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

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 179

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 179

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 216

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Branding Investment 216

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 206

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 206

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 211

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 211

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Having led sales teams of 500+ at BILL and 800+ at HubSpot, Michelle has unique insights into what makes great frontline managers and why investing in them is crucial for sustainable growth. “Some teams consistently sold more enterprise SKUs, others had high volume but low ACV. Shaping and maintaining company culture.

Sales Hiring 178

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 178

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

On the topic of building SaaS companies, Henry kicks off the conversation with: “I think a lot of bootstrapped founders who are less capital infused have to actually be great at developing their people. “The best hack,” Jason adds, “is not recruiting one management team. It’s recruiting five or six.”

Sales Recruiting 242

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 242

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 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 281

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 281

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 179

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 179

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 276

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 276

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 190

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 190

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 225

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 225

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 351

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 351

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2020

Intercom has responded by hiring a diversity and inclusion consultant, updating our recruitment strategy and hiring practices to reduce bias, scheduling allyship training for all employees, and amplifying Black voices in our podcast and blog. They equate “white” with “good” and “black” with “bad.”. This was going to be a team effort.

Technical Review 289

Technical Review Software Review Systems Review CTO Hire 289

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 240

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 240

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 176

Underperforming Technical Team Content Marketing Innovation Investment 176

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 279

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 279

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 167

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 167

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 201

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Startup 201

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 199

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 199

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop? Moving forward in your career, avoid the trap of doing work that feels high-impact, but it’s actually not , or work that makes you look good at the expense of the project and the team. How do people move into staff engineering roles?

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

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 242

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 242

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 264

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 264

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 249

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 249

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 40

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 40

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows software developers to embed communications into the apps that they’re building. He said, “I feel so bad. Jeff : I felt really bad, because you plan way ahead. For real, why is the developer market bigger today? He’s the only CEO that ever called.

Scale 298

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 298

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 339

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 339

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. The team has grown quite a lot, but it’s still tiny: we’re now close to 40 people in 13 different countries. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

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 274

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 274

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 251

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 251

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 242

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 242

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 269

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 269

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. But let’s step back a minute, you’ve got three reps on your team already, doing whatever revenue, four, and you want to triple your revenue. Whatever you do, hire two.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 261

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

In a recent talk at UX London , I discussed some lessons learned while growing the design team at Intercom, reflecting on the technology industry’s obsession with tools, and pointed out how our sense of tools as objects or apps blinds us to the reality that the processes we adopt and develop are also, in effect, tools.

Underperforming Technical Team 223

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Hire Technology 223

Incredo

DECEMBER 12, 2019

Why software reviews are your best friends and why you need them? #1 Bad reviews teach, good reviews sell Not all of your reviews will be positive. Bad reviews point out to your weaknesses, helping you better your customer support, product, onboarding, whatever issue they address.

Software Review 37

Software Review Systems Review Software Social Media 37

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 206

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 206