1.
SaaStr Annual 2021:
Session Summaries
September 27-29, 2021

2.
The Pricing Model Shift: How Evolving to Consumption-Based
Pricing has Accelerated Fast-Growing Companies (1/2)
Speakers: Matt Kropp, Managing Director & Partner, BCG; Courtney Dong, Associate Director, Growth Technology, BCG
Description:
There have been major shifts in how tech companies think about pricing today, with the fastest-growing ones focusing increasingly more on enabling
the right pricing model to drive accelerated growth. In this session, BCG pricing experts Matt Kropp and Courtney Dong, will share their insights on
how the evolution of pricing models to consumption-based has accelerated the growth of many companies to become unicorns.
Session summary:
• A major shift is ongoing in how SaaS companies are evaluated, with the typical strong emphasis on Rule of 40 is moving towards a focus on
companies' ability to increasingly grow ARR from their customer base, i.e. Net Revenue Retention
• Four dimensions to increase ARR: Price increase / pricing structure, Volume expansion, Product/cross-sell expansion, Product lineup upsell
• Changing SaaS pricing model is a major revenue growth lever: Changing pricing model typically results in a 20-25% increase in ARR
• SaaS pricing models have started to move from the traditional subscription pricing towards consumption pricing and hybrid models – BCG’s
survey of IT buyers suggest SaaS buyers want and expect more consumption-based pricing models
• Important to structure pricing in a way that scales with the value your product generates for the customer, i.e. you're only charging more
when the customer sees that it receives more value
• Examples for situations where consumption-based pricing should be considered:
• Efficiency = fewer users: If your product provides efficiencies which result in requiring fewer paid users, a per-seat subscription model does
not align with the value you provide to your customer
• UI vs. API: Think carefully how your API will be used & deliver value to customers and price accordingly relative to your UI-based product-
otherwise there’s a cannibalization risk of customers bypassing your per-seat UI-product by using your API directly into their own solution
• Spiky usage profiles: Flat subscriptions for e.g. payment solutions or logistics solutions which may have very large seasonal variation will
risk drastic underpricing at peak periods and overpricing most of the year
• Cloud infrastructure: AWS/Azure and other cloud vendors are actively pushing towards consumption-based pricing to align their costs with
customer usage, i.e. increased traffic/compute = higher costs
• Consumption/usage-based pricing forces organizations to optimize around customer usage and getting good at "expansion driving expansion" and
helping customers get the most out of your product
• Consumption-based pricing is also very powerful for "land and expand", allows for a very low (or free) entry point which then scales very well
with customer adoption and usage

3.
The Pricing Model Shift: How Evolving to Consumption-Based
Pricing has Accelerated Fast-Growing Companies (2/2)
Speakers: Matt Kropp, Managing Director & Partner, BCG; Courtney Dong, Associate Director, Growth Technology, BCG
Description:
There have been major shifts in how tech companies think about pricing today, with the fastest-growing ones focusing increasingly more on enabling
the right pricing model to drive accelerated growth. In this session, BCG pricing experts Matt Kropp and Courtney Dong, will share their insights on
how the evolution of pricing models to consumption-based has accelerated the growth of many companies to become unicorns.
Session summary:
• Important to consider transparency to manage expectation around cost - especially when there are unexpected changes in usage
• Consider implementing usage tiers where they pre-pay for expected usage
• Opportunity to manage overage in various ways, from some overage flexibility included in the price in the most lenient end, to more
expensive marginal usage in the more punitive end
• Pricing should often be non-linear so you can have competitive pricing throughout the low-high usage segments (customers can have usage
patterns varying by several orders of magnitude, large customers expect a lower price per unit)
• BCG recommends a logarithmic discount curve, typically 15-20% discount for every 10x increase in usage
• 7 considerations when designing a consumption-based pricing model:
• Choose consumption metrics that are easy to track and measurable
• Ensure that sales channels are aligned with pricing model
• Scale pricing with customers' perception of value and willingness to pay
• Design a pricing model that customers perceive as fair
• Go for a simple and predictable pricing so customers can budget for it
• Align base pricing to your cost to serve to recover cost as customers' usage profile changes
• Align pricing to market and competitive dynamics
• Subscriptions vs. consumption-based pricing and valuations:
• Switching to consumption-based pricing can result in a temporary through in revenue - as long as this is communicated and modeled out
well to demonstrate that the change will let you scale ARR faster over time, investors will typically reward (or at least not punish) you for it

4.
How to Perfect the Customer Journey from Marketing to
Sales to CS
Speakers: Waseem Daher, CEO, Pilot; Chloe Stewart, CRO, Pilot
Session summary:
• Always center the customer throughout the customer journey: Your job isn't selling your thing, it's solving their problem. Customers
rarely are looking to buy a product, rather to find a solution to a problem they are having
• Centering on the customer starts with the marketing process: Blasting prospects with "Buy our stuff"-messages isn't that helpful, but
content that addresses the customer's needs is - focus on answering questions and providing information, creating awareness about
your brand and expertise, i.e. building a relationship that puts you top of mind for when they encounter a problem/event that puts
them in the market for your services
• Effectively, your customer is identifying the problem, researching solutions and comparing product options
• The mid-point is sales: Once the customer moves forward in their journey towards Sales, they are really trying to figure out what to go
with - coach your sales team to go with a consultative approach, listen to what the customer needs, help them understand their
options, and how your solution can and cannot help them meet their goals
• Have good systems/tools in place to capture customer information, so they don't have to repeat themselves & enable other parts
of your organization can learn from each customer journey
• Build trust by letting prospects now when your product or service is not the right for them
• Once the sale is made, it is really important to ensure the customer's problem gets solved - the purchase isn't the end of the customer
journey! Important to follow up with customer success to ensure customer needs are continuously met. Proactively check in with
customers periodically (e.g. quarterly) to ensure they are doing well and proactively meet upcoming needs - this gets the flywheel
turning on customer happiness, NPS, upselling/expansion etc.
• Conclusions:
1. Your job isn't to sell them something, it is to help them solve their problem
2. Listen, so you know what their needs are and if you can meet those needs, or not
3. Stay in touch with your customers, you cannot manage what you cannot measure

5.
7 Proven Strategies to Reduce SaaS Churn and Give Your
Retention Rate a Boost (1/2)
Speakers: Deborah Preston, VP of Client Success, Verifone
Description:
As a software or a SaaS company, you are constantly in the almost impossible position of having to balance the two imperatives – growth
and retention. With recurring revenue businesses, high churn rates can seem like a losing battle. The good news is that reducing churn and
increasing customer value, while hard, is not impossible. This session looks at real-world commerce strategies that SaaS and software
companies can use to move the needle on their retention and expansion strategies.
Session summary:
• Churn - why fight it?
• It can be 5x more costly to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer
• Repeat customers are likely to spend 67% more than your new customers
• Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your company's profitability by 75%
• The typical lifecycle of a SaaS customer can be considered a loop, where the renewal & retention really is analogous to the initial customer
acquisition
• Measuring customer retention can be done with a variety of KPIs which can be situation specific - important that whatever KPIs you pick a) work for
your situation and b) you stay with them over time
• Customer churn rate - what is it and at what point does the customer actually churn (cancelling one product? All products? From termination
notice, or when it goes into effect)?
• Emphasis has shifted to retention vs. initial acquisition through the covid-19 pandemic
• What is an acceptable churn rate?
• 5-7% churn rate is acceptable, but only 1/4 of SaaS companies with over $15m in ARR are maintaining a low average annual churn rate at
6.3%
• Even the smallest reduction in churn can lead to material impacts on profitability and valuation, in one example a 2% drop in churn resulted
in a 20% higher company valuation
• Two types of churn which are important to separate: Involuntary churn vs. voluntary churn
• Involuntary churn can be hard declines / permanent authorization failures (e.g. frozen / cancelled credit cards associated with the card,
bankruptcies) but also temporary authorization failures where another payment attempt is needed
• Voluntary churn is where the customer either is actively leaving or downgrading to a free tier (if applicable)

6.
7 Proven Strategies to Reduce SaaS Churn and Give Your
Retention Rate a Boost (2/2)
Speakers: Deborah Preston, VP of Client Success, Verifone
Description:
As a software or a SaaS company, you are constantly in the almost impossible position of having to balance the two imperatives – growth
and retention. With recurring revenue businesses, high churn rates can seem like a losing battle. The good news is that reducing churn and
increasing customer value, while hard, is not impossible. This session looks at real-world commerce strategies that SaaS and software
companies can use to move the needle on their retention and expansion strategies.
Session summary:
• 7 strategies to reduce SaaS churn and boost retention
1. Encourage your customers to auto renew in a transparent manner (do not try to hide it in hidden contract clauses) - this enables higher
authorization rates, increased customer lifetime values and 3x higher likelihood of retaining the customer vs. manual renewals
2. For both manual and automatic renewals, it is important to leverage email offers and reminders to communicate early (and for manual renewals,
often) ahead of renewal to ensure a positive renewal experience for the customer
3. Offer flexibility and value, i.e. different billing lengths, ability to pause their subscription or downgrade/upgrade to a more appropriate product tier
as alternatives to outright churn - also consider usage-based pricing and grace periods to ensure service continuity in case of clerical/admin issues
4. Be transparent, make cancellation simple to enable trust. Perhaps counterintuitively, having a clear "cancel workflow" for the customer to feel
they have a simple exit builds trust while letting you offer the right incentives / offers to stay (e.g. discounted upgrades, free trials, incentives to
convert to a recurring billing plan etc.)
5. Use smart payment tools to reduce involuntary churn from failed payments (1 of 6 card payments fail for one reason or another), e.g. multi-
currency management for local billing (up to 25% increase in authorization), intelligent payment routing to the best gateways to handle them (2-
5% improvement), dynamic 3D secure to mitigate fraud, account updater services to ensure billing continuity for active subscription (up to 40%
increase in retention), expired card handling (4% increase in authorization rates), configurable retry logic (recovers up to 20% of transactions from
soft declines), Dunning management (if all else fails, send email to try to recover payments even from hard declines)
6. Follow up with churned customers, learn and recover to continuously improve: What was the reason for cancellation, how can we improve
communication and support, comments/concerns that would enable better relationship-building in the future?
7. Have an effective customer success program! According to Jason Lemkin "customer success is where 90% of the revenue is", so monitor usage and
utilization closely to predict customer retention behavior - the more functions a customer uses the more sticky your product becomes. Have
dedicated focus areas for each of initial implementation and ongoing help

