success How does John view the role of sales vs customer success in large accounts? How do they partner to drive expansion? How customer success managers be truly productive at the enterprise level? How can they measure their success with this productivity increase? Moving downstream, why does John believe the $2m benchmark per CSM is the hardest phase? What skills do you need to be successful at this stage? With so many accounts, is it possible to be proactive? 60 Second SaaStr The biggest mistake most companies make when it comes to customer success? Most common questions asked by CSM leaders? Measuring customer success? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr John Gleeson

First hire at Affinio: fining product market fit (8 months) where CS is critical; once felt like had PMF, selling phase to get logos on board and deliver the promised value; then post-series A and hired a proper VP Sales and then a transition full time into customer success; not a "playbook function" -- people are still figuring out the standard playbook for CS; definition - analog of sales: the annuiity is really important in saas; admire the sales pipeline, CS has a simlar framework and increaes the importance of CS is the org; partnership b/t sales and CS is about value - when sale closed, then #1 reponsiblity for CS is delivering value; no selling in CS, want to become a peer, a trusted advisor; AE deals with renewals, so church/state separation, but still work together; tech is helpful here to give tools to csm to be more proactive than they could do manually; csm - need to be very relational but very process oriented (and help build it); CS is more on the art side, but will move more toward science, similar to shift we have seen in sales; CS metrics -- renewal rate and growth/expansion are critical, others are important, but those are the two leading indicators; moving from jack of all trades to speciialization -- get in lock step with VP sales; secondly dialing in time to value; also get out of the building and talk to others (still an evolving area); to be good at CS, act like a good parent (not just "delight our customers"); big question -- where do you get them? If you build good processes, you mght be able to skip customer succes experience, and just focus on domain expertise + customer centric; seed to series A -- figure out if you can get something scalable. From A to B, get your processes down to make them scalable; post-B, perfect the sytem and capture annuity with extrememly high renewals

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-062-why-unprofitable-customers-must-be-fired-segmentation-in-sales-breeds-laziness-the-future-of-sales-in-an-ai-driven-world-with-john-barrows-godfather-of-sales

SaaStr 062: Why Unprofitable Customers Must Be Fired, Segmentation in Sales Breeds Laziness & The Future of Sales in an AI Driven World with John Barrows, Godfather of Sales

John Barrows is essentially the Godfather of Sales. We often have VPs of Sales from tech titans on the show but who trains those VPs and sales reps to be the best in the world at sales? That is where John Barrows comes in, with clients including Dropbox, Box, Marketo, Twilio and many more, John has amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience allowing him to provide the most proactive sales tips and strategies to optimise the sales process. If you have not checked out his blog, that really is a must and can be found here. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did John make his way into the world of SaaS and more specifically sales optimisation? How has John seen the sales landscape evolve? What has been the effect of the segmentation of roles pioneered by Salesforce? What will be the catalyst that causes teams to shift from current sales methods and teams to AI replacing the sales team? What does this depend on? How does John view the integration of sales and marketing? How does the rise of ABM change this? How can sales reps perfect the balance of being direct and being rude? How important is a summary email? What is the optimal structure and how should sales reps follow up on summary emails? 60 Second SaaStr The most common question asked to John by VPs of Sales? What are the benefits of Top Down prospecting? Do execs need structure? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr John Barrows

Go-to man for saas sales consulting; lots of corporate experience, ultimately moved to traiing of saas sales functions; Salesforce pioneered segmentation of roles, which was great for scale, but bred laziness, marketing automation, etc has taken over a lot of the old things that sales used to do; so avg sales reps are a dying breed due to technology; uber is taking out taxis, some AI could take out sales -- so how to reinvent; CS educate, educate then take an order; areas that sales make a diference is that customer don't always know what they need (outbound) -- have you heard about/thought about *this*? Where ABM comes into play; not like ABM is new just because they have an acronym; so much more marketing noise out there -- so ABM is really important to be targeted to slice through noise; currently 1 SDR to multiple AEs, but now a marketing rep should be added to the pod to help crack the market (for enterprise); customer profiles/segmentation -- focus is key to anything, at first, take any money from anybody (but will get some bad revenue) and wil ultimately need to fire bad customers; come up with actual profiles then test it and be data-driven to test hypothesis, then you can hone in to customers earlier; bad revenue -- bad for profit margins and resources; maybe a little more revenue, but they are a huge bother; top-down prospective (c-suite first) to find out who to talk to far more valuable than the bottom-up approach; how to get sales reps on the phone (particuarl millenials who haven't grown up with a phone); executives are like children, they need structure; millenials were given far more structured lves than a previous generation (figure it out yourself, "go play"); so the "figure it out" doesn't tend to work; but if you provide structure they'll do great; the summary email -- after any conversation with substance -- "thanks for your time, before I get to next steps, I'm gonna send out a quick email about what I learned from this conversation -- can you do me a favor and email me back to let me know if I missed anything"? (just a summary to confirm what I heard from you - active listening); meeting times -- can I have 10 minutes, etc (don't ask for meetings); product and services are pretty much comoditized now; the active professioanl interaction is a differentiator.

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-063-the-sales-script-that-increases-conversion-by-80-how-to-optimise-events-increasing-leads-demos-how-bootstrapped-startups-can-scale-teams-alongside-revenue-with-brandon-bruce-founder-coo-cirrus-insight

SaaStr 063: The Sales Script That Increases Conversion By 80%, How To Optimise Events Increasing Leads & Demos & How Bootstrapped Startups Can Scale Teams Alongside Revenue with Brandon Bruce, Founder & COO @ Cirrus Insight

Brandon Bruce is the Co-Founder and COO @ Cirrus Insight, the plugin for Gmail and Outlook that automatically updates Salesforce as you work. Cirrus is a bootstrapped startup with triple-digit yearly growth since it's founding 4 years ago and has grown from 2 co-founders in 2011 to a team of 55 people today. And I have to say a huge thanks to Aaron Ross, Author @ Predictable Revenue for the intro to Brandon today. Likewise, if you want to join me and Jason for mojitos at SaaStr Annual 2017 and also want an incredible 20% off ticket prices, then all you have to do is click here! In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Brandon make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Cirrus Insight? What does Brandon mean he says he likes to take the road less travelled in Sales? What have been his learnings from his interactions on the front line of sales? How has it changed how he approaches sales? How are Cirrus so efficient at events in terms of getting more leads, meeting and sales? What is the strategy going into events? How can we optimise this? Speaking of events in general there, how does Brandon look to define prospect and buyer personas? How important is this for events? How narrow and specific do these personas have to be? Brandon has stated before in the importance of learning and doing manual before automatic with the future in mind. What do he mean by this and how does it affect his roadmap and thought process to the future going forward? 60 Second SaaStr Favourite SaaS reading material? What does Brandon know now that he wish he had known at the beginning? The biggest challenge of running Cirrus and how Brandon looks to combat it? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Brandon Bruce

Couldn't find something that bridged salesforce and gmail; true market fit -- do we launch or do we launch in four months and get all the features -- but found that there was enough value at the time, so started charging (and got a few months lead in the market); worked the phones to start -- doesn't scale, but early on important to create relationships and get deep feedback; customer success to build brand advocates from early customers; very accesible for customers (give them the abilty to book a meeting whenever they want); no institutional backing, so scale the sales team based on revenue (bootstrapped); do a lot of events - get in front of the customers, swag - get stuff they can take home to their kids; leads - just the front of the funnel; personas for events -- swag grabbers, talkers, false decisions makers, stay 10 feet away, etc. - try to break through to the good leads; hardest things for startups -- focusing more on process to meaningful outcome; buffet -- what is key to success in biz? Emotional stability... relevant to startups;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-064-why-now-is-a-really-good-time-for-saas-startups-to-raise-how-saas-startups-can-innovate-their-business-models-the-biggest-takeaways-from-working-with-john-doerr-kleiner-perkins-with-matt-murphy-managing-director-menlo-ventures

SaaStr 064: Why Now Is A Really Good Time For SaaS Startups To Raise, How SaaS Startups Can Innovate Their Business Models & The Biggest Takeaways From Working With John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins with Matt Murphy, Managing Director @ Menlo Ventures

Matt Murphy is a Managing Director @ Menlo Ventures where he focuses on multi-stage investments across cloud infrastructure and AI-first SaaS applications. Since joining Menlo, Matt has led investments in Heap Analytics, Usermind, and Veriflow. Previously, Matt was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins for over 15 years.  Matt was also an observer at Google (from initial investment to IPO), launched the iFund in ’08 (a collaborative initiative with Apple to build the defining applications on the iOS platform), and led KPCB’s investments in AutoNavi (Nasdaq: AMAP, 2010) and Aerohive Networks (Nasdaq: HIVE, 2014). Before joining KPCB, Matt worked at semiconductor startup Netboost (acquired by Intel) and prior to that at Sun Microsystems. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Matt made his way into the world of VC and enterprise investing? What were his biggest takeaways from working alongside John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins? How is the enterprise investing landscape changing? What fundamental shifts have we seen and what have been the dominant repercussions of this? Nakul Mandan stated that ‘we would see the 2nd wave of consumerisation of enterprise through business model’. Does Matt agree with this and what key trends is Matt most excited about in SaaS? How does Matt look to evaluate early stage SaaS valuations? What are people fundamentally misvaluing and how should the topic be approached? Is it harder now for SaaS companies to raise than ever before? What metrics does Matt look for in a Series A investment opportunity?   60 Second SaaStr Matt's Fave SaaS reading material? What are the greenfield opportunities in SaaS today? What was Matt's biggest takeaway from working with John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Matt Murphy

Began with a startup, then intel, then to venture; originally with VC more ecommerce,etc; saas over the past four years or so since salesforce; recognize trends and go early and go big; saas has changed the enterprise sale -- departmental targets (rather than CIO) and quick time to value; anda shift from one application (peoplesoft) to a bunch of specific best of breed apps; a lot of biz models have been proven out in saas, really depends on the customer/industry/value; trend -- the stack: app layer, management layer, database layer, infrastructure layer. Infrastrucute layer is now dominated by AWS/Azure, etc. But, the other three layers -- database, management and application -- so look at it as three new clouds -- app cloud, api cloud and managment cloud - mgmt - appdymanics, new relic, datadog; api cloud - twilio, stripe, clarify, plaid (provide functionality across a wide range of applications); app cloud - best of breed broad set of applications for every vertical; -- all of this makes saas more exciting than before; valuation of early stage is the hardest; 4-20x arr depending on how how you are; how much have they already cracked the code v. looks good but work to do; biggest advice to founders -- system of records have already been filled; a big new idea or in existing category what more beyond just workflow can you do to automate/reinvent; VC is a long game and people really matter; good environment for SaaS for funding, but need to have something novel and differentiated (lots of companies), also move from horizontal apps to vertical apps; but also higher expectations around funding and traction, beyond seed; figure out the repeatable model, better the metrics the higher the valuation

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-065-how-to-create-an-ownership-culture-when-to-hire-your-first-customer-success-rep-and-why-the-funnel-needs-to-be-re-invented-with-sangram-vajre-founder-cmo-terminus

SaaStr 065: How To Create An Ownership Culture, When To Hire Your First Customer Success Rep and Why The Funnel Needs To Be Re-Invented with Sangram Vajre, Founder & CMO @ Terminus

Sangram Vajre is the Co-Founder & CMO at Terminus, the leading account-based marketing platform. Prior to Terminus, Sangram was the Head of Marketing @ Pardo, prior to it’s acquisition by Salesforce. Sangram is also the brains behind the marvel that is Flip My Funnel which challenges the status quo of traditional B2B marketing practices and transform how B2B marketers approached driving revenue in their organization. You might remember in a recent episode Tim Kopp @ Hyde Park Ventures cited Sangram and his revolutionary approach with Flip My Funnel as one to watch. If that was not enough, Sangram is also the author of "Account-Based Marketing For Dummies". In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Sangram came to found Flip My Funnel and Terminus? What was the a-ha moment and origin story for Sangram? Why does Sangram believe the funnel needs to be reinvented? Where are the inefficiencies? What can be done to optimise the funnel and what are the steps to do so? How did Sangram establish such a strong brand in the B2B space on a shoe-string budget in such a short space of time? What tactics can be done to exert your authority over a domain? How does Sangram look to create an ownership culture of internal entrepreneurs at Terminus? Why is it so important to try and hire people who know more than you? Why did Sangram decide to hire a customer success rep before any other function? What did he look for in his first CS person? What does Sangram thinks is fundamental to being successful at CS? 60 Second SaaStr Biggest learning from founding and scaling Terminus? Sangram’s Favourite SaaS reading material? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Sangram Vajre

Prior to Terminus, marketing at Pardot; joined terminus 6 months in and tried to productize the service; $0- $1M in first year; "Flip my funnel" - less than 1% leads turn to outcome traditionally - four stages new B2B marketing - identify right customer, expand within them, engage on their terms, turn them into advocates; this is great, but how do we do it? leads - traditionally measured on wrong thing -- infographic for game of thrones and crushed it, tons of leads, but all the leads were crap (interest was GoT, not interested in the biz that created it); sales/marketing should work together -- then outreach targeted based on engagement; ABM itslef is not new, the technology enabling sales/marketing is new -- sales can get far more targeted support from marketers; customer profiles - get as focused as possible, especially in early days; our culture - given them the keys to the ferrari - we expect them to be good, we will listen to them and then hand them the keys to drive it fast (with ownership/accountibility/autonomy); startups are hard and building a category is even harder; focusing on the problem matters way more than the product in the early stages;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-066-why-ceos-should-lead-from-the-heart-walk-the-sales-floor-pay-the-sales-team-well-why-sometimes-you-have-to-go-slow-to-go-fast-with-jeff-fernandez-founder-ceo-grovo

SaaStr 066: Why CEO's Should Lead From The Heart, Walk The Sales Floor, Pay The Sales Team Well & Why Sometimes, You Have To Go Slow To Go Fast with Jeff Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Grovo

Jeff Fernandez is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Grovo, the enterprise learning solution that allows you to educate and empower your employees. At Grovo, Jeff oversees sales, investor relations, and the building of Grovo’s award-winning culture. Prior to founding Grovo in 2010, Jeff served as product manager at Clickable (acquired by Syncapse). From 2006 until 2009, he led business development and sales for Doostang (acquired by Universum Global), an online career networking community. Jeff is also a bit of a rockstar off the field getting the highest honours from Harvard penning his thesis on human performance and then playing semi pro football for the New York Rebels in 2008. I would also like to say a massive thank you to Greg Sands @ Costanoa Venture Capital for the intro to Jeff today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Jeff came to found Grovo? What was the a-ha moment for him? Jeff is renowned to ‘lead from the heart’. What are the advantages of this as a CEO? How does this affect the company, the culture? What are the inherent challenges? Question from Greg Sands: Jeff likes to ‘work the sales floor’, how does that work? What does Jeff actually do? What have been Jeff’s observations having seen the sales floor up close? How does Jeff look to structure the compensation for his sales team? How does this vary with time and stage? What does Jeff mean when he says ‘sometimes you have to go slow to go fast’? How does that play out in his management style? 60 Second SaaStr Jeff’s biggest productivity tips? Biggest challenge for Jeff in being CEO @ Grovo? What does Jeff know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?   If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Jeff Fernandez

entrenpreneurial from early on - aha was "how do I connect google analytics to wordpress"; how to lead from the heart, but knowing when to be more reserved; very important in early days to compensate on commission that is extraordinally exciting (not necessarily the one later on, as things get more repeatable/easier); CEO is tip of the spear for sales - getting feedback & deliver value; early pricing wasn't scientific, but later pressuer test pricing mode fornew customers; feels right that a lot of saas companies don't charge enough in enthusiasm to get to product market fit; sometimes you have to go slow to go fast; future of employee learning is predictive (not on-demand);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-067-gustos-joshua-reeves-on-how-to-optimise-the-hiring-interview-process-how-to-build-create-an-ownership-culture-why-every-6-months-a-company-becomes-a-new-company

SaaStr 067: Gusto's Joshua Reeves on How To Optimise The Hiring & Interview Process, How To Build Create An Ownership Culture & Why Every 6 Months A Company Becomes A New Company

Josh Reeves is the Founder and CEO @ Gusto. Gusto reimagines payroll, benefits, HR, and personal finance and it is this reimagination that has led to their recent addition to the unicorn club with investors including Google Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Data Collective and General Catalyst, just to name a few. As for Josh, he was selected for the 2012 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Prior to co-founding Gusto, he was the CEO and co-founder of Unwrap, a SaaS startup which was acquired in 2010, and he began his career as an early employee at Zazzle. I would also like to give a big hand to Jason Lemkin and Phil Libin for the intro to Josh today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: HR and Payroll is not sexy so how did Josh make his way into the industry and what was the a-ha moment for Gusto? Josh has said before ‘he lives and breathes how a company is built.’ How has Josh looked to grow and develop his own internal organisation at Gusto? How does this vary with stage? Josh has hired over 300 people at Gusto, how does he approach the interview process? What is the right way for employers to approach the ‘making offers’ stage? How important does Josh feel it is to have an ownership culture and internal entrepreneurialism? How can this environment be fostered and developed? 60 Second SaaStr How employers can ensure new employees have an amazing first day? What does Josh know now that he wishes he had known when he started? The biggest mistake SaaS companies make with their HR and payroll organisation? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Josh Reeves

Knew a bunch of people with this issue in small business; grownt to 40,000 customers; 350 emplloyees; ask "what is the purpose of this hire" -- how will they impact. more work != better work; hiring buckets: values/motivation/skill set; hiring - few people on the call and make it a celebration; offer equity to everyone - make tthem an owner of the company and give this info to employees, since they too are owners and they can ask the "why" to make it better; fomo -- good to have when you're younger, but as you get older, focus on a few key things you see as valuable; biggest mistake with HR for startups -- important to know the comliance bits, but people/community is the core of HR; NPS important to track to make sure we're making our customer's life better;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-068-flexports-ryan-petersen-on-why-nps-is-the-most-important-metric-how-to-structure-internal-compensation-schemes-how-to-implement-bottoms-up-decision-making-organisation

SaaStr 068: Flexport's Ryan Petersen on Why NPS Is The Most Important Metric, How To Structure Internal Compensation Schemes & How To Implement @ Bottoms Up Decision Making Organisation

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarder for the internet age. Flexport recently raised a phenomenal $65m Series B from the likes of Founders Fund, First Round, Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, Yuri Milner, Susa Ventures and more incredible investors. With none other than YC founder Paul Graham stating ‘Ryan has the rare ability to not just satisfy the market but grow it’. Prior to Flexport, Ryan was Founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com, the largest provider of business intelligence to the import-export industry. A huge hand to Chad Byers @ Susa and Jason Lemkin for the intro In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Ryan make her way into the world of SaaS and come to found Flexport? How does Ryan view NPS? Why is he so bullish? Why is it the most important metric? What are the downsides to relying on NPS? What is the optimal method to structure internal compensation structures? Why is compensation based on NPS and Net not effective and what are the dangers of this? How can founders look to implement bottoms up decision making in their organisation? What are the benefits of this and what are the challenges to it’s implementation? Ryan is hiring his first VP of Marketing? What should founders look for in their VP of Marketing? Why is now the right time and what challenges has Ryan faced in the process? 60 Second SaaStr Fave SaaS reading material? What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he started? What has been his biggest learning throughout the Flexport journey? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Ryan Petersen

Early ecommerce, found that the frieght piece from china was a huge pain for a small business; had a proof of concept,but took 3 years to get customs license; NPS is "THE" metric; customer will refer you + they won't churn; helpful metric to determine where gauge were we are; geographical NPS will often change based on culture; but if you run into poor NPS, you can go address it and make those customers happy; comp sales based on gross, not net; if you have right price on freight and deliver on time, then infinite demand; customer segmentation is important; core is for 10-100M sales; enteprise likes it but takes forever to close and they want customization; smb, get 50 every day; hiring - I like builders; productivity tool -- delegate like crazy; investors don't like to invest in an LLC; customer service -- they need to be empowered to solve the problem; push the decision making to the edges of the org; empower/delegate to others for everything; as a founder "if a decision is made that you don't like, let it go" -- you get more out of people if they are empowered;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-069-5-key-elements-founders-must-consider-before-embarking-on-the-sales-process-with-whitney-sales-vp-of-sales-talentiq

SaaStr 069: 5 Key Elements Founders Must COnsider Before Embarking On The Sales Process with Whitney Sales, VP of Sales @ TalentIQ

Whitney Sales is the VP of Sales at TalentIQ, has been involved in bringing products to market and managing high growth sales teams for over a decade. She is the creator of the Sales Method, a strategic framework for launching products, which she used to help three companies earn a place on the Inc 5000 fastest growing companies list. Prior to joining TalentIQ, Whitney held executive positions at Wanelo and SpringAhead and currently serves as a mentor at StartX, Alchemist, and previous guest Acceleprise and a huge thanks to Michael Cardamone @ Acceleprise for the intro to Whitney today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Whitney make her way into the world of SaaS and more specifically sales? What are the 5 key criteria that founders need to consider before embarking on the sales process? How specific and targeted should a customer profile be? How many profiles can they have? What are the best questions to determine the optimal customer segment? How can founders identify which buyers are innovators? What tools are best for this? Once discovered, how should founders approach these innovators? Founders learn about gaps in customer information from selling. So how close should the integration of content marketing and selling be in the early days? 60 Second SaaStr What are Whitney’s preferred tools for her tech stack? What does Whitney know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning? Does the proliferation of sales tools make it harder or easier? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Whitney Sales

