Salesloft Revenue: $50M ARR in 2019, Past $100M by Mid-2021

Salesloft was at about $50 million in ARR when founder and CEO Kyle Porter talked to Nathan Latka on July 25, 2019. His own summary: “We were four employees with zero ARR in this product in 2014. We’ll hit 100,000,000 next year, sitting around the 50,000,000 mark, growing 100%, 120% net expansion.” The $50 million is annual recurring revenue, a run rate of subscriptions at one point in time. It is not the revenue booked over a year. The $100 million was a forecast for 2020, and it arrived about a year late. In December 2021 Salesloft said it had “surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in early summer 2021,” with 50% annual growth. Porter put the figure a year before the interview at roughly $25 million, “something like that.”

The $50 million also leaves out the business Salesloft used to be. From 2011 to 2014 Porter ran other products, including a data product that “went from 0 to 7,000,000 in about eighteen months.” He cancelled it to build the sales engagement platform. “When I tell revenue numbers now, I don’t even bring in the old product at all,” he said.

Salesloft revenue: the ARR line, figure by figure

Every row except the last is from the July 25, 2019 recording, and none of those includes the data product Porter cancelled. The last row is the company’s own announcement. His answer on the mid-2018 figure is garbled on the tape, and GetLatka’s interview page records it as about $25M.

The 2019 row is the one this page’s address is about, and an earlier version of this article called it “revenue.” ARR is the accurate word. Porter compared it with “zero ARR” in 2014, and Latka read it back as “50,000,000 ARR, 140 raised” without being corrected. For a company that doubles every year, the revenue it recognizes over twelve months comes in below its year-end ARR, so the two terms aren’t interchangeable.

Latka also brought numbers from his research team that Porter didn’t confirm. One was a $48,000 monthly quota for Salesloft’s first sales hire in March 2014, to which Porter said, “I don’t remember the exact numbers.” The other was a jump from 30 customers and $200,000 in ARR to 660 customers and $3.7 million. Porter answered that in 2015 the new product was at $200,000 and that the rest “was all the old revenue,” meaning most of Latka’s bigger figure came from the product he later cancelled.

The forecast came true, but not on schedule. Porter said $100 million “next year,” meaning 2020, and the company reported passing it in early summer 2021. Going from about $50 million in July 2019 to $100 million about 23 months later works out to a little over 40% a year compounded. That is our arithmetic on two round numbers, against the 100% growth Porter described in 2019 and the 50% the company gave in 2021. Salesloft’s GetLatka profile now shows that $100 million ARR figure for 2021 with its source. An earlier version of this article put the profile’s unsourced later rows in a table and a chart. The only post-2019 figures used here are the company’s own.

The $7 million product he cancelled

Porter started Salesloft in 2011 inside the Pardot offices, alongside David Cummings. The early years were a string of experiments. One product connected to a company’s CRM and watched LinkedIn for contacts who changed jobs. Another was a Twitter-style stream of news about target accounts. The third was a data product, “the easiest way to build the most accurate and targeted list of prospects in the marketplace.” The data product was the hit, “in the millions of ARR in 2014” and still growing. Porter shut it down anyway.

Really none of those aligned with the vision of what I wanted to do for the purpose of this company… we started looking at what the best sellers were doing, and they were communicating with their customers in an authentic, sincere, but repeatable and scalable way. So we decided to build an entire platform for that.

Kyle Porter, founder and CEO, Salesloft, July 2019

The new product launched at the end of 2014, and the switch was hard on the sales team. The old product was “easy to use. It was easy to buy,” and “sellers were making great money on it.” The new one was “not built out yet” and needed an evangelical sale in a category that didn’t exist yet. Before Porter handed selling to Anthony, his first sales hire, whom he’d recruited from Pardot, he said he had closed “probably somewhere around 150 k ARR” himself. He also went fourteen months without a salary and put his own money into the company.

The retention math behind 120%

Porter put gross revenue retention at “high eighties, nineties, something like that.” He said bookings split about 55% from new customers and 45% from expansion. Latka did the arithmetic: 120% net retention on 90% gross retention takes about 30% expansion. That works at 90%. If gross retention was at the high-eighties end of Porter’s range, expansion would need to be closer to 32% or more.

