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

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 20, 2019

There’s no shortage of advice for SDRs online , so it’s easy to find nuggets of wisdom to help in your sales career, but unfortunately there’s also a lot of bad advice. At the time I didn’t fully value the SDR experience or the skill set I was developing. The virtue of patience.

Sales Hiring 35

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Headcount 35

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

We surveyed and interviewed key people in our teams to understand how they worked and how they saw Intercom’s internal operations. Honest feedback can be hard to take, but it’s essential to develop the type of culture that encourages people to constructively criticize processes, leadership styles, or approaches. Paul: Yeah.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

OpenView Labs

JULY 1, 2020

IT teams scrambled to respond to the work-from-home lockdown by developing new procedures for provisioning home equipment, deploying new collaboration tools, beefing up their VPN networks and redesigning their service desk support procedures. There’s a Difference. If Phase I was a sprint, Phase II will be a marathon.

Underperforming Technical Team 86

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Compensation Leadership 86

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. For Natasha, the answer is a resounding yes.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. In the last six months at Weave, our sales team managed this balancing act. In the last six months at Weave, our sales team managed this balancing act. We made our machine more efficient even as we scaled, grew headcount, and skyrocketed our revenue.

Scale 59

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 59

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

What it does is give your company a bad name. Every single demo he did was exciting, because he was able to show in real time exactly what the problem was – not understanding whether, say, increasing headcount by 20 people would be too great a burden on the company – and the solution, his company (they’re called Runway ).

Social Media 202

Social Media SaaS Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 202

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. Building a great sales team: How Intercom fosters and maintains its sales culture. Onboarding, but make it remote. Kieron: Interesting.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

MAY 21, 2020

There isn’t a continual feedback loop between teams. They may or may not have developed a follow-up schedule but are not continually testing. A Sales & Marketing SLA (service-level agreement) is a formal agreement that defines clear, agreed-upon expectations that align both teams under a unified goal. Decrease Speed-to-Lead.

Scale 138

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Technology 138

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. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. How quickly you’re able to accelerate growth depends on your ability to build a nimble sales org and develop a strong sales strategy. These lay the foundation that enables your team to run as efficiently as possible.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom. In today’s episode, we sat down with Sanj to talk about scaling sales teams, what makes a great salesperson, and strategies to deliver the best outcomes for your customers.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

As we struggle to hit top-down targets through rounds of cost-cutting, we cut here and squeeze there so much that we can develop a certain myopia. Because it’s so hard to build a budget that hits the new targets in the first place, the last thing the executive team wants to do is sanity check that budget and find more problems.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Travel Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 118

Chart Mogul

MAY 7, 2020

Onboarding a new member of your sales team is challenging on its own, but especially so when they have to call prospects out of the blue. Providing the right cold calling training can make or break the success of a new team member. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Headcount 121

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

In August of 2016, Rachel Hepworth embarked on a unique challenge: start a growth marketing team at one of the most successful startups of this generation – one that had long relied heavily on word of mouth. I stumbled upon Eric Ries and Steve Blank, the concept of customer development – it was a revelation.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174

SaaSOptics

MAY 2, 2022

In a sales-led model, sales processes and teams are the primary drivers of revenue growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but neither is better or worse than the other. On the other hand, PLG companies are introducing sales teams and processes to deal with being pulled upmarket as their existing customers grow. .

Scale 97

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 97

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

We’re still learning what world we’re in — some people interview over Zoom, some are focused on how to build teams in the current age, and many are dealing with a weird overhang from the SaaS explosion of 2021, quiet quitting, layoffs, and team turnover. The last thing a VP of Sales wants to do is start without a team.

Sales Hiring 162

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 162

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 2, 2022

Does your Customer Success team have the right structure, workload, and engagement model to hit its goals? Re-segmenting your customer base is a natural evolution of your company, product, and team’s growth. We also had to think about how we were doing their variable compensation to incent fairness across the team.

