When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization?
Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, and Anoushka Vaswani, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, moderated a panel with Carlos Delatorre, CRO at TripActions, and Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense to discuss how you can scale your startup from $20 million ARR to $200 million ARR through go-to-market execution, talent, and culture.
Hootsuite CRO Melissa Murray Bailey shares secrets to running a successful SaaS sales team and reducing employee turnover.
Every high-growth organization inevitably reaches the point of pivoting its strategy and offerings to capture new audiences—a journey made more complex with the new demands emerging this past year. In this session, Dorian Stone will share lessons learned from Grammarly’s evolution from consumer to SMB to enterprise, address common assumptions and pitfalls in the process of scaling, and reveal must-know strategies to drive efficient growth this year and beyond.
Vimeo went public in May as an $8 billion powerhouse in video software. Better known as the indie version of YouTube for more than a decade, the company has redefined itself from a B2C destination to the B2B solution that empowers any business to create, collaborate and connect with professional-quality video. Join Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud for a conversation with Brent Thill, Financial Analyst @ Jefferies about spotting potential in what is now a $70 billion market, and how operating as a founder within a 16-year old company helped her take bets on a strategy that’s paying off.
Building out a marketing channel is like building product. It takes countless iterations and constant market feedback to get right. This session will introduce tactics on how to slowly and methodically test, assess success, and eventually scale a marketing channel until it hits a ceiling and it's time to move to the next one.
When sales teams succeed, the company succeeds. Revenue goes up, productivity increases, and ideally, the team continues to grow. But running a high-performing sales team isn’t an easy task. How can you ensure success within your sales organization in a way that scales with you?
Heather Akuiyibo, VP of Sales at Databricks, shares her four adaptable frameworks for high-performing sales teams and how those frameworks helped Databricks’ sales teams succeed.
Full video: https://youtu.be/9tn-I4f9Va4
Zach joined Canva in 2013 as one of Canva’s earliest employees and has worked across product management, communications and human resources before establishing the global marketing function. Eight years later 50 million people are now using Canva every month and the company recently approached $1 Billion in Revenue. In this podcast, Zach and Jason dive into the initial growth marketing strategies and framework behind Canva’s exponential growth as a start-up, the strategies for targeting and growing into the enterprise, and how to build out a global marketing function.
No one word strikes more terror in the heart of product-, engineering-, or even sales-oriented founders and CEOs than "marketing." How to understand marketing? How to drive marketing? How to measure marketing? What to look for in a marketing leader? In this session, we'll talk about how CEOs (and other startup execs) should think about, charter, direct, and support marketing.
Full video: https://youtu.be/ggUwcE600xU
Learn more about Box's journey to reaccelerate growth and march toward $1B in SaaS ARR and their CRO's lessons learned along the way.
Full video: https://youtu.be/RQ6gom-lLxE
Amy Appleyard, SVP Global Sales @ Malwarebytes, Michelle Benfer, VP, Head of North America Sales @ HubSpot Tony Benvenuto, SVP of Sales West @ Seismic, and Anna Baird, CRO @ Outreach share lessons learned when scaling their sales teams, the importance of BDRs, key hires and when to prioritize them, and more.
GitLab started as an open-source project that expanded into a public company with a buyer-based open-core business model. With over 300+ code contributions per month, innovating with the wider community is key to accelerating development efforts. Join GitLab CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, as he discusses GitLab’s journey, choosing the right business model that balances high revenue potential and community contributions, and co-creating the product with the wider community to deliver safer software faster.
In today's SaaStr podcast, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin shares 5 interesting learnings from Samsara at $500M ARR, growing 72% year-over-year.
Video and episode notes: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-samsara-at-500000000-in-arr/
Over the past ten years, Zapier has grown from a weekend side project to global unicorn, serving millions of small and medium businesses around the world. But Zapier isn’t your typical startup story and their roots aren’t in Silicon Valley. Come hear what Zapier’s early employees learned from building the foundation of one of today’s most successful startups.
Many start-ups today start with an amazing Product Led Growth (PLG) engine that hasn’t required an outbound sales and marketing motion. As amazing as this is, if your company wants to move into the mid-market or enterprise business, you’re going to have to build and hire a Sales team, and expand the capabilities of your Marketing function. How can you add this GTM motion effectively, without cannibalizing your existing business? How do you balance the two for the right target markets and audiences? Product-market fit, pricing, packaging, messaging, strategic investments, culture, evangelism all play a critical part and will change as soon as you add this team.
Hear from the CMOs of top tech companies on they helped Freshworks, Twilio, Salesforce, 1Password, Atlassian, Litmus, CircleCi, Coda and many others have faced this challenge and led their companies through this successful transition.