7.
Mastermind Masterclass: Adding Outbound Sales &
Marketing to the Product-Led Growth Engine (1/2)
Speakers: Sara V. Bright, CMO, Twilio; Carilu Dietrich, Fractional CMO, 1Password; Viviana Faga, GP, Coda; Stacey Epstein, CMO, Freshworks
Description:
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.
Session summary:
§ What is product-led growth? It is a growth and customer acquisition model that relies on the product and viral hooks to drive customer adoption
and retention, i.e. a “consumerization” of enterprise sales. Effectively this means that the product “sells itself” and lets users buy and start using
the product without having to go through a traditional enterprise sales process:
§ At Atlassian this was driven by founders in Australia not really wanting to talk to anyone, at Twilio they were until recently 100% self-
service, focused on selling to developers (who typically do not want to talk to anyone, especially aggressive salespeople)
§ PLG doesn’t necessarily have to be “viral” in the traditional sense, more important that the customer can mostly self-serve through the buying
process – sometimes product-qualified leads (PQLs) need assistance from sales, especially if the buyer isn’t the same as the user
§ PLG requires a significant investment in product: Looking at PLG-driven SaaS companies, you typically find lower than average S&M spend, but
higher than average R&D spend since the product has to be spectacular and meet customer needs while they try it out
§ E.g. Atlassian spends only 15% of revenue on S&M (no significant sales team), while they spend 35% of revenue on R&D
§ Implement a shared metric for customer acquisitions and encourage collaboration so everyone pulls in the same direction, across marketing,
engineering, customer success and product teams: For pure PLG the critical journey is “website to trial”, and then “what features/journey do we
show them to lead to a purchase?”, i.e. traffic to trial to customer conversion
§ Where does sales add the most value in PLG? Use sales for higher-touch accounts that spend several hundred $k/$m+ - the threshold for when to
refer a PQL to Sales will vary depending on your pipeline and should be evaluated on an ongoing basis
§ Important to properly design a PLG strategy, if you have an established and working enterprise sales process, be careful about disrupting this
motion by “slapping on” PLG without a thoughtful implementation (e.g. account-based marketing, customer segmentation etc.)

8.
Mastermind Masterclass: Adding Outbound Sales &
Marketing to the Product-Led Growth Engine (2/2)
Speakers: Sara V. Bright, CMO, Twilio; Carilu Dietrich, Fractional CMO, 1Password; Viviana Faga, GP, Coda; Stacey Epstein, CMO, Freshworks
Description:
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.
Session summary:
§ Stay true to who you are: Teams successfully took on Slack (PLG) by staying true to Microsoft’s ”traditional” enterprise outbound sales motion and
leveraging its customer relationships
§ Lessons learned:
§ Stacey: Collaboration is very important. If you’re spending your time arguing about credit internally, you are wasting your time. Care about
overall pipeline and deals closed instead of caring who originated the sale.
§ Sarah: When marrying PLG with a sales organization, get developers, product owners and sellers together in “hackathons” to accelerate
innovation
§ Carilu: Important to be mindful of what you do. If you’re serving a segment that don’t want self-service, don’t do PLG. Serve your
customers in the way they want to buy, instead of jumping on whatever is the “hot”
§ If you cannot walk people through a relatively similar user journey for broader customer segments, chances are PLG will not work for you
§ Main drivers for PLG success:
1. Your product must have product-market fit
2. “Network effect” is a critical driver, without it you will struggle to drive new traffic into your pipeline
3. Technical teams, small team buyers tend to like PLG buying journeys
4. Build systems to rapidly identify “Hot” leads
5. Beware of cannibalization – Sales and PLG will fight over leads unless you align their incentives
6. Sales adds value in complex enterprise deals – build a self-serve model for non-enterprise deals

