SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt
Chris Merritt, Chief Revenue Officer of Cloudflare joined Cloudflare nearly a decade ago when annual revenue was around $1M with one sales person — and has since been scaling the sales organization and helping grow Cloudflare into the multi-billion dollar business it is today. When building a sales team and business at scale, organizations go through various stages of growth with key milestones along the way—from 1-10 million in revenue, to 50-100 million, to 100 million, and onward. While no two businesses are the same, we'll dive into a few areas that are most likely to change, with Chris sharing some findings along the way to help others effectively scale their organizations.
Full video with Q&A: https://youtu.be/YkmDl59sDkg
Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.
Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976
Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/
Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh
Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8
CRO Cloudflare, Chris Merritt: Creating an Authentic Content-driven Strategy
Just take it from website security industry executive Chris Merritt — the internet was not designed with security and performance in mind.
As President of Field Operations and CRO of Cloudlflare, Chris and his company are dedicated to fixing this problem by protecting websites for a more secure and reliable internet.
On this episode of Go to Market Grit, Joubin and Chris discuss how Cloudflare’s go-to-market strategy has evolved, as well as how Cloudflare helps prevent bad actors from conducting internet attacks.
In this episode, we cover:
How Chris' current company, Cloudflare, is creating a more secure and reliable internet network. (3:44)
Chris' experience working at Cloudflare during the company's early stages. (8:23)
The evolution of Cloudflare’s go to market strategy. (13:18)
Content-driven strategy: How Cloudflare uses an engineering blog to help enable its freemium model. (17:54)
Stopping DDoS attacks: How an increase in security awareness among the general public benefited Cloudflare. (25:03)
‘A community watch’: Why Cloudflare’s large and diverse user base enables a better and more competitive product. (31:17)
Change management: The incremental and careful process of bringing Cloudflare up-market. (36:37)
The qualities Chris looks for in new hires. (44:23)
How Chris defines grit. (50:10)
Links:
Connect with Chris MerrittLinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins