SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Grafana Labs Origin Story Grafana Labs started as an open-source project back in 2014 with three co-founders, including Raj. Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. How did it come to be?

Scale 298

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 298

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

The Treasure Data platform instantly analyzed large amounts of data, which meant that companies didn’t need to hire lots of computer scientists or put up a considerable upfront investment for data projects. . As Ohta says, “Around 2014 in Q4, we were about to cross a $2.5 million and $1.2 million deals led by the founders.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 313

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. So, if he wanted to hire customer support, it could be a biomechanical engineer. Instead of hiring for skill, he focused more on core traits like empathy, patience, and being detail-oriented.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Scale SMB SaaS 290

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2022

Public software median inflation rate rests at 5% annually, including shares for new employees, retention grants for current employees and primary stock sales in the public market to raise cash. Early businesses tend to create more instruments to hire, grow, and incentivize. Trailing 2 Year Inflation Rate. Founded Year.

Startup 319

Startup Sales Hiring Government Outsourced Development 319

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 296

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

2014: $500k rev. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. It took us having a very … we had to go, we make an investment, hire the right person, ex-Barclays CIO. seed round.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 280

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018. But all this was pretty novel back in 2014. 2020 SaaStr Annual At Home.

Scale 313

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 313

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2021

I invested in 2014 at $12k in MRR at a $12m pre. Your best managers often work for you. One of the very best hires the team ever made was their Chief Strategy Officer, who started off as their first “business person” and “sales person” Gaetan grew and grew into an even better leader.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Investment Mobile 278

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 16, 2020

Loren, the General Manager of Shopify Plus , was hired to topple conventional notions of what enterprise software could (and should) look like. In 2014, the company smashed expectations, earning $105 million in revenue – double what they had taken in the year before. It’s no secret that talent is a magnet for more talent.

Sales Hiring 226

Sales Hiring Scale Artificial Intelligence Enterprise 226

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

Hear his top tough management lessons and mistakes he learned along the way to founding what is now a $3.8 Live Ramp, a middleware company that connects marketing applications was acquired by Acxiom in 2014 for $310 million. If you hire for things you’re already great at, you’re probably going to hire really well.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 200

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2019

We went public in December of 2014, so a little more than four years ago. Of course, people are our most valuable asset and back in 2014, this was the global presence of New Relic. But virtually, all of our salespeople in 2014 were located in San Francisco. It was an inside sales team calling on all regions around the world.

Scale 240

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 240

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

This is a natural evolution for many SaaS tools as they move towards a healthier economic model, as captured in Christoph Janz’s seminal 2014 blog. The challenge for product managers is ensuring that your product evolves to meet the needs of your new customers without leaving long-term, smaller customers behind.

Scale 249

Scale Management Sales Hiring Healthcare 249

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

If you go back to before 2014, what you see is the power of the cloud. Then they found somewhere in like year 2014 and ’15 that they could layer in something like payments as an additional way to monetize their customer base. This is really founder-led sales. We call that a second act.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. And at the risk of giving you a full Stripe sales pitch, don’t worry, that’s in my other talk. The exchange of value.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 163

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The company’s best-selling book, Predictable Revenue , details the hugely successful outbound process and sales created specifically for Salesforce. Afterward, he delved into education management by creating his own business, Mestreduca, a platform targeted at educational institutions. Talk: SaaS.City Bootcamp: Sales Leadership.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Since starting the company in 2014, there wasn’t a lot of money you could raise in a startup. Now, they have monday Sales CRM, a complete organization within the company. Slowing hiring won’t help you over the long term, so measure for that from the beginning and make it a part of your company’s DNA. They were wrong.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 183

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

Dennis started at Procore as EVP of Sales in 2014, before moving to the CRO role in 2018 where he was responsible for driving revenue across all customer-facing functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Rev Ops, Procore.org and Business Development. 18:13) Overcoming HR pushback on programs for top performers. (28:35)

Sales Recruiting 125

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI Search 125

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

But, there were a few things that were true about event bright and the environment and trying to hire in San Francisco in that moment. That meant that starting with 40 engineers in my team, I had to be able to hire six engineers every year just to stay flat. 18 hires a year I had to make in San Francisco.

