SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

There’s a slide I see again and again from start-ups: 2 of the early sales reps are at 100% of quota, sometimes 150%-200%. So why so often, do only 2 of the first 8-10 sales reps perform? The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training.

Scale 348

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 348

SaaStr

OCTOBER 8, 2020

We caught up with one of the SaaStr community’s favorite speakers, Dharmesh Shah CTO and co-founder of Hubspot on lessons learnings launching a second product. Hubspot recently expanded its Sales products and the learnings were top of mind. Hubspot launched Sales CRM as a Free product, which might have been a partial mistake.

New CTO 264

New CTO CTO Scale B2C 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

The Best Speakers In The World With hundreds of sessions from proven SaaS leaders who have scaled companies to significant revenue milestones, SaaStr Annual offers practical, actionable insights you won’t find elsewhere. Competitive Intelligence and Market Insights and New!!

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 31, 2023

One way to approach that last question is to use this simple model: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How will your business reach prospects? Don’t worry about scaling just yet. If your numbers work out, then scaling becomes a question of capital. cto , infotech , innovation , product , project , saas

Metrics 390

Metrics Startup Scale New CTO 390

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2021

. “Mastermind Masterclass: The SaaS Org Chart by Series with David Sacks” David Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures and Yammer, and ex-COO, leads us on a new Mastermind class on opening day. #2. “The Secrets Behind Creating Scalable Products with Box’s CEO” Always insightful when Aaron Levie joins! #6.

Scale 300

Scale New CTO CTO B2C 300

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

And, when you do, do you even think about sale tax compliance? vary on how they handle sales tax and SaaS. It can be confusing to understand how and where you should charge sales tax. Let’s explore a few more ways in which sales tax compliance could impact your growing business. Here’s why you should. .

Payment Services 335

Payment Services compliance SaaS Payments Scale 335

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

Our partners and good friends at PlatoHQ, the web’s leading engineering mentoring platform, are doing an incredible event-within- an-event at 2022 SaaStr Annual on Sep 13-15, Elevate : Come hear from and learn from at Elevate at Annual 2022 : SVP of Eng at Slack. CTO at Okta. CTO at Circle. CTO at Carta.

CTO Coach 246

CTO Coach New CTO CTO Scale 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Rather, it uses overage events to trigger a call from sales to buy more. #4. They’re growing even faster at scale. This is rare.

Scale 307

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 307

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Cash was tight and I didn’t know any great VPs of Biz Dev, so between myself and my VPs of Sales, Product and Customer Success, we all jointly managed our key partners. Fight and create mindshare with partners that deliver you leads. Get on jets and go meet them. A lot more.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

Common Signs You Need a Technical Review We’ve already mentioned the most common signs that you might need a technical review: Slow or late delivery: “I’ve authorized two new developers, and we’re still behind.” Are you preparing to expand, take your business in a new direction, or take on new partners? And what causes that?

Technical Review 390

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

Combining Strong Growth With A New Level of Efficiency. HubSpot’s operating margins have scaled into the double-digits the past two quarters for the first time. 23% Customer Count Growth Leads to 30% Revenue Growth, but NRR dips to 104% HubSpot is still very much SMB, especially the “M” of SMB.

Scale 322

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 322

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2020

Hiding the ball I’ve seen 100% of the time leads to a mediocre outcome. Great CEO But Mediocre CTO. Sometimes, you can grow quickly at $1m-$2m+ ARR growing quickly even with a mediocre CTO. You have to scale, and add 10x the workflows. A mediocre CTO can’t keep up. This is really just the prior point amplified.

Technical Cofounder 305

Technical Cofounder Investment New CTO CTO 305

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

We do that with a combination of industry-leading content and community connections. This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018.

Scale 307

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 307

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. with Aashish Krishna Kumar, Head of GTM at Togai Sales Enablement 2.0 – Elevate Rep Performance with Divanshu Goyal, Sales at GTM Buddy Common scaling pains for SaaS businesses and how to overcome them.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

Ciara Peter (Gainsight VP of Product & Design) and Mickey Alon (CTO & Founder of Gainsight PX) share their practical tips for product leaders looking to achieve business growth. Every year, millions of new products are created and launched. What does it mean to make your product the star in your SaaS growth strategy?

