Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

Building ‘opinionated products’ and the importance of customer intimacy Lessons learned from scaling Twitter’s ad business from zero to $650 million in three years. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) Plus, an analysis of the top 75 trending sales AI tools.

Scale 102

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 102

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2019

Erica has led New Relic through massive growth, scaling the company’s enterprise business 10x since she joined the business pre-IPO. Erica will share the five critical steps (and some lessons learned along the way) for scaling in the enterprise. We operate at great scale. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 240

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 240

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

A great VP of Sales to keep the engine scaling A great VP of Marketing to keep the leads coming in A great VP of Customer Success to make all those hard won customers happy After $5m-$6m in ARR or so, it’s really hard to scale without a strong VP heading most core functions. Upgrade the management team.

Scale 313

Scale Sales Hiring Banking Engineering 313

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. You must build a lean, impactful team to help your business scale. Sign up for free HERE !

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

FastSpring

OCTOBER 16, 2024

Foreign exchange rates, regulatory rules, payment systems, various bank accounts, establishing entities in different countries, and tax collection and remittance are just a few of the concerns you’ll need to stay on top of as your business expands into more countries and regions.

Merchant Services 158

Merchant Services Payment Services Payment Methods Outsourcing Services 158

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

So if you are outside of fintech and banking, you may not have heard of nCino. Customer Count Growth Driven in Large Part by Acquisitions There are only so many big banks to sell to, and nCino’s core customer count has grow slowly but steadily from 335 in 2021 to 428 today. Non-GAAP operating margins are now +17%. A lot to learn!

Scale 349

Scale Banking Acquisition Cloud 349

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. They kept doing it after the economy changed, and they also scaled it. It’s cheap.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 183

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

So just as supply chain logistics juggernaut Flexport was beginning to scale, founder CEO Ryan Petersen came to SaaStr Annual to share his top lessons — and mistakes. When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc.

Sales Recruiting 326

Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 326

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

It was much more than adding an API, especially at scale. Bill.com has a direct sales force, even at $2k ACV. And also 2 bigger channels — accountants and banks. Banks are a longer-term play, and a bit of a whale hunt. Word-of-mouth scales forever. But it paid off. Channels matter in SMBs, too.

SaaS Payments 64

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services Scale 64

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2024

Instructure is one of the leading learning management systems for education with its Canvas product. It was founded in 2008 but took a while to get going, hitting $1m in revenue in 2011 selling to Utah schools — and then scaled from there. Your kids may well use it. You may have in college, too. For better or worse. #9.

Scale 304

Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments 304

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

I opened up a remote phone bank / set of agents just to answer trial users’ questions; and I made sure every chat that was in a trial was answered in real-time where practical. Most SaaS companies steer away from phone support in general, and especially for lower-end and trial prospects/customers.

Outsourcing Services 291

Outsourcing Services Scale Banking Branding 291

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2025

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Hayden Stafford is the President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Seismic, where he oversees the global go-to-market (GTM) organization, including pre-sales, sales, customer success, services, partners, and more. The other thing is just.

Scale 64

Scale VP of Engineering Outsourcing Services Enterprise 64

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 ? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale). In fact, great sales teams are accretive. Why was Netsuite?

Scale 300

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 300

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Cash was tight and I didn’t know any great VPs of Biz Dev, so between myself and my VPs of Sales, Product and Customer Success, we all jointly managed our key partners. Fight and create mindshare with partners that deliver you leads. Get on jets and go meet them. A lot more.

Part-Time VPE 300

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 300

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

At Glasswing Ventures, they tell their AI-native companies not to lead with AI because it’s such a superficial indication of interest. 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?

AI Search 294

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 294

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%. More on that here and a great video discussion below: You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR.

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

Even if leads are still a bit lumpy, outbound is still stretching itself … you at least learn how to close by this point. And often, if you are capital efficient, your marketing cost will be close to $0 at this point (you are barely spending anything to acquire most customers), and your sales costs are pretty predictable.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 270

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2022

Plaid builds the infrastructure that empowers consumers to digitally interact with and manage their bank accounts. In the backend, they’ve integrated with over 11,000 banks and financial institutions. For one thing, they had a hard time winning banks over for integration. Plaid’s Current Relationship With Banks.

Banking 291

Banking Scale Acquisition Engineering 291

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

But in the end, today, at scale, their small customers churn is at the same high rates as other “grab and go” SMB products. Wildly Efficient, With Almost 40% Non-GAAP Operating Margins and $7 Billion in Cash on Balance Sheet Zoom’s has 39% operating margins, going up, which leads to massive free cash flow.

SMB 305

SMB Scale Banking Enterprise 305

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2019

6 Key Signs a VP Can’t Scale Beyond $5m-$10m ARR. Your Sales Efficiency Will Probably Plummet Toward $10m ARR. . We’s Banks Are Still Worried. Google Cloud Worth $225 Billion, Deutsche Bank Says. SAP CEO Bill McDermott stepping down after over nine years leading software giant. views · 25 upvotes.

