ChartMogul: What happens when a sales leader takes over marketing at a B2B SaaS company

Episode notes

This episode focuses on Sara Archer, Chief Revenue Officer at ChartMogul — a subscription analytics platform used by over 6,000 SaaS companies. Sara joined in 2018 as employee number one on the commercial side, couldn't build a forecast for the CEO on day two because the CRM data was useless, and has spent seven years inheriting more responsibility — from rebuilding the sales stack to now running both sales and marketing as a unified function. She believes demand generation is the hardest non-technical problem in SaaS and that most marketing systems that look healthy on paper are actually dead weight. ChartMogul built and shipped a revenue recognition product at the customers' request. The sales team dreaded every demo. Support tickets piled up. The product domain — accounting compliance — didn't match anyone's expertise. They decommissioned it. Years later, they built CRM capabilities inside ChartMogul instead, and the difference was immediate: it was fun to sell, customers adopted it naturally, and it made sense as an expansion lever.