Tom Clayton
CRO, Bill.com · 0 appearances on the record.
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Tom Clayton is the Chief Revenue Officer at Bill.com. He advises companies on expanding revenue streams to drive business growth.
1 not yet assessed how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 assertions · 3 opinions · 13 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Tom argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Tom Clayton said on the Official SaaStr Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
SaaS startups under $100M fail with VARs due to low market pull
“I think the reason most are burned by them is just because they try to go after them too early. They're like little kids on a soccer field. They go where the ball is, and if you're just starting out or you're sub hundred million dollars, you're not the ball ye…”
Clayton: M&A before $100M in revenue is just a distraction
“Before a hundred million, it's just a distraction.”
Clayton: Hire rising VP talent over repeat C-level journeymen
“Don't hire someone like me who's been a CRO several times and, or along the journey. Hire someone that's like that VP of sales that's like skyrocketed through their career.”
At massive scale, Salesforce employee quality maps to society's average
“Don't look at just like certain companies and certain brands and say, I want someone from Salesforce, right? Because Salesforce has how many employees now? At that scale, you start mapping to the average of society.”
Clayton: Addiction to employee referrals makes recruiters lazy and teams homogeneous
“They're also, like, crack. They get really addicting, and you don't want to get addicted to it because, What happens is then you start forgetting how to hunt and feed for yourself. Your recruiting team is more focused on the referral channel than scouring Link…”
Above-the-line marketing is an ego-feeding distraction for B2B startups
“Above the line marketing, not so much. Don't worry about it. It's a distraction and it just feeds egos.”
Clayton: Companies hit diminishing sales channel returns around $100M revenue
“Usually at zero to a hundred million dollars, you might have a couple of sales motions, maybe a couple, a few marketing channels. It's much simpler. You focus, but then after sometimes, sometime around a hundred million dollars, you tend to Start hitting dimin…”
Bill.com transaction revenue has surpassed its subscription revenue
“If you looked at our quarter last quarter we have now surpassed our revenues. Subscription pricing revenue has now been surpassed by transaction-based pricing revenue.”
Clayton: Divi makes more from transactions than subscription fees
“I guarantee that Divi or other companies like them make more money in that revenue model than they would if they tried to just try to charge a flat subscription fee.”
Clayton: Targeted white-labeling can rapidly scale revenue past $100M
“Once you get past a hundred million dollars, it's definitely a, an area where you can really scale revenue really fast if you do it with the right players, and I don't mean doing it to everybody, being more targeted, you know, don't spray and pray, you know, b…”
Clayton: Vertical GTM works without changing the underlying product
“Thinking about a go-to-market skin that's verticalized from messaging standpoint, from customer references, even segmenting customer, ah, sales teams so that they're calling specific verticals just makes you much more effective. You're not even changing the pr…”
SaaS startups must rely on self-serve or direct sales under $100M
“If you want to control your own sales, control your own destiny, you either have a great self-serve platform or you have your own sales force.”
Clayton: SaaS bundling only works for similar-sized companies with complementary products
“It works if you're like-sized companies, and you have a very complimentary offering that's selling into the same buyer persona.”
Clayton: Silicon Valley Defaults to English-Speaking Markets and Overlooks Asia
“When we think about international expansion in the Valley, we often say, oh yeah, UK or Australia or Canada. And it's you know, or sometimes we'll get really aggressive and we'll say, let's go after Europe. Like we rarely think I spent 10 years of my life in A…”
B2C startups face higher pressure to expand internationally than B2B SaaS
“If you're a B to B SaaS, if you're a B to C company with strong global network effects or fear of, ah, local copycats taking over the market, you might move a lot more aggressively internationally. That was Houzz. That was Airbnb. That was Uber. Ah, less is th…”
Clayton: SaaS industry spent two decades ignoring back-office software
“We in the SaaS industry for the last two decades have been focused predominantly on the front office. CRM, marketing automation, everything that touches the customer. We've largely ignored the back office”
Clayton: BEA Systems reached $1B revenue in two and a half years
“Alright, so BA Systems, back in the day, dot com, one dot o, was the fastest software company to hit a billion dollars of revenue. It took us about two and a half years.”
Clayton: International Expansion Is Currently a Distraction for Bill.com
“Bill.com. It's almost, outside of one recent acquisition, it's almost a hundred percent domestic. We have, you know, depending on how you count it, if you count all our acquisitions, yeah, maybe we have 300,000 customers. There's six million SMBs in the US alo…”
Clayton: Houzz waited to perfect U.S. playbook before expanding globally
“Like, Howe's really got it right in the U.S., and then we took that playbook and rinse, wash, and repeat in other countries. But, We waited till we got it right in the US before we just started going everywhere, and I've seen other companies go faster, and the…”
Clayton: Candidates Prefer Proven Winners Over Remaining Growth Upside
“A lot more people err towards wanting to be on winners than are concerned about how much more growth is left there in that, in the company.”
Played on the show (1)
Episodes where a recording of Tom Clayton was played rather than Tom taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.
| Episode | Date | On tape | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Path to a Billion Dollars: How to Create Multi-Revenue Streams with Bill.com CRO Tom C | Mar 8, 2022 | 32m | aired address |