SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Do a lot more Business Development and Partnerships. Underperformers found it harder to hide after Covid, and many have already left or moved on. Respectfully move on from any other underperformers by year-end. Those of us who have been around for a while know what happens when office space goes from plentiful to nonexistent.

Underperforming Technical Team 334

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 334

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

A smaller number of high-quality leads that convert at higher rates is vastly superior to a flood of poor-fit prospects. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business. Mix in the classic conflict between sales and marketing teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 207

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. Once you have solidified your company’s vision and have developed a strategic plan on how you will achieve success, don’t get too comfortable. Creating a category.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2020

Having a functioning product team will make that balance just a tad easier. . Sometimes as business owners and teams we make assumptions. A huge problem most teams face is homogeny. The curve can die off, and if you don’t know when to let go, it can be bad. . It’s easy to forget that you aren’t the customer.

Underperforming Technical Team 293

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Branding Investment 293

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

The session that I’m talking about is basically about the board dynamic and about how to survive this valley of death and bring not just yourself and your team but your extended team, including your board, across that until you cross the $1 million mark, and then the $10 million mark and keep going beyond. There we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. The Playbook For Building And Retaining A High-Performing Team .

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

Learn about your investors previous bad investments (this could determine your fate!). #2 Causes: Weak previous relationship. 5 Slow product development. Bad co-founder relationships. Discouraged or disengaged engineering team. How to prevent this: Have a product development cycle. 2 Investor = Boss.

Underperforming Technical Team 240

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 240

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2021

Don’t skip too many steps of development. But when I see folks skip 2+ stages of development, I’ve almost never seen that work out. A great boss will find ways to backfill your weaknesses, get you trained one way or another, get you into the right role with the right leads. From 60 days as an SDR straight to a quota-carrying AE.

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 345

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

When sales slow how do you keep the team motivated and push through? Look at what they’re posting on social media or on the blog. Because your product, if it’s early, is feature-poor, bug-ridden, slow and does nothing. ” Question #3: When sales slow, how do you keep the team motivated? What should he do?

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 277

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. I think the foundation of high performance teams is that they share five things.

Scale 254

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 254

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2020

What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. A bit more here: Corporate Blogs Always Work.

Underperforming Technical Team 247

Underperforming Technical Team Content Marketing Innovation Investment 247

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. We have team selling here that extends beyond the sales team. Want to see more content like this? FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. So, hey Jesse, I like the look of your blog, can I buy it? Blake Hutchison (06:32) Yes.

Scale 109

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 109

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Owning an airbnb, doing a podcast, coaching a team, volunteering or trading cards – that’s a hobby and a side-hustle and very much encouraged). Same holds true for developers.”

Underperforming Technical Team 325

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

Announcer: Up today, the secrets of market timing, how to develop the right idea at the right time with Allen Gannett, author of The Creative Curve. Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water. These are bad ideas. This is where the cloud meets. Allen Gannett: Okay.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. If you don’t work to keep your knowledge of the market fresh and current, you may be left with a narrow view that will inevitably catch your sales and product teams flat-footed. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 290

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 290

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. It’s one thing to invest in an area where only 5% of your business is today. The “I Give Up” VP Hire.

Scaling 306

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 306

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. It’s about enabling the people on your team to be more productive and efficient. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. It’s one of our enduring topics on SaaStr. Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? And I know you want to scale your customer success team in the right way. I know it’s a lot of pressure.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

You could watch it on YouTube or search on SaaStr on the blog about how ClickUp leveraged it. Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Jason Lemkin: But usually your teams can’t do that.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

While that doesn’t sound very bad, according to Corey Quinn, the world’s most notorious Cloud Economist, it goes against best practices or “sensible defaults” and is “ the worst practice to be avoided by default.” .” But over time, we noticed that teams hated working on these services.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. That doesn’t make them bad people. Most valuable employees will want to grow and develop new skills. Business model. The same goes for your investors.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

The good news is you have a big backlog, and the bad news is you have a big backlog. Adam came up with the wildest idea he could think of for an app and used Anthropc, a large language model company, to help develop the idea. All these developers will have agents to help them write faster and faster. What’s the data model?

Generative AI 299

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 299

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? Helping the engineering teams run smoothly and being super productive thanks to mentoring.

Scale 321

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 321

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. The last thing you want the team doing is chasing a shiny penny, when what really matters is hitting the plan for the quarter.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 317

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 317

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

That doesn’t mean they are “bad” Many, in fact, will thrive as a VP or Director somewhere else. Someone selling Gong today often will really struggle selling a complex developer product or nuanced pharma SaaS. It’s just they won’t make it at your particular, early-stage, quirky, pre-brand startup.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Growth exposes your weaknesses, and it will cause more problems than it solves – until you make sales scalable. Develop a culture of initiative, not adequacy, by embracing employee ownership. From Impossible to Inevitable helps you take impossible goals and turn them into inevitable successes for your business and team.

Underperforming Technical Team 258

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Development Software 258

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want. But you don’t carry any numbers, so your success is predicated on your team’s success. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 305

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 305