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 184

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

In 2014, we shipped some bigger things. It was summer 2014. ” But the people we hire don’t come in to work to fix bugs, they come in to work to build things and make new things. Third swing: hiring vs. onboarding. The third pendulum swing is whether you should hire fast or hire more slowly.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 160

Sales Hacker

JUNE 1, 2020

Publicly-traded, PLG businesses grow faster than their peers and are less reliant on expensive sales and marketing investments to fuel their growth. With PLGs massive growth, many wonder if PLG and self-service solutions will replace Sales. Sales Isn’t Going Anywhere. Sales still makes up 25% of their headcount on average.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 98

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2020

How to create boundaries and norms with the sales team, how to find customer advocates, how to build and scale your program, as well as the difference between incentivized vs. reward program. Customer reference program went from something that was nice to have and important to absolutely critical to our new business sales cycle.

Scale 191

Scale Payment Services Sales Hiring Payment Methods 191

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 8, 2015

After a SaaS startup has achieved some degree of product market fit, the business will likely ramp the go-to-market teams, and in particular the sales team. Measuring and tracking the performance of a growing sales team is critical to the growth and financial health of a business. Second, the report conveys the state of the sales team.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Startup Sales Product Marketing 100

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Eric Yuan : However, transitioning from engineer to engineer manager probably, is straightforward. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help. Speed is everything.

Sales Hiring 146

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 146

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 92

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 92

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 23, 2018

Before we get into our 2017 recap and 2018 road map, I wanted to provide some quick background on how Sales Hacker came to be. How It All Began: The Story of Sales Hacker. I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since we threw our first Sales Hacker Conference in September of 2013. 2014: Full Time on Sales Hacker.

Sales Recruiting 108

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 108

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 19, 2021

Between 2014 and 2023, global retail e-commerce sales are expected to increase by $5.2 Paid ads for e-commerce sales are pretty easy to jump into, and you’re likely to see faster results than you would with SEO. How Can Paid Ads Help You Reach Your E-Commerce Sales Goals? social referral share to e-commerce sites.

Social Media 145

Social Media Scale Sales Hiring Sales 145

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

You are getting enormous levels of organic traffic … Full of enthusiasm, you rush to your sales manager to check the sales status. And your jaw drops seeing you’ve got little to none sales from all of that traffic. You have to make consistent sales if you want to scale your business fast. No, I’m serious.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 144

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

359: The Secrets to Vertical Growth, What it Really Takes to Build a $1B SaaS Company with Matt Garratt, SVP, Managing Partner @ Salesforce Ventures, Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer @ nCino and David Schmaier, CEO & Founder @ Vlocity. They need fewer sales as a percentage of overall employees. David Schmaier: Sure.

Payment Solutions 219

Payment Solutions Pricing Payments Payment Services 219

CloseSaaS

MAY 29, 2014

More and more SaaS companies are implementing customer success strategies and hiring dedicated customer success managers (CSMs). Here are some of our takeaways from Pulse 2014. We recently attended Gainsight Pulse, the preeminent gathering for customer success professionals.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring SaaS Strategy 52

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 23, 2014

The recent 2014 SaaS benchmark survey aggregated by Pacific Crest and Matrix indicates that expansion revenue accounts for between 8-26% of total annual bookings, increasing as the company scales. In these types of sales teams, how much should a startup spend on customer account expansion?

Startup 100

Startup Sales Hiring Scale Benchmarks 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

And then from 2004 to 2014, she was at Google and managed lots of different things, including the self-driving cars project, global sales and operations, and the business teams for checkout in Google Apps. ” In the hiring committee meeting. I’m not just pushing to hire. I do my own reference calls.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

Neil Patel

JANUARY 22, 2021

That’s why, to drive sales on eBay, you must master eBay SEO. Keywords are where eBay and other search engines are the most similar, as keywords are integral to online sales regardless of which site you’re on. If possible, hire a professional photographer for your images. eBay eliminated that in 2014. Conclusion.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Engineering 120

Sales Hacker

MARCH 15, 2022

In the 200th episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Asad Zaman , CEO of Sales Talent Agency (STA), where he rose through the ranks from AE to CEO, earning recognition as Toronto’s Young Professional of the Year (2019). There are over 40K more sales jobs openings than salespeople. How COVID has affected sales salaries.

Sales Hiring 104

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition Development 104

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

million in 2014.). We had a notable funding round in October of 2014. Hire the VP of Marketing, MBA, the VP of Sales, MBA, the VP of Customer, MBA, the VP of Engineering, MBA, and now, the odds of any semblance of survival, let alone success, are vanishingly small at this point. Which brings me to sales and marketing.

Part-Time VPE 297

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 297