9.
Mastermind Masterclass: The Most Common SaaS Sales
Potholes and How to Avoid Them
Speakers: Mark Roberge, Founder, Stage 2 Capital
Session summary:
§ Pothole #1: Low license utilization rates causing revenue contraction. Very often, customers only use 50% of what they are buying, but why?
While it could be customer success’ fault, it usually isn’t – the reason is that legacy sales commission plans yield low license utilization, since
traditionally you compensate a salesperson more for first revenue and less for expansion revenue
§ Try a modern approach where you compensate sales people less for first revenue and more for expansion revenue - ensues the first seats
are really using it and not sold on false premises with high risk of churn, so while initially the revenue is a little lower, you have more
sustainable growth built in
§ Pothole #2: Increasing price without a sustainable moat. Increasing the starting price increases disruption risk – better to increase ACV through
expansion
§ Pothole #3: Confusing a temporary moat with a sustainable moat. How are you defending against the competition? If it is a feature, how long will
it take your competition to build it? Imagine a team of 5x “rock star” developers in Silicon Valley take VC funding, copy your product and sell it for
half the price – do you still win?
§ Sustainable moats can be sort of be derived from Porter’s 5 forces: Network effects, brands (e.g. category creation), economies of scale,
switching costs (albeit imperfect since it doesn’t help with new deals) etc.
§ Pothole #4: Promoting your best sales rep to sales manager. The better the salesperson is, the more likely they are to be promoted to manager.
However, the better sales people are typically worse managers! The best seller isn’t necessarily the best coach. So what you do? Develop a sales
leadership pipeline and process to up-skill them with the manager skills they are lacking. Then have them hire and train a new sales person. Often
this results in the sales person preferring to stay as a sales person. Have a paid promotion path outside of management for these people too!
§ Pothole #5: Prioritizing revenue acquisition ahead of customer value creation. You’re not ready to scale until you have product-market fit and go-
to-market fit and data on your business to measure and instrumentalize. Most confuse this as having revenue – however, a better definition
would be that you have customer retention, i.e. someone bought your product and liked it enough that they bought it again. Use measurable &
instrumentable leading indicators for customer retention to figure out early if they will churn or not, e.g. Slack’s goalpost of 2000+ team messages
in the first 30 days which highly predicted renewals. The same applies to go-to-market fit, important that your LTV and CAC support scaling
§ Pothole #6: Massive hiring of salespeople in the month after a financing round. Hiring the salespeople you can effectively ramp up over time –
instead of hiring everyone all at once, hire e.g. 2x every other month and monitor your KPIs. If this works well over time, then scale up from there.

10.
Picking the Perfect Pricing Model that Fits Your App (1/2)
Speakers: Marten Mickos, CEO, HackerOne
Description:
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.
Session summary:
§ Background in a variety of software products, from games to open-source software given away for free – extensive pricing experience from lots of
trial and error
§ What is the perfect pricing model? It should make it easy (but not necessarily cheap) to make the first purchase, while scaling easily (“scaling
while you sleep”) and being straightforward to justify to the Economic Buyer (who’s not excited to buy the product) – additionally it should be
challenging for competitors to match (knowing that you will win in the long run)
§ At HackerOne, this meant increasing their pricing: Economic Buyers didn’t like the unpredictability of HackerOne’s previous “bounty”
business model where fees were paid to their white hat hackers, with a 20% commission to HackerOne – instead they moved to a much
more expensive (but predictable) fixed subscription model, which the Economic Buyers could easily forecast
§ Customers look for convenience and predictability of cost – important to make it clear and reduce complexity, e.g. Databricks’ removing a lot of
complexity by defining their own unit of compute (DataBricks Unit, DBU) and having a clear, public pricing matrix of cost per DBU for a handful of
job types and service tiers, putting competitive pressure on their competitors
§ When Net Revenue Retention is high, you know your pricing is working and scalable – a world class example is Snowflake, which in the last five
quarters have posted NRRs in the ~160-170% range: Like DataBricks, they leverage a consumption-based pricing model with their own defined
unit (Snowflake credit) with three different priority tiers, plus two tiers of storage cost
§ Think about pricing in terms of the LifeTime Value of the customer (LTV): The gaming industry is particularly good at this, it is the only thing they
think about – are you a player that will play often and spend money? Will you spend a lot (special incentives to keep them going) or a little (show
them ads)? Axie Infinity is a particularly innovative example, they have sold $2bn worth of Ethereum NFTs in-game purchases in just a few months
§ Realize that some people spend time to save money, others spend money to save time – and both can be valuable. The former provides value by
providing a lot of input to the product, submitting bug reports and so on, while the latter will pay a lot to not have to deal with the hassle
§ Where possible, try to price for both of these groups

11.
Picking the Perfect Pricing Model that Fits Your App (2/2)
Speakers: Marten Mickos, CEO, HackerOne
Description:
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.
Session summary:
§ There are a variety of pricing models, and there’s a variety of ways they can be mixed and matched – important to pick what suits your customers
(and their Economic Buyers): Some prefer the predictability of fixed subscriptions over potential saving of paying for what they use in a
consumption pricing model, some like all-in-one whereas others want to pay only for features they use etc.
§ Freemium is however an all-in proposition – if choosing freemium, you need to have an ambition that everyone picks your free tier to start
§ Pricing that works for early customers may not be right for the mainstream market, and your early customers will usually not like it when you
inevitably have to change it – consider a “grandfathered” transition period of 1-2 years to give them time to digest your new pricing model
§ The ultimate pricing model goal: The best pricing makes both buyer and seller successful

