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 312

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

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

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 283

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 283

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

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 259

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 259

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 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 259

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 259

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 85

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing AWS 85

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

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 144

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 144

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

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 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

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

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

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

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 120

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

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 218

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB Enterprise 218

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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this. Usually, it requires an outbound sales motion.

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 113

Point Nine Land

JANUARY 30, 2019

Challenges faced by startups during the SaaS installation phase (2000–2010) When you look at the first generation of successful “SaaS first” companies (Salesforce, Zendesk, Workday, Hubspot…), they had to overcome three main challenges to succeed: Market education Infrastructure UI/UX Market education. The timing aspect is crucial.

AI Search 70

AI Search AI B2B Software 70

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

This was anyone from a marketing analyst at a small startup, to a junior analyst at my firm, to a cloud CEO like him. ” Sameer Dhokalia: It was really helpful to not have any of the usual dynamics, and it is fairly common, to have dynamics between founders and a hired CEO. That really stuck with me. I had none of those.

Scale 155

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 155

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos. Paul: 13th, yeah.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos. Paul: 13th, yeah.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

Following the webinar, we invited Dave to give his rapid-fire takes on tracking the retention of auto-renew customers, calculating customer lifetime value as a startup, comping CSMs on expansion, determining the importance of measuring time to value, and much more. tech ops, AWS, technical support). BUT NO ONE DOES THAT.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 5, 2019

On paper, the segmented sales model that many SaaS businesses use seems great – who wouldn’t want to copy the success of Salesforce? But there’s a trend I’m seeing that’s making me wonder whether this segmented sales model is actually good for us. The trick here is to not cut corners on who you hire.

Sales Hiring 41

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales AWS 41

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. You need a lot of education.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 13, 2019

It’s a Rough Time to Be a Startup – Here’s What You Can Do About It. That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Benchmarks AWS Scale 52

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

They also have partnerships with other companies like Cloudflare, AWS, and Let’s Encrypt. Pricing for WP Engine starts at $25 per month for their Startup plan, which supports a single site. But StartUp users still have access to 24/7 live chat, as well as phone support during business hours. We want it.”

Management 137

Management Technical Review Outsourced Development Engineering 137