#1. The classic high volume cadence-based outbound playbook is declining in effectiveness — but you still need to run it.
It still works. Just not nearly as well as a few years back.
#2. Your VP of Sales needs to own outbound themselves.
The toughest hire is a “Director of Outbound” today. You can’t outsource great outbound, & a VP of Sales that’s not good at it or has never done it can’t just go find a unicorn Director of Outbound.
#3. Top CROs and late-stage SVPs of Sales are getting better and better at retaining that first VP of Sales that got the company to scale.
The best CROs and such don’t replace a winning leader when they join — they augment them and help them scale further.
#4. ABM isn’t a failure — it’s just you can’t turn it all into software.
It’s not ABM that’s failed, rather it’s not doing the work. Hyper personalized, custom outreach that deeply understands the specific needs of a prospect still works well in most cases.
#5. Everyone needs an outbound team now.
Sales is being pushed more and more not just to close leads from marketing, but source more and more of its own customers. Even in SMB and mid-market.
#6. An interim VP of Sales can work — if it’s done right.
The key is often narrowing their spec — i.e., just do inbound. And getting a time-based commitment, e.g. a year. 4 days a week from a top candidate with a narrow spec can be a lot better than no VP of Sales at all.
Amplitude is the first pure-play analytics SaaS company to IPO in quite a while
It's growing a stunning 57% at $150m+ ARR ... and that's up from 50% just a year ago
It's a $7B leader so many of us rely on in our products
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. 1,200 total paying customers, with 300 of them at $100k ARR and 22 at $1m+ ARR
Amplitude has consistently gone upmarket, but not radically. This is the sort of organic upmarket path a lot of us see, growing more enterprise each year:
#2. Customer count growing as fast as revenue — rare, & a great sign for future
New customers grew from +41% in 2020 to +51% in 2021! Most leaders at scale with high NRR get more & more revenue from existing base. Having that high a ratio is a strong sign of future growth.
Expensify was founded way back in 2008, in the dawn of mobile, and took 13 years to file to IPO
When Covid hit, the business was hit hard as travel stopped
But then ... it's roared back to 60% growth (!) at $140m ARR. And on to IPO shortly!
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. Only 140 employees (!).
$1M in ARR per employee could be a new efficiency record at IPO for SaaS. Expensify kept it lean, maybe almost too lean. They raised little VC capital and became cash-flow positive.
As part of that, they learned to outsource anything they could (vs hiring internally), and maximized the PLG playbook … leading to a stunning $1m in ARR per employee. We can’t all do this. But it shows it can be done.
It's one that just ... always was growing at epic rates, from YC Demo Day to IPO
It's growing a stunning 69% a year at $250,000,000+ in ARR
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. 152% NRR from $100k+ customers.
We’re getting used to seeing these super-high NRR numbers from the top developer-focused leaders, in many cases because utility pricing often encourages it (see also Datadog, Twilio, etc). Still, these are truly top-tier numbers:
#2. 97% GRR (Gross Retention Rate)
It’s great and helpful to see this broken out as well to compare yourself to. GitLab’s customers … stay. Almost all of them.
97% GRR is world-class. Service Now has 99% -- but their customers sign 3 year contracts!!
$1M in ARR per employee could be a new efficiency record at IPO for SaaS:
An incredible 60% of their revenue comes from employees using the free version on their own, for their own expenses, and then socializing it to their "boss".