12.
Hold Onto Your SaaS: How ClickUp Rocketed from $4M to
$70M ARR in Two Years with Product-Led Growth
Speakers: Aaron Cort, VP of Operations, ClickUp
Description:
In a world full of endless software innovations and limitless competition, getting your software into the hands of new users and growing revenues can be a
monumental challenge. ClickUp was built to take on the hyper-competitive project management and collaborative work industry, and has not only carved out a
niche for itself but has actually taken market share from some of the biggest companies in the world. One of the key drivers of ClickUp's growth from $4M to $70M
ARR in two years has been its combination of product-led growth and organic marketing. In this presentation, ClickUp's VP of Operations, Aaron Cort, will share
how ClickUp's focus on building foundational product-led growth and organic marketing efforts combined with strategic paid marketing attribution and brand-
building with out-of-home advertising, enabled the company to take on one of the most competitive SaaS markets in the world to win.
Session summary:
§ Assembling a rocket ship using PLG: User experience is the center point, build your support, engineering and design efforts accordingly
§ PLG enabled ClickUp to find natural product-market-fit before raising funding; which again created a ton of word of mouth/virality which continues to generate
organic growth for ClickUp today
§ Important not to confuse inflated numbers from inorganic/paid marketing with true product-market fit
§ With effective PLG, you can enable a “sales and marketing-assisted” growth journey – this takes you to the “take off” point, from which you can start
effectively applying paid marketing strategies to augment your organic PLG sales growth
§ Paid marketing drives accelerated growth: Analyze key business and performance metrics with scale, important to measure the true value of performance with
cohort analysis – paid marketing allows product to expand into new markets by inflating demand faster
§ Core KPIs: In particular, LTV, CAC, CAC Payback, churn and NRR are critical to track systematically (e.g. using ProfitWell)
§ Generally you should target a 3:1 LTV/CAC ratio and a 18 month CAC payback (industry average)
§ Cohort expansion over time tells the growth story, and ultimately comes back to the development of LTV and CAC over time
§ Launching the rocket: Double down on all the foundational work done on your brand across your website, ads, billboards etc. to create awareness
§ Not only a benefit for sales, but brand awareness can materially help recruiting efforts as well
§ Brand lift is important to measure across tiers of brand awareness: a) unaware of your brand, b) aided awareness, c) unaided awareness, d) dominant –
effective creative work is crucial to lift awareness, and can be built as an internal capacity and/or with external agencies
§ Measurement and attribution is core to paid customer acquisition – attribution modeling will let you observe and predict free-to-paid behavior
§ Keep it simple: Know what matters most to your business, and choose something transparent and understandable
§ Lets you understand which marketing channels work and which ones don’t, so you can iterate quickly and continue to make big bets
§ 3 key conclusions: PLG is built on a critical foundation of organic product-market-fit; Hone in on attribution and analytics to scale growth efficiently (unit
economics); Brand is inherent to PLG and important to measure as best you can (account for entropy)

13.
From the Desk of ProfitWell's CEO: A Playbook for Revenue
Automation Based on 24,173 SaaS Companies (1/2)
Speakers: Patrick Campbell, CEO, ProfitWell
Description:
Our industry has shifted almost a decade in the past year, which means the playbook for growth and accelerating revenue has changed dramatically. Given
these shifts and ProfitWell's unique access to SaaS market data, their CEO Patrick Campbell will be premiering the results of a deep study on what's shifted,
as well as what the new framework for revenue success is based on those who've accelerated in this new era (and those who haven't). Attendees will take
away a better understanding of where the SaaS market is heading, as well as actionable takeaways from the data to implement.
Session summary:
§ How much can you actually impact growth? How much of growth has historically been driven by execution vs. powered by the market?
§ Early on, the best-performing market participants spent 14x more than the average/lower performers, i.e. “buy the market” whether by spend on
marketing or development/features
§ Once the cloud came along in the “golden age of SaaS” in the 2000-2010s with a myriad of new marketing channels, the market really was the
driving force behind most of the growth (despite everyone thinking “we’re geniuses”)
§ With the resounding success of SaaS into the 2010s came the “post-Gilded age” with 10x the competition for SaaS, 70% increase in CAC and a
60% reduction in willingness to pay over the past decade – giving rise to the recent trend of customer centricity
§ Consequentially, currently there actually is a lot you can control as a SaaS operator – great execution gives a clear advantage, and it starts with having a
great products; the best companies have engaging and well-liked products (whether measured via NPS or other metrics)
§ The best companies are great at a) acquiring customers (60% of budget), b) monetizing customers and c) retaining customers at very high rates
§ If you continuously focus on and improve on all three, you have a flywheel of growth
§ Implementing revenue automation is key; it automates revenue protection and bakes growth into your pricing and packaging
§ Subscription retention: How do we keep customer around longer and paying more? The most popular KPIs are Net Revenue Retention and User/Revenue
Churn, and key inputs to these are a) Active Cancellations, b) Expansion Revenue and c) Payment Failures
§ Active cancellations: Ultimate goal is to reduce the number of customers “clicking the cancel button” – not implementing plan optimization is a common
pitfall: By increasing term length to quarterly/annual plans, SaaS companies can increase average lifetime value (LTV) by 100-300%+
§ Ask customers to upgrade to quarterly/annual also after they sign up (many companies don’t) – in aa self-service / product-led growth model,
offering a simple switch to annual plans in month 2 to 10 typically works well
§ Win-back and triage cancellations: Make it easy for customers to cancel through an automated workflow, don’t force them to call you, that will feel like
you are “hijacking” them and ultimately reduces your chances of re-activation

14.
From the Desk of ProfitWell's CEO: A Playbook for Revenue
Automation Based on 24,173 SaaS Companies (2/2)
Session summary:
§ Add a little bit of “friction” by having a 2 question survey of “why are you leaving?” and “why did you like the product?”: Based on these answers you can
provide options like salvage offers, maintenance plans, option to pause, downgrade to a freemium tier, or alternatively “play chicken” and let them go
§ Automatic salvage offers and good off-boarding workflows can lower cancellations by 10-25%, which is a dramatic reduction of lost revenue
§ Don’t forget to try to win back customers: Often they don’t churn due to reasons that have anything to do with you – figure out why!
§ Expansion revenue: The best subscription companies have more than 20% of new revenue coming from existing customers
§ Add-on products are the most underutilized aspects of any subscription company: Increased ARR-potential and higher growth (multi-product
companies grow 30-50%pts faster on average than single-product companies),
§ Additionally, multi-product customers tend to be stickier, resulting in higher customer LTVs
§ Value metrics: Most SaaS companies are not pricing based on a value metric, which gives up a lot of growth potential from expansion revenue / getting
the value metric right can enable success even if you have made mistakes in other aspects of your pricing / monetization strategy
§ Payment failures: Credit cards are prone to failure, and represent the largest single bucket of reasons for losing customers (130 different ways a credit or
debit card transaction fails) since most SaaS companies are terrible at recovering failed payments (~30% success rates where it should be 60-80%)
§ DO NOT use email before a point of failure – correlates to 10-20% higher rate of active cancellations
§ DO NOT used stylized emails, plain text has 50% more engagement, even better if it is localized into the local language
§ Ideally make it frictionless for the customer to update their credit card info (avoid requiring a login, navigating through account settings etc.)
§ Localization correlates with higher growth, even if just cosmetic (getting the currency symbol localized) and not considering willingness-to-pay
§ Freemium connects the whole revenue automation wheel: If you are selling to someone paying on a credit card, you should at least debate a freemium
model to ensure whoever you are selling to already have been conditioned to using your product – typically customers that have converted from the free
to a paid tier have a 50% lower CAC, 15-20% higher retention rates and a 2x NPS than customers that came in directly on paid or via free trials
Speakers: Patrick Campbell, CEO, ProfitWell
Description:
Our industry has shifted almost a decade in the past year, which means the playbook for growth and accelerating revenue has changed dramatically. Given
these shifts and ProfitWell's unique access to SaaS market data, their CEO Patrick Campbell will be premiering the results of a deep study on what's shifted,
as well as what the new framework for revenue success is based on those who've accelerated in this new era (and those who haven't). Attendees will take
away a better understanding of where the SaaS market is heading, as well as actionable takeaways from the data to implement.

15.
Hyperscaling Post-IPO
Speakers: Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty; Sameer Dholakia, Former CEO & Board Director, SendGrid
Description:
An IPO is a huge milestone and accomplishment for any company but after this achievement is reached, what’s next? In this session, CEO of PagerDuty,
Jennifer Tejada discusses how to grow a company after its IPO, successes and lessons learned at PagerDuty and her next steps towards a billion in revenue.
Session summary:
§ Why go public? Many ask how to time an IPO, but it is more important to understand why you want to go public. Will the changes to your day-to-day as
a public company be helpful to your company and scaling, or will it be a hindrance? In PagerDuty’s case, it was to demonstrate that they are a viable,
dependable platform as a long-term partner to the largest companies in the world. For SendGrid the driver was access to capital for strategic M&A
§ Signal the next milestone: Make sure to think of the IPO as a milestone rather than an exit – for your private investors it may be the latter, but for the
company the IPO is only a steppingstone to setting even more audacious goals and motivating your team to pursue them
§ Ensure you continue to develop and maintain your company culture as you scale your organization – goes hand in hand with messaging to your
new (public) investors and customers; make sure you set up your people to succeed, empower them to do their jobs effectively
§ Design for durable growth: While you should have visibility into your first six quarters as a public company ahead of IPO, the long-term goals and
narrative are of utmost importance – without conviction in your goals, mission and vision it will be hard to demonstrate a story of long term growth
§ Over time, you’ll see more and more unstructured problems and use cases that you may not envision – important to continuously innovate and
expand your product to meet demand throughout customer organizations, whether this is taking customer feedback or having a product
platform which lends itself to customers to build into their own custom workflows
§ Operationalize trust between your company and your customers to ensure your customers are helping build your narrative – you’re a critical part
of their workflows and ideally play an integral part of the story behind their achievements (e.g. PagerDuty helping digital transformation in a
non-profit doing time-sensitive cornea transplants)
§ Build a deep leadership bench: As a CEO, focus on the work only the CEO can do – do not sleep on addressing middle/senior managers that have
plateaued or gotten as far as they will go (help level up or replace/find successor), ensure they are building out a deep bench of talent to safeguard
organizational resiliency
§ Do well and do good: Don’t ignore social impact and responsibility – all leaders should strive to do good with the scale of the platforms they control,
with very real benefits of demonstrating your purpose as a company and something for your employees to rally around on a higher level than “just” the
products and services you offer
§ Put your own oxygen mask on first: Be mindful of your mental and physical health; running a public company is very hard, especially so during a crisis –
many will look to you as a trusted resource, so ensure you put your own health first so you can serve the business no matter what comes up

