So many great sessions this past week at SaaStr. Below we highlight interesting insights from industry SaaS leaders Mark Roberge, Chris Merritt, Lars Nillson, and Dave McJannet.

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(1) Mark Roberge, MD Stage 2 Capital: Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: Optimizing GTM for PLG

“Survey first 80 users, if 40% or more would be very disappointed if your product didn’t exist, then you have product market fit.”

"Comp sellers higher on expansion revenue."

“What if we try PLG and fail?” …“well then the worst case is you’re left with an easy to adopt product”
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(2) Chris Merritt, CRO, Cloudflare: Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: Lunch with Cloudflare’s CRO: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+

"When you don't know the outcome [of a project/initiative], call it an experiment" ... "vs. 'making plans' or 'changes'. It puts people at ease. And if you put people at ease, you'll execute better. It's like a magic elixir."

(3) Lars Nillson, VP of Global Sales Development, Snowflake: Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: Lunch with Snowflake’s VP, Global Sales Development: How to Manage 100+ SDR's Across 4 Continents, 6 Countries and 10 Cities

"Never hire one salesperson, hire in pairs."

Lars later went on to say its many benefits, including: friendly competition and knowledge sharing. Understanding is your outbound motion working or is it a personnel issue? Is it working at the right level? This is all difficult to measure with only 1 sales hire.

(4) Dave McJannet, CEO, HashiCorp: Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: CEO Systems: 5 Lessons Learned from Scaling at Every Growth Phase

"The problem with most startup advice is that it doesn't account for phase shifts...It's not that the advice is wrong, it is just not matched to the phase." [Phases: Pattern Matching, Product Market Fit, Repeatability, Early Scale, Mid Scale, Scale & Diversity]. -

"My job is to look 36 months out in terms of picking the right market to be in. So we don't run out of TAM, so we don't run out of opportunities, so we continue to grow at the pace our investors expect. That is my job. That is what makes the CEO's job so difficult in my opinion."

So many great moments to talk about this past week at SaaStr 2022. We will leave you with this:

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- The Aircover Team