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. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

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?

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? Top Podcasts This Week: SaaStr 568: Mind the Gap: Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times with Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz. 10 Common Misconceptions About Getting Funded.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Scale 258

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. 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. And for good reason.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

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.

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SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 107

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2019

For me, it took a while to build up the experiences and confidence to get there: First, I worked with enough startups and CEOs to “get it”. I had a chance as a startup lawyer working in “Silicon Valley” to work with 20+ startups. Second, I joined the best startup that would have me, as a Director and then Senior Director.

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Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 206

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Indeed this was also my #1 mistake and the #1 I see from so many startups learning to go upmarket. You have to be careful to pair that with someone strong to manage the relationship, that has more time and that also can be trusted. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 325

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

To some extent, if you have the hottest startup in the world, the full package, you can play some games with investors. 99% of startups aren’t that. For 99% of startups, when you want money, tell VCs you want money. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” But you have to see progress in one sales cycle.

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Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

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?

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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 312

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

I was working with a company that … Because people will write big checks today into early stage companies, where someone came in very early and gave an early startup $50 million too early, and just started telling them how to raise the company, immediately told them to go buy competitors, which they’re not ready for.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2019

Even if you don’t like sales, or big companies, or whatever. Not hiring a good enough CTO. If you never thought you’d sell to sales reps, and even sort of hate sales, but that’s your core customer — embrace it. A bit more here: 15+ of The Top Sales & Marketing Mistakes SaaS Startups Make | SaaStr.

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Growth Hacking CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring 154

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.

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Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 202

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?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete. And you should do it right then.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 114

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I think the second part of the question is more important. This can be a huge advantage, especially for a bootstrapped startup that can't afford to hire many people.

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CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

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. 30% of all mobile apps with a paid subscription use RevenueCat to manage it.

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CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 144

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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

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. This is a program where we invite luminaries from the startup world to share their insights. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 165

OpenView Labs

MARCH 17, 2020

When you ask average questions, you get average hires. If a potential senior hire has gotten so far as to talk with the CEO , she’s probably someone the company wants. Related: Are You Hiring for Culture Fit or Culture Add? For example, I met with a new client recently, the CTO of a fin-tech startup.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team 52

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Along the way, we’ve interviewed trailblazers, business leaders, makers and doers to share their experience and insights on all things startup strategy, product management, design, marketing, customer experience, and much, much more. And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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. I think it’s more around a consciousness of what you know, or what you may not know, and then hiring around it to become successful.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 179

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. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. We’re on iTunes.

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Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

This could be explained by the fact that it was women, more often than men, who had to step down and work part-time to take care of stay-at-home children during the pandemic. It was an iPad interactive brochure and sales tool for sales centres. Sima Banijamali – Sr. I knew nothing about tech.

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Technical Review CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire 105

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

This video training was originally presented at the 2019 Sales Hacker Success Summit. In it, Co-Founder and CRO of Kronologic, Aaron Bollinger, shows us how to close enterprise level deals when you’re a startup. How to overcome limited sales support. How to overcome limited sales support (06:15). ? What You’ll Learn.

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Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 81

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Which is why you should sign up for the 2 for 1 Insider Sale and get two people for the price of one. The Gold: these are very rare and hard to achieve at the scale-up stage, so you’ll mostly encounter them with startups. Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth. Covering all ground won’t be easy. Full post. . Full post. .

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Simmone Taitt , CEO of HeartSpace Consulting , and a longtime sales leader and consultant in the New York community. How intuition and heart can be built into a sales organization. How to build diversity into your hiring practices. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast.

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Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 91

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

Listen to Hang Black’s podcasts to learn about the future of sales enablement or how to lead with empathy. RevOps leaders are talking about trends in the market, and how the move towards RevOps will change everything from marketing to sales development to post sales. Fixing visibility issues in your sales org.

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Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 122

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In this framework, you’ll learn how to design a scoring system that aligns to your growth strategy, brainstorm and select leader indicators of success, and operationalize the system across your startup. It’s not uncommon for early-stage teams to lean on CS to improve renewal rates and buy time for their software to catch up. “It

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Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

Suddenly, the team got to know SOC 2 Reports all too well and realized just how burdensome and unscalable it could become, especially for high-growth startups. Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees. Liam: I’ve read a lot about difficulties in startups becoming SOC 2 Compliant.

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Scale Software Review compliance Technical Review 211

Kellblog

APRIL 4, 2021

The CEO said to the CTO as we were leaving, “spend the $9M anyway.” To investors [4], advisors, and startup execs as a reminder that founders are not managers, even though sometimes we might like them to act more as if they were. Manager response: “Well, I know a CAC of 1.7 I was aghast, dumbfounded.

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CTO Coach CTO Hire Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 100

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Maggie Hott , Director of Sales at Webflow. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. Webflow’s Maggie Hott on building a scalable sales team from the ground up. Scaling a sales team is not for the faint of heart – for one, it’s not even that much about selling.

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VP of Engineering Technical Review Scale Outsourcing Services 118

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. That is a natural hurdle for PLG motion.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

A lot of startups built the equivalent of Dropbox but never became Dropbox. It’s the underpinning of your go-to-market strategy and impacts everything from marketing to sales, to customer success and the product itself. Why positioning matters? It's worth a billion dollars How many companies "could" have been Dropbox or Slack?

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Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet. In general, European rounds tend to be slightly smaller and valuations slightly lower than they are in the US.

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Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. Speaking your customers’ language will accelerate your sales and make your brand more engaging. Click To Tweet. You learn your customers’ language.

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Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76