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 273

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 273

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

By building a strong business tech stack for your startup – covering everything from incorporation to growing long-lasting customer relationships – you can not only win back time and establish best practices, but create a solid foundation for your business to grow. Ready to take your startup to the next level?

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

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 305

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. Why VCs Love Founders That Respond to Email Almost Instantly 90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Accountants are responsible for ensuring the company has clean financial statements and data. This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. Hire a Junior Team You can recruit your junior team from investment banking or other Strategic Finance teams.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

A problem many founders are trying to solve right now is going upmarket to Enterprise, and Lemkin and Grinich have a passionate perspective that every startup should take steps to check those Enterprise boxes in their first year. Head of Sales: They don’t understand what SAML means and don’t plan to learn it. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 277

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 277

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. 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. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

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.

Scale 256

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 256

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

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 240

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 240

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

First of all, do we have any European SaaS startups here today? And there were no startup communities. No startup environment. Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. So if you are a startup today what we spend nine months, twelve months initially, you could do that in like weeks today.

Cloud 238

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 238

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 255

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 255

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

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. And his answer, like many answers in startups, is it depends. You’re finding the repeatability of your sales motion. What Matters Most When Raising In Early Rounds?

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

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

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

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Now, I have some background with luck because in between some long stints with other companies, seven years at Eventbrite and 15 years at Ticketmaster before, I spent five years of my life playing poker for a living and learned an awful lot about luck and positive outcomes as well. 18 hires a year I had to make in San Francisco.

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 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. Startup folks are lean and mean, so they were going to iterate. It didn’t impact sales at all. You could also hire a banana, but that’s not as exciting.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., 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.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 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. How does a startup benefit from this? They’ve done well, but it’s not easier for them.

CTO Hire 141

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 141

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2020

It’s a sales pitch. It is a specialized version of sales, but it is sales, no doubt. Remember, you’re in sales, or at least in fundraising, someone’s on sales. Jason Lemkin: In late stage, often the investors are in sales. This is true of any sales. So you’re armed with that.

Software Review 213

Software Review Technical Review Sales Hiring Startup 213

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

And if you work for a CEO, whether you’re on the e-staff or really any position in a startup, I’m hoping that by understand how the CEO thinks and how the CEO looks at certain issues that you’ll be better able to add value and it will help your career. Startups are like sharks. Don’t go hire 10 more.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 171

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. They have massive distribution (installed customers + sales teams), and margin to play around with. Startups and younger companies don’t have this luxury. What do I mean by this? The list goes on.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

Kellblog

AUGUST 19, 2022

As someone who’s recruited candiates, been recruited as a candidate, and even once hired via a backdoor search, let me say that I don’t like them. If you somehow manage to pull one off, the candidate gets off to a rough start , typically never having had met with anyone on their team. Colloquially, you rip off the band-aid.

Sales Recruiting 97

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AWS Company Culture 97

Baremetrics

FEBRUARY 19, 2018

After all, as a startup founder, you want to have a solid idea of what your true gross margins are and what it actually costs to acquire a customer! Most startups I’ve seen often get at least some of this wrong, particularly if they are doing around $100k in MRR or less. that will fit the use case of most small to medium SaaS startups.

Startup 81

Startup DevOps as a Service Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 81

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

One is, lots of folks that have been through the startup cycle, you have this extrapolation from a single data point problem, which is, “OK, we have this story. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.” This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 1, 2019

. “Michael is the rare CFO who also leads up marketing, which makes him the perfect person to talk us through the company’s trajectory” As the head of Intercom’s Early Stage program for Startups, the fast-growing fintech startup is one company I’ve been keeping my eye on. From Wall Street to startup.

Strategy 36

Strategy Payment Methods Payment Services Startup 36

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. And I’ve seen many startups who fail to make this distinction create a cycle of diminishing returns that impacts the trajectory of their growth for the long haul… especially in enterprise sales.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

. ➝ Marketing should be accountable for signups, trial starts, seats, monetized seats, and self-serve ARR. ➝ Can also be responsible for PQLs, if there is a sales motion to upsell self-serve. Driving pipeline for sales (SLG). Pipeline better aligns with sales. They are a vanity metric. Efficiency. User preferences.

Metrics 122

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 122

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 3, 2019

And those of us and those of you who are involved in these companies, even the successful ones look an awful lot more like this. I think we all like to believe that we hire well and that the team members we have on board will be able to grow with the company. Challenges, mistakes, problems, surprises, every step of the way.

SaaS 179

SaaS Sales Hiring Scale Innovation 179

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. 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. More sales meetings, start creating better sequences faster, go to go.regie.io

Scale 119

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 119

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? Oops… Today we’ll be covering the five tips and here they are right here, from handling buyer expectations to navigating the complex sale. Thanks Allie.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB Enterprise 213

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. The truth is, A+ candidates will always have options… they are investments that make startups money and they know it. hire them immediately.

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 53

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

Thought I wanted to be an engineer, quickly realized I actually prefer the customer facing side of the startup world. I’m sure all of you that are startup founders love your companies and your products, but I have so much love for all of them. Atlassian famously does not have a sales team. That’s how early I was.

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

But as the college-dorm-room startup matures, there’s a fascinating twist to be found in the way it applies its new mission to Workplace, a B2B startup within the (former) startup. You really have to think of Workplace as a SaaS startup within Facebook. When Workplace became a real thing at Facebook, I was in London.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151