Christopher Nelson

Is Your SaaS Business Leaving Money on the Table by Ignoring Rate Limits? When scaling your service, rate limits aren’t just an afterthought—they’re a must. Too many businesses miss this step early on, and it costs them. Why should you care? Without rate limits, you’re paying for extra calls, whether they’re to internal systems or external APIs. Each unchecked call eats into your bottom line. Plus, storing frequently fetched data in a table can cut redundant calls and save time, budget, and server load. stories of fractional CTO. #SaaS #TechStrategy #RateLimits #CostEfficiency

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HIPAA compliance in HubSpot presents a huge opportunity for HubSpot to grab market share. To put this in perspective, the massive software industry in the United States represents $340 billion in annual revenue. The healthcare spending in the United States reached $4.5 trillion in 2022. The economic trickledown effect on HubSpot partners, app developers, and HubSpot customers will be even bigger. #crm #HubSpot #hipaa #Salesforce #hubs

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Top mistakes people are making when trying to hire a GTM engineer First - what ISN'T a GTM engineer? It's not salesforce admin It's not report building It's not customer journey design It's not outbound It's not A/B testing and growth hacking It's not GTM strategy It's also not sales enablement All of those things are REALLY important to get GTM engineering right and without them GTM engineering doesn't add any value But if you try to hire for someone with all of those skills you're going to have a tough time In a nutshell, a GTM engineer automates complex GTM workflows I'm not talking about something like a simple round robin lead flow I'm talking lead qualification in multiple ICPs, personas, products, verticals, and sales AI agents to identify key qualification criteria that predict win rates Data waterfalls that detect bounced emails or bad phone numbers and re-enrich with different providers Complex workflows that would normally require multiple tools and vendors to get working Or lots of manual effort on the web In other Give a GTM engineer a specific manual workflow that you KNOW drives value They give you BACK an automated workflow that scales with quality GTM engineering won't help if you Don't know your ICP Don't know your buyer personas Don't know how to qualify accounts Don't have reliable data sources Don't have messaging that works Don't know what qualified pipeline looks like Then it won't happen And if you try to hire a GTM engineer without having the other skillsets in place AND some kind of GTM architect to help discover requirements, and challenge them to simplify and streamline You probably won't be able to hire them OR get an ROI if you did find someone

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Utah has produced some of the top SMB / MM sales teams: Podium Route Divvy Canopy Lucid Pluralsight Brex Pinterest BambooHR and so many more here... Why? ⛪️ A huge percentage of saas sales reps start their sales career knocking doors. Selling Jesus. Nothing harder than that. Slam the door in your face? Go to the next smiling ear to ear. Oh, and do it for 2 years in a foreign country at 19 years old. Oh, and you pay for it yourself. Yes, I'll be making 'Utah, Selling Jesus & Saas' shirts soon. 🚪A HUGE percentage of these then go on to sell door-to-door with solar, pest, alarm, or whatever else you can sell door-to-door. It's what they are good at and know. 💵 Many then realize it's unrealistic to be 23, married and have their second kid on the way and still be making >$180k a year knocking doors only during the summer. So, the fastest path to $180k+ a year is selling saas. ⤴ The path to selling large enterprise is a journey and many fall out during the journey. So, sales teams naturally have a huge influx of SMB / MM talent that is top notch here to pull from 🎯 We're small. The community is still small and has the feel of 'everyone knows everyone'. This means your recruiting efforts have compounding effects. If you can steal a rep from company X, they likely went to school with, roomed with or worked with 3 others that want to follow them Regardless, I'm a believer. Selling to SMBs / MMs. No better place to build it than Utah. Shoot me a note, I'll tell you which companies to pick from. 😇

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The transition from founder led sales -> a repeatable GTM motion is hard... Extremely hard. There are so many things to consider to mitigate risk and get as many repetitions on closed loop feedback as quickly as possible. -> what profile of a rep should I hire -> how to assess the right talent -> SDR or AE or growth hacker type or both -> what channels should we be testing -> what does good look like? What does great look like? -> how do I know if we’re making progress? And so much more… We’re discussing all this live next Tuesday at Kiln. If you’re in Utah, come check it out: https://lnkd.in/eQ9dyJK4

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How much do you have to spend on Sales and marketing to generate $1 in ARR? We looked at this for the 30 odd SaaS companies that we track. Top performer for Q2 was Palantir. They spent $1.10 on S&M to generate $1 in net new ARR. Salesforce was the least efficient a $4.50 on S&M for every $1 in ARR. Want to numbers for all of the companies we track. Comment "send it" and I'll shoot it over.

