SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Technical Decision Makers : These are your “10x engineers” – the architects and principal engineers who may not have leadership titles but carry massive influence with leadership. CTO/Engineering Leadership : The final approvers who need to see clear business value and ROI.

Engineering 240

Engineering Development CTO Leadership 240

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

The Difference Between Kind and Nice Hannah asks how you balance a culture of hiring for kindness with the leadership team’s intensity for hard work, ambition, and getting things done. As you grow, you hire specialists, GTM leadership, sales leadership, and others who have done this at a similar scale or in a similar market.

Scale 260

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 260

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

So you need context from leadership to what you ultimately need to deliver on in your function to be successful. When you get everyone on the leadership team in a room to come up with the best ideas, those people take ownership of the ideas. Build the right leadership team based on your company’s core values and hiring principles.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2024

Deeper Bio: Early Life and Education Graduated with a Computer Science degree from The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo Demonstrated early interest in technology and software development Served in the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps, where he developed technical and leadership skills Early Career Began career as a software developer (..)

Scale 226

Scale SaaS Company Culture Leadership 226

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Intriguing Session Slides: Last but not least: Marketing SaaStr Session #5: “The How and Why of Category Creation and Leadership with BlackLine’s CMO”. Presented By: Vidya Peters – CMO – Marqeta – @vidya_peters. Video: HERE. Presented By: Andres Botero – CMO – Blackline – @BlackLine. Video: HERE.

Scale 358

Scale SMB Marketing Leadership 358

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

There’s also a management and leadership layer to enable and coach individual contributors. That’s why getting the right leadership in place is so important. But you have to have the right leadership and org structures in place in those locales, or you’re not going to see the benefit in cost savings. Net dollar retention.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 276

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

” What Will AI Change in Go-to-Market “It will lead to a next level of transparency for leadership,” Jason answers. So we should learn from it in sales for leadership, for transparency, for product, because here’s your crystal ball. It will be a big change and a lot of friction.

Sales Recruiting 302

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 302

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2023

It allows us to deliver reminders, call summaries, suggested next steps, custom prompts and easy to follow workflows directly to our market facing teams and leadership. Momentum powers a ton of automations between SalesForce, Gong and Slack for us.

Scale 295

Scale AI Leadership Innovation 295

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2024

years later: They build it to a $200m+ ARR business My co-founder and CTO, the most “start-up”-y guy on the team — is still there The sales team mostly stayed about 2 years after the acquisition, and then went on to sales leadership roles at Brex, Rippling, Gong, Seismic, Talkdesk, Pipedrive and so many other SaaS leaders Several (..)

Startup 310

Startup CTO Leadership Acquisition 310

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

At Wiz, the leadership team thinks of the company as a child. That’s why one of the main responsibilities of leadership is planning. In its infant stage, Wiz took on the kind of parenting role that would help an infant reach its full potential in its earliest stages of life. Best-laid plans.

Scale 286

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Communication 286

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2024

It is not an innate skill, even if perhaps some of leadership is. Then I slept on it, and 2 days later said he was right, and would appreciate the opportunity. Management is a set of skills. You gotta learn. The earlier you learn, the better a shot you have at becoming a Director, a VP, and a CEO. And a better founder.

Leadership 277

Leadership Management Business 277

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Promote someone great that everyone respects into a leadership role. Dear SaaStr: One of Our Most Respected Team Members Quit and Folks Are Leaving. What Do I Do? This is really the only answer I’ve seen to this situation. We’ve all been in it at least to some extent, at some level. Sometimes, a termination.

Leadership 298

Leadership Strategy Management 298

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

We hired job hoppers that never stayed anywhere for more than 18 months for leadership roles. This data from Carta helps illustrate it: So we cut corners. We stopped doing reference checks. No time, didn’t want to know. We all did, just to get it done. And now we’re paying the price.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Investment Leadership Startup 313

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.

Customer Success 297

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 297

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2024

He made many great leadership points, but one in particular rattles around my head a lot and I think deserves its own post: You usually won’t know if you’ve made a 10x hire … when you make the hire. So Auren Hoffman did a SaaStr workshop a few years back that was one of my favorites, I’ve embedded it below. They more often rise up.

Sales Hiring 288

Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO CTO 288

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2023

Jessica brings nearly 20 years of marketing and leadership experience to Calendly. Jessica Gilmartin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly, where she leads all aspects of marketing including brand awareness, creative, demand generation, and product marketing.

