SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

374: ZoomInfo founder and CEO Henry Schuck shares how he built a business from scratch and grew it into one of the most successful IPOs of the 21st century—and what it was really like…the good, the bad, and most of all, the ugly. If you think of this from a market size standpoint, there’s often this debate, is that good or bad?

Sales Hiring 233

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 233

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. So how do you create a strong, enterprise-ready team? Not just support on steroids: How to build a customer success team.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 113

ChurnZero

JANUARY 4, 2019

the stuff that Customer Success teams are really meant to do). One customer success trend I’m seeing is the need to develop more repeatable customer education programs. 5.) “The biggest trend I see emerging in Europe, which started at the end of 2018 is Customer Success Plans becoming a staple asset of Customer Success teams.

Customer Success 73

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 73

ChurnZero

JANUARY 4, 2019

the stuff that Customer Success teams are really meant to do). One customer success trend I’m seeing is the need to develop more repeatable customer education programs. 5.) “The biggest trend I see emerging in Europe, which started at the end of 2018 is Customer Success Plans becoming a staple asset of Customer Success teams.

Customer Success 49

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 49

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

TL;DR No-code growth is an innovative method to achieve great product-led growth without having to code. Its implementation can be time-consuming and challenging for non-technical team members. It helps keep teams aligned with the shared feature-planning guide. Let’s get started. Cons of Pendo? – Parita P.

Software Review 52

Software Review Technical Review Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team 52

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

TL;DR No-code growth is an innovative method to achieve great product-led growth without having to code. Product-led growth may be a bit of a buzzword, but achieving no-code growth is particularly important for SaaS companies with low ACV, freemium models, and generally those in the SMB sector. Let’s get started.

Software Review 52

Software Review Onboarding Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. Michiel Rauws: And luckily our innovation is very innovative, so people invite us to speak for free.

Scale 275

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 275

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Never believe that doubting yourself is a bad thing. That company only lasted another year before they were out of business, so it was a poor use of my energy, time, and being away from my family – a lesson I work to pass on to others new in roles today. Invest in your development internally and externally. Joyce Johnson.

Scale 137

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 137

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Lessons from the Best & Worst Deals (00:05:03) To succeed in today’s rapidly changing business landscape, startups need an ultra-committed binary team, especially two co-founders with an insane level of commitment. The combination of these factors is making it more difficult for startups to succeed.

CTO Hire 295

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 295

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2023

Mistake #1: Viewing Investors Only As Capital As founders build a team, they focus on obtaining complementary skill sets. Of course, building great teams and finding product market fit is critical, but don’t forget about product investor fit. Enterprise will likely have a different problem set vs. an SMB. That’s a mistake.

Development Team Review 263

Development Team Review Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SMB 263

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

If something bad happens, you’re going to have to cut your burn, probably. There is one thing, I love this quote and it’s a little bit of a crude quote, not that it’s bad language-. What do you do with that lightly toxic person on your team? I’ve spent three years deploying Gainsight. Aaron : No.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 245

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Nick Mehta: Power of the developer, or the API economy, both of you play very much in both those trends. How do you help your team make that link to value? We’ve got a lot of training to do with our sales teams to get them to start to speak in these types of terms versus feature function. Nick Mehta: Yeah.

Payment Methods 271

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 271

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

And it’s not without good reason: nearly all software products with dominant market share started as apps but grew to the point where third-party developers began building valuable integrations on top of what these companies had already created. New Relic’s General Manager, Mark Weitzel, weighs in on how you can support your developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. When done correctly, your sales strategy will help your sales team execute with focus – SMB or enterprise, inbound or outbound, hunting or farming. 8 steps to develop a winning sales strategy. But that threshold exists.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

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: Absolutely.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. It helps me and the team be so much more productive. And I always found it, because I’d be in there with my team, an enjoyable market to cold call into.

Outsourcing Services 119

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 119

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams? * And even just that shift drove a lot of behavior change both with customers and internally with the teams.

Underperforming Technical Team 202

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Services Technical Advisors 202

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

What are the core metrics founders should measure to determine the effectiveness of their reps and sales teams? How does this differ between SMB and enterprise? So if you think about those earliest steps, so A, identifying the pain point in the market, B, validating it, those are kind of like customer development, customer research.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 286

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2020

As for Kate, prior to making the move to Notion just last month, she spent an incredible 8 years at Dropbox including holding roles such as Head of Sales Development, North America and Director of Global SMB Revenue and Operations. And most of the people, the team was about 30 people, 15 of them had been there for four years or more.

