SaaStr 245: The Ultimate Guide To ACVs; When and How To Increase Them, Revenue Optimisation Per Lead & What It Means To Truly Be An ARR First Company

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired.

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community and leading early-stage SaaS fund with investments in Automile, TalkDesk, Algolia and more.

Jason Vandeboom is the Founder of ActiveCampaign, a sales and marketing automation platform that enables small businesses around the world to meaningfully connect and engage with their customers. Since 2013 with their transition to SaaS have grown to more than $50 million in ARR in less than five years, while maintaining profitability.

Dave Kellogg is a leading technology executive, independent board member, advisor and angel investor. In his most recent role, Dave was the CEO @ Host Analytics where he quintupled ARR, halved customer acquisition costs and increased net retention rates before selling the company to a private equity sponsor.

Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• Does David Skok believe that ACV should sit at the top of the metrics stack? What are the 4 metrics that fundamentally matter in your business? What can founders do to their pricing model to extract as much value from each customer? How do the very best businesses structure their pricing for value extraction?
• If ACV increase is a core focus for our startup, should we hire a sales rep solely selling to enterprise? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in this scenario? What can founders do to optimise revenue per lead? How does on need o approach lead targeting according to the individual skills of their reps?
• Is it best to start at enterprise and work down to SMB or does SMB and work up to enterprise work best? How does the product have to change with the scaling to enterprise? How does the messaging need to change with the scaling to enterprise? How do you need this change to be reflected in your pricing?    
• What does it truly mean to be an ARR first company? What is the right way for founders to calculate their differing ACVs? What is the right way to present that when pitching VCs? Where do many founders go wrong in how they present and discuss ACVs with investors?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Harry Stebbings
Jason Lemkin
SaaStr
David Skok
Jason Vandeboom
Dave Kellogg
Fred Shilmover