16 Ways to Level Up in 2022 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin | SaaStr Software Community

Anyhow, I thought this could be an informal session. You could grab a cocktail or a snack, but the session's 20 Upgrades for 2022, 20 things you can do to almost guarantee you will grow faster this year. And what I, what I wanted to use was a bunch of surveys. So a couple of months ago, we invested a little more in our LinkedIn page. I know everyone knows LinkedIn works for B2B. But we didn't do much. We started doing some surveys, asking some of the SaaStr classic questions, and wanted to use some of the answers from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 per survey on some questions that we've talked about for years about how things work in your business and how to level them up. So I want to use about 20 of these surveys for a prop. I— we may run out of time, we may have extra time. You can interrupt a little bit. But I think some of them tie into some classic SaaStr themes. A lot of them A lot of the stuff you've heard today, but maybe we could dig in a little bit on data. And this one, and I know David Kellogg talked about it, I think Bill Binch talked about it if you heard their sessions, but I like this data, 'cause we've talked about this a lot in SaaS. There's a classic SaaS post which I really think if you haven't read, I would, one of the top 10 I would read, which is why the best sales reps close 9x more than a normal rep. Not a little bit, Not 20% more, 9x again and again and again and again. I was just talking with the top sales reach, one of the top sales reps ever, maybe the number one at outreach ever. He was 9x his first year. Even our little Saastr team over here that sells sponsors, we have one person, and it's a great sales team, we have one that has sold $23 million of sponsorships already. Okay, 9x. And we won't get into all the math today, But I did a survey and I asked, we asked, only 427 for this, but how much more does your number one sales rep close than your average sales rep? 20% said 5x or more, 35% 4x or more, and the majority 3x or more. So what do you do with this data? Great, the sales magician. The most important thing, if any of you are having any stress in your model, is one way or another move on from the bottom top 10% of your reps. Do it early. You heard David Kellogg and Bill Binch talk about making these decisions early, but think for a moment. Think how many leads— what if you took your 100 leads that you're sending to your 2 or 3 or 5 worst reps and gave them to your best reps or the middle reps, and they closed 3 times more, 9 times more? Every single time I see this happen in SaaS companies— had it happen to me back in the day as a SaaS CEO— magic happens. You just closed 20% more from the leads you already have if you concentrate them in your best reps. Now, of course, you can't give your number 1 rep all the leads. That doesn't scale. It doesn't work. But again, your bottom 10% are usually just flushing leads down the drain. So be kind, be helpful, but literally move out your bottom 10% and your revenue will literally go up in less than 1 sales cycle. It's just math. So this works for— worked for me. It works for all the companies I've invested in or worked with, and it appears to work with 427 of you as well. Just get— recycle the rep that leads to your best reps. Um, a second one I asked about what people are seeing on turnover, and we could talk about the Great Resignation and what you're seeing, what you're feeling. But the best sales teams stay together, and the best VPs of sales not only are constantly recruiting the best AEs to join them, but the best VP of sales don't let anybody good go. And design sales comp plans so that you'll never want to leave, right? And if you haven't worked in a great sales environment, you're just experiencing it today, what you'll see is literally with the best VPs of sales, there's almost no turnover on their team, and their top reps make a lot of money. That becomes a virtuous cycle. It is risky as an AE to leave and go to another startup if you're doing well, if you're making a lot of money at a SaaS company. Just because another one just raised a round or looks hot, what are the odds that you're gonna make top 10% salary if you just quit and go somewhere else? It's risky. And if you love your boss and you're making a lot of money, you're not going to leave. So I asked, what percent of your sales team turns over each year? The median appears to be about 20-25%. That's crappy. It's crappy. And the reminder is, and I think we've learned this over the years, old-school sales is some sort of bell-shaped distribution. And notwithstanding that we do want to get rid of the bottom 10%, we want everyone, we want the bell, curve to keep moving and reps to get better and better. And you want the vast majority of your sales team hitting quota. You want 80%, 90% hitting quota. It can be done. We've talked— you can check on YouTube and Google Sam Blonde, who's now CEO of Brex. We've done this so many times. You want 80% hitting quota and not having this turnover. So honestly, ask yourself 3 things. Do your reps love your VP of sales? Your good ones? If not, that may be a flag. You have a problem. The best reps should love them. Does it reward excellence? Are your top reps making a lot of money? Like depending on where you are, in the US, your best AEs should be making $300,000 for SMB, $500,000 for mid-market, and $1 million for enterprise. If your best folks make 3 to 5 times more than the mid-pack ones, they should be making that much money. So does your sales comp plan work? And don't take away money from your best reps. And strive for zero voluntary attrition. It truly is a flag if any of your best sales reps leave for any reason. It's a flag. Find out why. Go grab them in the parking lot if you have the off— if you have an office, grab them on Zoom or grab whatever. Don't let them go. Because again, if they're making good money, I have a good boss, why, why would they leave? The only reason an individual contributor sales rep should leave your company is for a promotion they can't get at your company. You can't promote everybody, You cannot— everyone can become a director of sales or a VP of sales or promotion. Typically, there's only enough slots to maybe promote half of the folks that want a management level role, but it should be the only excuse. If someone else good is leaving, it's a flag. It's a problem. So don't lose any. That's, that's, that's one of the best ways to keep growing. Concentrate that knowledge because the best reps just get better and better around year 2 and even year 3, and they train the rest of your team. Don't let them go. Point 3, this one is, I love what, again, what David Kellogg talked about, the dramatic damage from a cost perspective a mishire in VP of sales can do. I asked the flip around question. We should have gotten more votes on this one, but how much of a revenue boost did you get from your first great VP of sales? 20%, half got 20%, and about half got 40 to 100% boost. And the number— maybe the number one thing, tactical thing you can do is concentrate leads in your better reps. But the number two thing you can do to grow fast this year is just upgrade your weak VPs. Dave made the point that you already know who's not cutting it, but things should always improve in one sales cycle. Another classic SaaStr post, if you want to go back and look on the site, is, you know, a great sales— a great VP of sales should make an impact in one sales cycle or less. And when I wrote this years ago, so many VPs of sales I knew got mad at me. Like, how can you expect me to improve sales in one— I need 2 quarters, I need 4 quarters, I need 12 quarters to turn this ship around. Read the post, you don't. You don't, because what a great VP does is a couple of things. And not just in sales, in marketing, in product, in eng. A great VP of sales brings in a couple great people, a couple great engineers, a couple great developers, a great marketer, and they move out anyone that's not great. They do it, in fact, their first week, the good VPs, especially VPs of sales. Because VP of sales is half your job is hiring. They immediately assess the team on the ground. They immediately bring in 1 or 2 great people, move out 1 or 2 great people. And you see that same math with the great AE, like they route the leads to the best people internally and they bring in a few ringers and the best VP of sales are better at closing than someone mediocre. So they come in and the deals that are already happening, the deals that are already in the pipeline, they just close more of them than a weak VP of Sales or no VP of Sales. So you should always see some improvement. You should see more story points in your VP events. You should see more leads from marketing. You should see more revenue from sales. The nuance is don't expect magic. Not every VP of Sales can come in and double sales in 30 days like I experienced. Sometimes it's a smidge better. Sometimes marketing gets a little bit better. Engineering product gets released a little bit faster. It can't always happen overnight. But if you see no progress, you're almost always better off with nobody. And most folks know this. You're almost better off without a weak— with no VP than even a mediocre VP. So fix this today and revenue usually will go up. And again, other folks have said this, but if we had to just wrap this one, last one, just remember time never turns a mediocre VP into a good one. It just never does. And especially never listen to your VCs or investors that tell you this. Many of them don't know, they haven't run companies, and they always want to give, especially that strapping, like, white male VP of sales from a hot tech company that's 6'4" and has a suit and a good accent, they always want to give him more time, but you gotta close, right? So time never helps. So upgrade your weak VPs. A small one, but to impact your team is make sure You hire any great VP. You do not have to sequence it perfectly. And we've talked about this on Saastr. It's a classic post of what order to sequence it in. But the real key to understand, and this is not intuitive until you're later, is any great VP is accretive. Any great VP. And I'll hit the math for a minute. But I asked folks, 11,101, which VP do you wish you'd hired earlier? 