Marketing 302

Marketing Leadership Engineering Enterprise 302

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

With a career focused on the intersection of storytelling, media, technology, and advertising, Sarah also previously held leadership roles at Ooyala, Discovery, and Viacom. Previously, Sarah worked at Spotify, where she led a team responsible for marketing Spotify’s advertising business globally.

Advertising 283

Advertising Leadership AI Technology 283

SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2024

They have “values-anchored leadership.” Who Beefree’s leaders are Getting people together Who Your Leaders Are Many people stay with the company because of the managers they work for. Like Beefree defines behaviors associated with core values, they also define behaviors for leaders. Let’s go back to the example of open-mindedness.

Retention 314

Retention Scale Company Culture Leadership 314

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

ARR asks Jason how he sees the best companies steering into metrics and KPIs to drive performance at a leadership level. You want every person in your leadership team to have a dashboard they present weekly at e-staff meetings and send out weekly across all departments — Here’s how we did in lead gen, pipeline, etc.

Scale 285

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 285

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

She was able to get into a leadership position immediately and coach people who were hungry for it in a slightly safer space than more tenured folks. Shifting from an operator and loving operations and data to a sales and revenue leadership role felt like a big jump.

Scale 299

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 299

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Finding Alignment: The Role of Marketing in Company Leadership The best VPs of Marketing in SaaS should own a delivery to sales metric and ensure someone cares about the customers, not just upselling. This structure was common among unicorns in 2021, but capital masked the underlying issues.

Sales Hiring 295

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 295

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

Every Trusted App with Great Leadership Will Win When you trust an app, and they add in AI, people are willing to use it and pay for it. Every trusted app with great leadership will win. For some, if your product ACV is relatively low and efficiency matters, it could be the difference between having a sales function and nothing.

Sales Recruiting 293

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 293

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2023

In 2017, he was named by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 CMOs in the world to follow for thought-leadership in the digital marketing domain. Chandar also spent years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies. He is a Strategic Advisor to the CEO of Freshworks. He is on the Board of Directors for R.R.

AI Search 287

AI Search Consulting Leadership AI 287

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2022

If the business itself is different than their core business, they may not have the right leadership talent internally. They don’t know the customers, or at least, the use case as well as you do. That also often leads to a slow start. It is hard to catch-up in a niche once a start-up has achieved some escape velocity there.

Leadership 298

Leadership Engineering Startup Branding 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Whatever his strengths, I couldn’t in good faith recommend him for a leadership role, or even one in a real position of trust. I wanted to help, but without a single recent role for more than 24 months, and with him having resigned (not been laid off) from his last role, I just couldn’t.

Leadership 276

Leadership Startup Sales 276

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2023

They’ve also paved the way in running distributed teams at scale, and in ethical leadership. Whether you use GitLab or not to build and manage your software, you’ve at least looked at it and learned from them. And now … they’ve crossed $500,000,000 (!) in ARR, growing a jaw-dropping 58% (!).

Leadership 301

Leadership Pricing Scaling Startup 301

SaaStr

OCTOBER 2, 2023

options: Find a replacement “founder” While this isn’t literally possible, by that I meant someone who can operate at a very senior role and carry the founder-level emotional and leadership role. Basically, you have 2.5 Fake it for a while. This really is the 0.5 option and doesn’t really work for too long.

Startup 285

Startup Banking Leadership Engineering 285

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2023

Here’s a list of some of the most popular to dig into: Atlassian’s CRO Cameron Deatsch: “How The Biggest Product-Led Enterprise Company In The World Did It” Skilljar’s CRO: “An Inside View on Hiring Your First CRO” Rippling’s CRO: “Entering a Hyper-Competitive Market” DigitalOcean’s (..)

Scale 303

Scale Sales Hiring SMB SaaS 303

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2024

Loren has been a SaaS SMB+ leader for years, running Shopify Plus and revenue leadership roles at Bill and Podium as well. This week’s Workshop Wednesday was with Loren Padelford, CRO of Slice, a $100m+ ARR vertical SaaS platform for independent pizza shops.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring SMB SaaS Leadership 270

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2023

Many of the comments said it was more important a VP of Sales understand process and leadership more than the product itself. I get that in bigger companies it’s more about process, there is more support, and you often see sales and sales leadership not really be product experts. Not just with buzzwords.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 290