The Rise of B2B SaaS Communities with Sam Jacobs, Founder and CEO of Pavilion

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Sam Jacobs, the founder and CEO of Pavilion, formerly known as Revenue Collective. Today, we will be covering four main topics that we discussed with Sam. First, the vision behind founding a community of revenue and go-to-market professionals. Second, the primary learnings from building a B2B community. Third, we'll be talking about the strategy to go broad, in-deep in building a B2B community, like Pavilion. And fourth, what is the key benefits to members of the Pavilion? Sam, would you please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Sam Jacobs** (1:17)
Sure thing, Ray. Hi, everybody. My name is Sam. I'm the founder and CEO of Pavilion. My background, and we will dive into it because it's relevant to the founding of the company. I have been a go-to-market leader, VP of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer in New York City since 2003
Before that, I worked in the finance industry. But since 2003, from 2003 to 2018, I was a sales leader at high-growth companies, typically venture capital-backed. Then since 2018, I've been working on Pavilion, as you mentioned, Ray, formerly Revenue Collective full-time.

**Ray Rike** (1:51)
Well, when I was preparing for today's show, of course, I do all my research for my episode notes. When I went to the Pavilion homepage, at the very top, and about us, it's in the high-growth space, we all need somebody to lean on. I just love that as the overall message to your target members. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to be?

**Sam Jacobs** (2:14)
Sure. Well, there's two main forces that created the opportunity, the market opportunity, I guess you could call it, for the creation of then Revenue Collective, now Pavilion. The first was that the average tenure of executives at startups was shrinking and continued to shrink, and that was 17 months. So on average, chief revenue officer, a VP of sales will last about 17 months in their role before there's some kind of transition, either they're being asked to leave or they're deciding to leave. The second is that the job themselves are becoming much more complicated, thanks to technology, thanks to changing go-to-market conditions, just having a grip and an understanding of how to solve some of these problems became harder and harder, and it was only through community, which is a way of saying, it is only through being able to ask other people that are doing the same thing at the same time that you can really begin to develop some kind of perspective on what the right answer might be to a specific challenge. I started Pavilion as a response to both of these forces because I was subject to them and victim to them as well. My stints were seven and a half years from 2003 to 2010, and then four and a half years, then 18 months, then nine months, then 10 months. My tenure kept shrinking as my responsibility kept increasing, and I wanted to create some kind of platform for people to come together, to support each other, to share best practices, common challenges, to share jobs if that was relevant, to share negotiating advice if that was relevant. And the purpose of the community ultimately was to help people realize the potential that sits inside themselves and helps them understand and achieve the goals that they want to achieve for their professional lives.

**Ray Rike** (3:51)
Which is interesting, Sam. I grew up, I was an engineer, then I became a sales leader and then kind of the go-to-market team leader. And I always found my job was very lonely because there was no one else in the organization that understood what I was going through. And what's interesting is heads of sales or head of revenue teams, though not the most social bunch, when I say social, it's not like we spend a lot of time on social media, but that really seemed to change not only for sales leaders, but for sales professionals with COVID. Did you see the same type of inflection point caused by COVID?

**Sam Jacobs** (4:23)
Yeah, we really did. Before COVID, Ray, we were effectively, and I can go through the value proposition, which we'll talk about as your fourth topic, but effectively, largely an in-person events business. We would get together for dinners. We have a Slack workspace, so you could ask questions in real time. But the point is that COVID really did seem to generate in a way that I think might have been counterintuitive if at the beginning of COVID, if one were to predict what would happen, but it generated an even more acute need for community, even if it was remote community. Because imagine, yes, you feel lonely, but at least you get to go to an office and see other people. Now you feel lonely because there's a number that you have to hit and a target on your back as they say, and you're by yourself in your home office or sitting in your living room at your dining room table. COVID really was for us an inflection point actually, even though we had previously been a face-to-face business, we pivoted very aggressively into digital as everybody did. We went from hosting one webinar a quarter to 40 to 50 a week. We started doing and producing much more real-time benchmarking reports and just trying to create all kinds of different experiences digitally that provided resonance and meaning for our members. As a consequence, we saw a pretty significant growth in 2020 We went from about 800 members to about 3,700 members in 2020, and we more than 4x'ed our annual recurring revenue. We did see that in COVID.