Last name sales: fate; worked in sales and able to launch an internal product and fell in love with startup process and having hand in all kinds of processes; sales is a process of inquiry, not a structured playbook; founders should be selling from day #1; as soon as money exchanges hands you start getting real feedback on product market fit; sales can be learned with enough time and effort -- a deep dive into problem solving; founders typically have a mentality of "why not", but often don't do that in selling the product; segment the market, who are the buyers (need to find early adopters); how do they talk about their pain (craft pitch and find gaps in knowledge), how do they find your product (marketing); what other products do they use (partnership); how are pricing models structured (so cuatomes can latch onto and understand); market segment: not too broad nor too narrow and find out where you get traction and hen look at those buying cycles (process inquiry) -- 2-3, before narrowing down to 1; look at techstack - BuiltWith, Datanyze, Intricately -- you can find out if a customer is comfortable with new tech; imho sales and marketing is one in the same -- need to work together as a well-oiled machine; when to hire your sales team -- question: do you know what's going to be required on a day to day perspective to set them up for success? Characteristics to look for -- look at the sales process to determine skills you need + someone who is comfortable with gray (it's gonna change in 6 months) and someone who can think on their feet and want to figure stuff out; Advice: go for it. biggest mistake from saas founders - sales has changed a lot in the past 10 years - don't throw headcount at it; know what you need them to do; buyers know a lot more now; lots of tools, ready for consolidation; hiring structure for new sales -- mentality and skillset and culture - happy hour test: do you want to spend 8 hours with this person.

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-070-whether-you-should-have-a-missionary-or-mercenary-sales-team-does-culture-in-sales-really-matter-how-to-make-sales-and-engineering-work-in-unison-with-sequoia-backed-inkling-founder-matt-macinnis

SaaStr 070: Whether You Should Have A Missionary or Mercenary Sales Team, Does Culture In Sales Really Matter & How To Make Sales and Engineering Work In Unison with Sequoia Backed Inkling Founder, Matt MacInnis

Matt MacInnis is the Founder & CEO @ Inkling, the company that brings policies and procedures to life for your desktop workers. The company has backing from some of the best investors in the world with the likes of Sequoia, Felicis and Kapor Capital behind them. As for Matt, prior to Inkling, he spent 7 years at the one and only Apple Inc. I would also like to say a huge thank you to Taro Fukuyama, Founder @ AnyPerk for the intro to Matt. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Matt make his way into the world of SaaS and Inkling from Apple Inc? Does culture in sales really matter? Is it not just about hitting the fucking number? What are the two opposing culture that exist in the world of sales team? Why is missionary always better? How can a sales leader instill a competitive element into a missionary sales culture? What are the inherent challenges and how does Matt approach them? Is it possible to have a fantastic sales and a fantastic engineering culture? How can the two live under the same roof and what needs to happen to ensure this works? In terms of measurement, how can a founder know whether they have a strong culture? What are the signs and indications? 60 Second SaaStr Productivity Tools What does Matt know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? Biggest mistake most SaaS companies are enacting with their sales process? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Matt MacInnis

At apple early and saw ipad in advance; build an education platform, but didn't work - then evolved the business to enterprsie who had pain of communication with distributed workforce; sales culture is inherently competitive -- you can either have mercinaries or missionaries -- the latter will optimize toward the customer; competition -- focus on what's going right (success -- be the #1 player on the team); rather than focusing on mistakes; build on strength and celebrate sales success; do they focus on the sales number v people who think about the broader company; how are sales contributing to the business; can you have a fantastic sales and engineering culture under the same roof; obsession with the product and then incoming barbarians of sales org; conflicts come in early reconciling short term (sales) and longer term (engineering): to do this core values - humilty, integrity, unconditional responsibility; how do best do communications -- should be captured in product process: here's how to communicate to product people, here's the time you can give feedback; compensation structure harmonization - sales/engineers are valued the way the market value them (sales rep live paycheck to paycheck); early on, wish I understood the value of conserving cash (a lot of the cultures of silicon valley don't make a difference if you have a strong culture); saas companies are trying to grow faster than higher than hull speed - get rationale about hull speed and more capital efficient; culter comes down to commitment and happiness of employees -- really comes down to when the going gets rough; layoff - based on consistent leadership the previous 36 months;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-071-5-steps-to-building-a-cohesive-team-how-founders-should-structure-off-sites-with-taro-fukuyama-founder-ceo-anyperk

SaaStr 071: 5 Steps To Building A Cohesive Team & How Founders Should Structure Off-Sites with Taro Fukuyama, Founder & CEO @ AnyPerk

Taro Fukuyama is Founder & CEO @ AnyPerk. Born and raised in Tokyo, Taro is a Y Combinator graduate with AnyPerk and part of the first Japanese team ever to be admitted to YC. He was also named one of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley 100 Coolest People in Tech Right Now.”Fun fact, Taro co-founded AnyPerk in a Taco Bell car park! What a story! They also have investment from the likes of DCM, YC, Gary Vaynerchuk, previous SaaStr guest Nick Mehta and many more incredible people. I would also like to say a huge thanks to Jason lemkin for the intro to Taro today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Taro make his way to San Francisco and come to found AnyPerk? As a first time founder, how did Taro look to build out the management team? What were the inherent challenges and what did Taro look for in his core executive? What are the 6 questions that will determine whether you have clarity in your organisation? Why is clarity so important to unify the team? What does this clarity allow? What are the 5 steps to building a cohesive team? How can CEOs be both vulnerable and authoritative as a leader? How should founders approach offsites? What is the necessary preparation? How should they be structured for optimal productivity? What can be done to ensure they produce meaningful outcomes? 60 Second SaaStr Favourite SaaS reading material? What does Taro know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? The biggest mistake companies make with employee happiness? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Taro Fukuyama

YC 2011; people are the biggest challenge and retentin/anyperk came out of this; YC provided a great network; for hiring, experience helps, but not a requirement; up to ~10 employees, you need generalists, but specialists will organically happen later; if everyone can answer 6 questions: why does the company exist, what does the company do, who do we hire, how do we win the market, what are the most important things right now, who does what - if these questions are clear, there shouldn't be any politics or confusion; investing in the happiness of the management team is important; possible for a given person to scale/grow as company scales, but it isn't always easy; offsite once per quarter to build team and talk strategy; what I learned: importance of meeting customers;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-072-part-1-david-skok-saas-legend-on-how-long-should-your-payback-period-be-how-to-assess-sales-rep-productivity-what-is-a-good-ltv-in-relation-to-cac

SaaStr 072 Part 1: David Skok, SaaS Legend on How Long Should Your Payback Period Be, How To Assess Sales Rep Productivity & What Is A Good LTV In Relation To CAC

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David make his way into the world of SaaS? What was it about Matrix that made him want to make the transition from operations to VC? Why are metrics so important? What role do they play in an organisation? How do good founders respond to questions on not achieving sales targets? Why are SaaS businesses immune from being measured on standard financials like GAP financials? What metrics in SaaS really determine the trajectory of the business? How can founders examine unit economics to determine whether they have a sustainable SaaS business? How does David address sales rep productivity? How much in ARR should they be booking in relation to their annual comp package? 60 Second SaaStr If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok

CS in the UK, and started a company; and then a few more companies and IPOs; ended up with Matrix (former investors); software & B2B - open source and SaaS; why metrics are important: "why did you miss the number"? Bad companies will come up with theories, good company will have a specific answer based on metrics... and you can go back and fix that problem; Pick a small number of metrics and make them highly visible (great technique to get improvement in that area from your team); four metrics you really care about: profit, cash, growth, and market share -- but need detailed metrics to understand the top leve metrics; gaap - profit revenue and cash -- but a really successful will have terrible profitiblity and cash flow in the early days - the saas cashflow trough - b/c you'll spend a lot of money to get a customer, but won't recover that in the short-term; needed a better metric to determine if it was a good or bad saas company -- to measure this need to look at two unit economics - customer level (CAC and LTV - ration of at least 3x)); how long does it take to recover the amount you spent to get the customer (~12-18 months by 24 mos need to reevaluate your model); retention is extraordinarily important for SaaS (and LTV); customer success is front and center; sales productivity and unit metrics -- you need to back test your math to make sure your projections are legit; a salesperson should product 5x ARR of their compensation; define boookings based on a standard period of time (1 year) and then how much they'll pay advance; how much new ARR did we add each month - new less churn plus upsell - net new ARR (plot this); bookings show how to grow (repeatable/scalable process); phase 1 - product/market fit 2 - how to create a scalable/repeatable process 3 - hit the accelerator with funding;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-073-david-skok-part-2-what-is-negative-churn-how-to-get-different-acvs-from-the-same-product-should-customer-success-be-involved-in-the-up-sell-process

SaaStr 073: David Skok Part 2: What Is Negative Churn? How To Get Different ACV's From The Same Product? Should Customer Success Be Involved In The Up Sell Process?

