Just moving on from the lowest performer (or two) gives you a 10%+ boost right then and there
Leads are precious for quite a while
Once you hire a strong VP of Sales, this problem will solve itself. She’ll make the calls, and backfill her team, and cover all the leads one way or another.
But if you’re still running sales yourself after 2 reps or so, you’ll usually hire a few reps that simply can’t repeat the quirky playbook of the 2 you hired that can close
That’s your fault, not theirs. But it happens in almost every startup I’ve worked with.
Datadog is the latest Cloud leader to grow faster than ever
It's now growing 75% at $1.2 Billion in ARR!!
The key? Getting customers to buy 4+ products
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. 1,800 customers with ARR of $100,000 or more, a year-over-year increase of 66% from 1,082.
Datadog isn’t leaving smaller customers behind, but they are increasingly a smaller % of revenue. $100k+ customers have gone from 50% of revenue in 2016 to almost 80% today:
#2. More product, more products, more products.
10 new products this year. Almost all the Cloud leaders accelerating after $100m ARR, let alone $1B ARR, are multi-product.
#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.
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.