SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are the best 5 points to improve poor sales performance? Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out. Decide who to hire, when, and how. Be more involved as the CEO with sales.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales AWS 278

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

A year ago, AWS, GCP, & Azure averaged 44% annual growth. Amazon: We expect [customer] optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters. So So far in the first month of the year, AWS year-over-year revenue growth is in the mid-teens. Amazon: Net sales increased $21.4

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 310

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Cloud AWS Sales Hiring 310

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

Building a team of rockstar product managers and leaders is hard, but even harder is to scale the team by hiring and growing senior talent in global locations while maintaining a culture of innovation, impact, and integrity. Customer Success is a team sport – we play well with Sales and Solution Architecture.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Are there categories where outbound sales just doesn’t work? The old sales playbooks of 2009 and even 2019 may not work as well in 2021.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It’s less jack-of-all-trade hires, so the knowledge and questions they’ll ask will look a lot different. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%. A recent survey showed the typical company would halve its costs by managing its own servers.

Sales Hiring 266

Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 266

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

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. There’s no choice.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. Stay late with the sales team when they’re trying to close the last deals of the quarter, and take ’em out for drinks after. Hire People Better Than You (and That Aren’t Your Friends). You can hire up-and-comers, that’s OK.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 280

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 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

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. . million revenue quarter…In reality, though, we were still the founder-led sales company.”. million and $1.2

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 312

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2022

But even there, to truly scale, they went more enterprise and built out a full enterprise sales and marketing function. Hiring some agency to write a bunch of low-value blog posts, or making a really junior hire than doesn’t know the product do some … rarely works. At least for a while. So where do you start?

Scale 332

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing SaaS 332

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

For context, Docebo is a learning management platform addressing the needs of corporations that train an audience internally and externally. Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable. Let’s dive into it.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

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

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

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. Head of Sales: They don’t understand what SAML means and don’t plan to learn it. 50% of SaaS sales are outside of North America. Some are the same in terms of ease of use.

Enterprise readiness 289

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 289

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 241

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 241

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. Fred Viet: Yeah, we hope so.

Outsourcing Services 117

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount). Build it for you : How will you get your customers? And what mix? What will your ACV really be? How can that scale over time? What will it really, truly cost?

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 284

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). Sales Efficiency: Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback Demonstrating the ability to efficiently acquire customers is the fifth aspect of a successful quarter.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake. Not none, just less. Growing remains jaw-dropping at 50% at $2.4

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. Silicon Valley-based venture capital companies might tell you to build productivity models around hiring salespeople and scaling your organization that way, but it’s not the way. It wasn’t thoughtful.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

Your first few hires are so influential in the success of your company. As Des Traynor, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, says, your first few hires are so influential in the success of your company. For small startups, hiring internationally can be intimidating. AWS – Cloud computing. Questions to ask.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

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. One option was to double down on MongoDB, hire some experts and really commit to running this software ourselves. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. Then we had to hire more. Then that guy hired his people.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Over time all of that changes. Well… maybe! But not for us.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Nicole Wojno Smith , the VP of Marketing at Tackle.io. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Nicole is the VP of Marketing at Tackle.io, a company that helps ISVs sell their software through the cloud marketplaces. We’re on iTunes.

Sales Hiring 84

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing AWS 84

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. We are seeing platform shifts from how they traditionally run their infrastructure and services and business to seeing them run that stuff on AWS. Like anything sales, now we do sales tools too, to marketing, all these other things. Just saying.

Cloud 245

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 245

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

You’re finding the repeatability of your sales motion. They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. The three lessons learned and sustainable growth strategies for those at $10M-$100M are: How to scale sales and marketing from a systems perspective.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

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 96

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 96

Sales Hacker

APRIL 26, 2019

when interviewing for a sales position? You answered the sales interview questions in a way that made you look like a winner. In this article, we’re going to review the 27 most common sales interview questions, PLUS the types of answers your interviewer is looking for, so you can raise the bar on your interviewing skills.

Sales Recruiting 22

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 22

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

If you’ve ever tried hiring, onboarding and training a brand new team, you know how challenging that can be. You can get an awful lot of focused work done in the quiet of your own home, and of course you’re free to rock your pyjamas all day long if you please. We felt like we were growing something from scratch.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Tech companies realized that this cloud thing might be for real, but the word on the street was that AWS was too hard and complex for customers to realize its benefits. Figure Out The “Jobs To Be Done” Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School worked with Mcdonald’s to increase milkshake sales. It didn’t impact sales at all.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 3, 2019

The Data-Driven Sales Manager. The average tenure of a sales VP these days is just 19 months, according to Xactly CEO Chris Cabrera, who expects that number to drop lower as businesses become increasingly data reliant. Here’s how he sees data changing sales management. They also hire more diversely.

Sales Enablement 111

Sales Enablement Artificial Intelligence Branding Sales Hiring 111