To kick off the Fall season and close out Q3, Atlanta Ventures hosted the third Simply SaaS Forum. 70% of Forum attendees this September were Founders who gave up half their day to hear rapid fire learning sessions on four topics—People, Product/Engineering, Sales and Marketing. Not only that, attendees were able to connect with fellow SaaS people who have been chasing after the “overnight success story” for years. These events were created to help SaaS Professionals connect, learn, and be inspired, and the Forum on September 27th did not disappoint.
In addition to speaker sessions from four industry leaders, Josh Pigford, Founder and CEO of Baremetrics, joined for a Q&A with David Cummings. Below is the full video recap from the event and check out the highlights from what each speaker shared!
Brad McGinity leads the Revenue Organization at 15Five, including sales, customer success and customer support. He previously co-founded Windsor Circle, a predictive marketing and analytics software provider, where he was the VP of Sales and a Board member of the company. He was also the top performing Sales Exec at Bronto Software before its acquisition by Netsuite.
Brad came to help provide structure and systemization to sales pipelines and how we think about selling. His main topics were about opportunity stages and verifiable outcomes.
The outcome stages are as follows:
He taught us that these opportunity stages have goals for each stage, verifiable outcomes, common languages, and that each stage has meaning. MEDDPICC is a strategy to help increase win rates:
Quantify the payoff your solution brings to your customer.
Jeff Perkins is Chief Marketing Officer of Parkmobile, the leading provider of mobile parking solutions. Prior to Parkmobile, Jeff was the CMO of QASymphony where he helped establish the brand and grow revenue 500% over a three-year period. He also has held senior marketing leadership positions at PGi and AutoTrader.com. Jeff started his career grinding it out in the NYC ad industry at Saatchi & Saatchi. His experiences range from traditional to digital, B2C to B2B, and agency-side to client-side.
Jeff took us through 6 ways to make a big impact with a small budget. The main takeaways were: 1) Focus, 2) Know your buyer, 3) Get your name out there, 4) Think big, 5) Be the brand, and 6) Create raving fans.
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
Some Metrics:
Jonathan is the CTO of CodeGuard (recently acquired by Comodo CA) and has been responsible for overseeing the product architecture, engineering efforts, project management and customer service for over 7 years. He has been able to help CodeGuard grow from the prototype stage to the stable, scalable and mature platform it is today.
Jonathan taught us the foundations for your high performance engineering team. He shared the importance of a well-defined project management, choosing the right metric, thoughtful operations, customer support, and the team.
Find the best communicator you can afford.
Lessons learned included: 1) transparency is a feature, 2) be open to new information, 3) spreadsheets are key, 4) estimating is hard, 5) Customer Success should an engineering discipline, and 6) make sure you talk to each other (a lot)!
Christine Kaszubski is the Chief People Officer (CPO) at SalesLoft. As SalesLoft’s first human resources executive, she is dedicated to helping the company attract and retain the best, most-diverse talent, while building industry leading programs and core value driven culture. Christine has more than 20 years of Human Resource and Organizational Development experience. Prior to SalesLoft she served as CPO with Commissions Inc. (CINC), VP of Human Resources at C2 Education, and Senior Human Resources Business Partner for Dunkin’ Brands.
Someone here today is going to positively change a person's life forever because you knew they were a fit for the organization, and to me, there is no greater level of success than that.
Christine presented on why hiring good people is so hard. It's all about fit and making sure that their skill sets and core values meet the company's. Core values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. They help determine if they are on the right path and fulfilling their goals by creating an unwavering guide. Living your core values will create a better workspace and create better hires. If your people use core values as their unwavering guide for acting, they cannot go wrong.
There is nothing more important to your success than hiring great people.
Josh Pigford is the Founder & CEO of Baremetrics, which provides revenue analytics and insights to businesses of all sizes. He writes and shares on topics like growth, transparency, startups, marketing and psychology.
One big takeaway from Josh and David's Q&A: Early on in SaaS, don’t pay attention to the metrics. Just go with your gut. There’s not enough data to get obsessed about. The only number you should increase and focus on is revenue.
One helpful resource the Baremetrics team creates is a benchmark page so others could view where they fall in the industry compared to others.
People were always asking, 'How am I doing?' So we made an open benchmark page and eventually built that into the app so that anyone can compare their numbers to their spot in the industry.
One of the biggest lessons Josh has learned over the course of his Baremetrics journey is what to use the money for:
We celebrate raising money, but a lot of times it makes things worse.
The ability to have an idea and make an idea happen on their own is extremely valuable.
You're idea isn't really worth anything. You'll have lots of ideas. The ability to prove an idea faster than how long it takes someone else to build it is extremely valuable long term.
© 2026 Atlanta Ventures
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