The Where, When, and How of AI with Theory Ventures, Open AI, MotherDuck and Lamini
(not a GTM focused session)
How to Scale Go-to-Market Through IPO with ICONIQ Growth’s General Partners
- To find product market fit
- Identify your TAM
- Refine your features & use cases
- Understand your ICP
- Know your differentiation
- 5 metrics indicative of growth at any stage:
- ARR growth
- NRR
- Rule of 40
- Net magic number
- ARR/FTE
CRO Confidential: The Hangover is Over: 5 Ways to Get Your SaaS Revenue Back On Track with Gong’s SVP Jameson Yung
- Get back to working hard
- Diagnose the bottleneck to growing faster. Fix it.
- In 4 out of 5 companies, the problem is at the top of the funnel pipeline generation.
- Increasing the top of the funnel is way easier than most other optimization
- Get creative and stand out
- Tell people something interesting about their own business that they may not know about
- Test direct mail (champaign campaign; hand written notes; mail a coconut; etc.)
- Encourage your new users to post organically on social media about their onboarding experience (Rippling does this)
- Be prepared to keep changing things
- Relationships matter
- Get back to visiting prospects & customers in person
- If a customer gives you a shout out on social media, don’t just send them an email. Send them a hand-written note, or when appropriate a suitable gift
- Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome
- With SDRs, if you want to drive top of funnel, reward meetings. If you want to drive bookings, reward closed on business.
Who Will Win the Go-To-Market AI Race? with Stage 2 Capital Co-founder Mark Roberge
- Incumbents have all the data to succeed with AI based SDR co-pilots and forecasting. However, they don’t have recordings of sales managers coaching reps to build and AI sales coach.
Hitting Hypergrowth with Amplitude’s CEO, Spenser Skates: Take Your SaaS Company from $25M to $100M+
- Maintain a culture of product innovation
- Manage a portfolio of small teams
- Build what your customers ask for
- Treat new products like a mini startup
- Understand the three stages of executive hires
- Early Stage ($0 to $25M): You need an executive who can make something happen out of nothing
- Mid Stage ($25M to $100M): Takes early process and scales deliberately and systematically
- Late Stage ($100M+): The job is to hire other leaders not to do “work.”
- Make the early-stage to large org mental switch
- You have to say “no” a lot more
- The rate limiting factor is your ability to hire great leaders
- You have to give your executives feedback, esp. that they must attempt to resolve conflict with their peers before coming to you
The 5 Ways AI Will Transform Creativity with Adobe CSO & EVP Scott Belsky
- Creativity is the new productivity
- Creative confidence is growing as a result of web-based content creation tools.
- The opportunity of creative exploration is expanding
- The future of every digital experience will be personalized.
- We will crave story, craft, and meaning more than ever before.
- Higher bar for experiences
- Seeking meaning & scarcity
- Engagement by meaning
Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: My Top 10 Failures as a SaaS CEO & What I’ve Learned
- Not holding my leaders to the highest possible standards (the same standards I hold myself to)
- Altitude: 30,000 feet: What is the long-term vision of our company; 3,000 feet: What is our plan for the next few years?; 300 feet: What are our OKRs for this quarter?; 3 feet: What do we need to do today?
- On the other hand, not betting on the team that got me there
- People can do more than you think they can; promote from within; hire the person you need now/for the coming year
- Not scaling based on leading indicators
- Ex: One mega-deal is not necessarily the sign of something repeatable
- “Fire bullets, not cannonballs” – Jim Collins; run small experiments and then scale; ex: hire 2-3 sale people in a new segment, not a whole team
- Doing custom deals that felt OK in the moment
- Not investing in digital customer success early enough
- Make things as self-service as possible
- Not parting ways well always
- Help people post-RIF
- Celebrate your alumni and be kind on their way out
- Not being prescriptive enough early enough
- Ex: Tell customers how to implement (= strong recommendations); What is your use case? –> Here is how to achieve that.
- Not starting Act II fast enough (new geo, new product, new segment, etc.)
- It is much harder to raise money when growth is slowing
- Build a bottom up database of your entire addressable market – the companies and the people.
- Not being patient and ignoring FOMO
- Not being myself
How to Navigate Strategic Change for Growth with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- New sales VPs should sell for a quarter or two to learn the product and the sales process
- In vertical SaaS, the salespeople you hire must have industry expertise.
- If you exit founder-led sales in vertical SaaS before $10M, then you fail.
What SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Really Thinks About AI, Sales & Lead Gen In 2024
- If you do a great weekly webinar, it always works.
- Everyone wants to be a strategist which means they don’t do the basics. Instead, they outsource and get back cr$appy ChatGPT-created content that does not work.
- Go from founder-led sales to 2 reps. Once those two reps hit quota, then hire our first VP of sales to continue to scale.