Part 2 with David Skok, now David is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What is negative churn? Why is it fundamental for SaaS startups to have a strong grasp of their negative churn? How does negative churn affect the pricing axis? What can startups do if they have no alternative product to upsell to? To what extent should founders be willing to engage in customisation in order to upsell a product? What are the dangers? What should founders be mindful of? To what extent is up sell the responsibility of customer success? Should they have a hand in the sales process? What are the dangers and concerns? How important is it for a startup to track their champion with the customer company? Does it matter if your champion leaves? What should you do if so? 60 Second SaaStr If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok

Negative churn - track both customer churn and revenue churn; drr > 100% (where upsell is greater than churn); how do you get more money if you have nothing to upsell -- take current product and have variable pricing axis (e.g., seats, # of leads, amt of storage); add more versions (enteprise, pro, etc.), then add new products; as you get toward enterprise -- need to break everything into modules; customization is dangerous (unless you can productize it), since it isn't scalable; account manager needs to have a trusted relationship with customer, so that means they shoudln't talk money; important predictors in churn -- when they're happy, best to do onboarding (scoring system at end of onboarding); if your champion leaves if your product ins't sticky (customer service needs to find a new champion); greenfield: AI; biggest thing I learned -- how important it was to create a strong management team; biggest mistake of founders -- 3rd phase not aggressive enough to hire sales people (rare situation where they shoudn't be saving money);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-074-the-4-step-playbook-to-expanding-distribution-outside-of-early-adopters-how-humans-really-want-to-buy-software-with-daniel-saks-co-founder-co-ceo-appdirect

SaaStr 074: The 4 Step Playbook To Expanding Distribution Outside of Early Adopters & How Humans Really Want To Buy Software With Daniel Saks, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ AppDirect

Daniel Saks is the Co-CEO of AppDirect, which he founded in 2009. AppDirect is the leading commerce platform for selling cloud services and at the firm, Daniel plays a key role in the growth and development of AppDirect, from attracting a leading team, to nurturing relationships with customers and partners. AppDirect has backing from some of the leading investors in the world including the likes of Foundry Group and J.P. Morgan. Prior to AppDirect, Daniel worked at Viant Capital, a boutique tech investment bank. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Daniel make the move from family business to SaaS founder? How did he get the business off the ground in the early days? From working in his family business, what did Daniel observe about the buying patterns of businesses? What makes Daniel believe humans like to buy from humans? Is it a problem that many of today’s software vendors lean on direct sales? What are the first steps to create a multi-channel approach? What does it take to support indirect sales channels such as affiliates and resellers? What is Daniel’s 4 Step Playbook for optimising the distribution of software? What does it take to move past the early adopter audience into the hands of the wider market? Why does Daniel believe that the promise of SaaS is yet to be fully realised? What excites Daniel with the rise of the cloud and the movement away from on-premise? 60 Second SaaStr When is the right time to hire your first customer success rep? What does Daniel know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Biggest challenge in the AppDirect journey and how Daniel overcame it? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Daniel Saks

How to connect great cloud tools with companies around the world; early on - how do businesses really buy software (usually local VAR to help); finding a customer to solve the chicken and egg problem of a marketplace; evolutionary (casette to cd) v revolutionary (digital); same with software from on-premise to cloud; our contrarian view - businesses fundamentally want to buy software from humans; early adopters are happy to not talk to people, but harder to reach the masses thereafter; critical to iterate and experiment, but there is an evolution in the playbook -- direct model (find product market fit where CAC is low), channel (drive more traffic/leads - influencers), reseller programs (train someone else to sell on your behalf, trusted VARs); application marketplaces (mobile, itunes), leverage your sales team to sell other partner services; just at beginning of what saas means to the world - two trends with impact - bigdata & IoT

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-075-domo-cmo-david-thompson-on-why-b2b-branding-is-both-consumer-enterprise-why-facebook-sem-is-crucial-for-b2b-branding

SaaStr 075: Domo CMO, David Thompson on Why B2B Branding Is Both Consumer & Enterprise & Why Facebook & SEM Is Crucial For B2B Branding

David Thompson is CMO at Domo, the company that allows customers to turn data into opportunities. David is a highly accomplished branding expert and recognized leader in demand generation, having served as longtime CMO of WebEx, where he named the company, helped create the cloud-based conferencing category and positioned the company for its IPO and subsequent buyout by Cisco. He also co-founded and served as chief executive officer of Genius.com, a leading SaaS marketing automation company, and he launched the Sales 2.0 Conference. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David make his way into the world of tech and SaaS pre-bubble? How did the bubble affect how David approached company building going forward? What should all SaaS startups consider pre spending big on marketing? What should their core gating factors be? Is it always right to have an internal marketing team? What are the must haves and the nice to haves in B2B marketing? Why is Facebook a must have or business branding today? How can businesses accurately measure the success of their marketing and branding efforts? Is it all about revenue or is there external reputation metrics to consider? On the whole, would David consider successful B2B branding closer to consumer or closer to enterprise marketing? What do the best in the enterprise class do? 60 Second SaaStr What are David’s favourite marketing tools? If David could recommend one book to SaaS founders what would it be? With the martech explosion: are we entering a world of consolidation? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Thompson

Employee 15 at webex; ultimately bought out by cisco; early on was category creation (educate people to have online meetings); product is really important -- but the other half of the go-to-market is working the sale; content marketing is essential, but not sufficient in and of itself; for BI -- before you get to the analytics - what is the problem, where is the data, prep, etc.; without customer testamonials/use cases, etc it will be dubious that you will go big and close sales; enterprise customers don't want to stick their toe in the water first; seo/sem is intertwined and an anchor in marketing today; "facebook is the new television"; biggest challenge -- product-market fit; biggest branding mistake -- not articulating the customer need; huge number of marketing tools -- bewildering for customers; reverse engineer your funnel re: revenue outcome

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-076-what-metrics-seed-investors-require-for-prospective-saas-investments-what-makes-the-best-saas-investors-with-rob-siegel-partner-xseed-capital

SaaStr 076: What Metrics Seed Investors Require For Prospective SaaS Investments & What Makes The Best SaaS Investors with Rob Siegel, Partner @ XSeed Capital

Robert Siegel is a Partner at XSeed Capital, one of the leading seed funds in the valley. At XSeed, Rob specialises on, you guessed it, all things from the wonderful world of SaaS and he sits on the Board of Directors of Cape Productions and Caller Zen. Robert is currently on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches an array of topics that he led to His role as the Co-President Emeritus of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs. Prior to joining XSeed, Robert was General Manager of the Video and Software Solutions division for GE Security, with annual revenues of $350 million. Before that, Robert was Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Weave Innovations Inc. (acquired by Kodak). If that was not enough Robert also served in various management roles at Intel Corporation, including an executive position in their Corporate Business Development division, in which he invested capital in startups that were strategically aligned with Intel’s vision. I would also like to say a huge thanks to Tien @ Zuora for the intro to Robert today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Robert make his way into the world of SaaS? What was it about XSeed that made him want to make the transition from operations to VC? We have seen many big SaaS exits in the last year with Marketo and Nutanix, does Robert think the time for big SaaS exits has come and gone? Have we moved to a world of consolidation? How do companies both large and small need to react to this shift on a strategic level? How does this affect the internal infrastructure of larger companies? For smaller startups, how should their attitude to competition change? How does this change Robert’s search process as an investor? How can smaller startups make themselves attractive acquisition targets? How does Rob’s view of consolidation affect his excitement for mega returns in SaaS? How does it impact how Rob approaches valuation? How does this change Rob’s expectations of unit economics? 60 Second SaaStr Strategic investors: Good or Bad? What does Rob know now that he wishes he had known when he started? Fave SaaS resource or reading material? Greenfield opportunity in SaaS? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Robert Siegel

Came out of operations/tech, fell into VC; we're in 2nd half of the game with SaaS; VC looking to be ahead of the curve, harder to do that in SaaS now, which is more mature; "clever/foolish matrix"; metrics to hone in w/seed: MRR, growth rate and de miminis churn: looking to have companies come out of the seed stage at 150-200K MRR, 15% month growth rate, 5% or less churn; 50-70K is too small for series A these days (vc will sit back and wait); "almost easy to get to $1MM ARR", but not enough to get a $5MM+ series A; metrics are clear for saas; acquisition: product + technology + team; Developing a feature, product or company? Need to understand who you are; don't be dismissive of your competition (be paranoid); healthy skepticism of competition can force entreprenuers to up their game; sooner you get to profitibility the better to control your own destiny; LTV:CAC can make you stand out; optimizing payback period - as you are starting to hit your growth curve (12-18 month payback); once economics of your business make sense, optimize; monster breakthroughs come at the end of the cycle; follow the entrepreneurs; need to make 10-20x return, so need to be disciplined as an investor;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-077-wtf-is-net-retention-why-the-best-saas-companies-focus-on-it-why-you-do-not-have-to-be-in-sf-to-be-successful

SaaStr 077: WTF Is Net Retention? Why The Best SaaS Companies Focus On It & Why You Do Not Have To Be In SF To Be Successful in SaaS with Michael Sharkey, Founder & CEO @ Autopilot

Michael Sharkey is CEO & Co-Founder of Autopilot, the startup that allows you to automate customer journeys as simply as drawing on a whiteboard. Autopilot has funding from some of the best investors both in Australia and in SaaS with backing from the likes of Salesforce Ventures and Blackbird Ventures. Prior to founding Autopilot with his two brothers, Michael joined his brother Chris to grow start-up Stayz into a top Australian rental booking site which was acquired by FairFax Digital in 2006 and again by HomeAway for $225M in 2013. Michael also co-founded digital marketing agency Sharkey Media where he helped grow Australian startups. I would love to say a huge thank you to Matt Garratt @ Salesforce Ventures for the intro to Michael today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Michael come to co-found Autopilot with his two brothers? What was the a-ha moment for him? Why did Michael choose a self service model with Autopilot? How does this model affect their CAC? How does this model alter the outbound marketing strategy? How does Michael approach the dilemma of variable or fixed pricing? Has Michael found that the lack of reliability around variable pricing causes customers concern? With Michael interest in unit economics, why are we seeing many SaaS startups, Marketo and Eloqua, exiting with losses? What can founders do to adopt the unit economics first mindset? How does this attitude to unit economics affect attitudes to aggressive growth? Michael focuses on 100% net retention, what does that process and strategy look like in practice? How does this commitment to 100% retention affect Michael’s management style and work processes? 60 Second SaaStr Biggest mentor to Michael and how it came about? What does Michael know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? The biggest mistakes SaaS companies make with their email marketing processes? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Michael Sharkey

Three brothers; started as a selfish product to grow startups quickly; many smbs were stuck in old school marketing email blasts; started a company called bizlo with a suite of products -- one of which was autopilot, standout application for marketing automation; 2000 customers in 18 months; affordable/accessible saas companies (esp for SMB); multi-channel marketing at scale; keep CAC low, high NPS; expansion business -- seed planting; investing now for later expansion; if you have large horizontal market and then increase revenue per customer over time; invest heavily in customer success; when is human interaction worthwhile (at scale)... identify compelling events and automate interaction; biggest mistake - outbound marketing is lazy (spray and pray blasts); focus on great product/great customer service experience; lesson learned: focus on one thing; 12-month Net Retention: current MRR / initial MRR * 100; obsess about it being in SMB (high churn biz); ex. if activity is waning, auto-send emails to reach out prior to churn;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-078-to-get-early-customers-you-have-to-make-people-uncomfortable-why-customer-success-should-be-actively-involved-in-the-upsell-process-with-kathryn-minshew-founder-ceo-the-muse

SaaStr 078: To Get Early Customers You Have To Make People Uncomfortable & Why Customer Success Should be Actively Involved In The Upsell Process with Kathryn Minshew, Founder & CEO @ The Muse

