#SaaStrAnnual 2019: Day II — #SaaSholic Notes
Straight from the trenches!
Published in
3 min readFeb 6, 2019
Ready for day 2? Here we go!
A Step by Step Guide to Revenue Growth with Mark Roberge, Harvard Business School
Beyond $1B ARR: Lessons from Zendesk on Why the Cloud is Unstoppable
- U$700m Run Rate;
- Aiming at 800m by Dec 2019;
- 1b in 2020;
- You new founders are spoiled. When we started "Cloud was the future". 10 years ago you could not build a SaaS business in Europe;
- We built everything from scratch. The entire stack;
- We need to get away from old locking based vendors… We shouldn't be locked on their pace.. Sunshine is a modular set of components to help you build freely;
- You won't live if you live month by month thinking if customers will live. The early days are terrifying;
- I can name a few VCs that told us we would be crashed. We never worried about it. We worried about the market! Real competition are companies that want to redefine the market!
State of The Cloud: Byron Deeter
Scaling Revenue via Indirect Channels and Platform Ecosystems with Stripe, Box and Slack
- Focus on development and APIs
- Freemium to enter the partners and be needed and them go Enterprise
- Measure the value of your ecosystem and quantify it;
FIVE EFFECTIVE THINGS WE DID TO MOVE UP MARKET AND BUILD PIPELINE
Align buyer expectations
- Build the right tool — big companies have different needs than SMBs
- Big companies — It’s a partnership: get ready for more support and requests for services in all areas.
- Take the plane, visit them.
- If you say “no” one time it’s ok, but not ok to say no like 10 times if your customer really needs something that fits your product
Harnessing buyer intelligence
- Becoming data-driven: put enough energy and time with going upmarket by handling data, otherwise you can spend too much focus on something that needs other thing. Journey upmarket needs to be smarter — use data and insight to target and prioritize the right buyers, in the right accounts, at the right time;
- Use ABM — smart way to focus on buyers that you wanna attract because the data says them are healthier
- Importance of integrated people, process, content, technology and data around target buyers and accounts
- Continuously build a relationship and progress on it
Navigating the complex sale
- Multiple stakeholders: decision makers, influencers, advocates, legal, IT, procurement… You should help each stakeholder with their own needs and doubts. Ex: Deliver a webinar for a manager and them gain that area or a demo to someone more technical. The goal is to make the many people as possible to know/hear about you
One-size doesn't fit all
- Always be helping: brand touchpoints must be smart, insightful, and aligned with the needs, motivations and priorities of the buyer
- Start small, get a foot in the door
See ya'll tomorrow ;)
