OpenView Blog

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Kyle Poyar’s newsletter, Growth Unhinged, which explores the unexpected behind today’s fastest-growing startups. You can subscribe to get the latest from Kyle here. In today’s post, I’m tackling the somewhat controversial topic of outbound automation, aka scaling outbound acquisition without hiring BDRs or SDRs. My two cents: it sounds like a fad, but automated outbound is worth exploring.

Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a two-part series on the future of SaaS sales. You can read part one here. I recently caught up with an investor who was an operator during the recessions of 2001 and 2008. In the last year, he’s spent more time with founders and GTM teams in the SaaS startup space. The common thread? Many of these founders and executive teams are in their first or second startup over the last 10 years.

If you cast your mind back to a decade ago, most SaaS companies treated pricing and packaging as an afterthought when it came to their growth strategy. They would often focus their time and budget on customer acquisition first and then retention. In 2023, that’s changed. In fact, over 94% of B2B SaaS pricing leaders update pricing and packaging at least once per year, with almost 40% updating as often as once per quarter.

The world of sales continues to evolve with the popularization of product-led growth (PLG). PLG is an end-user-focused growth model in which the product itself drives acquisition, activation and expansion. Giants like Slack, Zoom, and Notion have inspired a new generation of startups to consider PLG instead of traditional go-to-market (GTM) strategies such as top-down sales.

When done right, product marketing is one of the most impactful roles in your company. Product marketing teams work cross functionally, translating the needs of the customer into items on your roadmap, they translate product functionality into value drivers and marketing pillars for GTM teams, and they play a strategic role supporting pricing, packaging, community building, market sizing, and much more.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Kyle Poyar’s newsletter, Growth Unhinged, which explores the unexpected behind today’s fastest-growing startups. You can subscribe to get the latest from Kyle here. Do you find yourself debating whether to sell a new product as an add-on or include it in an existing package? Or perhaps questioning if it’s the right time to introduce a new package altogether? These are the Groundhog Day discussions of SaaS companies everywhere.

Product-led sales (PLS) is a go-to-market motion that acquires prospects efficiently through a self-serve (freemium or trial offering) and converts them into paying customers through a sales-assisted or sales-led approach. Expansion efforts can also benefit from PLS with marketing and sales teams leveraging firmographic and product signals to drive expansion campaigns. Product-led sales can be somewhat of a misnomer though since it requires substantial contribution from Marketing.

CAC payback period – the amount of time it takes (in months) to recoup the costs of acquiring a new customer – used to be one of those wonky SaaS metrics VCs threw around when discussing an investment. But more and more, founders and operators are getting in the weeds on CAC payback. CAC payback is a fantastic metric mostly because it’s better than the alternatives.

OpenView invests at the expansion stage – the challenging growth period between seed and series C – when the stakes are high and decisions need to be made quickly. At this crucial stage of growth, every decision has the potential to change a company’s trajectory: Who should you hire? When should you increase your pricing? What will it take to move up-market? But any VC firm can write a check. Founders need someone in their corner to help them reach their fullest potential.

You’d think that all the new tools and digital channels we have these days would make B2B go-to-market (GTM) easier. But the reality is quite the opposite. CMOs and revenue leaders are struggling to create pipeline and drive growth, especially with constrained budgets. Sure, the economy may be partly to blame, but I believe the core issue is the fact that we’ve used the same GTM playbook for the past 15 years (a playbook partly inspired by my own work at Marketo).