Kathryn Minshew is the Founder & CEO @ The Muse, named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media and Inc.’s 15 Women to Watch in Tech. Before founding The Muse, Kathryn worked on vaccines in Rwanda and Malawi with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and was previously at McKinsey. Kathryn has spoken at MIT and Harvard, appeared on The TODAY Show and CNN, and contributes on career and entrepreneurship to the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Kathryn came to found The Muse? What was the a-ha moment for her? Why did Kathryn introduce a SaaS business model into the traditionally, transactional model of recruiting? What were the benefits and how did it alter her go to market? With no prior sales experience, how did Kathryn find the experience of running the sales team? What were the core takeaways? At what stage should the founder stop selling the product and hire a sales team? Why does Kathryn believe you have to make the customer feel slightly uncomfortable to be successful? What did Kathryn look for in her initial sales hires? Why did Kathryn hire 3 reps to start with and not 2, as usually suggested? How does Kathryn approach the customer success field at The Muse? When did Kathryn hire her first CS rep? What is Kathryn’s take on CS being involved in the sales process? 60 Second SaaStr What does Kathryn know now that she wishes she had known when she started? Biggest mistake SaaS companies are enacting with their recruiting process? Productivity tips and hacks? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Kathryn Minshew

Started at McKinsey; what do I actually want to do? Frustating to go to all the job sites like Monster, etc -- what would it look like to help people find jobs in a more human way; 50MM people come to Muse each year; SaaS made sense for relationship, rather than more transactional (price per job posting); sales: "you have to make people uncomfortable" ask direct questions to get to the close; lesson learned with sales hires: hired for passion for the muse, but not passionate about sales; 1st VP sales, need to have experience but scrappiness to build out structure; lesson learned: "don't believe the hype -- businesses are build on small, incremental steps"; CS is leading upsell process;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-079-where-to-start-with-a-b2b-saas-content-plan-how-to-encourage-the-non-marketing-team-to-create-content-why-nps-should-be-central-to-everything-with-seth-besmertnik-founder-ceo-conductor

SaaStr 079: Where To Start With A B2B SaaS Content Plan, How To Encourage The Non-Marketing Team To Create Content & Why NPS Should Be Central To Everything with Seth Besmertnik, Founder & CEO @ Conductor

Seth Besmertnik is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Conductor, the company that boasts the biggest customer list in their category including more than 500 Fortune and Internet Retailer 500 brands like Under Armour, Citi and FedEx with their web presence management and SEO. With this incredible success, the company has been ranked 13th fastest growing software company in the US and the 3rd Best Place To Work in NYC. They have also raised funding over $60m from some of the best investors on the east coast in the form of Matrix Partners and FirstMark Capital just to name a few. I would like to say a huge thanks to Fayez @ Bluecore for the intro to Seth today.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Seth make his way into the world of SaaS? What was the a-ha moment for Conductor? What does Seth mean when he says, ‘B2B companies need to build a weapon in their marketing’? How does this look in his approach? How does this differ according to differing startup budgets? Previously, Meaghan Eisenberg @ MongoDB has said ‘the largest lift you are going to see is from your site’. Does Seth agree with this? How should we prioritise the site? What are the fundamentals to consider in terms of optimising conversion? With the proliferation of content today, to what extent should B2B companies look to alternative platforms such as  Snapchat, Youtube and Instagram for content differentiation? What are the fundamentals to consider with platform diversification? How does Seth suggest creating a culture of content creation in previously segmented cultures? How can this be done with actionable strategies to encourage non-marketing professionals to produce content? 60 Second SaaStr What does Seth know now that he wishes he had known before? Biggest advice on content creation for B2B SaaS companies? Fave SaaS reading material? Being a CEO vs Being a Founder If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Seth Besmertnik

Good to Great by Jim Collins; Getting Real by 37 Signals; Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff

Started as a SEO services business ~ 10 years ago; once people came to the site, you had a lot of analytics, but not much about what they were doing before that; saas: sales absolve all sins; marketing drives a SaaS company (a differentiator); product is only the start, lot of dead software companies by the side of the road - no one knows about them; need to build a brand in order to scale; SEO if you're small -- need to be focused; need to have clear understanding of profiles/personas and then buyer journey map... then can build content; days of just building mediocre content is over; marketing: presence on the web is going to dominate, so website is most important thing... but if no one can find your site...? Forms - range, top of the funnel, give it away, proprietary info, can ask for more; if you have too many profiles, they don't become rule... 5 personas are a lot even for a 100-person company; lesson learned: people -- having wrong staff, bad hire and not acting quickly enough; don't take eye off customer value; let NPS be your barometer for pricing; start with your customer and work backwards; founder - vision; ceo - clear goals;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-080-segments-peter-reinhardt-on-why-the-reality-distortion-field-is-damaging-when-it-comes-to-product-market-fit-how-founders-should-approach-pricing-negotiations-with-large-corporates-how-founders-can-truly-determine-product-market-fit

SaaStr 080: Segment's Peter Reinhardt on Why The Reality Distortion Field Is Damaging When It Comes To Product Market Fit, How Founders Should Approach Pricing Negotiations with Large Corporates & How Founders Can Truly Determine Product Market Fit?

Peter Reinhardt is the Founder and CEO @ Segment, the startup that allows you to collect all of your customer data and send it anywhere and they count some of the biggest and best companies in the world as customers including the likes of Reuters, HotelTonight, New Relic and Atlassian. They do not only have some of the world’s leading customers but some of the world’s best investors with the likes of Accel, Thrive and Kleiner Perkins participating in their latest $27m Series B. I would like to say a huge thanks to Grant Miller @ Replicated for the intro to Peter today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Peter make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Segment? How does Peter define product market fit? Does he agree with Justin Kan in stating that it is when you get the first 10 customers that are unaffiliated? Why does Peter believe product market fit suffers when related to Job’s idea of the reality distortion field? What is so damaging and what should founders look to avoid? How do technical and non-technical co-founders differ in their approach to product market fit? How do their expectations, desires and reactions alter to differing levels of uptake? How did Peter navigate the process of scaling prices with time? Was he nervous when doing so? What does Peter advise founders when attempting significant price increases? 60 Second SaaStr What were the biggest takeaways from YC? What does Peter know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? The biggest challenge in building out the team? Favourite SaaS resource or reading material? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Peter Reinhardt

Started in 2011 with a student feedback tool... failed, but interested in the analytics; noticed that all the analytics tools had similar fields; reality distortion field is damaging re: product-market fit -- if not careful, you can be self-delusion; product-market fit - when people are buying for value, not for social reasons, etc. Early on -- meager levels of customer excitement were product market fit... but customers have a more dynamic range; but when you really hit a painpoint, it goes up to 11 (holy shit!); a transition from you pushing it to "oh that's nice" to all of a sudden they rip it off the table... searching for 11 out of 10 for customer pain response. Hardest thing early on -- product is moving target and audience is moving on; need to know problem and how to value the solution; goal of mvp is to reduce risk and test; landing page was able to test risk of "does anyone care"; not something about maturity, but about testing. marketing v engineering tension; open sourcing on github -- libraries -- help for hiring and cred in the ecosystem; biggest lesson: launch sooner. Change pricing from cost basis to value basis (alignment to customers); supporting a diverse group of customers, how varying is the problem? Are you trying to service a bunch of needs or just a lot of groups with the same need; sold not to vertical, but to marketers/engineers;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-081-why-it-is-wrong-to-have-a-sales-led-culture-why-there-should-be-tension-between-your-sales-and-finance-orgs-why-everyone-needs-an-executive-coach-with-steve-garrity-co-founder-hearsay

SaaStr 081: Why It Is Wrong To Have A Sales Led Culture, Why There Should Be Tension Between Your Sales and Finance Orgs & Why Everyone Needs An Executive Coach with Steve Garrity, Co-Founder @ HearSay

Steve Garrity is COO and founder of Hearsay Systems the leading advisor-client engagement solution for the financial services industry. Hearsay have backing from the likes of Sequoia, NEA, Kleiner Perkins Partner, Mike Abbott and Path Founder, Dave Morin. Before founding Hearsay, Steve worked as an engineer at Microsoft Corporation in Seattle is a graduate of Stanford University with a BS and MS in Computer Science. While at Stanford, he was selected as a Mayfield Fellow in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. During which, he joined Fortify Software as a product manager. Steve is also an investor in, and advisor to a number of Silicon Valley start-ups. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Steve made his way into the world of SaaS from the world of Microsoft? How does Steve approach the management around his engineering team? How does Steve balance management of engineers while still allowing creativity? Are there dangers of giving engineers freedom? Is it possible to have both a happy engineering and sales? How does Steve look to harmonise the team? Is it not contra popular theory to have different cultures for different segments of the team? Why does Steve believe that executive coaching is an almost universal requirement? How does Steve justify that to the board? 60 Second SaaStr Steve’s Biggest Productivity tools? What does Steve now know that he wishes he had known at the start? The biggest mistake SaaS companies are enacting with their social media strategies? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Steve Garrity

Started with how people reach customers on social media; tool about building relationships; enterprise software companies tend to be sales-driven company, but wanted to be product-focused; challenging to harmonize sales and engineering to the same culture, but focus on creating a unifiying culture; create a healthy tension; micromanaging - you have one choice - built what I say or quit; if you give people choice early, they'll give you buy in (what is best of the business?); proponent of executive coaching (therapy); lesson learned - enterprise sales framework; err on charging more and negotiating down; won't do customization, but will change roadmap to build reusable code; system v process - how to automate and make lives better; startups should start investing in systems from day one

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-082-what-really-is-saas-marketing-what-are-the-big-factors-startup-founders-should-consider-before-spending-big-on-marketing-what-are-the-must-have-marketing-channels-today-in-saas-with-david-rodnitzky-founder-ceo-3q-digital

SaaStr 082: What Really Is SaaS Marketing? What Are The Big Factors Startup Founders Should Consider Before Spending Big On Marketing @ What Are The 'Must Have' Marketing Channels Today in SaaS with David Rodnitzky, Founder & CEO @ 3Q Digital

David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of 3Q Digital, a leading digital agency that was acquired by Harte Hanks in 2015. Prior to 3Q Digital, he held senior marketing roles at several Internet companies, including Rentals.com (2000-2001), FindLaw (2001-2004), Adteractive (2004-2006), and Mercantila (2007-2008). David currently serves on advisory boards for several companies, including Marin Software, MediaBoost, Mediacause, and a stealth travel start-up. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David enter the world of B2B SaaS marketing? What was the entry point for him? What really is SaaS marketing? Is it more consumer or B2B like? How does this alter and develop with the growth of the company? Before spending heavily on marketing, what gating factors should SaaS founders think heavily about before the big spend? Should this marketing plan be undertaken by an external firm or an internal team? What market channels should a SaaS company consider as ‘must haves’ in today’s world, as compared to ‘nice to have’s’? How does David differentiate between the two? We are always told if you cannot measure it, do not do it? How can SaaS companies measure the success and effect of their marketing campaigns? What are the key metrics that define success? 60 Second SaaStr Biggest mistake current SaaS companies are currently enacting with their marketing? Favourite marketing resources and tools? What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Rodnitzsky

Graduated from law school; moved to SF in dot com companies; online marketing/SEO; online performance marketing; saas marketing = consumer/enterprise mix; saas customers act like consumers, but cycle is longer like enterprise; a lot of marketing nurturing can be done with automation; basics before investing in marketing -- make sure your economics are in line with competitors; great conversion funnel; having the right offer; having marketing expertise; collect and analyze data -- figure them out before you spend a dime on marketing costs; online marketing - easy to do but difficult to do well; need to understand rationale, brand metrics; facebook -- best way to reach people who are not specifically looking for your product but need your project -- getting in front of targeted people not looking for you; top five marketing channels for saas - SEM, Analtycis, SEO, Conversion rate optimzation, email marketing (nurture element and automation); paid social was in top 10; 'you gon't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate"; a good negotiator has a little swagger -- if they don't choose us, it's their loss; biggest mistakes: not looking at detail -- success in online marketing is continually looking for more and more advantages from data analysis - best people, constant testing; when they settle for "good enough" that is when they stagnate; "above average performers deserve above average compensation and average performers deserve a generous severance package"; look for people who wants to own it; moving toward increasing fragmentation and automation; marketers now need to be data wonks to be successful; a golden age for having one to one relationships with potential customers...

