SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2021

Pick a price point you know how to sell a t. I’ve seen sales reps great at $20k deals join a start-up with tons of leads but at a $2k price point and fail. Don’t skip too many steps of development. But when I see folks skip 2+ stages of development, I’ve almost never seen that work out. Most of us do. And vice-versa.

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 345

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

JUNE 21, 2023

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. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

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

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. Low touch you’re gonna talk a lot about what we call customer success teams.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

While your product managers use our analytics reports to track product usage, your engineering teams can use our session replays to uncover bugs, and your customer support team may use our in-app help center feature to offer self-service and reduce support tickets. Only it comes at a much, much higher price. Pendo vs. Userpilot.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

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. With less capital and a tighter team … you won’t be able to spend as much on marketing.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Pricing is really difficult, so these athletes are complex. So the pricing… Jesse Paliotto (17:59) interesting. The good news is we have the equivalent of like a Zillow’s estimate where we’ve got so much sales data that we can predictively price these things and tend to get it right. The category is different.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes. This survey informs you about sellers’ overall confidence along with knowledge of pricing, expertise in value selling, discovery, and price negotiation comfortability. Create dynamic alignment on goals. Deliver one narrative.

Scale 328

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 328

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

That doesn’t mean they are “bad” Many, in fact, will thrive as a VP or Director somewhere else. They’ve never really sold at your price point. Someone selling Gong today often will really struggle selling a complex developer product or nuanced pharma SaaS. This almost never works out.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

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

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

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

The real value of any company depends not on its share price but on the value it provides to its users. Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. That doesn’t make them bad people.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Scott’s newsletter makes a great point: as buying teams get bigger and bigger, our sales teams need to grow with them. In other words, the partners balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. After all, why make someone forcibly talk through budget and pricing if they clam up whenever the topic surfaces?

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

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. A simple way to achieve this is to align sales compensation with LTV to reward good behavior and disincentivize poor behavior.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

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

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. Trisha Price: nCino is a little bit different in its background.

Payment Solutions 218

Payment Solutions Pricing Payments Payment Services 218

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 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

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. Instant live customer conversations!

Scale 277

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 277

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 Machine Learning 203

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. They can also route customer conversations to the team best equipped to handle their questions and can even provide answers to simple customer questions like, “How can I add more users?”.

Underperforming Technical Team 279

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support AI Headcount 279

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 4, 2019

More recently, however, I’ve realized that the technology industry at large struggles with such clarity and consistency – in marketing terms, there is often a difficulty developing a clear value proposition that aligns with product and brand identity. Do you compete primarily on price? On product performance? On simplicity?

Branding 209

Branding Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Airlines 209

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

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? When it comes to marketing, executives can grow frustrated or intimidated by the sheer volume of numbers and metrics, ill-defined terminology, unclear processes, and potential conflict between sales and marketing teams.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 264

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2020

They equate “white” with “good” and “black” with “bad.”. At the end of the day, using a different word is a small price to pay in exchange for our coworkers’ psychological safety”. At the end of the day, using a different word is a small price to pay in exchange for our coworkers’ psychological safety.

Technical Review 289

Technical Review Software Review Systems Review CTO Hire 289

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

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. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 298

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 298

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. The team has grown quite a lot, but it’s still tiny: we’re now close to 40 people in 13 different countries. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

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: But usually your teams can’t do that. So you’re going to need at least three of those in the sales ops team. This always works.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. When I first joined the Gorgias team, there were two founders, two engineers, and myself as the first non-technical hire. Additionally, a high close rate means you are able to run your team with greater efficiency.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

WordPress is its own ecosystem, a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of people who create add-ons, plugins, and develop sites. There were way too many messaging apps, so Matt and the team decided to bring it all into one, and it’s secure, encrypted, and local to the device. Then, in 2023, they moved into messaging.

Underperforming Technical Team 333

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 333

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. Knowing the common pitfalls won’t stop you or your team from making them, but it will help build the most important skill any manager can have: resiliency. Want to see more content like this? Overwhelmed.

Scale 184

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 184

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 29, 2020

The bad news is that marketers waste 37 to 95 percent of their marketing budget. You’ll want to break each of these areas down in enough detail so you (and your team) can work with each of these areas properly. Are you focusing your attention on a specific niche, i.e., affluent travelers, price-conscious fashion aficionados?

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Development Strategy Payment Methods 145

FastSpring

APRIL 24, 2025

Since 2010, she’s been leading teams, building websites, web applications for nonprofits, K through 12, higher education, government, businesses of all sizes. And so I think there are a lot of self-taught developers that just don’t know. And I’m giving that a bad description.

Business 108

Business Software Review Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 108