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 225

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 225

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

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

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 263

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 263

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

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 208

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 208

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 214

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 214

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 242

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 242

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. And second, the scorecard provides a way for a team to understand their strengths and weaknesses. sales enablement: how strong are the materials sales teams use to pitch? Comms Marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 280

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 280

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 228

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Branding Investment 228

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 255

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 255

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Most support teams have seen an influx of support queries since COVID-19 hit – and those issues are more complex than ever. According to recent research, however, many teams aren’t sufficiently equipped to meet these new challenges. Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

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 164

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 164

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 215

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 215

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 289

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 289

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

More on that here: The $2 Million Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team. Now some bonus tips: Build an enterprise-only sales team. Once you have 1 top logo in a segment, put an amazing outbound team on everyone in that space. You need human beings to do this. Get zen about longer sales cycles.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 312

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 254

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 254

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 184

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 184

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 288

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 288

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 305

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 305

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 292

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 292

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Is this so bad? Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient. That won’t work.

Startup 259

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 259

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 4, 2019

More recently, however, I’ve realized that the technology industry at large struggles with such clarity and consistency – in marketing terms, there is often a difficulty developing a clear value proposition that aligns with product and brand identity. 1 Poor definition of value proposition and feature focus. 2 First-mover disadvantage.

Branding 209

Branding Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Airlines 209

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

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 353

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 353

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. They can also route customer conversations to the team best equipped to handle their questions and can even provide answers to simple customer questions like, “How can I add more users?”.

Underperforming Technical Team 279

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support AI Headcount 279

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 42

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 42

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2022

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they’re building. Without an accessible onboarding process , customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Onboarding 194

Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Technical Review 194

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 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 264

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

Azure 237

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 237

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 210

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 210

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 287

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 287

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 196

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 196

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 229

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 229

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 238

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 238