Stacey Epstein, CMO @ Freshworks
Sara Varni Bright, CMO @ Twilio
Carilu Dietrich, Fractional CMO @ 1Password
Viviana Faga, General Partner @ Coda
Pricing can kill your product, or make it soar. To start with, create pricing tiers and make pricing easy and convenient for your customers. Beyond that, the decisions are difficult, such as usage-based vs. predictable pricing. In this presentation, we discuss the key principles of pricing and app or online service, showing the pros and cons of your choices.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/picking-the-perfect-pricing-model-that-fits-your-app-with-hackerone-ceo-marten-mickos-podcast-508-and-video/
When is the best time to find your next gear of growth? Now. Whether you are growing rapidly or seeing growth start to slow, this talk will share proven ways to accelerate.
Karen Peacock, CEO of Intercom and former SVP of Small Business at Intuit, will discuss how putting customers at the forefront of your business is the key to hitting that next level.
She’ll cover how to segment your customer base and analyze the health of each part as input to strategy, design and package your product based on value and build highly contextual and personalized customer experiences that lead to happy customers, retention, expansion, and growth.
Karen will share stories based on her experience at Intuit building one of the world’s largest SaaS product lines from $500M to $2.5B and in her current role leading Intercom’s high growth on the path to IPO.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/shifting-to-the-next-gear-proven-strategies-to-accelerate-growth-with-intercom/
Treasure Data was founded as a big data platform company, but struggled to compete against larger tech companies. After pivoting to a more vertical solution (CDP - Customer Data Platform), revenue growth accelerated, going from $20m to $100m in 3 years. Kazuki will share the struggles and decisions a part of pivoting the company.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/100-million-arr-pivot-with-treasure-data-ceo-kazuki-ohta/
A lot of startups and SaaS companies that build a business around an open source technology struggle to commercialize in a way that is both profitable and scalable, while also supporting the open source community that is so critical to innovation. Join Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks and Nithya Ruff, Head of Open Source at Comcast and Chair of The Linux Foundation Board, who are both open source thought leaders, for a fireside discussion about the value open source software has delivered for enterprises and their perspectives on the current state of the open source landscape.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/the-future-of-ai-open-source-databricks-ceo-ali-ghodsi/
In this episode, Bryan Smith, Co-Founder at Leon Health sits down with SaaStr's own VP of Sales, Bryan Elsesser, to talk about the best techniques to overcome Q4 and end-of-year stress in sales teams.
Gone are the days of Sales and Marketing building their own tech fiefdoms. In this podcast, Sydney Sloan, CMO at SalesLoft shares a holistic approach to adding technology that powers your revenue engine and shares examples of tech stacks, best practices, and org designs from successful companies at different growth stages.
Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/the-revtech-stack-playbook-going-from-1m-to-100m-with-salesloft/
There are countless ways for founders to learn how to build strong teams, strengthen go-to-market processes, and focus on growth and customer success. But a topic that's becoming more important, especially after such a challenging year, is founder well-being. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein shares insight on how successful entrepreneurs approach personal change, coaching, and ongoing development to achieve work-life harmony. Harley will be joined by Felicis founder and Managing Partner Aydin Senkut and Felicis' Head of Founder Success Dasha Maggio. They will discuss what founders should ask for and how focusing on personal development can lead to stronger teams and better outcomes for the business.
Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/why-founders-should-prioritize-personal-development-with-shopify/
The state of software buying has changed. SaaS spending dipped in the first half of 2020 but has since accelerated and increased as we reach the end of 2021. Amanda Malko, CMO at G2, shares a fascinating look at the data that reveals shifting patterns in the way consumers purchase software.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/the-state-of-software-buying-from-smb-to-enterprise-with-g2s-cmo/
We're celebrating episode 500 of the SaaStr Podcast! Our SaaStr 'OG' podcaster, Harry Stebbings, Founder of The 20 Minute VC and, Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder discuss the future of the markets and how to build a successful SaaS sales team from the ground up.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/how-to-scale-saas-sales-team-with-harry-stebbings-jason-lemkin/
Sponsors:
In this episode, Mark Jung, VP Marketing at Dooly, and Zoë Hartsfield, Community Manager at Dooly, sit down with SaaStr's own VP of Sales, Bryan Elsesser, to talk about best practices for brand re-launches and the cutting edge techniques for an impactful live event strategy.
Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/saas-live-event-strategy-dooly/
Sponsors:
https://calendly.com/
https://www.invoca.com/
https://stripe.com/
Featuring 3 prominent Founders - from Calendly, Coda and LaunchDarkly - that have achieved scale, at "Founder Confidential" you will hear about the highs and lows of fundraising, working with a VC board, and real talk about what it really is like to be a true Founder.
Moderator: Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder, Boast.AI
Panelists: Shishir Mehrotra, Cofounder and CEO, Coda Edith Harbaugh, Cofounder and CEO, LaunchDarkly David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, SaaStr
Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/founder-confidential-saas-fundraising-expensify-launchdarkly-coda-boast-saastr/
Sponsors: