Cledara Nearly Tripled Pipeline in One Quarter by Selling to One Buyer
Cledara's own SaaS-spend data told it to ignore the go-upmarket consensus of 2023. Three pricing and packaging changes later, pipeline nearly tripled quarter over quarter — though revenue is a different number entirely.
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The biggest single lever Cledara pulled on its go-to-market was a button. Over the Christmas break at the end of 2023 the SaaS management company rewrote its pricing, repackaged its product and changed the call to action on its website, its landing pages and its outbound sequences from “Book a Demo” to “Get Started Free.” Then it measured.
Click through rates of get started free was nine times higher, nine times higher than Book a Demo.
Brad Van Leeuwen, co-founder and COO, Cledara
Van Leeuwen told that story on stage at SaaSOpen in Austin, and the recording went out on the Latka podcast under the title “How to 3x your revenue with 3 simple pricing changes.” The 3x he actually reported was pipeline, quarter over quarter — not revenue. At Cledara that distinction carries more weight than it would at most companies, because the product moves hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s software spend through its own rails, and almost none of that is Cledara’s revenue.
The argument. Cledara sells a real-time view of what companies spend on software. When its own pipeline flatlined, it turned that view on itself, found that the consensus advice of 2023 — go upmarket, the SMB is dead — had already expired, and rebuilt its pricing, its packaging and its first click around the small buyer instead. The payoff showed up at the top of the funnel first.
When this actually happened
This talk is easy to place a year early — its sibling session was recorded on the same conference stage in March 2023. It dates itself to 2024 three separate times.
- Nathan Latka’s introduction — “Here in 2024, we’re doing three to four new deals per week,” and the next SaaSOpen is “September fifth and sixth in New York City,” which is the New York edition held on 5 September 2024.
- The market Van Leeuwen describes — “Markets got hard last year in ’23,” and the overhaul was made “between Christmas and New Year last year.”
- The chart behind him — “an index of our pipe generation from Q1 this year till about two days ago,” with February data plotted and March “looking great as well.”
So the talk was given at SaaSOpen Austin on 28 and 29 March 2024, published to YouTube on 23 May 2024, and the pricing changes it describes were made in the last week of 2023. Everything below is dated on that basis.
The flatline
For most of Cledara’s life, pipeline generation was not a problem anyone had to think about.
PipeGen was easy. Right? PipeGen was something that just happened. People would book demos. People would respond to our outbound. And we didn’t need to think about it. It was it was like the air we breathed.
Then it stopped. Quota attainment fell as the company added SDRs; demo bookings stayed level rather than dropping, which is a subtler and more annoying failure. “I wanted to double revenue last year, and I was wanted to think about how we were going to double revenue again this year,” Van Leeuwen said. “And so a flat line didn’t make me very, very excited.” Note what that is: a stated ambition on both sides of the year, not a reported result. Nothing on this tape claims a completed doubling of revenue.
Going upmarket made the sale worse
Cledara did what the room full of software CEOs mostly did in 2023: widened the aperture. Inbound had been arriving from companies with several thousand employees, so the team chased those alongside its usual buyer of 50 to 500 people. The deals came, and they closed. The total pipeline did not move.
Companies of 50 to 500 people, the ICP since the start, closing in about thirty days on average — a machine the team had run “since the beginning of time for us.”
Multi-thousand-employee buyers: unfamiliar personas, new objections, buying committees the AEs had never faced. The sales cycle spiked, and attention drifted off the deals that closed quickly.
Interestingly, our win rate didn’t change. It just took a lot longer and we had to work a lot harder for it.
Brad Van Leeuwen, co-founder and COO, Cledara
The data underneath the decision
Cledara read its own product
Cledara is a SaaS management platform: customers discover, buy, pay for, manage and cancel their software through it. That gives the company an unusual instrument. When a customer onboards, Cledara sees the whole estate — including the parts nobody in finance or IT knew about. More than 60% of companies, Van Leeuwen said, have at least 40% of their software sitting outside the official picture, with sales and marketing teams the biggest offenders.
It gives us probably the best real time view of SaaS buying that exists anywhere in the world.
The company distils that into a quarterly measure it calls the SaaS Buyers Index, and the arithmetic is deliberately blunt.
SaaS Buyers Index = average of 200 (spent more on software than last month), 100 (about the same) and 0 (spent less)Above 100, the average company is increasing its software spend; below 100, it is cutting. Cledara publishes the index quarterly.
Split by buyer size, the index told a story that ran against the advice most boards were giving. Until the third quarter of 2022 — the quarter Cledara closed its Series A — smaller buyers were increasing spend faster than large ones. Through 2023 that reversed, and big buyers looked like the safer place to be. Then, around Web Summit in the autumn of 2023, the lines crossed back: small buyers started outperforming again, the trend held through Q4, and February and March 2024 confirmed it. Cledara’s own ICP had quietly become the strongest segment in the market again while the company was busy chasing enterprises.
A second series in the same dataset shaped the packaging decision. Buyers put 95% of their annual software budget into renewals rather than new purchases, and on average they will spend about 30% more on a renewal than on a new purchase. Read one way that is vendors leaning on their installed base in a hard year. Read another, it is a data-backed argument for land-and-expand — which is the reading Cledara acted on.
The three changes, plus the one that mattered most
The changes were made between Christmas and New Year. None of them is exotic; the discipline is in how they interlock, and every one of them is a SaaS pricing decision before it is a marketing one.