16.
10 Tips:
CMO + CRO = Love....Building Lasting Leadership (1/2)
Speakers: Tolithia Kornweibel, CRO, Gusto
Description:
How do you ensure growth is good growth? How do you build a durable business that can withstand the challenges that come up? Tolithia
Kornweibel, CRO (previously CMO) of Gusto, discusses a CMO-CRO working model that works for long-term, durable growth.
Session summary:
§ Finding and hiring great sales and marketing leaders can be crucial for success of SaaS companies – but often these marketing and sales leaders
“flame out” relatively quickly post-hire: If you’re hiring for these executives and do not have experience in them yourself, find someone who does
to help you – their tenure is a two-way street, and it usually comes down to friction between sales and marketing
§ Tip 1: Don’t believe the hype - this is a surmountable problem so don’t send signals that you expect drama and a lot of compromise (i.e. “you get
what you give”)
§ Tip 2: Always be networking – use your network to learn what you need to do differently, not to find the “perfect fit”
§ Tip 3: Better recruiting - the inbound messages candidates typically are inundated with are “mad libs”
§ If the message says the CEO is interested, CEO should be sender; exit prospects, TAM or having raised a ton of money isn’t necessarily
interesting for someone you’re hiring to build out your distribution; being “the first [sales/marketing] hire” isn’t interesting in itself, more
important to understand level of autonomy and empowerment (i.e. “will I have a seat at the table?”); only mention investors/board if they
actually have a relevant voice (e.g. previously were executives themselves); be respectful of them time, signal how much time you’re trying
to get (e.g. “can I pick your brain for 30 minutes”)
§ Tip 4: Understand your go-to-market model – the market model guides the leadership model. If you’re high velocity/low ACV/product-led, hire
your CMO first, this will be the strategic business leader owning revenue until you hire your CRO (get their input on this hire), and vice versa – if
you don’t know your model(s), you should find someone with more experience rather than less and willingness to get hands dirty – matchmake
for chemistry and trust, and pay them well (in cash) to de-risk the move to leave e.g. a public company job for your early-stage company
§ Signs of durable sales leaders: Repeatability is better than relationships, ability to “move the middle” is better than just one “rock star”,
Rule of 40 is more important than valuation, need to be inspirational for customers and team and have an experimental mindset
§ Signs of durable marketing leaders: ROI is more important than budget, LTV/CAC more important than cost per lead, viral coefficient (how
many lead are from customer referrals? How many did you not actively source?) more important than brand awareness, need to be
inspirational for prospects and stakeholders and have an experimental mindset

17.
10 Tips:
CMO + CRO = Love....Building Lasting Leadership (2/2)
Speakers: Tolithia Kornweibel, CRO, Gusto
Description:
How do you ensure growth is good growth? How do you build a durable business that can withstand the challenges that come up? Tolithia
Kornweibel, CRO (previously CMO) of Gusto, discusses a CMO-CRO working model that works for long-term, durable growth.
Session summary:
§ Tip 5: Expect Impact, demand progress – excuses around building campaigns, long sales cycles etc. are not valid excuses for showing some
progress every month, demand positive progress
§ Tip 6: Have both CMO and CRO own revenue together, they are both responsible for success and failure across LTV, CAC, pitch, spending time with
customers etc.
§ Tip 7: Expect expertise, don’t signal that what you expect from your CMO or CRO is less than others, or worse, easy
§ Tip 8: Let us be peers, even if the CMO and CRO are stacked, still “set the able” for both seats in the leadership team
§ Tip 9: Fire fast if someone doesn’t work, at month 6 you know if someone is working or not – be aggressive to not lose out on the next 12-18
months from a replacement if it comes to that
§ Saving (or not) your sales and marketing marriage: Have a small group aside (see slide in image
§ Tip 10: Use “GTM” accurately, respect our heritage, what’s been lost and reinvented. Ideally, stop using “go-to-market” as an expression – it
signals that S&M is not part of the entire strategy, sounds like an activity that happens after something more important has happened (when in
S&M are the ones continuously speaking to customers and prospects in the market)
§ Overarching conclusion: Hire the right leaders, and empower them to succeed

18.
Scaling Your Startup From $20M to $100M (1/2)
Speakers: Cathy Gao, Partner, Sapphire Ventures; Anoushka Vaswani, Partner, Lightspeed Ventures; Carlos Delatorre, CRO, TripActions; Latane Conant, CMO, 6sense
Description:
Growing a startup is just as challenging as starting one. There are many things to think through and steps to take when scaling from $20M to $100M in ARR, and
getting ready for that much anticipated exit. How do I prepare for an IPO or M&A? What’s the best way to ramp up my sales and marketing engine? At what point
do I invest in the customer success function? How do I ensure I have the right team on board? And last but not least, what should I consider when partnering with
later-stage investors? These are some of the top questions startups grapple with as they enter the growth stages of their businesses. Join this panel to hear about
the steps you need to take in order to grow your business and ensure long term success.
Session summary:
§ Two major topics: Go-to-market execution and talent & culture as you expand and grow your enterprise
§ GTM can be pretty tricky as you go from $20m towards $100m ARR, since previously successful strategies may need dramatic changes or outright replacement
- sub $20m, you’re really in “beast mode” where everyone is running at everything
§ At $20m+ you need to build teams of dedicated specialists to operationalize and create repeatability, i.e. building “a machine”
§ Define your revenue operating model (not marketing or sales operating model): Revenue operations need to be cross-functional across the business
and tracking GTM KPIs holistically across marketing and sales and the entire journey from lead to sale
§ Generate and catch demand effectively and efficiently: Often BDRs end up wasting a colossal amount of time on prospects that are not going to go
anywhere, or you don’t have a crystal clear profile of what a successful Account Executive looks like
§ Never think small, do a few things boldly: If you’re at $20m, act and think as if you’re at $100m
§ Recruiting and enablement needs to be a core competency: You need to recruit exceptional sales talent and give them great training, prior experience
in your segment isn’t a prerequisite (and can often be unhelpful if you’re trying to disrupt incumbents)
§ Develop methodology on how to identify and develop champions who will help you land your deals
§ What about product-led growth (PLG)? PLG can be effective, but it isn’t something you necessarily have or ability to create, and typically cannot get you from
$20m to $100m on its own since Economic Buyers most likely won’t ever see or touch your product – you need an effective sales motion to assist PLG when at
scale; however, PLG is a very effective “hook” vs. offering marketing content via some lead capture form
§ The only real asset you have in a sales team is time, so make use of that time as efficiently as possible: Your sales team is the most expensive GTM channel you
have – leverage marketing to figure out what the most “winnable” demand signals are, and feed those high-quality leads into your sales team rather than
maximizing the number of (low quality) MQLs
§ On the flipside: Have Marketing involved when defining Sales territories and markets / segments to ensure there’s a way for Marketing to effectively
feed the Sales engine with high-quality, winnable MQLs
§ Avoid counterproductive tension between departments: High functioning managers have at least as good relationships with other department heads as they
do with their own teams – the end goal is that the company meets its goals, not the individual team

19.
Scaling Your Startup From $20M to $100M (2/2)
Session summary:
§ If Account Executives are responsible for lead-gen as well, leads from BDRs and Marketing will be like a “gift from the heavens”, and they will treat these
counterparties with far more respect than if they don’t
§ Thoughts on talent and culture:
§ People are ultimately either your product or the makers of your product – strive to have fun with the work you do and products you make! Poll your
employees “How many of the last 10 working days were fun?” to track your “fun factor” (TripActions targets 8 of 10)
§ What does the right talent look like? For instance, a great quota-carrying sales rep has a good combination of intangibles (drive, intelligence/smart
enough to be effective, coachability, right values) and tangibles (pipeline building, close rates etc.)
§ Maintain and promote your culture by having frequent, open communication, e.g. quarterly check-ins and periodical townhalls etc.
§ Mid-year go-to-market kickoff events: Involve the entire go-to-market motion, not just sales; have high-quality content (target quality should be at least
on par with a customer event!) and don’t waste a good deadline to get things done, e.g. sales materials, strategy etc.
§ Morale and burnout: The challenging nature of morale and burnout is that you need individual interventions – everyone is always going through
something, and “one size does NOT fit all”; however most people thrive when learning, growing and feeling like they are winning
§ Everyone should be recruiting: If you’re trying to grow 100% annually, the only real hurdle is hiring enough good people – be vary of managers that are not
actively filling their recruiting pipeline by leveraging their own network, reaching out to prospective candidates etc. (i.e. expecting HR or Recruiting to do
everything for them)
§ Promote from within, if possible: The only reason not to would be if the skill gap is greater than what the internal candidate can fill while the company
waits a reasonable time
§ Always ask people where they want to be 2-3 jobs from now: Helps with retention and filling organizational gaps, as well as surfacing where you really
do need to recruit externally
§ Always be learning as a leadership team + think bigger + “Slope is more important than scale” when evaluating candidates (someone having built from $50m
to $90m is probably better at building things than someone having overseen $80m to $120m)
Speakers: Cathy Gao, Partner, Sapphire Ventures; Anoushka Vaswani, Partner, Lightspeed Ventures; Carlos Delatorre, CRO, TripActions; Latane Conant, CMO, 6sense
Description:
Growing a startup is just as challenging as starting one. There are many things to think through and steps to take when scaling from $20M to $100M in ARR, and
getting ready for that much anticipated exit. How do I prepare for an IPO or M&A? What’s the best way to ramp up my sales and marketing engine? At what point
do I invest in the customer success function? How do I ensure I have the right team on board? And last but not least, what should I consider when partnering with
later-stage investors? These are some of the top questions startups grapple with as they enter the growth stages of their businesses. Join this panel to hear about
the steps you need to take in order to grow your business and ensure long term success.