SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. That way, she knows.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 280

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 286

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 286

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 300

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 300

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the Customer Success lead hire, but worse. To me the first question is — do you have leads?

Sales Hiring 291

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. When a new sales leader comes in, they usually say the data is messed up, difficult to comprehend, and unclear about where leads are coming from. The bigger you scale, the harder this can be.

Sales Hiring 283

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 283

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

One way is by talking to your customers and prospects. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. Ensure you’re aligned with the sales team on what you want to accomplish as you go upmarket and build these demand gen strategies. #2: How do you figure that out?

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 306

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 160

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 160

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 26, 2020

Our leadership team is fully engaged in the active management of our response during this challenging period. All of Intercom’s production infrastructure is provided as a service to Intercom by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This includes not just compute resources, but storage and database resources, networking, security, and DNS. .

AWS 192

AWS Business Scale Cloud 192

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

But developers notoriously don’t want to talk to anyone ever, and they’ll still spend six figures and beyond without ever talking to sales. If the company wasn’t built around this purpose, it would be hard to scale. Head of Sales: They don’t understand what SAML means and don’t plan to learn it. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 290

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 290

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? They can make donations for those charities.

Software Review 260

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 260

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. Sales enablement is easy: all you have to do is create perfectly targeted content, stay informed on email best practices, drive more engagement quarter over quarter, spend less money, and do all of this with less time. We’re on iTunes.

Scale 120

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

If we look at that and step back, you can think of this, again, from the leading perspective of the public’s first, which is this evolution over time. We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. They had to reinvent themselves.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. At Snowflake, he was the first rep and single-handedly built the outbound-engine on the way to scaling the business from pre-revenue all the way past $150M+ in ARR.

Scale 83

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 83

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

I joined intercom remotely two years ago as the first person in Sydney, and since then we have scaled the APAC team (lovingly referred to as the APAC Alliance) to almost 20 people across 4 countries. Due to our rapid growth, we needed to scale the team remotely before opening an office.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Come and hear about the typical pitfalls (and how to avoid them) from Pat Poels, an executive with over seven years under his belt leading Eventbrite’s now 300+ strong engineering team that sits across North America, South America, and Europe. That was the area of the company that I was leading. Want to see more content like this?

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 184

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Even though HubSpot grew 23% at $2.5B, there was weaker demand and longer sales cycles, and they had to do pilots with CEOs and CIOs. You can see the growth on the platform side with Azure, Google, and AWS and how much it’s accelerating in AI. Or Scale AI securing $1B. Being AI doesn’t necessarily lead to riches.

CTO Hire 148

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 148

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 113

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

And so when Amazon called me and they’re like, “Hey you want to come with us and do you want to actually start the mobile services, backend business within AWS?” David: Maybe you can talk about that transition, coming from a business like AWS to financial services, which I think was new for you.

Development 109

Development Technical Review AWS AI 109

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Those on the front lines know that more competition means greater saturation of traditional marketing and sales channels, increasing customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Scale 70

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 70

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? Everyone’s always like, “how did you guys scale so quickly,” and like, everyone loves this product. Your sales team becomes more efficient, your customer success team becomes efficient, your customers like you more.

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113

OpenView Labs

JUNE 17, 2019

And unfortunately, on more than one occasion, I’ve seen this FOMO cause them to lose remarkable salespeople and sales leaders that were previously beyond excited to work with them. Here are three reasons FOMO is the kryptonite of high-growth sales organizations… and how to conquer it. hire them immediately. How did you feel?

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 53

Sylvia Ng

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

Proven ability to scale a start-up from the ground up. Experience scaling and improving performance on evolving software and web applications. Previous experience scaling a social media account to impressive numbers. Prior experience with building architectural patterns for large, high-scale web applications.

Engineering 74

Engineering Growth Hacking Scale Social Media 74

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Those on the front lines know that more competition means greater saturation of traditional marketing and sales channels, increasing customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Scale 51

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 51

ChurnZero

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

While more and more CS leaders are catching onto the value of having Customer Success Operations, they still face challenges in both convincing the C-suite of its need and finding qualified people to lead the function. I had an intern that was helping me, so she quickly learned the platform, and then was able to scale it across all the CSMs.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 52

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Those on the front lines know that more competition means greater saturation of traditional marketing and sales channels, increasing customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Scale 40

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 40

Audacix

JULY 18, 2022

Cross-team sharing is key to scaling DevOps effectiveness Do you have sharing, caring team members? Talk to the people at the DevOps coalface Senior leadership in large and small organisations often fails to comprehend the nature and scale of the challenges and frustrations faced by those at the coalface.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service Technical Review CTO Coach Underperforming Technical Team 52

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

One of the most famous lines from Citizen Kane is, “It's no trick to make an awful lot of money, if that's all you want is to do is make a lot of money.” There are various subgenres of the markup model, including the following: Wholesale: Sale of goods or merchandise to retailers, business users, or other wholesalers.

Payments 40

Payments Revenue Payment Methods SaaS Payments 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 246

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Women in sales often have a polarizing experience. In the Sales Hacker video series Aha Moments , I asked 10 women: “What is one ‘aha moment’ you’ve had in your sales career?”. The conversations that followed were so authentic and encouraging that we decided to expand this conversation to other badass women in the sales world.

Scale 137

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 137

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Of course, not at scale.

Scale 174

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 174

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : It’s like saying, “Hey, you want a sales rep to carry 10 times the quota they do today. You can’t, you have to invest in that sales infrastructure.”

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Fred Viet serves as the Chief Sales Officer at Aircall, overseeing global sales and playing a key role in scaling the company’s reach over the last four years. The first one, I know my sales cycle.

Outsourcing Services 118

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 118

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

We’ve done a ton of terrific sessions with the Twilio leadership over the years, including 4 different deep dives with Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder. How sales worked, how pricing worked, how billboards work, and more. Yesteryear, if you had a communications product, you would go into a relatively top down, IT type sale.

Scale 307

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 307

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The scale is extraordinary. It will take some time to discern just how fundamentally our political and social discourse will be changed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but just as with every revolution, it will lead to both positive and negative outcomes, to both delight and disillusionment. There are about 3.2

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

Sales Hacker

MARCH 4, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Dan Fougere , CRO of Datadog. Dan is a 20+ year veteran of technology sales and has seen 4 of his last 5 companies become unicorns. Dan talks about the key qualities of great sales leadership and how to be an effective executive in addition to being a great sales leader.

Leadership 72

Leadership Scale Sales Hiring Sales 72