38% said VP of Sales, which is what everyone thinks, but VP of Marketing, VP of Product, Eng, maybe, I guess I get the 9%, we could talk about it, but they're all accretive. And we've talked about this on SaaStr, but just to tie to the poll, a great VP of Sales is at least going to increase sales 20% in a sales cycle. A great VP of Marketing is going to bring in more leads than they cost, bring in more pipeline. You'll immediately see a boost, at least in somewhere in the pipe. A VP of product. Most folks here probably have not hired a great VP of product before. I see too many people wait, but your product, by $5, $6 million in revenue, sometimes earlier, it gets complicated. You have a lot of workflows, you have a lot of use cases, you have a lot of customer demands. And I see too often the CEO or the CEO and the CTO hacking the roadmap. It doesn't work when you have 100, 1,000, 10,000 customers. You're making the wrong bets. You're making the wrong bets overall, and you're making the wrong bets for your biggest customers and the ones in the pipeline. The VP of Product will figure out how to manage those, those bets, those story points, and optimize the chances big deals close and that big customers are happy and that big customers buy more from you. So they're all, they're all accretive, even a million in ARR. So the point is, as founders, your job is spend at least 25, 20% of your time recruiting. Half if you can, but meet all the great VPs. And if you think you need a VP of sales but you find a great VP of demand gen, just hire her. If you think you need a great VP of product but you find an amazing VP of eng that your CTO loves, just hire her. They're all accretive. You hire an amazing VP of engineering and let's say you're doing $100K deals and you're able to close 2 more amazing customers because you hired a great VP of eng. I mean, more than pays for herself in a quarter. A quarter or two. So don't wait. Don't try to perfectly sequence your VPs. If you want to close more this year, hire any great one. They're all accretive. Okay, another one that people give you crappy advice on, especially your VCs and investors. A VP, especially VP of Sales, but any VP, you have to bring in good folks. You have to bring in good folks, and when I'm interviewing Any VP candidates, engineering, marketing, but especially sales, there's a few trick Columbo questions I ask. I never ask tough questions. I always ask simple questions, layups, but I ask, "Okay, who are you gonna bring with you if you join this startup?" "Bob, Diane." "Bob, Diane, great. Okay, what are their backgrounds? Are you sure they're gonna come with them? Go talk to Bob and Diane. It's okay. If she's gonna bring Bob and Diane with her, they've known each other for years, they're already grooming them to come." It's okay to go talk to them. If you hear a VP of sales, or really any VP candidate say, "I don't know anyone, but I'm gonna hire a bunch of recruiters," like, don't hire, that's not a VP. It's not a VP. And this is a mistake again and again, so I asked 1,217 people, "How long do you give a VP to bring in a few good hires?" Most of you failed this test. The correct answer is day zero. It's always day zero. And two-thirds of you said a quarter or two. It never works. VPs don't have time. Any VP role is 50% recruiting, especially engineering and sales. And again, I've got to tell you, I've never seen a single VP of sales succeed that didn't bring in one or two good people with them immediately when they joined. Never seen it. Not once. Could be a good individual contributor, could be a good placeholder, but it's not the job. Okay, next one. This is kind of a more recent issue that I've realized that's dawned on me. It's not brand new, but this is one of the best ways to level up right now this year is to make sure you focus as much on logo retention as NRR, right? Years ago when Saastr started, Saastr's 10, um, we were just learning about the power of NRR. We didn't even really know. And now if you look at all the companies that have gone public, and you can read it on our 5 Interesting Learning Series, everyone's got it. Datadog, you know, we talked about it this morning. $250 million in revenue, growing over 70%, 130% NRR. All these NRR numbers are great. Snowflake's like 170%. But here's what I've learned. High NRR companies are friggin' lazy, especially their customer success teams. And I wrote a post just recently about how customer success teams at higher NRR companies are lazy, and all the CS people flamed me on LinkedIn. 1,000 people said I was wrong, but I'm right. I've recently interviewed over 70 CSICs. I usually interview 70. They're so lazy in these higher-end environments. Now, when you interview someone at a B2C or a high-churn SMB environment that's got 80% retention, 85%, they hustle, okay? They work hard. They're judged every hour, every day when you see that churn happening. But goodness gracious, when you walk into the work and your companies buy 140% of your API, They're lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy. And I've asked so many CSMs that are more mid-market or enterprise, how often do you do QBRs? Right. I don't know if it's in here, like, well, it's quarterly, but how many do you— I did one last quarter. Oh, they don't show up. They don't do anything. That's lazy. It's lazy. It's lazy. It's lazy. And okay, so we could talk about that point to learn how do you cure a little bit of this laziness in a high-energie environment? You got to track logo churn. You got to track it relentlessly. Because if you don't and you lose, and you lose a couple of high-profile customers and you lose Notion and Chargebee and Asana, who's here, but your NRR is still high, no one gets