From Outbound to Channel Partnerships: Your Burning Sales Questions Answered by SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

At the closing AMA of SaaStr Annual, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin shared candid insights about what’s really happening in SaaS today.

In this Ask Me Anything Part 1, Lemkin answers the questions:

1. What does SaaStr attendee data tell us about the state of SaaS?

2. Is outbound sales dead?

3. When sales slow how do you keep the team motivated and push through?

4. How important are channel partnerships for sales and revenue?

5. When should founders make their first executive hires?

Let’s find out the answers.

Question #1: What does SaaStr Annual attendee data tell us about the state of SaaS?

“The raw attendance was up about ~103% of last year – so just a tiny bit up,” Jason explains. “But the mix is pretty different.”

Here’s the breakdown:

• CEOs and founders: Up 150% from last year

• International attendance: Up from the last two consecutive years of SaaStr Annual

• CMOs, CROs, CCOs: Significantly up with the addition of Summits to SaaStr Annual

• VC attendance: Down 40% from last year

Why the drop in VC attendance? Jason explains: “While YC is as hot as ever – I talked to two YC founders in this batch that got 40 VC offers before the batch started – a lot of folks in venture, even though it doesn’t look like it, they don’t have money to invest. They’re struggling to raise another fund. They’re sitting on the sidelines.  They’ve slowed it down.”

Question #2: Is outbound sales dead?

“The classical approach to outbound is close to dead,” Jason stated. “That old playbook of just loading up a database with the same generic email is dead.”

So it’s not that most of us truly believe outbound is dead, but the yield now is really low. With the explosion of AI powered outbound tools or completely automated outbound AI SDRs, we’re all receiving emails written by AI daily, and they’re terrible.

But.. are they actually better than the ones the humans send?

Yes, all the AI-written emails sound the same under the hood, but this example Jason gave of a human-written outbound email was much worse. It said ‘Jason M. will you be attending SaaStr today?’. There are many issues with this. It was sent during the event and if you had to guess if the CEO of the company hosting the event would be there, it would already be a high probability. But adding in the fact that Jason shares live updates on social media during the Annual that are clearly from the SaaStr Annual and there’s just no excuse for an outbound message like this. So this ‘classical’ style of approach to outbound is dead.

so what does work?

Building out an outbound message that truly adds value to your prospective customer in the following ways:

• Slow down and be thoughtful. Spray & pray is dead. To some degree, cadences are dead too. But one-off highly custom outbound almost always works.

• Find your 10x feature. And highlight how you can solve a problem for your prospect with this. Look at what they’re posting on social media or on the blog. Relate this back to something they’re already doing and make an educated guess on what they’re trying to do next and what their goals are.

• Research 100 prospects who truly need that feature. It will take time and it will take more time that just putting in a csv into a tool and using a lookalike audience (which can work to some degree too) but this will almost certainly boost opens if you’re confident that who you’re pitching too has a need for your product.

• Spend an hour crafting each email. Yes, an hour. Yes the AI sdr can do hundreds per hour, but most have noted they haven’t closed a single deal yet from an AI SDR. Zero x Zero is still zero. So take the extra time to craft highly personalized outbound.

• Make it specific and solution-focused. The right email to the right account and the right points of contact there that solves their problem, even at the edge, will always at least, get you a conversation.

“If you’re trying to get something off the ground, be honest first. Do you have a 10x feature? Because your product, if it’s early, is feature-poor, bug-ridden, slow and does nothing. No one needs your product or your outbound emails unless you have a 10x feature.”

Question #3: When sales slow, how do you keep the team motivated?

A founder attending SaaStr Annual gave Jason this example, his company is over $1M ARR, with 50 enterprise clients, but recently sales has started to slow which has led to some dissent among the team both with each other and the product. What should he do?

“ Don’t chase the shiny penny,” Jason advised. “Maybe growth has slowed and that’s an issue, and it may be more of a team issue or competition. But stay on course. There’s a good chance you can get from 50 to 100.”

“When I went through this situation as a founder, our goal was 10 million at the time. And we had this huge curve on the wall from one to ten with a superhero flying over our current revenue, and every week I would move the superhero up the curve.

Every week we would do a team meeting and every quarter we would do a bigger meeting and I would literally move the superhero up the curve. This was the slowest flying Superman going up this wall, but the point is they could see it. Everyone could see the goal.”

Atomize on a stretch, but likely attainable goal and get the team buy-in so everyone knows the goal and is consistently working towards it – slump or not. The superhero will move up the curve.

Question #4: How important are channel partnerships?

“Way too many founders learn the direct motion, and then they just get their ass kicked when their competitors figure out the channel and partner strategy,” Jason warned. He shared some compelling numbers:

• Klaviyo: 40% of $1B revenue through agencies and partners

• HubSpot: Over 40% from partners

• Shopify: 40-45% from agencies

What most founders overlook is in the enterprise, ie Accenture and others like it that will really only partner with one or two companies in a category and strongly recommend it to their clients. So if you’re not the strongly recommended one, you product better be bad ass because you’re not going to get recommended by the bigger folks.

The key to success?

First, if you’re selling direct then if nothing else, use public companies, use SaaStr’s five interesting learnings series, and learn what folks in your industry and segment are doing through partners and channel. And then start doing it as much as you can now, copy it, learn from it, dance around it, because in many of your industries, you’ll start off direct, and you’ll start off from early adopters, and folks that find you in tech, and found you on Google, and that’s great, but it’s not everything. It’s often less than half of your world, and if you get boxed out because your competitor owns a channel or partner, It’s sometimes game over.

Second, find someone who’s done this successfully. When done right and thoughtfully, channel partnerships are a completely separate department to sales. Find this person whose goal is to talk to every agency, go to every event, and talk to every single possible person who could recommend your product at scale. Once you build a ‘mini brand’ around channel and partner, it can snowball and help lead you to the bigger agencies like the Accentures to start recommending you.

Lastly, don’t get boxed out. Dedicate the right resources to business development to channel and partner. When you’re building out your channel and partner ecosystem, it’s easier to dedicate more of your personal founder time and resources to it. But what happens when it starts working and get pulled into a different direction? Too many founders get boxed out by not being present. And of course, you can’t be everywhere at once, so build a team here sooner than you think. Otherwise your competition may sneak in and box you out.

Question #5: When should founders make their first executive hires?

Here’s the sequence to follow: VP Marketing, then VP Sales, then VP Product.

1. VP Marketing: Can be hired as early as $20K MRR.

2. VP Sales: Wait until you have two reps hitting quota. 99% of VPs of sales get you from rep three to 300. They take a process that is starting to repeat.”

3. VP Product: Timing varies, but don’t wait too long
“Most founders have never worked with a game-changing VP of product that can spend 50 hours a week with the customers.”

The real answer, though? If you have something, hire any great VP you can find. Hire them too early, or even in the wrong order if you find someone truly great.

The bottom line from this AMA? Despite market uncertainties, founders who focus on the fundamentals – finding their 10x feature, building strong channel partnerships, and making strategic executive hires – are still finding ways to scale efficiently in today’s SaaS landscape.