SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product.

CTO Hire 210

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 210

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. Rather, it uses overage events to trigger a call from sales to buy more. #4.

Scale 310

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 310

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 296

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. Something new to boost your ACV and TCV. Double your pricing for new customer, on the largest deals. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. Add a layer. the prospects).

Part-Time VPE 287

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. It was a hire I wasn’t really in favor of, but it was an experiment.

Part-Time VPE 287

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 287

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer.

CTO Hire 327

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 327

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years.

Sales Hiring 231

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 231

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

We had Lew Cirne, Founder & CEO of New Relic, Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder & CTO of HubSpot and for the first time at Annual, we added office hours with the top VCs in SaaS. total attendees, e.g., a CEO + a VP of Sales and a VP of Customer Success, or two Co-Founders, or CEO + CTO, etc.

Scale 310

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 310

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 263

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

AI is coming for sales and marketing, and Jason is a super fan of AI in marketing. Because hundreds of the best founders are radically ripping through post-sales AI, and now it’s time for marketing. It’s challenging to find super high-quality folks unless you’re in B2C, where customer support is sales.

AI 302

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 302

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

Merchant Services 205

Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 205

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 181

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 181

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. They wanted to sell the Amplitude product, I forget, to sales or somebody else, and that was their mistake. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Well, in the past several years, there’s been a tremendous number of companies that have built specifically for developers and use this as a way to get into these new markets, to displace incumbents and disrupt the competition. Bottom-up sales. You have the opportunity to upsell new features and capabilities to them.

Outsourced Development 212

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 212

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

analyzing how often Directors and Executives are involved in the sales process. Scott pulled the research from Chorus, which reported that over five weeks (~May-June 2020), 88% more directors have been joining calls and 72% more executives are joining sales calls on the sell side. Playing the right roles.

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. X sales force, X meta.

SMB 99

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 99

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. What comes next?

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

If I think about the founders of "my" SaaS startups, these are the three qualities that all of them have – in addition to a huge amount of intelligence, motivation and commitment, which allows them to quickly acquire new skills as the company grows. The second best option is two, and the third best option is one, four or five.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. Deals are contracting, not because of layoffs, but because people are managing budgets so tightly. It Takes Time To Bounce Back Jason was the first investor in RevenueCat , a company that automates mobile subscriptions on your phone. What happened?

CTO Hire 146

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 146

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 148

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 148

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

If your sales team has 20 plus reps, we’re confident Apollo could be a game changer for you. Topping the list of most-loved sales platforms, Apollo has a 4.8 and a New Era in Sales Tech Last week, we unveiled Operator , the first company incubated within GTMfund, alongside the announcement of a $3.6 The result?

Technical Review 74

Technical Review Scale Technical Cofounder New CTO 74

Scytale

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

What happens if you add new services or locations? Better attract and retain new clients ISO 27001 is known as “The Golden Standard”, proving that your organization has implemented the highest security standard. Proving due diligence regarding information security can drag out the sales process. The result?

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Software Review CTO Hire compliance 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company.

Payment Methods 271

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 271

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

Stax

AUGUST 14, 2024

Experienced payments and sales executive joins Stax leadership team to drive accelerated growth for Stax Connect and embedded payments. Krahl’s appointment cements Stax’s commitment to investing in its team and bringing on new team members with deep industry knowledge and is the latest executive hire at Stax.

Payments 88

Payments Stax Payment Solutions Payment Services 88

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. Keep the promise of sales enablement and keep your team doing what they do best, which is winning.

Scale 119

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 119

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sales enablement is easy. Oh, and do all of this with less time. More sales meetings, more money. More sales meetings, more money. We’re on iTunes.

Marketplace as a Service 112

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 112

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They love new ways of working and were happy to bring Slack into their functional teams and say, “Let’s experiment with this new way of working.” And it was very successful. Product can do a huge amount there.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

Great to see a lot of repeat attendees and some new ones. A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. I’m Travis Bryant.

CTO Coach 159

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 159

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

New for 2020: SaaS Pricing and COVID-19. In this brand-new report, we finally answer the question “Freemium or free trial?” Pricing in a Time of Uncertainty. The State of SaaS Sales in a COVID-19 World. Pricing Low-Touch SaaS: How to Approach Pricing and Packaging a New SaaS App, by Example.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Understanding the guardrails we need to build means closely tracking meaningful change across Intercom and making sure we’re on top of new initiatives”. Shipping quickly and securely. Continuous risk management. Evolving security landscape.

Data 118

Data CTO Hire Technical Review Scale 118