bent out of shape. Oh my gosh, we lost, we lost Asana. I mean, who wants to lose Asana? That's death. But if your other customers are growing enough, no one cares. But if you say, look, we need 90% logo retention or 95%, And you talk about that every day, every week, and it's just as important in revenue ops and CS as NRR. People's behavior will change. People will have to be accountable for every logo they lost. And really, every logo, every customer you lose in SaaS is sort of a failure. Someone failed. Sales oversold it, your product let them down, or CS let them down. No one buys SaaS products for fun. It's not fun to deploy, test, and roll out a SaaS app in your company. And every single time they churn, you have failed a customer and you're going to fail a few times. But focus on logo retention as much as NRR and you will, you will watch magic happen. Things will happen much better. Don't let CS cruise because it's gotten endemic. Okay. Next point in terms of 20 ways to do better in 2022. And this is some old SaaS stuff on how to raise pricing. But I asked folks, how much have you raised price on your product this year at all? I was a little surprised. Obviously, we're in a weird inflationary world. Things have changed. But 60% of you have raised prices this year. Right. And what I have found on the first point with companies I worked with and talked is there's a lot more elasticity in pricing for most SaaS products than I ever thought. I sweated this as a bullet as a founder, and then I sweated this since. But folks are getting better at this. They're providing more value in their products. They're more trusted vendors. And listen, if your product's $20K a year, what's the difference between $20K and $25K? Nothing. Okay, nothing. It may look like it on your website, but if you're providing— if you're charging $20K, I hope you're providing $100K or $200K of value. It really doesn't matter if you're providing a lot of value if you increase your price an even 20%. And it's great to try— not only will Will your new customers pay it, which we'll get to, but if they don't, it's wonderful learning to kick the ass of the rest of the team. We really can't go from 20 to 25 and we can't close customers anymore? I mean, that's a flag that you are not providing as much value for your customers as possible. So a lot of things we can talk about. We have an old Saastr post on your next customer double pricing. I love doing this more in the enterprise, is double pricing and see how it sticks, see how it goes. Different point, but raise your prices, but do it thoughtfully with adding value. Folks will pay more for high-value products. But again, the second point, and I don't have the data on the second other than all of my experiences over the years. When th— if hopefully things aren't tough for you as we talked about this morning, but if things are harder, if they're getting a little bit harder to close, if there's more drama, a lot of folks wanna raise pricing on your base. It's a cheat. It's actually a completely weak sign when a VP of sales is missing a quarter and he says, well, you know what, I'm not going to make it, but let's raise prices so that we can make my plan. It's a cookie. You raise prices on your base once, it works once. You can't raise it every quarter. It's almost worthless. If you piss off your customers, it's not worth it. And the customers you have today, whether even if you're at $20 million in revenue, they're likely a very small percent of your customers going forward. So look, if you can raise prices on your base strategically, you have data, it works, it's elegant, or maybe better yet, it's for a new addition, a new product so that it's additive, go do it. But raising prices on folks that bet their careers on you, I usually don't see that worth it, and it consumes a lot of internal oxygen, a lot of discussion, and then the cookie's gone and you can't raise prices next quarter to miss the plan. So maybe even ideally only raise prices on existing customers when you've blown out the quarter. Then you take out the pressure to kind of make up for it by doing it, and people come to that conclusion for the wrong reasons. So, but it's interesting that the elasticity I've seen, you know, 60% of folks have said we've been able to raise prices significantly, and implicitly it hasn't really hurt our business. Okay, next one, and we talked about this a little bit this morning. If you, if folks on your team are whining about the markets. And again, SaaS is growing faster than ever. We talked about this morning, um, Asana is doubling at $400 million in revenue. Snowflake's almost doubling at a billion in revenue. GitLab up 70%. Like, all the cloud leaders are growing like crazy. Salesforce is accelerating. But I know a lot of you are going to hear complaints from the field, from your teams, from your sales team. Remember that some budgets are down, but more are up than down. So I asked, you know, the 680 folks, given all the turmoil, what are you seeing on budgets? Well, 22% said they've seen budgets reduced, but half said no change, and more— not statistically, but more said budgets are going up. Like, budgets are going up. So focus on that. Even if some of your customer segments are impacted, focus your energy on the segments that are growing. And like we talked about this morning, don't let too many excuses in