Greg Werner

Great conversation with Joey Brodsky! Definitely one of the sharpest guys I know. I love his passion, drive and unique perspectives. I have followed his podcast for a long time and was super happy to be able to be a guest. I will share more insights from our time together but wanted to post a quick thank you to Joey and share the episode. #NextGenSales

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Every SaaS CEO wants a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Let's study the newly released winners... To make it easy, I pulled the 2024 list into a spreadsheet and enriched it with some Keyplay growth and website signals. Full sheet here: peersignal.org/cloud100 For the analysis I compared the Cloud 100 to PeerSignal's B2B SaaS index for similar sized companies (300-5,000 employees). Winners stand-out on growth and valuation, but what else shows up? Take-aways from the 2024 list: 1.) More AI companies. -- Last year, 9% of winners were AI companies. This year it’s a whopping 15%.  -- OpenAI has the highest valuation, but they aren’t alone. New additions include Perplexity, Glean, Mistral AI. 2.) More AI integrated SaaS. -- AI is eating software. -- In 2023, 28% of Cloud 100 talked about AI in their main headlines and company description. -- In 2024, that number jumped to 71%. 3.) Hiring like it’s 2024. -- Even the Cloud 100 felt the 2022-2023 SaaS correction.  -- Last year, 33% of the Cloud 100 had *reduced* headcount over the previous 6 months. Only 55% had a net increase. 13% were neutral. -- This year is different. 80% have increased headcount in the previous 6 months, only 11% reduced. 9% are neutral. -- Open roles have increased massively. Up 66% Y/Y from ~4,400 to ~7,300 for this group. 4.) B2Bs with strong brands. -- They sell enterprise software (ie. they’re not Vuori or TikTok), but top cloud cos have increasingly big audiences and broad reach. -- 250K is the average LinkedIn followers. -- 86% have top 100K website traffic. 12% are 100K to 500K. 5.) PLG. -- Consistent with last year, PLG is commonplace in the Cloud 100. -- 66% have a free plan or free trial, 2.6x more than the comps. -- 52% have transparent pricing, a massive 5.2x more than their peers. -- Most of the PLG players this year are horizontal (dev tools, fintech, collaboration). 6.) Partners/ecosystems/integrations. -- Multiple clues that suggest Cloud 100 are investing in their ecosystem.  -- 74% have a Partners page, 1.7x the comparison group. -- 48% have a public API, 2.5x the comparison group -- 39% list multiple integrations, 3.2x the comparison group. -- This is consistent with last year’s list 7.) Security winners keep coming. -- 17% are in the security space. That's 2 more than AI. -- “Boring” problems = big money. -- Wiz was the highest ranked at #11 and is likely to climb after turning down $23B from Google. I hope the spreadsheet gives you some SaaS role models to explore more. I'd love to add more to this in the coming weeks. Today's PeerSignal.org newsletter has all the charts. What’s your take-away? #SaaS #B2B #startups #marketing

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In the last 12 months, Rev has increased our close rates by 300% and shortened our average deal cycle from 100 days to 40. Here's the 3-step playbook we used to increase sales velocity (without adding headcount): BACKGROUND Since 2021, sales benchmarks in SaaS have trending down: - Win rates have dropped 18% - Deal sizes have shrunk 21% - Deal cycles are 16% longer We’re all working harder and longer in every deal for less money! Unfortunately, this environment is here to stay. So what’s a Sales Leader to do to generate velocity in this market? At Rev, we follow a process that I call “SLC” - for “Stalled, Lost, or Churned.” Here's how it works: 1. Convene a SWAT team of your GTM leaders (Head of Sales, RevOps, Marketing, etc). It all starts here. Without getting the right people in place who can impact change across the org, nothing matters. The team is going to meet daily at first to generate a new and valuable report (see #2); then they will divide and conquer to resolve the issues slowing down your GTM. 2. Generate your Stalled-Lost-Churned Report The key insight here is that a standard “closed-lost” report isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you’re going to create a new report of every deal that closed-lost, but also any customer that churned and any deal that “stalled” (i.e. where there hasn’t been a positive change of close-% within three weeks). 3. Map your sales cycle and attach to each step exactly HOW MANY and WHY deals stalled-lost-churned. The WHY is the hardest part — the simple answers in Salesforce will not be good enough. You need to scrub the heck out of the opportunity list to dig deep and figure out real “why” answers. For example:  “Customer went dark” is not a good enough reason. What was really happening in the deal when the customer stopped responding? Were they not impressed enough by the demo? Missing a key feature? Scared off by pricing? Did a key persona refuse to engage or fail to see value? Talk to your AEs and listen to more Gong calls. The answers are there. You just have to find them. 4. Assign each of the WHYs to a member of the GTM team and work through a meaningful improvement Are we missing a slide that speaks to a key persona? Mishandling a certain objection in the sales cycle? Is our order form sitting in procurement too long? Each SLC issue gets assigned to an owner and worked until it no longer slows deals down. Here’s an example: One “SLC issue” we found at my past company NetBase was that our order form was being sent to legal review by our customer 90% of the time. So we removed the legalese from the order form and referenced online terms and conditions with a URL. The result was our buyers only sent the form to legal 10% of the time! That was a savings of 2-3 weeks on 80% of deals! TAKEAWAY Want to improve sales velocity? Find out the real reason WHY deals aren't closing. Not just why you LOST deals. But why deals stalled and churned. Use SLC.

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What we were promised: a unified ops function for all GTM teams. 😎 What we got: a new name for sales ops. 😔 The labels aren’t really the issue here. It’s the fact that alignment across functional ops teams still seems elusive in many companies. These are some common objections to creating a unified RevOps function: 😰 Functional leaders are worried about their ops teams becoming less responsive 😰 MOPS and CS Ops worry about getting swallowed up by Sales Ops and losing autonomy  😰 Marketing and CS worry their needs won’t be prioritized if RevOps reports to a sales leader These concerns are legitimate and need to be addressed. But they don’t change one simple reality: a lack of alignment among operational teams is usually just a mirror of the lack of alignment among the GTM functions. And these silos harm business performance. Instead of focusing on the challenges, let’s look at what a business can GAIN when ops teams are strongly aligned or unified: 🗺️ A holistic view across the entire revenue process ⚖️ Initiatives prioritized by business impact rather than executive fiat 🥰  A more unified and seamless customer experience 💰 More efficient tech spend with fewer redundant tools 🤝 All revenue teams rowing in the same direction 🤗 Pooled ops resources and mutual support 💪 A stronger ops function that can manage performance rather than just close tickets These teams DO exist, and this week on RevOps FM, I spoke with Julia Kim, who leads one of them at Electric. Julia leads a very mature RevOps function that supports marketing, sales, CS, and partnerships. Not only does this org structure work—her team is a driving force behind the business, which wasn’t at all the case when ops teams were embedded in their functions. In this episode, Julia shares: • The scope and structure of her team • How they plan and prioritize • How they balance running the business as usual with innovation and strategy • How RevOps can have different objectives at different stages of maturity • How she finds efficiencies across the tech stack • And much more Episode link in the comments 👇 —--- P.S. a unified function is one way to achieve alignment, but I don’t suggest it’s the only way. At my company, for example, my team supports marketing and BDR Ops and reports into marketing, while all other ops teams are centralized. This still works very well because a) The marketing leader also reports to the COO, ensuring consistent priorities b) Marketing ops still works closely with other ops teams, has regular cadences, shared OKRs, etc. So the key factors here are a centralized reporting structure and close collaboration. P.P.S. I feel like I've seen the meme I used before somewhere. If you created it first please raise your hand and I'll gladly give credit 😊

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