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Where Did Revenue Operations Come From, and Is RevOps Necessary? Do you remember the days when IT bought and ran all the technology for your company? Then, 10 years ago, we saw a significant shift to your marketing and sales departments taking on most of the software purchases and running the software themselves. IT vetted purchases, but did not play a central role in selecting or managing software. In the past 4-5 years, we have seen another big shift based on two trends: >>> Marketing and sales strategies have matured and accelerated. >>> Data-driven insights are increasingly relied on to drive growth. As a result, the functionality and complexity of sales and marketing tools have increased. In a lot of cases, new software platforms or additional software modules are needed to run your business. However, your marketing and sales teams don't have time to both manage modern cross-departmental software systems and do their jobs at the same time. And IT does not have the time or experience to play a central role in your growth strategy. Leadership teams look to revenue operations professionals to lead the selection, implementation, and ongoing management of marketing software, CRM platforms, sales tools, and reporting engines. RevOps teams take on the data analyst, business analyst, automation builder, tester, and architect roles that sales, marketing, and IT leaders don't have the time or skillset to take on. So, if you ever wonder WHY everyone is talking about revenue operations and WHY the need for a RevOps team seemingly came out of thin air, pay attention to the increase in marketing and sales tools over the past decade. #HubSpot #Salesforce #Martech #Inbound #RevOps #RevenueOperations

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I can't believe it was almost 6 years ago when I started doing the podcast circuit talking about how RevOps was needed because there would be a fundamental change in the way SaaS works and the economy. Here's what I got right in these early conversations, this one with Dan Martell. 🧾 Current metrics that SaaS companies measure themselves on aren't true signals of the business's health. Looking at 3VC and effective use of capital was and now is the future. 🧾 Using industry benchmarks for your tech segment is more critical than using VC numbers for only high growth as you'll need both a day-to-day strategy in case you aren't a high-growth unicorn (which you are not) or def. in case you are (which again, you are not) 🧾 The future of outbound is personalized at scale, meaning real personalization is at the root of your outreach strategy. The key is the right to offer a message tied to the contact lifecycle. We just implemented a version of this at TrustLayer in 2024. 🧾 How RevOps, more than any other function, boosts efficient revenue gains, sometimes 36%. I saw this in clients when I was the CEO of Go Nimbly. Made this happen as CRO of TrustLayer - as we grow with well-run revops costs stay more fixed and produce more dollars out of each employee. For those of you who don't get it. This is the "check" emoji 🧾. The link to the original podcast is below.

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Large enterprises are now finally realizing they may be paying more for what they really need on their large-scale SaaS platforms.

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Interesting insights on the GTM side. Some of the key insights what i see for Saesforce is untapped market is like APAC, the pentration is low due to higher price of subscription premium. This is where they need to think different for these markets. tailered business centric experience from the salesforce offerings. Going beyond tools and methods, salesforce has to demostrate how its purely increasing revenue for every business partner they dealt with. Helping business models like b2c, b2c enaling the transparaency in revenue growth and market share. Salesforce was built by following he concept of Blue Ocean Strategy, they continued to look forward a way to sailing fast by outsmarting their competition with new simplified offerings. With a click of button Salesforce should able to build & deploy a omni channel experiene (like an app) from the lead generation to customer support. The configuration can decide what should add and drop. I think salesforce is more innovative company, Hope they have a product map for next 5 to 10 years already and working on the details of whats coming and how its growing their business. :)

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SaaS Leaders this one is for you: --> Struggling with lead quality? 🎯 --> It's like fishing in a sea of sardines when you need a whale. 🐋 --> I specialize in getting you the right fish—er, leads—on a call. Let's chat if you're tired of chasing sardines. 🐟✨ DM me directly or if we are not connected comment below.

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David’s S&M as a % of net new ARR is basically the same thing as net new CAC ratio and at 2.3x it’s running high. Even if you back out stock-based compensation (SBC) it’s still running above 2.0x. And these are best-in-class public companies. But despite historical comparisons is 2.0x too much to pay for a $1 of new ARR? It depends, mostly on expansion potential and stickiness. If paired with a high NRR, it works. If paired wtih a low GRR or a short CLT then it might well not. But, more than anything, make sure you look at it both ways — relative to past norms and relative to future value.