the team. As many folks— look at the folks here. Let's just pick the sponsors. I bet our average sponsor here is growing 100% or more. OK, these are good companies. If they're your customers, go get more. Go sell them more. They're growing 100%. Worry less about the ones that are struggling because cloud is just— it's just a rising tide. And again, don't take budgets are down as an excuse. The data and the public markets don't support it. Maybe just this one quickly. We hit it earlier. But I asked, I'm a big fan of variable comp for everybody, but you gotta get the KPI right. So I just asked, how much of your VP of Sales realized comp is variable? It was interesting to me that out of over 2,000 votes, only 13% said more than 50%, although very few had almost no variable comp. I did an old Saastr post that a lot of folks have used for a 50/50/25 plan. I think it works well. Works well today if you can pull it off, which is half your head of sales comp is base, half is tied to hitting the plan for the year, and then 25% for blowing out the plan. I still like 50/50. It still works. It worked 10 years ago, it worked 5 years ago, it works this year. But whatever you do, now is the time. We're in the middle of the year, coming to the middle of the year. Revisit your variable comp plans. Boy, if you get them wrong, it, it really incents behavior. And only one KPI matters. Do we have the right one for CS? Do you want to incent logo retention? Are you really incenting QBRs? Are you really incenting driving MPS and NRR up? Do you have the right incentives for sales? I was recently talking with an amazing sales leader, but she was coming out of a really big company. She wanted 95% base, 5% variable. Like, we'll see how that one plays out. I don't think it's going to play out that well. Like, pay more for more performance. And less for weak performance. But my real point is sometimes we set up these variable comp plans, we think we understand them, we don't revisit them. Revisit it this summer, revisit it now, tweak them so you can maximize the outcome because people really almost irrationally respond to incentives here and they don't do anything else other than the number one or number two KPI they have that they're getting paid out on. Okay, next one. If you read much SaaSster, I've just become religious religious on this, as I've realized. We talked about the lazy CSMs early that don't do the QBRs and coast. Man, the last 2 years, everyone lowered the bar in hiring, and I'm talking to so many sales reps today that have no idea how their product works they sell, and no one can demo it or understand it. Everyone wants to bring in SEs, someone else to demo the product. I almost wanna blow my brains out. But so I asked 1,149 folks, Does your sales team really understand the product? It gets worse on another slide. Only 46% said their sales team's as expert as their customers. Just like, think about that for a moment and listen to the Gong and Chorus calls and Zooms and others, we'll get to it. But honestly, move on from any sale. Until your brand is so big your product sells yourself, move on from reps that can't sell your product. Move on from folks that send embarrassing emails and send dumb answers. Move on from them. And Dave Kellogg flipped it around this morning. He said, you want a VP of sales that will go into that meeting for you and be an ambassador for your product. You need every rep to be an ambassador for your product. And so spend more time here. Not only move out the bottom 10% of your sales team, but either train them better, hire better people, but they need to be experts. Like, we are all smart. The average, the average SaaS company has one of 200 B2B apps deployed in their org. 200. So if your customers have 200 apps, that probably means they've evaluated 2,000. Like, they deserve an expert. They are not novices for SaaS. They deserve that their 10 questions answered very thoughtfully. They deserve a demo. They deserve whatever they get. They've earned it. We're all experts. And don't— so this is just, this is just shocking. And just 2 more points on this, and we'll come back to it. You got to read the emails. You got to listen to the calls. And so I asked, how many of you really read your sales reps' emails and calls and Zooms? It was a little bit better. 20% don't read any emails or listen to any gongs or watch any Zooms. Only 40% do it for all reps. And look, all I can tell the founders here is if you don't do this, your sales team is worse than you think. Unless they're crushing it. Unless they're crushing it. I invested in a company that just crossed $10 million in revenue, almost bootstrapped. Brought in a VP of Sales, and then everything just slowed down. And we don't— that happens. It's the company's fault as much for hiring the person. But the VP of Engineering had never been in a sales call ever, and he couldn't stand it anymore, and he went and listened to the calls. He's like, "This is the worst. These are the worst calls I've ever heard." He, the VP of Engineering, said, "I'll be the VP of Sales." I couldn't believe it, and he literally was for about a month, and then the CEO took it over again. But you gotta do this. I know you're busy. But someone on the team has to be doing this. And I will tell you one thing, if your VP of sales isn't great, she or he won't be doing this well. They'll be making