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This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Stripe

What’s Better, X/Twitter or LinkedIn? Our Data and Some Learnings

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, January 8, 2025 | Blog Posts

What’s Better, X/Twitter or LinkedIn? Our Data and Some Learnings

I’m not a social media expert, but we ended last year with about the same views (40,000,000) and followers (250,000) on both.

#1. X and LinkedIn perform about the same for us in terms of driving traffic to SaaStr.com itself

It used to be different, but in 2024, they both drive about the same amount of traffic to SaaStr.com (about 15% total) and about the same amount of attendees to events.

#2. Yes, you can re-use content across both, and they perform differently

The audiences are distinct enough that there appears to be little downside to cross-posting to X and LinkedIn. Posts that take off on one often do not take off on the other. But a post that is not popular on one rarely is popular on the other.

WHAT'S BETTER?

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Usage-Based Revenue Models: Successes and Pitfalls from Checkr COO Lindsey Scrase on CRO Confidential

By Amelia Ibarra
Wednesday, January 8, 2025 | CRO Confidential, Scale

In the latest episode of our SaaStr CRO Confidential podcast, host Sam Blond sat down with Lindsey Scrase, COO of Checkr (and former CRO), to discuss her tactics for driving growth at the background screening unicorn. Having joined Checkr from Google in 2022, Lindsay shared valuable insights about identifying and executing on major opportunities for improvement within an already mature go-to-market organization.

USAGE-BASED REVENUE MODELS

SaaStr Is #1 on Pavilion’s Revenue Leader Podcast

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, January , 2025 | Blog Posts

So Pavilion launched a new Revenue Leader podcast series last year, and we kicked it off with episode #001.

You don’t usually want to do one of the first episodes of a new podcast because they all take a while to build up scale, but since it’s led by Kyle Notion, CRO of Owner where I’m on the board, we made an exception.

It ended up being the #1 podcast of the Pavilion series in 2024.

NEVER HIRE A "STRATEGIST"

Dear SaaStr: How Much Do I Pay My First Sales Rep?

By Jason Lemkin
Monday, January 6, 2025 | Early, Q&A

Three ways to simplify the answer here, especially in the early days:

In the end, in base salary AND commission, most sales reps take home about 20%-25% of what they close in first year deal value. So if your ultimate model sums up to that or close, you are in the zone. But, you often can’t start there. It’s often not enough comp for your very first rep, not to start. So:
You have to pay a living wage. No one in sales wants to work just for the fun of it. This may mean in the early days you have to pay out more than 20% of the deal size of the initial deals. Maybe even 50%-100% of the deal size in the very early days.
Your first rep doesn’t have to be magically profitable on Day 1. It may be enough to break even at first, just to prove out non-founder sales even works. It can often makes sense to pay a much higher commission for an introductory period for your first sales rep or two. I paid my first reps 100% of what they took home the first 60 days, for example, and then 25% thereafter.
You probably have to pay a competitive “OTE” (On Target Earnings), or base + bonus. Or else, they will do the same work at a company with a market OTE.

Back solve for these 3 points, and you’ll have the start of your first sales rep comp plan.

HOW MUCH?

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STRIPE SESSIONS

5 Interesting Learnings from Asana at $750,000,000 in ARR

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, January 8, 2025 | 5 Interesting Things, Scale

5 Interesting Learnings from Asana at $750,000,000 in ARR

So the overall “project management” space has seen widely disparate impacts from the SaaS partial downturn of 2022-2024. Asana, strong in B2B2B and selling to tech, was perhaps hit hardest, with growth slowing to 10%. Monday.com by contrast, selling mainly outside of tech, saw growth remain strong at 34%. It’s been a tale of two worlds. SaaS that sells to B2B companies, and SaaS that sells to the Rest of the World. The former often had a tough time from 2022 to 2024. The latter? It was often close to the best of times.

AI though is the tailwind. It’s given Asana a boost, albeit it’s still early for AI at Asana. And the stock rallied, and while down a bit recently, is still up a stunning 52% over the past 6 months!

5 INTERESTING LEARNINGS

Dear SaaStr: How Long Should You Give a New Sales Rep?

By Jason Lemkin
Sunday, January 5, 2025 | Early, Sales

The tough truth is from 0.5–1.5 sales cycles. And yes this is true even in tougher times. Probably even more so in tougher times.

Sales is tough. It’s a lot of Nos to get to a Yes.
And while sales is pretty similar in SaaS at a given price point / ACV, different products are still different to sell. A rep good at one product can fail at selling another.
Training and support matter. Not all reps can work with the limited support, onboarding, and training you get at a start-up.

The best reps “get on the board” fairly quickly. They may not immediately hit quota (few do). But they find a way to close something relatively early. At least, 1 or 2 deals. If you don’t see that in 0.5–1 sales cycles, it rarely works out. They lose their confidence. They haven’t been trained properly. They don’t have the right types of leads and prospects.

HOW LONG TO GIVE A REP

Dear SaaStr: My Salesteam Doesn’t Want to Do Outbound or Visit Customers in Person. How Can I Get Them To Work Harder Here?

By Jason Lemkin
Saturday, January 4, 2025 | Q&A

I’ve discussed variants of this question with so many CEOs and also CROs and VPs of Sales.

I think most agree, behind closed doors, there’s only one answer: start over.

You can’t get folks used to working from home to embrace coming to the office
You can’t get folks used to selling 15–20 hours a week to start working 50–60.
You can’t get sales reps used to only doing inbox to magically start cold calling for real.
You have to start over. You have to start with a certain set of expectations, and hire folks that want to meet them.

Sam Blond, ex- CRO of Brex and I talked a bit about this at our Miami meet-up:

Can you get sales reps to be “full stack” and do outbound as well as inbound if they don’t really want to? Can you have them start doing outbound when they haven’t had to before? His answer, too:

No. You gotta hire those folks from Day 1. Or .. start over.

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What’s Better, X or LinkedIn?