- Make sure you’d hire them independent of their resume. Do they understand your product? Are they conscientious? Would you buy from them?
- You want a stretch, a hungry up-and-comer. But, the person needs to have been in a true management role before – esp. people who have hired reps who have in turn hit quota. ‘Stretch, don’t double stretch.’
- The best sales leaders are constantly recruiting. They have people to bring with them.
The Chat GPT Growth Story: How AI is Changing the Way We Work with OpenAI’s Head of Sales
(no key GTM takeaways)
How to Close More SaaS Deals with Less Budget with Datadog’s CMO Alex Rosemblat
- Rather than MQLs, focus on MQAs since multiple leads from a single company is just one account in the eyes of a sales rep
- Reallocate marketing budget to generate leads for sales teams with capacity
- Checks:
- Are 100% of leads reaching the right rep [rapidly]? You might even need a dedicated FTE on lead routing.
- Are 100% of leads being worked [in a timely fashion]?
- Do leads engage at expected rates? (ex: look at meeting rate)
- Can reps recognize potential deals? (measure opportunity creation rate)
- Datadog significantly cut its content syndication budget
- Use your customers’ words with them and with lookalike accounts
Unlock Profitability and Growth – The Key Strategies of Expensify’s COO Anu Muralidharan
- Automating support is one of the best ways to improve efficiency
- Once you hire an internal team rather than outsourcing, you’ll find yourself stuck strategy-wise.
Secrets to Scaling and Growth in an Unpredictable Market with monday.com’s Co-founder and Co-CEO
- From it’s earliest days, monday.com instrumented a BI platform to track product usage
- The major product functionality leaps were not things customers were asking for en-masse
- Unless you have a vertical SaaS solution, strive to diversify your customer base to limit industry concentration risk
- To scale faster, focus on cash efficiency. I you spend $100 on performance marketing and 50% comes back within 3 mos, then you can redeploy the $50 and so on.
- Consider a model that mixes consumption and seats to moderate the impact of macro volatility.
How to Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup with Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel
- Stand out by being concise and easy to understand
- Common elements of seed stage pitch:
- What do you do? – This is the first slide. Do this in 2 sentences plus a specific example. An investor pitch is not a customer pitch.
- Team – If possible, cover how your team personally experienced the problem. Include titles. Make it clear who writes code. No life stories.
- Traction – use graphs only if impressive. Cover what you did and over what time frame.
- Unique insights – Non-obvious things you have learned about the customer, the problem, or the solution. Should be unique, specific, and quantified.
- Market size – Show bottoms up calculation esp. including key assumptions.
- Ask – How much are you raising and what milestone do you expect to accomplish with the money? Share social proof of others who have invested. Don’t talk about who you plan to hire; they care what you will accomplish.
- A pitch is a conversation. You want the investors to talk as much as possible.
- A lot of pitches are on Zoom. Pay close attention to their faces.
- No distracting slides.
2024 SaaS Landscape: Why 2024 Could be Pretty Darn Good for SaaS IPOs with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
(good overview of SaaS market but no substantive GTM guidance)
From $5M to $100M: How to Scale a Multi-Product Startup with Lattice CEO Jack Altman
- Building GTM teams for new products
- Setting ARR goals and other targets – often setting product-specific targets is counter-productive
- Overlay teams or enable full sales force
- Sales versus account management
- Net new sales ramp faster than cross sell
- The vast majority of the time, building is better than buying
The Latest 2023 Napkin Reveal: What it Takes to Raise Capital with Christoph Janz of Point Nine
- Burn multiple = net burn / net new ARR (below $25M, 1.5 is good and below 1.0 is great)
State of the Cloud 2023 with Bessemer Venture Partners
- Review CAC on a channel-by-channel level to understand which channels are performing best and shift spend accordingly
Building a Global SaaS Empire | Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham on His Biggest Bets
- 5 big bets
- Go global from day 1 – betting on inbound & PLG
- Hire talent with a learning mindset and role-suitable talents (we did not have access to people who has ‘been there and done that’
- Going multi-product early
- Overlay field motion over inbound to increase deal size with MM and ENT prospects
- Bet on disruptive technologies early (ex: AI in customer 360)
- Don’t just celebrate company wins; celebrate employees for what they are individually good at.
What the Future of SaaS Holds for 2024 with David Sacks, Founder & General Partner, Craft Ventures
- Use burn multiple (total cash burn / net new ARR) as a measure of efficiency to prevent hiding expenses in other categories – ex: ‘hiding’ expenditures in COGS to make CAC payback look better. (original 2020 article here).
- Per David, the standards do change over time based on total ARR. For a large, cash flow positive, your burn is zero so you should trend to zero over time. Series A should be ~2. Growth round should be ~1.
- Be more conservative in a tough market since you are more likely to miss.
- Custom SaaS metrics BI tool with benchmarks: SaaSGrid