Porter named two drivers. First, Salesloft sold to every revenue-facing role. It started with SDRs and inside sales and then added field reps, account managers and demand-gen teams, so enterprise accounts grew department by department and smaller ones grew role by role, with seats as the unit in both. Second, it cross-sold conversation intelligence after buying a company called Note Agent the year before, a competitor of Chorus and Gong. Note Agent’s founders were bootstrapped, “hadn’t raised any capital,” and still worked at Salesloft. Porter said the deal terms were theirs to tell. An earlier version of this article got the company’s name wrong.

Customers numbered in the “thousands.” The range of “between two and ten thousand” was Latka’s, not Porter’s. Contracts ran from “a 15 ks customer to a million dollar customer,” a spread Porter said he learned from Scott Dorsey at ExactTarget.

Atlanta, team ratios and a new category

Salesloft had a mid-market team and an enterprise team, each with its own VP and both reporting to the CRO. Selling was mostly done by inside sales, plus a handful of field reps in enterprise. Porter said he no longer knew the exact rep ratios, but estimated about two AEs per SDR in enterprise and three AEs for every two SDRs in the commercial segment, which covers mid-market and SMB. In the early days he had run it the other way round, with three SDRs for every two AEs. The company had “a little over 400” employees, with offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Guadalajara and San Francisco.

Porter argued that Atlanta was an advantage. He said Salesloft had lower employee churn than any other company in the category, which was “what we hear from our investors when we report it at the board meetings.” Asked for the actual rate, he said “just barely in the double digits” and added, “I don’t have the facts on me right now.” He also cited G2 Crowd ranking Salesloft first in sales engagement for three quarters in a row, and said Salesloft’s own conference had drawn 1,400 people the year before. Latka framed Outreach’s purchase of Sales Hacker as Salesloft losing a distribution channel. Porter dismissed that, calling Sales Hacker “more of a brand play.”

$140 million raised, half still in the bank

Asked for total funding, Porter said: “140, I believe.” Latka put the ratio bluntly, “50,000,000 ARR, 140 raised,” and compared it with Zoom. Porter replied that Salesloft’s biggest round ever had just closed and that the company was “still sitting on half of that money or more.” When Latka asked, “Half of the 140?” Porter said yes. (An earlier version of this article said half of the latest round was in the bank, but on the tape it’s half of the $140 million total.) When Latka asked whether monthly burn was around $5 million, “more or less,” Porter said: “Less.” CAC payback was “thirteen, fourteen months right now.” Latka’s sign-off said fourteen to sixteen months, but the tape has thirteen to fourteen.

I’m not telling my employees that it’s IPO or bust because I wanna, you know, make sure that they know that we can still have a great business if we don’t do that.

Kyle Porter, July 2019

Porter said Salesloft’s financial projections allowed for the new round to be its last before an IPO, though “that doesn’t mean we might not raise again.” He expected IPO talks to start around “one forty, one fifty” rather than at the $100 million mark, with a caveat: “I’ve got a CFO who knows way more about that than I do.” He said he had no plans to sell: “we also didn’t build this company to sell it. I built this company to transform the profession of sales forever.” Near the end of the interview he said it again: “Not in acquisitions talks with anyone.”

After the tape

On December 23, 2021, Salesloft announced what it called a “strategic growth investment” from Vista Equity Partners, headlined at a $2.3 billion valuation, with Vista joining the board. Mubadala, which invested alongside Vista, described the deal in May 2022: “Vista Equity Partners took a majority stake in Salesloft in December 2021, in a deal that was valued at $2.3 billion.” So about two and a half years after Porter said he was “Not in acquisitions talks with anyone,” a private-equity firm owned the majority. The same Mubadala note put Salesloft at about 4,000 customers. Citing the company, it also said Salesloft was on track for a 50% increase in annual revenue in 2022, which was a forecast at the time.

Asked what he wished he’d known at 20, Porter pointed to the purpose statement written on his wall: “my purpose is to grow and equip others to do remarkable things and lead significant and fulfilled lives.” He said he started to realize it when he was 20.