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-083-qualtrics-ryan-smith-on-bootstrapping-to-a-bn-valuation-why-radical-transparency-is-fundamental-what-makes-the-truly-great-ceos

SaaStr 083: Qualtrics' Ryan Smith on Bootstrapping To A $Bn Valuation, Why Radical Transparency Is Fundamental & What Makes The Truly Great CEOs

Ryan Smith is the Founder & CEO @ Qualtrics, an online survey company with 1,200 employees and a valuation of more than $1bn. They have backing from some of the world’s best investors including the likes of Sequoia, Accel and Insight Venture Partners having raised a $150m Series B in 2014. As for Ryan, there are many awesome things, first, he has built Qualtrics from Utah allowing him to gain perspective outside of the traditional tech bubbles, second, he held off on attain VC funding for many years despite the common belief that it is necessary for unicorn growth and finally he has the most incredible work life balance I have seen and if you have not already you must check out this piece on him in Forbes, it really is a must.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ryan made his way into startups and came to found Qualtrics? 2.) Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier states that Ryan’s success is due to running the company on ‘first business principles’. What does he mean by this? How does this affect the way Ryan runs Qualtrics? 3.) Why did Ryan decide to bootstrap the company for such a long time with the likes of Accel and Sequoia looking to invest? What are the benefits of retaining such control? What are the financial requirements to do so? 4.) What makes the best CEO’s? How do they view the internal structure of the company? How do they perceive their role? How do they manage their day and optimise their time? 5.) How does Ryan look to instill ‘radical transparency’ in the organisation? What are the benefits of doing so? Can an organisation ever be too transparent? What are the challenges of such transparency?

Started qualitrics in 2002; father was trying to do something to duplicate himself; how to democratize it; taking a process that was hard and making it simple; started in academia; to do something great, will take 10, 20, 30 years; building a business to last, not to get funding; academic users seem like a bad business to start; cash flow positive since the beginning; took 2.5 years to figure out the sales cycle -- creativity comes from resource constraint; VCs are our partners; caatalyst for taking funding: $50MM sales and 50% profit margins; qualtrics became the de facto NPS product and feedback product; go there with whom you want to partner with, not just funding amount; transparency -- spend a lot of money communicating and over communicating; principle - "no minor lapse of integrity"; my job as CEO changes every three months; have a plan: the day will run you if you don't run it'; it's going to take time: every bet we've taken has taken a little longer than we anticipated. Every single one had a point where "it's not gonna go"; gotta play the long game; CEO: "I was most happy when ___" (an individual contribution);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-084-why-personalisation-is-the-future-of-sales-the-benefits-of-an-engineering-led-sales-team-why-customers-pay-a-premium-for-predictability-with-alex-maccaw-founder-ceo-clearbit

SaaStr 084: Why Personalisation Is The Future Of Sales, The Benefits Of An Engineering Led Sales Team & Why Customers Pay A Premium For Predictability with Alex MacCaw, Founder & CEO @ Clearbit

Alex MacCaw is the Founder & CEO @ Clearbit, the startup that is building a suite of business intelligence APIs to help companies find more information on their customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud. They have backing from some of the best early stage investors including the likes of First Round Capital, SV Angel, Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe, Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah and many more incredible investors. As for Alex, as well as being a fellow Brit who loves tea, he also worked at the likes of Twitter and Stripe prior to founding Clearbit. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Alex make his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Clearbit in SF having grown up in the UK? Should API driven companies have sales teams? Should they do outbound? What’s the most effective way to generate leads? Alex has said before that the trouble is, ‘everyone is treating their customers the same”. What does he mean by this? How do the smart companies differ? How possible is it to address customer specific needs at scale? How does this scalability alter when elements like freemium and self service models are added to the equation? How effective have freemium tools been for Alex as a lead gen to on board new customers? Why did Alex choose the same pricing structure as the likes of Stripe and Twilio? What was the thought process behind this? 60 Second SaaStr How important is it for SaaS startups to be in SF? What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known when he started? Biggest mentor to Alex and how it came about? Fave SaaS reading material? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Alex MacCaw

Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam

Engineer by trade (stripe and twitter) -- solving companies data problems; modern data provider -- D&B 2.0; great product and great timing = rocketship; sales team is necessary, but you need to automate so you don't have to scale headcount; API-first means that it is you strategy; try to integrate where our customers hang out all day; tech companies tend to rely less on outbound than inbound/freemium; mistakes: lead qualtification manually; personalization is the future of sales: right now see the same thing; hear the same thing; personalizing at scale requires data (even customize home page); customized drip campaigns (40% increase); roadmap: suite of data apis; lesson learned: poor product development - going to customers and pricing before you build product; pricing -- billing by API volume; customers will pay a premium for predictibility (they don't like or understand the approach); stripe was straightforward "by charge"; sales/mktg doesn't care -- moving to database contact size model (offer buckets);

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-085-how-saas-founders-should-view-competition-why-you-should-raise-every-round-as-if-it-is-your-last-how-to-create-an-environment-of-growth-fulfilment-with-david-hassell-founder-ceo-15five

SaaStr 085: How SaaS Founders Should View Competition, Why You Should Raise Every Round As If It Is Your Last & How To Create An Environment of Growth & Fulfilment with David Hassell, Founder & CEO @ 15Five

David Hassell is the founder and CEO of 15Five, the leading web-based employee feedback and alignment solution that is transforming the way employees and managers communicate. They have backing from the likes of Matrix Partners, Point Nine Capital and many more leading investors. As for David, he was named "The Most Connected Man You Don't Know in Silicon Valley" by Forbes Magazine, David has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Entrepreneur, Wired, Fast Company, and the Financial Post. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found 15Five? How does David view competition? How should founders view additional competition to their space? What is the right response? Why did David choose such a public and deliberate fight back against one competitive attempt? David has said before that is passionate about the meaning and purpose of the business vehicle. What does he mean by this? How does this affect his thinking toward management and organisational structure? What are the keys to creating a harmonized, incentivized and happy culture for your business? How scalable is this approach and how has David seen his approach alter and develop with the growth of the company? Why did David choose the more bootstrapped funding option over the traditional heavy reliance on VC funding? Which startups is this right for? How can founders know when is the right time to put the pedal to the metal? 60 Second SaaStr David’s fave productivity tools? David’s biggest mentor and how it came about? What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the start? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Hassell

Follow my passion, but if no money, then not a huge future in it; worked with CEOs as service; "I'm sorry, ivan is out surfing" CEO superpower - be informed no matter where you are; competition is great -- we're better for it, but plagarism is a different story; fear based competition (kill them); world is abundant (rising tide raises all boats); ignore competition (focus on customer success; row your own race); people attracted to authenticity; people with shared purpose (not asset -- owned and controlled); get 20, 50, 100% output by putting systems in place; you can feel when people are engaged v. checked out (hard to measure); lesson learned: greater clarity on strengths; starting out - wanted to figure out how far we could get with bootstrapping; took more space and time to create a framework;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-086-why-you-have-to-focus-on-a-tiny-market-how-to-sell-that-market-to-vcs-with-auren-hoffman-founder-safegraph-liveramp

SaaStr 086: Why You Have To Focus On A Tiny Market & How to Sell That Market To VCs with Auren Hoffman, Founder @ Safegraph & LiveRamp

Auren Hoffman is best known for being the former CEO and Founder @ LiveRamp, the leading data onboarder that was acquired by Acxiom for $310m. Today’s talk focuses on the 5 core lessons Auren took from that incredible journey with LiveRamp. Auren was also an angel investor and board member at BrightRoll, prior to it’s $610m acquisition by Yahoo. Today, he is the CEO at SafeGraph, the startup that is unlocking the world’s most powerful data so that machines and humans can answer some of society’s toughest questions. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What is Auren’s thesis towards hiring all round athletes as opposed to position players? When do it make sense to do either? What stage of the company is right for which persona? What are the two different types of sales personas? At what type of company should you hire a relationship driven sales team and then what type of company for a product driven sales team? Why does Auren believe you should target a very small niche of the market? What are the benefits of such focus? How can you sell such a small market to VCs? How does Auren perceive the future of enterprise software? How has the rise of bottoms up sales affected the SaaS environment? How many more SaaS companies and buyers of SaaS are there today, compared to 10 years ago? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Auren Hoffman Algolia the robust search API that allows developers to integrate lightning fast, typo-tolerant search into their SaaS product. Out of the box, Algolia offers developers a powerful platform for building great search experiences. By owning the entire stack from engine to server, Algolia free up development teams to focus on adding intuitive search that delights users. This is perfect for existing search teams looking to spend less time on maintenance and infrastructure management and more time on user experience. For small SaaS teams, Algolia is a great investment on top of your existing stack that requires no specialist engineers. And you can learn more about how Algolia helps SaaS Scale Search and get started on their 14-day Free Trial at Algolia.com/SaaStrPodcast

Saastr Annual 2016; 5 lessons learned:
1) All around athletes beat position players in early days - potential v. position players; if you know what you're doing, then position players will be better -- but if you don't know, then all-arounders are better
2) put yourself in a box to define optionality - box says what you won't do (we're only going to do this thing); own the box; if strategy is clear, then you can push vision to everyone, if not clear, you need to micromanage;
3) Focus on a small market that you can actually win - find tiniest marketing you can find - really small (so no one else will care), you can own it and market is going to grow very fast;
4) Sales people - product or relationship oriented - figure out what type of company you want to be quick - relationship (classic extrovert); product oriented (introvert and engineer, never will go to a baseball game)
5) The future of enteprise software - replacing people with software; how do I play in this scenario of abundance;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-087-successful-saas-startups-do-1-of-two-things-why-specialisation-is-key-to-success-in-saas-with-michael-driscoll-founder-ceo-metamarkets