Headcount 98

Headcount Underperforming Technical Team Scale Outsourced Development 98

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

And yet, downplaying your team’s needs undermines CS’s current impact and future revenue-driving potential. According to our 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study, CS teams are already underfunded and under-resourced. This is something that I’m doing with fractional headcount allocation. Now we have a name for this.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 98

FastSpring

JANUARY 31, 2023

Luckily, most developers find it easy to integrate Stripe with most other software (however, you have to pay for each software separately). You’ll be able to manage all aspects of the payment lifecycle from your FastSpring dashboard without adding extra software or headcount. Stop bad actors before a transaction is even processed.

Payment Services 112

Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services Software Review 112

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

At the forefront of this change is what we at Engagio call, Account-Based Everything (ABE), some people know it as Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD), and others call it Account-Based Marketing (ABM). We’re going to look at what data you need to develop an account targeting strategy and where to get that data. In Summary.

Underperforming Technical Team 64

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Data Development Team Review 64

Sales Hacker

MAY 19, 2021

This helps us with our prospecting strategies but it also helps our reps develop their skill set and become stronger in their role. When a customer says that now is bad timing, I know that my rep didn’t understand the customer’s pain enough to drive value and offer a solution to their current problems. This is actually gold for us.

Data 90

Data Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Funnel 90

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 SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

It’s your secret to finding the diamonds in the rough when you need more qualified leads, without increasing headcount. SaaS companies, who often have complex sales cycles coupled with small but agile sales teams, can especially benefit from lead scoring, since it allows small teams to punch well above their weight class.

Sales 105

Sales Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review Headcount 105

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. The second is employees.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 120

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. They were clearly property management and software development, and as someone that was hired to accelerate Buildium’s growth I immediately saw countless opportunities to grow the company by moving into new markets. We mostly succeeded. I’m proud of all that.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. Using Sales Navigator’s search engine, you can filter results by plugging in various titles, locations, industries, company headcounts, and so on, to come as close as you can to your ICPs. This will result in poor open and response rates.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

ChurnZero

JUNE 26, 2020

Using ambiguous instructions and poor questions. Implementation – What time constraints is our team working against to launch the product? Prior to your discussion, be prepared to talk about your organization and answer questions such as: What’s your Customer Success team’s recent history? Price – What’s our budget?

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Software Review Software Scale 98

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

And you and your team won’t waste your time working on bad opportunities. The first question sales leaders and their teams need to answer is: who is our customer? If you stay too high-level, the pain could be misinterpreted by your team and the rest of the organization. No more convincing them to buy. No spray and pray.

Scale 114

Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 114

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Sales leaders have a bad habit of dumping people into a new job without properly preparing them to succeed. Although I went through two weeks of training with my team, they were underwater too. I’m going to share my top 20 sales onboarding secrets to help your team beat their 30-60-90 day plan. So tune in….

Sales Hiring 83

Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 83

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

If you’re in a position to fill a sales role, you’re likely already feeling the pressure, because your revenue targets are built on the assumption that your team is fully staffed. These factors can quickly derail a sales team. Some roles don’t work if you have a bad hire. Implement career development and specialized training.

Sales Hiring 85

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 85

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

If you don’t want to manage all of the infrastructure around Iceberg (plus allocating headcount to do this!) Iceberg is an open table format developed by Ryan Blue and Dan Weeks (2 of the 3 co-founders of Tabular) while they were at Netflix. This prevents bad data from leaking downstream.

Data 130

Data Government Scale AWS 130

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

The same was true when I ran the People function at a software development consultancy that doubled its headcount to ~100 while reducing attrition from 40% to 5% voluntary in 18 months. The question becomes: “Who do I want on my team—and why?”. A final comment on purpose: It should come from your team.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

OPEXEngine

MARCH 9, 2022

How can Finance and Engineering management work together to diagnose weak areas, and shift R&D resources to produce better outcomes for the company? For over a decade, we have been benchmarking R&D expenses and headcounts. Work with engineering teams to understand how and where they’re getting faster or slowing down.

Software Review 59

Software Review Development Team Review Technical Review Outsourced Development 59