Scale 284

Scale New CTO CTO Acquisition 284

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Bonney Pelley, SVP, Strategy + Operations @ New Relic. Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Elias Torres, CTO @ Drift. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Josh Reeves, CEO & Co-Founder @ Gusto.

CTO 280

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 280

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. It did work — we got the scaling done. You have to try new things. Everyone hated him.

Part-Time VPE 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 284

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2020

Your investors and others will learn a lot more hearing about sales from your VP of Sales, your CTO co-founder … and not you. Regularly Ask Your Investors How Happy They Are on a Scale of 1-10. But there are 1,000+ new firms since 2016 alone. All-hands meetings, board meetings, whenever.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting New CTO Scale CTO 363

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

It likely will in fact create conflict if you add a separate sales team to sell adding fries to the order. You really need a separate sales team almost on Day 1 here. Almost every SaaS CEO at scale confirms this. Maybe it can start off as founder-led sales, but you need a totally distinct team.

Scale 261

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 261

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2022

Bonney Pelley, SVP, Strategy + Operations @ New Relic. Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Elias Torres, CTO @ Drift. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Josh Reeves, CEO & Co-Founder @ Gusto.

New CTO 262

New CTO Scale CTO AWS 262

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

Merchant Services 202

Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 202

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2022

I thought my sales team would leave quickly. My VP of Sales and the team stayed for 2.5 Most surprisingly, my CTO — the most start-up-ey guy I know — is still there. You may be asked to own new stuff beyond just what your company / app does. You don’t have to work as hard. See previous point. And it is hard to predict.

Payment Solutions 349

Payment Solutions New CTO Payments Payment Services 349

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

However, we’ve been talking to our customers and prospective customers about European data hosting for a long time – we knew what we had to deliver and the problem we had to solve : Intercom, but with the data stored and processed in Europe. That meant moving fast, despite the scale of the project.

Scale 234

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 234

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… Marianna Tessel, Intuit CTO + Cathy Polinsky, Stitch Fix CTO + Robin Ducot, Survey Monkey CTO. We’re especially excited about this all-star, CTO panel from three publicly traded companies. The Accelerators ??. appeared first on SaaStr.

New CTO 113

New CTO CTO Scale Engineering 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

There was also a highly efficient inbound sales model. In fact, there is currently no field sales organization! If the PLG strategy is implemented well with a quick time to value, the cost of acquiring new customers and upselling the customers provides for a very efficient business model.”.

New CTO 283

New CTO CTO Benchmarks Consulting 283

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. Keep the promise of sales enablement and keep your team doing what they do best, which is winning. More sales meetings, start creating better sequences faster, go to go.regie.io

Scale 120

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

Being on call regularly can lead to burnout, apathy or a general desire to never see a computer again. Back in the early days of Intercom, our CTO Ciaran was the entirety of the on call team, both in and out of the office. We decided create a new virtual team who would take all out of hours on call work from every team.

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 146

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 146

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 179

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 179

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. Bottom-up sales. Doing Business with Developers. Developers hate opaque pricing.

Outsourced Development 210

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 210

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. We saw inside the company this tension between our classroom business and this new B2C digital business, and we knew we had to make a decision.

B2B 173

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

Scytale

MARCH 12, 2025

As the co-founder and CEO of leading fintech company, OakNorth , – valued at over 1 billion – he has revolutionized lending for scale-up businesses through advanced data analytics, providing fast, flexible financing solutions for SMEs. As co-founder and CEO of Wayve , he is transforming transportation with AV2.0,

Startup 59

Startup Scale Cybersecurity AI Search 59

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In a Quora thread , Ian McAllister, Director of Airbnb and former GM of Amazon describes the process: “ For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. And the same customer challenges that we were being presented, which was: How do you scale? So one trend is just containers, Kubernetes and how that auto scales in a very seamless way wherever you are.

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Artificial Intelligence 173