Scale 154

Scale Cloud Scaling PayPal 154

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

Chime wasn’t the first digital bank, but it has become the largest one in the United States. The financial services industry – banking, lending, insurance – has long benefited from deep competitive moats that limited competition and stifled innovation. Ashley Grech, Global Head of Sales @ Square.

Payments 280

Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments Banking 280

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first. Names stick.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 163

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

As part of our new 5 Interesting Learnings series, here are a few: Freemium continues to scale for Slack, but now more as a lead gen tool. Free also serves as a hunting ground for sales to find prospects and leads. Slack notes this is now the primary value of self-service (lead generation vs. direct conversion).

Scale 279

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 279

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 28, 2021

Large software companies accelerated growth this year, despite their scale reinforcing the notion that users write data into systems but rarely delete it. Or a personalized email to a sales prospect. Marketing, customer success, and sales software will be upended. Not this one; I enjoy writing too much to automate it).

Scale 275

Scale Blockchain Banking Machine Learning 275

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Sales is much harder than in 2021. Therefore, sales and marketing practices made no sense in 2020. How Does That Impact Sales and Marketing? In 2021, many sales folks were marginally efficient. If you have a good sales and marketing team, they will respond. Exactly as hard as it always used to be,” Jason shares.

Metrics 277

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 277

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

Because once you finally get your first management team in place, some of them will be a mismatch, or just only a good fit for the next year or so, or end up better as directors or team leads, but not VPs, etc. But many of the VPs you recruit around $1m in ARR just won’t scale, or fit, at $10m in ARR.

Scale 339

Scale Management Banking Scaling 339

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2022

The y-axis is sales efficiency: a proxy for product-market fit (PMF). Chewing Gravel : the startup hasn’t attained efficient commercial success yet and its bank account implies zero cash in less than 12 months. Time to Strategize : with a long runway but lacking product-market fit, the startup possesses the resources to scale.

Startup 355

Startup Outsourced Development Scale Banking 355

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2022

Go Long — if you get to Initial Scale with happy customers and good growth. you make on bank interest. Mark is one of the most talented natural sales leaders I know). “Go visit your customers and prospects.” Infinite diversity really does lead to infinite combinations. Power Laws are real.

Sales Hiring 362

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Startup 362

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

I argue that standard saas metrics make it possible for founders to scale using debt capital (production capital thats cheaper) instead of solely relying on venture capital (financial capital thats more expensive). . As SaaS Metrics Become Standardized, Banks Want In On The Action. Why Let Banks In? Sales efficiency ratio?

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Technical Review SaaS Scale 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 296

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 14, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Redpoint has partnered with Spot AI to lead their $20M Series A. Video cameras are everywhere: in warehouses, factories, car washes, hospitals, schools, banks, and stores. Despite the UI challenges of incumbent solutions, their scale is a testament to the amount of customer demand.

Artificial Intelligence 298

Artificial Intelligence Scale AI Banking 298

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2022

Prospects sign up and grow their accounts seamlessly. Usage data feeds the PLG lead score , and AEs outbound to the most promising users. Separately, the startup may have to reinvent its GTM: new AE quotas, sales materials, margin calculations. How much should a Fortune 500 bank pay for your startup?

Pricing 269

Pricing Scale Banking Startup 269

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2019

As you scale, your competitors will try to do Rip-and-Replace deals. But if you are thinking in terms of Decade Long Relationships … put sales and even customer success back on lost customers. View them as a Special Prospect in Salesforce, instead. Not prospects. Run the tables here. They may boomerang back.

Scale 353

Scale Churn Construction SMB 353

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

But UserZoom’s roots in Europe drove them to be more creative – everything from FFFs (friends, family, and fools), to bank loans, to government grants. After being useful, UX is the leading factor impacting user retention. “I Pick the right partners to scale. Understand the business value of great UX design. Choose wisely.

Scale 246

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2021

If I had 1 mentor, just 1, Who said: If you are at $10m ARR, Growing 100%, With 150% net revenue retention, With 80% viral and free lead acquisiton, And 50+ NPS, Then, You have already build a unicorn-in-waiting. Do you really understand building and growing a SaaS sales team? If i'd had just 1. Find yours. There are exceptions.

Scale 275

Scale Sales Hiring Payments Banking 275

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

As you approach $10m ARR, Initial Scale, money per se shouldn’t be an issue, other than the rate at which you can and should invest it. And a couple of sales folks, running in part, on commission. I know there isn’t enough money in the bank to really do all that much. One great sales rep. Upgrade one position.

Sales Hiring 318

Sales Hiring Scale Engineering Banking 318

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2023

But, if you have a founder leading the way, it can be successful. There’s underwriting and some risk because you’re basically a bank but also paying the interest rate. That’s why Navan Connect exists — to connect directly to the banks for easy expense management every time you swipe a card. The “why not” was obvious.

Payment Solutions 289

Payment Solutions Payments Travel Scale 289