Scale 211

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 211

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

Join Vlad Shmunis, founder, chairman, and CEO of RingCentral as he discusses RingCentral’s journey from a two-person startup to a $7B market cap global enterprise communications company (NYSE:RNG) — the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s how do you transition the team, how do you not loose each and every friendship that you’ve ever had?

Scale 206

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 206

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

Prior to joining the world of venture, Karen was a Senior Director at Apple and before Apple, Karen spent an incredible 9 years at Box as a founding member of the executive team, where she was responsible for defining and leading Box’s Industry GTM strategy. What is the ability of the company to continue to build an incredible team?

Scale 219

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Investment Sales Hiring 219

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2019

Is it best to start at enterprise and work down to SMB or does SMB and work up to enterprise work best? When does SMB pricing turn into enterprise and mid level pricing and so much more. Can I not just start at SMB and stay there or can I start with SMB and scale up? What’s good for each segment?

Outsourcing Services 136

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring SMB 136

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

As for Krish, under Krish’s leadership the team has grown to over 300 people and over 5,000 clients making it one of the next generation in truly global SaaS businesses started in India. How does Krish think about purely serving the SMB market? How does he think about the mortality rate of SMBs? What questions reveal the most?

Scale 162

Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Payment Services 162

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Management teams should prepare themselves for activist investors and adapt their financial profile to keep valuations high. Companies who sell to SMB may see increased amounts of uncontrollable churn as customers cease operations. Frequent readers already know that Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is my favorite book on corporate strategy.

Software Review 130

Software Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 130

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Ep 256: As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. Here’s what Eyal and Megan talk about: How to develop software faster. What should they look for in those reps? Missed the session? The emergence of new A.I.

SaaS Payments 157

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Sales Hiring 157

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2019

As for Whitney, she directly leads the organization’s go-to-market efforts, including sales, marketing, business development and customer operations. When is the right time for founders to think about building out their first exec team? How can you develop a winning culture? Pssst Loving our podcast content?

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team 157

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2018

After a full day of listening to some of the world’s most innovative sales and marketing leaders at Revenue Summit, I walked away with mindblowing learnings to help up my sales game and prepare me for 2018. Top sales teams chase conversion metrics. The Analytics You’re Looking at Are Outdated. Volume metrics a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 54

Sales Hiring Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Sales 54

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

Join PagerDuty’s CEO, Jennifer Tejada, as she discusses the need for agility and innovation and how automation is aiding adaptability and allowing enterprises to surge ahead. Jennifer Tejada: So it’s not all terrible bad news because Winston Churchill told us, “Never waste a good crisis.” Sound easy? Not so much.

Scale 202

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 202

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2019

Before Assist, Liat spent 6 years at Twitter where she first hand saw their hyper-growth, managing a team of 40 across New York and SF and also Liat achieved 102% to quota on average every year. Liat Bycel: Yeah, I think that career development conversation should be an ongoing conversation. Harry Stebbings: Totally.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team 160

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2025

Prior to Docusign, Rob spent over ten years at Adobe, leading the global sales and go-to-market teams for their Digital Media Business Unit and holding responsibility for over $7B in revenue. Leading a large, remote-first team. It helps me and the team be so much more productive. 55:56 – The power in simplicity.

Scale 106

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 106

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2025

At the time, expansion and upsell were handled by the CS team, whose primary focus was retention and customer success, not sales. The fix: moving upsell and expansion to a dedicated sales team. By the time Levelset was acquired by Procore for $500M, they had: A well-defined SMB and mid-market sales motion. The result?

Scale 74

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling AI Search 74

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 23, 2020

The situations that portend failure are varied and unfortunately common – no product-market fit, no cash, bad product, burnout, to name just a few of the most obvious. Poor marketing. A better strategy is to prioritize building your audience alongside developing the product. In this world, growth trumps all other priorities.

Underperforming Technical Team 183

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Payments Payment Services 183

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 31, 2024

It helps me and the team be so much more productive. Uh, it helps me and the team be so much more productive. If anyone else wants to take back control of their inbox and empower their teams to do so as well, Check out superhuman at superhuman. And it’s such bad behavior. The number was pretty terrifying.

Sales Hiring 108

Sales Hiring B2B Scale Sales Recruiting 108

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

In terms of timing, how should entrepreneurs think about whether to start at SMB and move to enterprise or start enterprise and move to SMB? Having built numerous successful remote teams, what have been Peter’s biggest learnings in what it takes to successfully build remote teams? And so really it became a bad habit.

VP of Engineering 157

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 157