SaaStr 108: Growing To $500m In ARR & How To Hit 7 Figure Sales with Veeva Systems Founder, Peter Gassner

Peter Gassner is the Founder & CEO @ Veeva Systems, the industry cloud for life science systems. With just $4m in capital raised, Peter has taken Veeva to almost $500m in ARR and a prominent force in the rising tide of enterprise SaaS. As for Peter, prior to Veeva, Peter was a Senior Vice President of Technology at Salesforce where he experienced the successful IPO of the company and their rise into the most successful SaaS platform in the industry. Before Salesforce, Peter was with PeopleSoft for 9 years where he led a team of 450 professionals to support PeopleSoft’s technology platform. I do also want to say a big thank you to Jason Lemkin for the intro to Peter today without which the episode would not have been possible.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Peter make the move from Salesforce to founding one of the leaders in SaaS, Veeva?
• Why did Peter not want to be CEO in the beginning? What was the catalyst for his changing mindset? How has view of CEOship evolved over the Veeva journey?
• How does Peter assess the attractiveness of a market? What are the 2 questions Peter asks before going into a market? Is it wrong to move into smaller adjacent markets?
• How does Peter assess the suitability of potential board members? What does he mean when he says all founders should use the ‘grocery store rule’?  
• What is required to close 7 figure enterprise deals? How can sales teams look to build this relationship with large co’s in a natural and non-transactional way?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr