Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Chief Business Officer at Stripe) offers key operational advice on sales planning and revenue modeling at SaaStr Annual.
Insight
Grosser: Startups moving upmarket must secure core enterprise workloads over pilots
“If you go into enterprise, you wanted to get the whale, not the fin. A fin was like our little derogatory term to me, like, you didn't really get a legit workload at that company. So I think a lot of times people will get a side project, an experimental busine…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Stripe had zero sales engineers when Jeanne DeWitt Grosser joined
“When Stripe was selling into developers, believe it or not, when I showed up to run the sales team, we didn't have a single sales engineer or solution architect”
Insight
Grosser: Enterprises prefer predictable, modular pricing over standard pay-as-you-go models
“Enterprises like predictability. They also like a lot more modularity. They like more all-apart. And so we really had to do a lot to unbundle our pricing for enterprise, let them buy more sub-components, and in some cases, price fundamentally differently.”
Assertion Partly supported
Stripe's 2017 enterprise push was driven by Shopify, Lyft, and Squarespace
“So for Stripe in that first camp, this was back in 2017 that we started our foray into enterprise, and it was the Shopify's, the Lyft's, Squarespace's were all growing up, bringing in adult CFO's, contemplating IPOs, and so they had a bunch of demands.”
Assertion Supported
Stripe Won Amazon.com in Singapore as an Early Enterprise Client
“And then on the other side, we won Amazon's, Amazon.com in Singapore.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grosser: Stripe's first-year enterprise deals were smaller and higher velocity than expected
“In Stripe's case, actually, it turned out that we were doing a lot more deals, but they were smaller and higher velocity in enterprise in year one.”