SaaStr 087: Successful SaaS Startups Do 1 Of Two Things & Why Specialisation Is Key To Success In SaaS with Michael Driscoll, Founder @ CEO @ Metamarkets

Michael Driscoll is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Metamarkets, the startup that provide interactive analytics for programmatic marketing. They have raised over $38m in VC funding from our good friends at Data Collective, Founder Collective, IA Ventures and more incredible investors. As for Michael, prior to Metamarkets, he started two other companies: Dataspora, a life science analytics company (acquired by Via Science in 2011), and CustomInk.com, an early pioneer in e-commerce. Fun fact: Michael is also a founding Partner of the previously mentioned VC fund, Data Collective. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Michael make his way from data lover to Silicon Valley SaaS Founder? Why does Mike believe in the inherent value of customer focus and product focus? What are the measurable benefits of being so specialised? Why does Mike believe it is so hard to be a cost leader in software? What are the fundamental challenges? What role does open source play in this? How does Mike view the alignment of the sales and the engineering team? Is it possible to have a harmonious relationship between the two? What should SaaS startup founders look for in potential seed investors? How can they determine whether they have these qualities? What should they look at in particular? 60 Second SaaStr Mike’s fave productivity tools? What most companies are doing wrong in their approach to data science? What does Mike know now that he wishes he had known at the start? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Michael Driscoll

Founded ~ 5 years ago; jackpot of big data was in digital media; 600B trades on high frequency media per day; 3 generic categories: 1 - cost leadership (walmart) 2 - product differentiation (apple) 3 - focus (deep into a vertical); software is always being commotitized; tableau in product differentiation, but has had market share eaten away by focused specialties; value of focus is that you can tie return in a measurable way; hard for excel to capture value from hedge fund to school; find ways to show where you can drive revenues up or costs down; historically -- broad horizontal strata, with saas - now vertical... now a shift back - how do you have vertical strata communicate? Early days in startup are acts of innovation, but as you scale execution gets more important; biggest mistake - data science is a separate dept, but its like arithmetic, should be everywhere; early stage investor -- look for VCs that look at the long term, patience is a virtue, seed is about team, series A is about innovation, product market in B and beyond; SaaS and credit facilities based on recurring annuity

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-088-how-to-react-when-a-lead-goes-dark-how-sales-reps-can-be-polite-not-rude-why-summary-emails-are-fundamental-after-all-client-interactions-with-john-barrows-godfather-of-sales

SaaStr 088: How To React When A Lead Goes Dark? How Sales Reps Can Be Polite Not Rude? Why Summary Emails Are Fundamental After All Client Interactions with John Barrows, Godfather of Sales

John Barrows is essentially the Godfather of Sales. We often have VPs of Sales from tech titans on the show but who trains those VPs and sales reps to be the best in the world at sales? That is where John Barrows comes in, with clients including Dropbox, Box, Marketo, Twilio and many more, John has amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience allowing him to provide the most proactive sales tips and strategies to optimise the sales process. If you have not checked out his blog, that really is a must and can be found here. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did John make his way into the world of SaaS and more specifically sales optimisation? What are the key points all reps must cover in their first calls with new leads? Why is expectation setting so crucial? Why does John believe the best client to rep relationships are those that are equal? How can reps continue to provide value with every interaction? In the case of leads going dark, how can sales reps engage with the lead to ensure conversion? What words must be avoided and how should this conversation be structured? How can sales reps perfect the balance of being direct and being rude? How important is a summary email? What is the optimal structure and how should sales reps follow up on summary emails? 60 Second SaaStr The most common question asked to John by VPs of Sales? What are the benefits of Top Down prospecting? Do execs need structure? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr John Barrows

Stumbled into sales; 8 years training and sales; real sales education on the job; expectation setting is critical (when was the last time you were pissed off? based on expectations); summary emaill (see previous notes); priority based sales -- if you're not top 1 or 2 priority, its not worth the time; if you can't align with top 3-4 priorities of company, your done; ask educated questions to uncover those priorities; don't ask a dumb question; you'll get a dumb answer; personalization (AI / Machine learning) is going to be a key, but after that computer will know more - context is most important thing for sales in the future; marketing is content, sales is context (to personalize and sift through the craft); value is in filtering/curating content; google "best subject lines"; discounting is OK -- but get something back; price up front or build value and the do price later; instead of "discount" you talk about creativity and flexibility in pricing -- we can be creative with pricing, but it usually entails longer term contracts, etc, etc; (when you can get creative); best deals you ever sign are the ones that are equal; qualifications stage - two types of persistance; annoying persistance and professional persistence; first is saying the same thing over agin and again (annoying); the latter setting expecations (direct v rude); "No" is the second best answer in sales;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-089-buffers-leo-widrich-on-the-top-10-learnings-in-growing-to-10m-arr

SaaStr 089: Buffer's Leo Widrich on The Top 10 Learnings in Growing to 10m ARR.

Leo Widrich is the Founder & COO @ Buffer, the Simple and powerful social media scheduling, publishing & analytics. They have raised funding from some of the best including Scott and Cyan Banister, Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah, Hiten Shah and Eric Ries just to name a few. Now in today’s talk with Leo he breaks down his and the Buffer teams Top 10 Learnings in Growing to 10m ARR. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What are the 3 questions Leo asks his customers to understand them best? When is the right time to ask them? How should you follow up from this? How to experiment with weekly masterminds? How do masterminds work? When is the right time to do them? What is important to remember in entering a mastermind? How does Leo assess pricing structure? Why does he think it is important to experiment with different pricing? How do you do so without losing customers or trust? Why does Leo advise startup founders to get advice from mentors with conflicting opinions? Why is this important and how should a decision be reached? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Leo Widrich

Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez; Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Saastr annual; 10 thing learned from growing to $10MM ARR; completely remote; 1) weekly relationship building 2) early on, focus on more qualitiative data & insights, than quantitative data 3) talking/listening to customers; (no leading question) - the magic wand question - helpful to get creativity from customers; 4) keep data in house 5) zero in on one marketing channel (focus) - marketing flywheel - early repeatibility; want to become good at marketing; you can then step away and still reap benefits 6) try and get two opposing opinions for big decisions and then forced to make your own mind; 7) more adventurous with pricing (adding features is adding value); doubled-revenue without losing a customer 8) startups use lean methodology once, but never again; slightly embarred by your first product -- shoudl be a cupcake, not only bottom layer of a 3 layer cake 9) personal experience/personal growth - selling our company - what are the experiences we'd miss out if we sell now; 10) N/A yet... :)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-091-saastrs-own-jason-lemkin-on-the-specific-characteristics-jason-looks-for-in-founders-what-levels-of-acv-suggest-the-potential-for-a-unicorn-why-founders-always-undersell-how-you-should-hire-your-first-sales-reps

SaaStr 090: SaaStr's Own Jason Lemkin on The Specific Characteristics Jason Looks For In Founders? What Levels Of ACV Suggest The Potential For A Unicorn? Why Founders Always Undersell & How You Should Hire Your First Sales Reps?

Jason Lemkin is the Founder and VC @ SaaStr, or more accurately put Jason is a 2x founder, 1x VC, and constant SaaS enthusiast. He led or sourced the first VC investments in many leading enterprise/SaaS start-ups, Greenhouse.io, Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, RainforestQA, Automile, and more. He is also an advisor or smaller investor in Showpad, FrontApp, Influitive, BetterWorks, and other SaaS leaders. Jason has co-founded two successful start-ups selling to the enterprise.  Before SaaStr and VC investing, he was CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $50,000,000 in ARR in 2012 and $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. Prior to EchoSign and Adobe, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50m just 13 months after founding. Other than SaaS he is like me, no known hobbies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Jason make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Founder and VC @ SaaStr? ACV: What levels of ACV and characteristics suggest potential for a unicorn? How does Jason look to help founders attain higher ACVs? Why is stay focused horrible advice with regards to increasing your ACV with differing customer demands? Does Jason believe that founders always undersell? What advice would Jason give to founders that are nervous to ask for more? What customer response would excite Jason and what would make him concerned? Jason has previously said that ‘founders have to be 110% committed to sales’. What does this mean? How does this look when assessing a founder? Should founders be happy to pay their sales hires more than them? How quickly should the payback period be on these reps? Jason has also previously said that some founders financials are ‘simply ridiculous’. What makes him say this? What financials are fundamental to have very accurately pin pointed? Why is 100% gross margin impossible? 60 Second SaaStr Why does Jason like it when startups have clients that are not in tech? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What should SaaS founders look for in their investors? Why does Jason only invest out of the SaaStr community? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Started with quora/blogging to start saastr, then partnered with friends to develop saastr fund -- $1-4M checks; less than $6-8k MRR (<$100K too early); more than$1-2MM ARR to late (8-150K); team/founder - all I need to meet is a CEO better than me; saas is harder - so much to do too early; when founders are too tired, they will sell early; can't recruit sequentially, need to do it in parallel; ACV for unicorn - easier to get to big company if you can drive pricing up; founders almost always undersell; VP Sales knows how to get deals without breaking the pricing; $1MM in revenue, hire VP sales (they'll magically create money); 70% of VP sales doesn't work out; best bet is to rule it out -- wash out (from big company) or a stretch (wasn't in the position before); hire 2; VP should give 2 customer references; not fire fast, fire must;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-091-jason-lemkin-on-why-hire-fast-fire-fast-is-bs-why-he-never-invests-in-quarterly-mrr-why-the-key-is-successful-reinvention

SaaStr 091: Jason Lemkin on Why Hire Fast Fire Fast is BS, Why He Never Invests In Quarterly MRR & Why The Key Is Successful Reinvention

Jason Lemkin is the Founder and VC @ SaaStr, or more accurately put Jason is a 2x founder, 1x VC, and constant SaaS enthusiast. He led or sourced the first VC investments in many leading enterprise/SaaS start-ups, Greenhouse.io, Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, RainforestQA, Automile, and more. He is also an advisor or smaller investor in Showpad, FrontApp, Influitive, BetterWorks, and other SaaS leaders. Jason has co-founded two successful start-ups selling to the enterprise.  Before SaaStr and VC investing, he was CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $50,000,000 in ARR in 2012 and $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. Prior to EchoSign and Adobe, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50m just 13 months after founding. Other than SaaS he is like me, no known hobbies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Jason make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Founder and VC @ SaaStr? ACV: What levels of ACV and characteristics suggest potential for a unicorn? How does Jason look to help founders attain higher ACVs? Why is stay focused horrible advice with regards to increasing your ACV with differing customer demands? Does Jason believe that founders always undersell? What advice would Jason give to founders that are nervous to ask for more? What customer response would excite Jason and what would make him concerned? Jason has previously said that ‘founders have to be 110% committed to sales’. What does this mean? How does this look when assessing a founder? Should founders be happy to pay their sales hires more than them? How quickly should the payback period be on these reps? Jason has also previously said that some founders financials are ‘simply ridiculous’. What makes him say this? What financials are fundamental to have very accurately pin pointed? Why is 100% gross margin impossible? 60 Second SaaStr Why does Jason like it when startups have clients that are not in tech? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What should SaaS founders look for in their investors? Why does Jason only invest out of the SaaStr community? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Customers out of tech (non-early adopters) - if you can get past early adopters, you have something; investing - takes 4-5 years to get good; founder - doesn't get good until $10MM ARR; look for investors who you trust at seed stage (it'll take 10 years) AND who can help you the most and, hopefully, someone that can help you get to the next round; 110% commitment to sales (most founders don't like sales) -- they'll kill their customers; founders should have no problem with VP Sales being the highest paid in the companies (should be accretive in 30 days); insanticy -financial red flags: 100% gross margins & projections that are insane & hide the ball (quarterly MRR companies)

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-092-raising-100m-from-sequoia-why-sustainable-growth-is-fundamental-with-zooms-eric-yuan

SaaStr 092: Raising $100m From Sequoia & Why Sustainable Growth Is Fundamental with Zoom's Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan is the Founder & CEO @ Zoom, the video and web conferencing service that just last week raised $100m in venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Prior to founding Zoom, Eric was Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's collaboration software development. As one of the founding engineers and Vice President of Engineering at WebEx, Eric was the heart and soul of the WebEx product from 1997 to 2011. Eric proudly grew the WebEx team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real time collaboration. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Eric make his way into the world of SaaS? What was a-ha moment and founding story of WebEx? How does Eric think about building products, customer first? What does that mindset and approach look like What are the main questions to ask? What are the challenges in doing so? How should one approach growth with startups? Is growth ever in need of control? If so, what can be done to control growth? How can this be done without angering investors? Eric has said before that founders must ‘spend more and burn less’. What does he mean by this? What does that look like in reality? What should be the main focus? Does Eric agree with the notion that founders always undersell? How does Eric approach the situation of leaving money on the table? What are the challenges of doing so? 60 Second SaaStr What does Eric know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Eric’s Fave SaaS Reading Material? Biggest advice to SaaS founders? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Eric Yuan

started in 2011; previously at cisco (webex acquisition); saas - what is the pain point, why you can do better; competition - want to make sure that my product is better than competition; growth -- do we spend enough times to make sure exisitng customers are happy?; first VP sales is really important; hire potential, rather than experirence in the early days; use minimum spending to test results; if results are good, pour money on it; founders are always underselling; starting on low price gives you options compared to starting at high price; started as SMB and focus on product experience; biggest advice on pricing -- talk to experts; spend most of time on sales;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-093-why-you-cannot-be-excellent-for-anyone-if-you-are-not-willing-to-be-ok-for-someone-how-to-manage-nps-effectively-with-scaling-with-lexi-reese-chief-customer-experience-officer-gusto

SaaStr 093: Why You Cannot Be Excellent For Anyone If You Are Not Willing To Be Ok For Someone & How To Manage NPS Effectively With Scaling with Lexi Reese, Chief Customer Experience Officer @ Gusto

Lexi Reese is the Chief Customer Experience Officer at unicorn startup, Gusto and is one of the top female executives in Silicon Valley. Lexi’s passion for serving customers was sparked by her early career in microfinance as a public policy advocate with ACCION International—giving loans to people living in poverty to start their own ventures. She later worked at Google for eight years, most recently serving as Vice President of Programmatic Sales and Strategy globally. Lexi also started the Cambridge AdWords team for Google's small business organization. Now at Gusto, Lexi ensures that Gusto is continuously going above and beyond to serve all customers. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Lexi make her way from the world of Google and Facebook to SaaS with Gusto? What were the biggest takeaways from spending 8 years at Google and seeing the immense hyper-growth there? How has Lexi applied those learnings to Gusto today? How does Lexi look to put the ‘customer first’ thesis into practice? What does this look like in reality and from day 1? How can one maintain such high levels of customer service with an ever increasing customer base? How can one insert elements of repeatability to make this easier? Question from Hunter Walk: How do you fundamentally measure customer satisfaction? What benchmarks do you calibrate against to consider success? 60 Second SaaStr What does Lexi know now that she wishes she had known in the beginning? Most challenging aspect of Lexi’s role? Question from Tien @ Zuora: How do you look to avoid the hype culture that pervades the valley? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr  

Chief Customer Experience

Started in documentary films; moved to that to microfinance, heart is in right place, but need some hard skills; went to b school; starting a business you can influence change; spent time in corporate; then to google; customers are first; easy to say, hard to do; is customer service a differentiator; who do you have to be awesome for and who can be less so; have to make trade offs and setting expecations; early NPS can be done with heroics; as you scale need analytics to understand where you need to gravitate toward; focused on SMB - easy payroll service; health insurance; HR; most difficult part of day - context shifting and how you spend your time; NPS is simply one tool, can't replace customer interactions;

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-094-the-100m-question-all-saas-founders-must-ask-learnings-from-working-with-marc-benioff-at-salesforce-scaling-zuora-to-a-bn-valuation-with-tien-tzuo-founder-ceo-zuora

SaaStr 094: The $100m Question All SaaS Founders Must Ask, Learnings From Working with Marc Benioff at Salesforce & Scaling Zuora To A $Bn Valuation with Tien Tzuo, Founder & CEO @ Zuora

Tien Tzuo is the Founder and CEO @ Zuora, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies that has been at the forefront of the rise of subscription business models. They have funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Benchmark, Sequoia, Redpoint and Marc Benioff, just to name a few. As for Tien, before Zuora, Tzuo was one of the 'original forces' at salesforce.com, joining as employee number 11. In his 9 years at salesforce.com, served in numerous different roles including as Chief Marketing Officer for two years, and most recently as Chief Strategy Officer. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Tien make his way from being an early employee at Salesforce to founding Zuora? What were the big takeaways for Tien from seeing the meteoric rise of Salesforce? How has that experience moulded his running and strategy with Zuora today? What does Tien see as the fundamental benefits of a subscription model? What products and services does it work best for? What are the keys to assembling this model successfully? Tien has previously referred to scaling as ‘the climb’. How does he approach this analogy What was the most challenging element of scaling for Tien? How did he overcome it? Tien has previously said that market strategy is the $100m question all founders must ask. So how does Tien approach go to market? What are the fundamentals to think when considering different go to market options? 60 Second SaaStr Biggest mentor and how the relationship came about? What does Tien know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? Highlight of the Zuora journey so far? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Tien Tzuo  

Started through complaining around around billing systems; not just tech companies that are subscriptions, but others in the world are moving toward subscriptions; salesforce talked about both business model and technology model -- need to deliver value to customer regularliy; no investment up front; people change as they grow, so do businesses; climb a mountain via switchbacks, almost about face; $1M then figureout $3M then $10M, etc; billing and finance are the embodiment of the contract with the customer; invoice is a monthly reminder; churn is a differentiator with SaaS; early days not hire sales people,but get people that workwith customers; everyone early needs to be invested in sales and customer success; be a jack of all trades as long as you can; the sophmore entrepreneur syndrome... got to take blank sheet of paper and start fresh each time; what is your model and does it match with your valeu proposition (10,000 customer $10,000 ea or 10,000,000 customers at $1 each, etc

http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-095-trellos-jd-peterson-on-why-now-is-the-best-but-hardest-time-to-be-a-marketer-how-to-unify-the-sales-marketing-team-how-the-role-of-data-effects-marketers-today

SaaStr 095: Trello's JD Peterson on Why Now Is The Best But Hardest Time To Be A Marketer, How To Unify The Sales & Marketing Team & How The Role Of Data Effects Marketers Today

JD Peterson is CMO of Trello where he heads the company's marketing and customer service teams. A true child of Silicon Valley, J.D. has been helping startups for nearly 20 years.  Before Trello, he held positions as the CRO and interim CEO at Scripted, the VP of Marketing at Zendesk, and the VP of Products at Marketo. JD takes pride in building world-class teams, helping companies accelerate growth, and ensuring the customer remains at the center of every strategic effort.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did JD make his slightly unconventional entrance into the world of SaaS? Having picked Marketo and Zendesk, what does JD assess when picking companies? Once picked, how does JD evaluate culture? How does JD measure this? How does JD approach lead qualification? How does JD measure the effectiveness of lead generation, revenue or amount of leads? How does JD unify the sales and marketing team? JD has previously said that now is ‘the best but hardest time to be a marketer’. Why is this and what is behind this thesis? What are the pros and cons of the data driven marketing world? What are the commonalities among the best marketeers? JD has seen many companies scale into hyper-growth, when does JD believe is the right time to hire and expand aggressively? What roles should be filled first? What does JD optimize for in the hiring process? When is the transition point needed to have a VP? 60 Second SaaStr Is SaaS marketing B2B or B2C? What does JD know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? Biggest mistake companies are enacting with their current marketing plans? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr JD Peterson

Not an engineer (though grew up in SV); but made way back to tech company back in the 90s; then worked at customer service at hotmail; the Microsoft; product manager (early in marketo); then marketing at zendesk; and now at trello; how to pick: big market, big vision of how the world will look when they win, big passion; great product - is it solving a real problem or is it improving/changing people's lives (can people live without it); stage company is in - understanding your sweet spot and what is best fit for you; people/team/culture; great culture is when employees know and can articulate the vision; work style/meetings - understand that the style aligns with you; empowerment where you are entrusted to own the stuff that's mine; revenue is front and center to judge marketing effort, also NPS; integration of marketing/sales (chief revenue officer); muchof the customer journey is done prior to talkign to sales; proliferation of tools -- easy to spin up a tool that ever before and so much noise and content; but hard to cut through it; being data-driven is awesome, but some negatives - paint by numbers marketing, but it is a blend of art and science; often choosing the wrong metrics, wrong signals; SaaS 80% B2B, but winners have a little B2C DNA in them. Biggest mistake -- building marketing plans without understanding of CAC and LTV; overlook install base, much of marketing is now customer planning; Always be hiring; early days optimize for athletes; generalist to specialist -- maybe ~100 person range;