SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. was created by a team with 25+ years of experience in location-based tech, spanning various services and real-time asset tracking systems. Founders : Max Armbruster.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

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 190

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 190

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

Within the next 12 months, Adam Seligman, VP of Generative Builders at AWS, believes there will be an inversion of SaaS. That many of the standard assumptions and ways of doing SaaS will change a lot. He believes we’re rapidly approaching that new world where anyone can build a great SaaS product. What does that mean?

Generative AI 265

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 265

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

Azure 237

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 237

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. Your happy customers beget more happy customers in SaaS. Leave the pipedreams for $100m in ARR.

Scaling 289

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 289

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Both are two of the most impressive and inspiring public SaaS CEOs — but their products and companies couldn’t be more different. One was to get a sense of what the bar was to pull off a successful SaaS IPO these days (answer = oh man, very high). Do you have two sales teams? It’s not just building the 1.0,

Underperforming Technical Team 353

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 353

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

More on that here: The $2 Million Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team. More on that here: Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much: Absolute Churn and Sales Cycles. Now some bonus tips: Build an enterprise-only sales team. You need human beings to do this. A lot more.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 312

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Former Head of Revenue at BILL and HubSpot Americas leader Michelle Benfer recently joined us on a SaaStr Workshop Wednesday share her insights on one of the most critical roles in any SaaS organization: the frontline sales manager. “Some teams consistently sold more enterprise SKUs, others had high volume but low ACV.

Sales Hiring 164

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 164

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Owning an airbnb, doing a podcast, coaching a team, volunteering or trading cards – that’s a hobby and a side-hustle and very much encouraged). Same holds true for developers.”

Underperforming Technical Team 292

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 292

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

Sales Hiring 288

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 288

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 217

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 217

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. I would argue it was one of the first SaaS companies of its time, but back then we called it an ASP, an application service provider. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams.

Scale 229

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 229

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

Then, we have this community in SaaS — SaaStr. Generally, what happens is 95 percent of us SaaS founders, while we may have done some sales in our career, we’re not formally trained in sales. It’s pretty rare that a VP of sales comes out and founds his or her own SaaS company. I don’t want to do biotech.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 274

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team.

Scale 256

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 256

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. It’s about enabling the people on your team to be more productive and efficient. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 210

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 210

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

So the first question is what made SaaS so successful. If you kind of that question, thinking about the stakeholders and the decisions and companies of using SaaS products, there’s kind of three types. Customers love SaaS products and tools because it simply works. The second constituent there is the developer.

SaaS Payments 234

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 234

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. Not only is Klaviyo a rocketship but also the first to IPO in over 2 years (since December 2021) when it went public in September of 2023.

Revenue 284

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Is there a lot of internal or customer work that needs to be done or managed by your team? As the lens of efficiency is further applied in SaaS, Customer Success is coming under greater scrutiny.

Underperforming Technical Team 102

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 102

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2019

It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there, so I thought it would be worth digging in more on each point: Regrets are different than mistakes. So what’s my list of SaaS regrets? The best ones are always accretive in SaaS. What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In? #4. It Compounds.

Sales Hiring 193

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 193

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

JANUARY 16, 2023

That doesn’t mean they are “bad” Many, in fact, will thrive as a VP or Director somewhere else. Someone selling Gong today often will really struggle selling a complex developer product or nuanced pharma SaaS.

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 272

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers. It seemed like the best investment! .

Scale 276

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 276

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

At the closing AMA of SaaStr Annual, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin shared candid insights about what’s really happening in SaaS today. In this Ask Me Anything Part 1, Lemkin answers the questions: What does SaaStr Annual attendee data tell us about the state of SaaS? Is outbound sales dead? Lets find out the answers.

Scale 169

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 169

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

At Maxio , we help B2B SaaS companies unlock their next stage of growth. Our financial operations platform is designed to meet the unique financial challenges of B2B SaaS, including billing, subscription management, revenue and expense recognition, and SaaS analytics. Vendr is forever changing how companies buy and renew SaaS.

Scale 223

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 223

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 282

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 282

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 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 264

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

Announcer: Up today, the secrets of market timing, how to develop the right idea at the right time with Allen Gannett, author of The Creative Curve. It could be a hit marketing tactic among SaaS marketers, right? Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water. These are bad ideas.

Underperforming Technical Team 208

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 208

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. But that’s not Disruption — in SaaS at least. Sometimes in SaaS, there are natural monopolies. But more often, SaaS categories with significant complexity in workflows and features end up in natural oligopolies.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 241

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Sequoia Capital’s India arm put together a terrific summary of all their learnings about SaaS and Cloud from SaaStr Annual this year. They also did an A+ session at Annual with several top India SaaS founders, which you can catch below! Here’s 22 of the most relevant takeaways for India’s SaaS ecosystem.

Scale 231

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 231

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

Join 10,000 fellow founders, investors and execs for 3 days of unparalleled networking and epic learnings from SaaS legends from Sep 27-29 across 40+ open acres at the San Mateo County fairgrounds at the SF Bay Area. He said, “I feel so bad. Jeff : I felt really bad, because you plan way ahead. It’s pretty cool.

Scale 305

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 305

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. In this post, I outline how SaaS founders should modify their approach and implement a simple sales methodology to increase their odds of success. The sooner you adopt these steps, the faster you’ll see growth.

Startup 178

Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178

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. SaaS = Software that scales.

Scale 171

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 171

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

So how feasible do you think that works for a typical B2B SaaS business that probably our user-base is not too knowledgeable about [inaudible] on the internet for something specific in their day-to-day use case? Jason Lemkin: But usually your teams can’t do that. This always works. If you do Salesforce, try to do Pipedrive.

Scale 256

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 256

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 238

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 238

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2022

The developed world revolves around e-commerce. In a crowded field, how can SaaS companies prove themselves and shift from being completely irrelevant to their markets to delivering services their market and buyer personas value? Embed innovation into your team’s DNA. Becoming market leaders. Global approach. Product evolution.

Underperforming Technical Team 217

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Innovation Investment 217

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. For companies in B2B SaaS, it also means understanding to whom they’re selling. Strategy to win. Key takeaways.

Consulting 42

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 42

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