Marketing
Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Answer: 35% (with 45% and 15% as the top and bottom quartiles). Charts like this, from OpenView's 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey, help to answer questions like that all
Customer Success
A few weeks back, I sat down with Jonathan Corrie, cofounder and CEO of Precursive -- a Salesforce-native professional services (PS) delivery cloud that provides PS automation, task, and resource management -- to discuss one of my favorite topics, the role of professional services in today's SaaS businesses.
Marketing
Quiz: Your marketing team generates an MQL. It's passed to an SDR, who does basic BANT-style qualification and decides it's real. They create a sales opportunity in your pipeline and pass it to a seller. What number is in the opportunity's value field at
Management
I'd previously posted a video of my SaaStr 2021 presentation, A CEO's Guide to Marketing, but it was a bit of hack (a link into the stage stream) done favoring time-to-market over production values. In this post, I'm embedding the official SaaStr 2021 video
AR
Using the Marketing Fundamental Tension Quadrant to Map Your Demandgen and Communications Strategy Years ago I wrote a post on what I call the fundamental tension in marketing: the gap between what we want to say and what our audience wants to hear. For example, let's say we&
Marketing
With angel and seed money flowing, and a great environment for company creation, I've been talking to a lot of seed-stage and pre-seed stage startups of late. They often ask me about positioning. Listening to myself talk, I realized that I didn't really sound like me,
Databases
Well it's time for my annual predictions post, a series now in its eighth year. Before diving in, let me remind readers that I do these predictions in the spirit of fun, they are not business or investment advice, and that all of my usual disclaimers and terms
SaaS
I think two demo practices are nearly universal these days and I'm not a big fan of either: * Using a demo as the primary call-to-action on a website [1] * Using demo as a sales cycle stage I discussed using demo as the primary website CTA in a previous
Metrics
I'm revising this post because I learned today that I've been named not once (as I thought yesterday) but twice to the SaaStr All-Time Top 25 List of podcast episodes (see Top 1-12 and Top 13-25). Apologies for the confusion, but wow, what an honor. This
Demandgen
I hopped over to London a few weeks back to visit my friends at Balderton Capital (where I'm now working as an EIR) and during the visit we decided to host a meetup for portfolio company founders, CEOs, and CMOs to discuss the question of how to build
Management
Is your leadership team world-class? Are some of your executives holding your company back? Could you grow faster if you replaced your head of sales? Does your board think you have the right leadership team? Heck, does your leadership team think you have the right leadership team? Do your rank-and-file
Growth
In my new capacity as an EIR at Balderton Capital, I recently gave a presentation to a leadership meeting at a high-growth, Balderton-backed startup offering my perspectives on growth and the challenges that come with it. I discussed these five challenges: 1. Next-levelitis, an obsessive focus on scaling everything to