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 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

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.

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

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. You will fail if you: 1) try to build a suite of products out of the gate, 2) focus solely on SMBs, or 3) have an MBA. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

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. Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet. in 12 months?

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So up to 100-150K and SMB, we’re at 2K. And actually when we started, I see one face in the room that I recognize, Kurt Freytag, was one of our big customers at the time when I joined. So you were the first sales hire. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015. So over time, don’t hire resumes necessarily.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

From contract signature to launch. Touching it, playing with it in a way a CIO or CTO might not before? We are still heavily oriented to SMB and to entrepreneurs. You say that Shopify is an SMB customer when I see 29%. I think Slack the majority of their revenue is enterprise even though their roots is SMB.

Payment Methods 273

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 273

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

That means lots and lots of hiring and I don’t want to say firing, we did fire anyone, but people get reshuffled, you know? We just stayed the course, but we did and do have a recurrent revenue model, we had predictable revenues, we weren’t maybe hiring as fast as we would have otherwise, but we never had to lay off. We did not.

Scale 207

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 207

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2020

While the CTOs may be directly involved in the purchase decision-making at the startup and SMB organizations, the role of the CTO at larger organizations can be very different, and not all CTOs look the same. “A A lot of our clients want to target CTOs or C-level executives,” said Valentino Volonghi, CTO of AdRoll.

Enterprise 52

Enterprise Software Review CTO Hire Software 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. We were part of the office of the CTO. At that time, Marc Andreessen, the founder was the CTO of the company and there were only three of us in the group. It was pretty easy being an SDR for Marc Andreessen because he’d been on the cover of Time magazine.

Payment Methods 62

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 62

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. We had to say: what does SMB want? So, we combined our 20 products into one and said here’s a package for SMB, here’s a package for mid-market, and here’s a package for enterprise.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. Is it sustainable?

CTO Hire 297

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 297

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should you hire 2 at a time? What does one look for in their first sales hire? How does this change when selling to SMBs vs enterprise? * We were hired into the same role, same start date, competed head to head. Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook.

Scale 252

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 252

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Because one message isn’t necessarily always transferable when considering kind of SMB to enterprise. ” How do you know when’s the right time to think about moving from an SMB and mid-market to enterprise?

Scale 214

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 214

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? He was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth.".

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 10, 2024

35:30) Optimal team structures for SMB sales organizations. (52:25) And that made it a lot easier for me to build the SMB sales motion that we ended up being the core sales motion that we built at Levelset. Let’s go hire somebody. Okay, now you got to go figure out how to hire and who to hire.

Scale 114

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling CTO Coach 114

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? He was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth.".

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 40

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. Why is it no longer to come into large enterprises with a small contract and expand? How has Peter found the transition from CTO to CEO this time?

VP of Engineering 159

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 159