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I've been learning a ton on the differences in go-to-market for product-led growth software companies this year compared to the more traditional sales-led growth motions that I've typically implemented for companies. We dug into all of it on our podcast episode this month with Emma Cimolini 🍎. She does a deep dive into how to plan out your PLG customer journey in this post and video below. The video gives a high-level overview but be sure to read the full text of her post for all the specific details! She goes through lifecycle stage, lead statuses, and how and when to use what to build high-performing product-led growth for a software team. 🤘

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My biggest tip for demos: practice navigating your platform as your ICP. What specific challenges/workflows/use cases does your ICP use your product for? The demo isn’t to show cool features.. it’s to show how you can solve their problems. Practice solving problems on your demo account! 🤔What’s your demo tip?

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Wondering how to merge PLG and SLG for maximum impact? Japna Sethi talks about how they made this work at companies like Dropbox, Productboard, and Calendly. She calls it "defining the API" between the two growth motions so the right PLG leads get passed on to your sales team and shares the details on the approaches at the companies she has worked. For the full episode: https://lnkd.in/d-2ZAvir

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What does your sales conversion rate look like at your accounting firm? 🤔 Too many firm leaders talk about "crushing it" and "doing great" but not enough data to really know how well you're stacking up. This is why I loved having Patrick Dichter come on the Jetpack Workflow "Growing Your Firm" podcast to talk about ACTUAL NUMBERS. Here's his data ... 10 discovery calls ⏩ 4 proposal call ⏩ 2 clients Early on, he realized he had a repeatable process and was able to double revenue within 12 months of acquiring his first firm. In the interview, we talked about his sales process, pricing, how he built more inbound acquisition (all his clients come from inbound) and much more. Take a look at the comments for the full interview 👇 #JetpackWorkflow #GrowingYourFirm #accounting #sales

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As a #RevOps professional I could not be more excited about what is coming tomorrow! ZoomInfo Copilot delivers on what other Sales AI tools have promised for years but failed to realize. Harnessing AI to unite and analyze thousands of data points, 20,000 early ZoomInfo Copilot users across 500 different companies reported saving significant time on manual prospecting tasks and uncovering more opportunities to win business. Copilot predicted half of their existing pipeline. Seriously. Tomorrow, every seller becomes your best seller. Stay tuned! #ZoomInfoCopilot

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That's it - We nailed it. Any Salesforce or HubSpot object. Custom or default, including opportunities, deals, leads, contacts, and accounts.  Any event.  Any field type—picklists, ranges, checkboxes, text fields.  Mandatory fields, fields with dependencies. We update it ALL. When we first started building WINN.AI, I didn't imagine we'd go this far and this deep into CRM functionalities. Why not stop at the basics like most tools? Why not push it all in a bulk note and that's that? Our goal with WINN is to completely take CRM admin work off of reps' hands. That means updating the CRM with meeting data JUST LIKE A SALESPERSON WOULD. Covering any mandatory field. Being able to support custom requirements. If we don't do it all, then at some point the seller will have to fill out the rest. Or, more likely, they won't do it at all. That's why we didn't stop until we knew we had the whole process covered, no matter what specific CRM requirements our customers bring to the table. That's how you reach perfect CRM hygiene. That's how you 9X CRM data. For. Every. Customer. Interaction.

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For AEC focused startups, think about GTM this way. For scale and keeping CAC metrics in line. Bottom Up. PLG for PLG : Product Led Growth for Project Led Growth - User focused marketing - frictionless on boarding - No Sales Function (it’s too expensive) Enterprise: Leverage Project based success to sell to the enterprise. - High Level Solution Sales - Proven ROI Metrics - Make the CFO your champion - Have a well thought out - ABM strategies work well here. Enterprise Solution vs Discounted offering for bulk purchase. Spec to Check: Build generic specifications for your product and work with A/E firms to get them placed. This is for Construction Tech Specific. Owner Influence - Everyone’s ultimate customer. - Brand awareness - Thought Leadership - Building Type Specifc Marketing. We have an entire playbook on this type of stuff. Also what we teach in our stage agnostic incubator.

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