SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

With so many incredible sessions to choose from, we thought we’d highlight a few for you here: Building & Scaling Global Product Teams. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market. Also, they had a direct sales team mainly selling to enterprises in a top-down sales motion. “[The And remember to scale. But it pays off!

Outsourcing Services 290

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 290

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. You do need “quota capacity” as you scale. Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out. That math here. They love it.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales AWS 278

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. 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. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 Rico Mallozzi, Sr.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

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 279

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 279

FastSpring

APRIL 29, 2025

When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented. We empower you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more.

Payment Services 133

Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods 133

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

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

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? And it’s gone much more aggressive in its sales motions.

Cloud 298

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 298

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on? Being able to size up what kind of training you need and making choices based on that answer will determine the stack Enterprises can scale on.

AI Search 293

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. 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. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. But at scale, even the slightly less long version of the tail is where the money is. Digital Ocean has added a sales team and now a partner team, but it’s still early for both. Or at least. Churn Stable.

Scale 297

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 297

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. Marketplaces: AWS marketplace, Heroku marketplace, Salesforce marketplace.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

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

APRIL 2, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: It’s Now Year 2 of the Venture Downturn Clawbacks and Tracking-to-Cash: Two Sales Management Tools to Be Thoughtful With 8 Things That Are Just Harder in SaaS Now Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better. What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

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

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Pursuing Two Different Segments: The Tale of Startups vs. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 313

Cloud Scale AWS AI 313

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

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

Still, always helpful to see how any leader does free to paid at scale. Spending a Hefty 50% of Revenue on Sales and Marketing. They spend a pretty high 50% of all revenue on sales and marketing — and that’s up from last year. And interesting to see they are growing the top of the funnel, Free, faster than Paid: #3.

Scale 261

Scale AWS Scaling Revenue 261

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Lars Nilsson, VP, Global Sales Development @ Snowflake.

CTO 285

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 285

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales.

Fractional VPE 287

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 287

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. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling sales and marketing software, like Zoominfo, it can seem a lot tougher than 12-18 months ago. Growth in public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, etc.) If you’re selling cloud infrastructure, for the most part, growth may be down a smidge but is still strong, e.g., MongoDB.

Merchant Services 312

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 312

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 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Bonney Pelley, SVP, Strategy + Operations @ New Relic. Farrah B, VP Business Operations @ Cribl.

New CTO 267

New CTO Scale CTO AWS 267

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2022

Its PLG-assisted sales motion has kept it capital efficient, and today it’s worth $2.7 But let’s step back a bit … the damage hasn’t been even, and capital-efficient SaaS stocks in many cases have held up pretty well. A few case studies: * Sprout Social IPO’d in December 2019 at an $800m market-cap. It’s tripled. It’s doubled.

AWS 295

AWS SaaS Cloud Scale 295

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. Head of Sales – What Corners Can I Cut? A bad VP of Sales is a total disaster. And to some extent, vice-versa.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 290

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). As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. The graph below shows the median net retention going back to 2020.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

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 289

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 289

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount). What will your ACV really be? appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 284

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. 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.

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

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 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

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

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

But these days, there are so many innovative and impactful tools that can massively streamline your workflows and help to set you up for success as you scale. This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163