- Take IT out of the plans. Cledara went feature by feature and pulled everything aimed at IT out of the core packages. The goal was to sell to one buyer, with one champion and one set of objections, instead of assembling a committee on every deal regardless of company size.
- Turn what you removed into the expansion path. The IT features were valuable, so they became add-ons — a roadmap for happy customers to buy more later, which is the land-and-expand motion the renewal data argued for.
- Lower the entry price without cannibalising the base. The old pricing had a high entry point, worst of all for the small buyers who were now the best buyers. A free plan went in at the bottom. Roughly a thousand existing customers were already paying something, so the plans and add-ons were priced so that a customer keeping the same features paid the same money. Van Leeuwen’s justification for the free tier was retention: “Our our churn is very, very low,” so a company caught earlier than usual can be kept and grown — a bet that only pays if the churn rate really is what you think it is.
- Change the first click, everywhere. “Get Started Free” replaced “Book a Demo” on the site, on landing pages and in SDR outbound, where the team saw a similar lift. Discovery was cut from thirty minutes to eight and folded into the demo call itself, aimed at a one-call close; quotas are being tested on logos rather than dollars to keep the urgency.
Who wants to give up thirty minutes of their time to do discovery and and all these things and see a product? Why don’t you just let someone start?
What moved, and what didn’t
~3xpipeline, one quarter to the next, after the changes
“So here’s the result. So nearly tripled pipeline from one quarter to the next,” Van Leeuwen said — Q4 2023 into Q1 2024, measured on the index chart he was standing in front of. That is the whole of the reported outcome. Pipeline is not bookings and bookings are not revenue, and on a tape given in late March the first quarter’s cohort had barely had time to renew, let alone expand.
What the GetLatka profile for Cledara holds is thinner than the video title suggests. Two dated revenue rows bracket the whole story: $720,000 recorded on 4 November 2020, and $8.19M recorded on 23 December 2023 — the latter flagged in the database as an estimate. That estimate is where the $8.2M attached to this interview comes from; it is not a figure anyone states on tape. There is no dated revenue row between those two, so a doubling in 2023 can be neither confirmed nor refuted here. Eleven-fold over three years is what the two endpoints describe, and that is as precise as the record gets.
Headcount is better documented, and it complicates the growth story in a useful way.
Cledara went into the pricing overhaul with 70 people on the books in December 2023 and came out of the quarter that tripled pipeline with 63 in May 2024. The team got smaller while the funnel got bigger. That is consistent with the mechanism Van Leeuwen describes — fewer people in the buying committee, shorter discovery, a self-serve entry point — and it is the sort of thing the headline number hides.
- Sep 2019 · Pre-seed $930,000.
- Nov 2020 · Seed $3.4M, alongside the $720,000 revenue row and a team of eight.
- Sep 2022 · Series A $20M — the same quarter the SaaS Buyers Index shows large buyers taking over from small ones. Total raised to date: $24.33M.
The number that is not revenue
Cledara had been on a Latka stage once before, in March 2023, when CEO and co-founder Cristina Vila Vives took questions about that Series A. That conversation is where the business model is on the record, and it is the reason to be careful with any large number attached to this company. Vila Vives said Cledara has two revenue streams — the subscription to the platform, and interchange paid directly by Mastercard on the virtual cards customers use to buy their software — and that interchange was 60% of monthly revenue against 40% subscription.
Asked for the total card volume running through the platform, she gave a number an order of magnitude above anything in Cledara’s own P&L: “I can tell you that this year we’re gonna do half a billion, so 500 million dollars.” Customers were buying or renewing 1,500 subscriptions a day. Those are throughput figures for other companies’ software budgets. Cledara earns a slice of the interchange on them, not the volume.
The same session dates the US expansion, which Cledara ran from London until it had roughly 50 customers there; the first US deal was about $500 a month, an annual contract value of around $6,000, and the Denver office opened after the September 2022 round. Latka worked a revenue band out loud from the team size — 80 people at about $130,000 per employee, so “between like nine and 20 million in ARR” — and Vila Vives put the company at the bottom of that range. It is an estimate derived on stage, and it sits within touching distance of the $8.19M the database estimates for the end of that year. Asked how much Cledara would grow in 2023, she answered “minimum 3x.” A year later, her co-founder was on the same conference’s stage describing a flatline and rebuilding the funnel around it.
Epilogue, added after publication. The next dated revenue row GetLatka recorded for Cledara is $10,812,391, on 17 October 2024, also flagged as an estimate — about a third higher than the December 2023 figure, not a double. The pipeline result held up better than the revenue ambition behind it.
What he told the room to do
The takeaway Van Leeuwen left with a room of a thousand software CEOs was not about free plans. It was about which buyer was actually available in 2024, and how much friction stood between that buyer and a purchase.
If you’ve heard the SMB is dead, I can tell you it ain’t. It’s doing really well right now. But you’ve got to make it easier to buy. And my challenge to you is how easy can you make it to buy?
Brad Van Leeuwen, co-founder and COO, Cledara
Sources — Brad Van Leeuwen’s talk at SaaSOpen Austin, 28–29 March 2024, published on the Latka podcast 23 May 2024; Cristina Vila Vives in conversation with Nathan Latka at SaaSOpen Austin, March 2023; GetLatka’s Cledara profile for the revenue, funding and team-size rows, quoted with the dates they carry; roles as listed by Cledara and Crunchbase.
