Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure. Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

I really appreciate you coming to talk about how to attract, hire, and build a more diverse sales team in your organization. So I’ve been building top-producing sales teams for a really, really long time. So over the years, I’ve watched many sales leaders go out and say, “Brian’s my top producer.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 264

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. But no sales team can afford to grow without intention. While building a sales team, we’ve focused a lot on our sales culture. Here’s how we went about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture-additive.

Scale 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. How can you capture, qualify and convert the right leads for your business while working within your means? Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Companies were growing their sales organizations and bringing in more revenue. Companies everywhere have frozen their hiring and laid off workers — with sales reps often among the first to go. I’ll be honest: as the leader of a sales-focused recruiting company, this has been tough for me and my team.

Sales Hiring 126

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 126

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 92

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 92

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. What “customer success” looks like evolves as your company and customers scale upmarket.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

JUNE 26, 2018

Today, everyone working in and around sales and marketing knows that bots are hot, in vogue and quite simply, of the moment. In my role leading sales enablement at HubSpot in EMEA, we deliberately carve out time to think about ways to leverage tools, technology and software that will make sales reps more effective.

Sales Enablement 100

Sales Enablement Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hacker

APRIL 5, 2021

In 2020 I was building my sales team at Livestorm , and at the time we were going through a big hiring boom. For the first time in my life, I was in charge of vetting and hiring new team members at scale. Over the course of time, I’ve interviewed and talked to hundreds of sales candidates. Value-based recruitment.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Company Culture Interviewing 125

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

Like most things in life, hiring sales talent is a matter of timing. Especially since the best candidates with strong sales skills are usually snatched up within 10 days. That’s why it’s critical to overcome indecision and move quickly when recruiting sales talent. Is it unrealistic sales quotas?

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 100

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Scale 106

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

At the time, I was a sales engineer, and my job was to close deals and move on to the next prospect. However, I found there were two flaws in our customer management process. After getting slapped on the wrist a few times for my after-sales support, I knew things had to change. We had presales, and we had post-sales.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review Compensation 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 12, 2018

As VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, Elad Gil was a key player as company headcount skyrocketed from 90 to 1,500 employees. This wasn’t Elad’s first experience with hyper growth – Google grew headcount 10x during his time as a product manager there – nor the last. If you enjoy the it, check out more episodes.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 120

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

First, digital CS will become a way of life due to flat or reduced headcount. Customer sentiment, intention, and level of trust can be surfaced and incorporated into more predictive customer health scores while providing valuable insights and feedback to CSMs and account managers. A few common themes emerged.

Trends 98

Trends Customer Success Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence 98

SaaSX

JULY 26, 2020

Here are 5 roles you may not have thought of and how they can help drive immediate revenue & sales efficiency impact. Role: Also known as Sales Engineer, but I prefer to call it Product Specalist. This is a dedicated role that helps distribute product knowledge across a fast-scaling sales and customer success team.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Scale Startup 64

OpenView Labs

JUNE 3, 2021

Specifically, I’m talking about product management and product marketing. Unlike functions such as sales, engineering, or finance—where the roles, responsibilities, and outcomes are clearly understood (and measurable)—product management and product marketing can’t always make those claims, particularly in early-stage companies.

Product Marketing 93

Product Marketing Sales Hiring Startup Scale 93

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones. This is a strategy that we’re replicating at Outseta, so far with James our lead designer. As a result, Buildium grew to $15M in revenue with a sales team that was most often just two sales reps.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

ChurnZero

JANUARY 25, 2024

Skillset 1: Sales acumen In 2024, driving revenue is a primary responsibility of CS. This means that sales acumen is no longer just a bonus for CS professionals—it’s a new baseline for many companies. Scaled customer success roles This role is starting to carve out its own space and made a huge splash in 2023.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 52

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

Inner Workings of Product Management at Product Led Growth Companies. At product led growth (PLG) companies like Atlassian and Intercom, product management may look very different from a ‘traditional’ SaaS company. These companies have fewer sales reps (or none at all), meaning more resources get invested into product and engineering.

Management 55

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting 55

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

Other businesses, like LinkedIn and Netflix, have strong histories of being producers of open-source projects, which provides a strategic recruitment and retention tool for top-tier engineering talent. Related podcast episode: How MongoDB Scaled Their Open-Source Product with a Bottom-Up and Top-Down Sales Motion.

Business 52

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 52

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. The VPM giving their all to create leads, opportunities, and more. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic.

Sales Recruiting 317

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 317

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Inspired by the release of our book Intercom on Sales , we wanted to take a fresh look at three big topics – speed, automation, and growth. We wanted to know: what are sales leaders doing to bring velocity to their sales cycle? How are they using automation to bring new efficiencies to their sales orgs?

Scale 139

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Trends 139

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

Ever since he was hired as the Director of EMEA Sales at BrowserStack , a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, he had to completely rethink how to successfully onboard hundreds of salespeople just as everyone was going remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

We’re going through layoffs and furloughs, recession planning and for me as the CMO, facing really massive cuts to marketing budgets and headcount. Meagen, sales. Launch it to our customers, launch it to the sales team, launch it to prospects.” We’re looking at everything we do from software to people.

Travel 241

Travel Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 241

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 252

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 252

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter – read by over 50,000 revenue professionals weekly to scale their companies and careers. If you’ve used big-name prospecting tools before, you know that they all share one, massive problem: Bad data. So how did Wisely go from $11 in the bank to selling for $187M? Let’s get into it.

Banking 122

Banking Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 122

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

How does this requirement change as the company scales? How does Karl think about working with recruiters? How does Karl think about doing this at scale? How does Karl think about retaining agility and flexibility with scale? How does Karl think about the balance between creating accountability without a fear of failure?

Sales Hiring 241

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 241

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 28, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Amyra Rand , VP of Sales & Strategic Partnerships at Criteria Corp. Amyra is also a member of the Revenue Collective & the Chapter VP at the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals; she is an MBA from Pepperdine. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast.

VP of Engineering 44

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 44

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

And if there’s an abundance of something, like an abundance of capital, it definitely can lead teams and companies to pick things they wouldn’t have normally picked. If you’ve got a good setup, then more teams equal more product, and more product equals more marketing and more sales and all sorts of stuff like that.

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2025

You dont usually want to do one of the first episodes of a new podcast because they all take a while to build up scale, but since its led by Kyle Notion, CRO of Owner where Im on the board, we made an exception. Far too many CROs and VP of Sales worry they are going to be fired for the wrong reasons.

Technical Review 278

Technical Review Sales Hiring Revenue Sales Recruiting 278