excuses for the team. If your VP of sales can't demo your product, if your VP of sales is not an expert in your product, there's no way they're listening to the calls and watching the Zooms and making sure the reps are good at it. It's a compounding effect and then everybody gets just terrible, terrible at the product. So jump in as founders and make sure you're listening to a subset of calls, watching a subset of Zooms, and if they're not good, change it. Change it, everyone should, I'd rather have an expert in my product that's a decent closer than an amazing closer that doesn't understand the product. They won't close anything until your brand is just mega. So this one was pretty bad, and hold on, let me see if I can find the other one. I'll flip back. Okay, sorry. Let me go back to this one, and then maybe we'll just do a few more. Okay. Another thing you can level up in 2022 is just make outbound work. Do a good job. Everyone— I would say 5 years ago, maybe half of SaaS companies did outbound. I would say today it's like about 80 to 90%, as near as I can tell. Outbound always works. There's a classic SaaStr post called Outbound Always Works. You can read it and walk through the math, but do fewer, better meetings. Train your SDRs, force them to get you 15 meetings per month, and force them to generate $2 million of quota. This is kind of the magic trifecta for, for SDRs. And then I ask folks, how many qualified meetings do your SDRs set up per month? And you can see about half did 10 to 15 per month, and then 25% did this 15 to 20. The more SDR leaders I've talked to in the last year, the more the best SDR leaders aim for this second target. They're like, we'd like to do 10 to 15 qualified meetings per SDR, and the best ones can do 15 to 20, and the best ones always generate about $2 million in pipe per year. So don't throw 20 terrible SDRs, don't hire some agency that doesn't know your product. Get a couple of folks working at the right targeted account, nail this down, and get them more help and do fewer better meetings, 'cause it always works, it always works. Take a look at, and if you don't know how to do it or it's not working, a lot of folks say outbound isn't working. For me. Like, we tried, it's not working. Well, I ask a simple question. Who's your biggest customer? Well, you know, it's Google for $100K. Okay, well, who else like Google could buy your— why do they buy your product? Who else is like Google? Well, there's Meta, there's, there's Snap, there's whatever. Are you talking to the right people? Have you outbounded them? Have you set up the right conversation? Maybe, I don't know, it doesn't work. Like, outbound will always work. You can always send an email to the same job function at Meta as Google and say, do you know Google just bought this for our marketing team. It's their number one favorite product of the year. Can I just show it to you? That best email will get opened half the time and you will get meetings if it's perfect. If you sell— try to do targeted outbound to the same buyer. If you load up a bunch of stuff in Salesloft or Outreach, who I love, you know, I was an early investor in Salesloft or Mixpacks, and you ask people for coffee, it's not gonna work, okay? It's just not gonna work, but get them more help and do it better. It always works. It always works this year. Level it up and try to set these goals. Don't just set SDRs randomly. Say, "I want 10 to 15 qualified meetings per month that my AEs accept and say is qualified, and I want you to generate $2 million in pipe a year." And then pay up. Again, pay up. Pay up when they do it. A related point I just had was I just asked, "Now that everyone's doing outbound, what's your ratio of SDRs to AEs?" The, the, again, I actually, this ties to the prior point. The most interesting one is who has no SDRs. Only 14% of folks have, have no SDRs at all. So if you're forcing your AEs to do all the work themselves, we may be past the age of the full stack AE, like get them help. And then what's the ratio? It is interesting that, that, that sort of the plurality is 1 SDR to 2 AEs. So 1 person supporting 2 in a pod. There's different ways to do it. You need to experiment here, but again, everyone's doing it, and there's, you know, 1-to-1 can work if you have a big enough deal size, 1-to-4 maybe if you're smaller, but if this meeting is 1-to-2, make sure you have 1 good SDR setting up appointments for every 2 AEs, and then sort of magic can happen. Oh, I think we sort of hit this one. Maybe I'll skip this one for time unless people want to do more. You can let me know, but when did you hire your first VLP of product? Most folks waited, it looks like here, till about $4 to $5 or $6 million AR. Maybe I'll just simplify one thing that I have on the right. There's a moment in time when everybody realizes they need help, a product manager, like a moment in time. I need a product person. And 98% of you, 96% of you, I think, make the same mistake. You hire a junior person. Okay, I'm going to go hire, I'm going to go hire a product manager. That worked on one pixel at Twilio or worked on one little thing at some great company. They don't know how to ship products into production. A manager is not enough. Your product gets too complicated, and someone with 1 or 2 years of experience at a brand can't do it. But if you hire a great VP of product at $3, $4, $5 million, and you have a sales-driven motion, if you have that, magic happens. A great VP of product immediately, Her or his first 2 weeks will go meet with your top 20 customers. Magically, they will understand how to improve the experience your top 20 customers have. They will join your head of sales and your customer success on all the top accounts and provide leverage, and that leverage can be amazing. Hire a VP of product that has supported customers, that has worked with a sales and engineering team at your size, and go hire them, and watch more deals close and have higher NRR because they can provide more value to these customers. It's magic to drive up the revenue. All right, maybe just 2 more and then unless anyone wants, we'll drive home a point. One fun one, if you wanna do better, is this was an early SaaStr post too, but be wary of high win rates. Be wary of high win rates, high close rates. It's a bad sign if you win every deal. So I asked, this was an early poll, so maybe we only got 214 votes, but did your win rates up or down as you scaled, right? 41% said they went down. So just a reminder that if you're going up, as marketing gets better, if you hired a real VP of marketing, if outbound's working, if your mini brand is growing, you should start getting into more deals. You start getting to deals where the competition is, not just the folks that know this little tiny feature you do well, but you should be in more conversation. If you're more conversation, you should be losing more often. You should be in the deals. If you're competing with Asana, um, and you get into more of those deals, Asana is a pretty good product, it's a pretty good brand. You should lose a lot of those deals, but even if you win 10% or 15%, it can really move the needle. So be wary of, of high, of high win rates and high close rates. If you want to grow faster this year, watch— you should, if your team's good, you should actually want to see your win rate go down. That's a sign that marketing's working and outbound is working, that you're getting into more deals. And it's a terrible sign if 80% of your deals close? It means you're doing no marketing. It means you're literally doing no marketing or outbound if 80% of your deals close. Alright, so maybe one more good one and then we'll break. I pick this one. Make support more important. I wanna do all of them, but let me maybe break on this one, because this is another one everyone's getting terrible advice to today, and then we'll break. People are being more capital efficient now. They're being more thoughtful even though the markets are up, venture's down. Again, come to a trillion great sessions tomorrow on what's happening in venture, why the stock market compressions are making fundraising hard. But I see so many folks freezing hiring in sales. Okay, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And let's just talk about why for a minute. But let's say you're at $4 million ARR today and you want to get to $8 next year. So you want to double. So typically at $4 million an hour, you've been very efficient. Maybe you got there with 3 reps and let's say you can do $500K per rep. That's pretty good. That's pretty efficient yielded. And you have 3. Well, you want to go from $4 to $8 next year. Hang with me. You have 3 reps that do $500K. That only gets you to $1.5 million. To go from $4 to $8 million in one year, that's $4 million at $500K attainment. You need 8 reps hitting quota. 8. Not, not as many as you think. And to keep growing after that, you need more as you hit 8 because you want to go to 16. So you probably need a dozen. My real point is, as founders especially, we usually get this math off by at least 50% and we end up with not enough scaled sales reps. And look, there's nothing worse than, than flushing your leads down the toilet with a rep that can't, that can't close. But you will, as you cross even a couple million in revenue, as you leave the founder-led sales, you will need bodies that are good to hit the plan. You will need bodies. Now, if you bring on a suboptimal VP of sales, they will throw a lot of bodies and revenue won't go up. A lot of us have experienced that. It's— that's destructive. But do the math. Look at where you'll be in 12 months. Be thoughtful about attainment. Like, you will— your efficiency will probably go down. And just figure out how many reps you're gonna need. And you can't freeze hiring and hit the Plan. You can't cut your way to growth. It doesn't work. Whatever your issues are, cutting— sometimes you have to cut if you have 2 months of burn, but you can never cut your way to growth, and it especially doesn't work in sales. It takes us a little while to figure this out in SaaS, but there's no freaking efficiencies in sales in SaaS. Like, you get engineering efficiencies. Everyone can use your same code base, but you barely get any efficiencies in sales once you hit a billion in ARR, and I don't think too many people here are at a billion in ARR. It is linear. It is linear. But great sales reps are accretive. If a great sales rep closed $500K and she takes home $150K, you've made $350K. So dial that in and make sure you don't underhire. You will never hit the plan. So I got a few more. I'll post them, but hopefully this was helpful. And thanks, everybody. Well, let's go have some cocktails now. We'll do more tomorrow.