SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. because they needed to rebuild the sales team.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. While at Gorgias, I expected to leave with as much knowledge to earn me an honorary bachelor’s in sales.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Get best price tickets here!!! So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. This session is particularly fun to look back on.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

The second constituent there is the developer. Why do developers love SaaS products? Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. The key here is knowing what your sales model is. They love SaaS products.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Not that they are just "great at sales" — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) January 12, 2023. So a while back we did a deep dive on why 95% of the VPs of Sales candidates just won’t thrive at your start-up. I think it’s important to repeat that analysis, but for your first few sales reps.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

Unlike traditional businesses, most SaaS businesses operate the subscription pricing model. Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market. Transparency : The company is open and honest about product prices, updates, and changes. Userpilot review on G2.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. Once the players in a new market get pretty big themselves, they’ll ultimately most likely raise prices. And at a sales perspective, they’ll move to optimizing revenue per lead, over closing every possibly lead.

Scale 282

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 282

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Listen for the full insights into: How Flippa.com works to connect for-sale businesses with buyers while managing the complexities of valuation and seller expectations. Pricing is really difficult, so these athletes are complex. So the pricing… Jesse Paliotto (17:59) interesting. The category is different.

Scale 121

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 121

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 317

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 317

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely. It’s rare for companies to improve both their sales and margin during a downturn. Key takeaways.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

With Merge’s Unified API, developers integrate just once and give their customers access to over 150 HR Information Systems (HRIS), Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Accounting, Ticketing, and CRM integrations. Empower your inside sales team by automating the hardest parts of outbound calling. With over $1.5B

Scale 277

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 277

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

In this episode, Bob and I chat about his new book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. What is it about sales that makes academia hesitant to teach it? Bob wondered where all the sales professors were and discovered that perhaps as a profession it required more art than science.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? Helping the engineering teams run smoothly and being super productive thanks to mentoring.

Scale 321

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 321

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

analyzing how often Directors and Executives are involved in the sales process. Scott pulled the research from Chorus, which reported that over five weeks (~May-June 2020), 88% more directors have been joining calls and 72% more executives are joining sales calls on the sell side.

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

The three core areas to focus on are: Evolving your growth engine Building and solving for when to become a multi-product platform Investing in your people and team #1: Evolving Your Growth Engine Let’s start with some context for Bitly’s journey. You might have to rebuild your marketing team. Expand pricing and packaging.

Scale 306

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 306

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 4, 2020

That’s what selling without a sales dashboard is like. But a sales dashboard is only useful if it’s done well. What is a Sales Dashboard? A sales dashboard gives your team a fast and efficient way to see all the data that is most important to doing their job effectively. Why Use a Sales Dashboard?

Underperforming Technical Team 136

Underperforming Technical Team Data Sales Metrics 136

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 261

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 261

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. She said, “Your team really needs to get to know you. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 179

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 179

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. Use a mixture of long and short sales cycle tactics.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 264

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. Velaris – pricing is only available upon request. Catalyst – pricing is only available upon request. Gong.io – pricing is only available upon request. Chorus – starting from $8,000/year.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Classic agencies don’t value the software enough to engender pricing power, develop fast sales cycles, or change the operations of their business to maximize the value of the ML innovation. Consequently, product market fit is weak. Second, how to price the product relative to the competition?

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence 203

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

359: The Secrets to Vertical Growth, What it Really Takes to Build a $1B SaaS Company with Matt Garratt, SVP, Managing Partner @ Salesforce Ventures, Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer @ nCino and David Schmaier, CEO & Founder @ Vlocity. Trisha Price. They need fewer sales as a percentage of overall employees. Matt Garratt.

Payment Solutions 207

Payment Solutions Pricing Payments Payment Services 207

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person. I’ve never even played a sales person on TV. All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question? That’s a great example.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Silicon Valley has a deep talent bench.

Scale 298

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 298

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

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

Sales Hacker

MARCH 30, 2023

If you’re new to sales (or don’t have an economics degree), decoding the sales compensation plan on offer can make your head spin. There are 3 key questions you must ask your hiring manager or recruiter when offered a sales role to maximize your earnings and career potential. You have two sales job offers — how to pick?

Compensation 98

Compensation Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 98

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? Lattice had a product-led growth flow on the website while the sales team was still trying to sell the PLG companies The good news is Lattice had a lot of activity and initiatives at play. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 278

Sales Hacker

APRIL 10, 2023

Too often, I see sales teams thinking of their “ sales process ” as a set of stages in their pipeline and maybe a bunch of fields to complete at each stage. We were weak on some key functionality areas where the winning vendor was strong. Price gap We were too expensive. The gap was too big to bridge.

Technical Review 112

Technical Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 112

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. They moved to a more traditional SaaS inside sales model, and they started shipping out these hardware devices, and only 30% to 40% of the customers would end up paying for them. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product.

Scale 277

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 277