Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) community day event in Dublin about the technical strategies I’ve experienced that don’t work and the ones that have helped us to grow and scale at Intercom. But over time, we noticed that teams hated working on these services.

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Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

On the topic of building SaaS companies, Henry kicks off the conversation with: “I think a lot of bootstrapped founders who are less capital infused have to actually be great at developing their people. “The best hack,” Jason adds, “is not recruiting one management team. It’s recruiting five or six.”

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 304

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Let’s get it going. Times are good.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 274

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. “At HubSpot, I had over 100 frontline sales managers reporting to me.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 199

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Unicorn companies often need to scale quickly to meet the demands of their rapidly growing customer base. 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. ” – David Cancel.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 245

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

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.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 173

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Some classics here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days. Your VP of Sales Shouldn’t Be Perfect. They hire weak, too junior folks.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 253

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. So a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. So big, big scale.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 215

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

Earlier this month, Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov sat down with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin at SaaStr Europa 2024 to talk about all things AI and the lessons learned while scaling to billions. What Does AI-Enhanced Sales Look Like In Two Years Everyone’s thinking about it. First, no drudgery. Yes,” Amit says.

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Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 307

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

If you already have a few bigger deals under your belt, but most are smaller … a few higher-level suggestions: Hire a Very Good VP of Sales that has sold at your “high end” price point. More here: The 48 Types of VP Sales. The best way to make pos-initial sale land-and-expand happen organically is engaged, happy customers.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 312

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. Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers. Stay Laser-Focused.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 290

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

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Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 325

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 289

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 28, 2018

As the rise of bots and automation continues apace, a lot of people are wondering how the sales process and lead qualification will be affected by this fast-evolving technology. Working as Sales Development Representatives at Intercom, we deal with a huge volume of conversations with potential leads that come in through live chat.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Customer Support 187

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. If you’re a leader, he says, don’t try to scale your job. Here are five quick takeaways: Most sales and support teams talk about their jobs as a funnel.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People explains how asking hard questions, embracing feedback and making personal connections with your customers can move the sales journey from prospect to champion. We have heard a lot of sessions today around ramping up your lead gen, accelerating marketing. Want to see more content like this?

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 228

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. Good afternoon.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 256

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. Want to see more content like this?

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 304

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. I don’t know anything about sales. More power to you.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

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). Often the Great Guy from Salesforce or Shopify or ServiceNow or LinkedIn or whatever other leading SaaS company. Only money.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 334

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 302

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

We believe that in order for SaaS companies to unlock their next stage of growth, their financial operations tech stack must strike the right balance between flexibility, which allows them to pivot quickly in an ever-changing market, and complexity, which supports them as they scale their business, operations, and monetization strategies.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 272

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Most support teams have seen an influx of support queries since COVID-19 hit – and those issues are more complex than ever. According to recent research, however, many teams aren’t sufficiently equipped to meet these new challenges. Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

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Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

Is outbound sales dead? When sales slow how do you keep the team motivated and push through? How important are channel partnerships for sales and revenue? ” Question #2: Is outbound sales dead? And highlight how you can solve a problem for your prospect with this. Lets find out the answers.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 166

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. And second, the scorecard provides a way for a team to understand their strengths and weaknesses. You might score each on a 1 to 10 scale. Business Development. who does it sell to?

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Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 282

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

We remain optimistic about the prospects of cross-border SaaS. Companies in our region are good at achieving PMF and scaling to $1 million-$5 million ARR efficiently. They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. Org Building Ideas for Cross-Border Companies.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 284

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. A well defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful, sustainable growth. When done correctly, your sales strategy will help your sales team execute with focus – SMB or enterprise, inbound or outbound, hunting or farming.

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Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

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?

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Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Is this so bad? To scale means hiring lots of people.

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Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 259

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

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. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

We can look back at how Datadog scaled. 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? We hired everybody on our teams.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 320

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

The age-old sales funnel has worked fine for decades…until now. Why is the sales funnel alone, no longer an appropriate way of thinking about customers? Brian Halligan: Whether we all like it or not, trust in sales and marketing is at an all-time low. We’re going to hire tele-sales reps who are going to cold call.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 55

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Regardless of what stage you are in, he provides a framework to systematically approach this stage and what you should focus on to get to scale faster. We are screwing up the scale. What is sales? What is sales? Isn’t sales really around customer value creation? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

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Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 246

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Almost everyone in sales seems to be into real estate, either “multi-family” real-estate or getting their broker’s license. Especially a VP of Sales, working on a big number, and with presumably, a big upside and OTE? About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 324

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling and VC funding. But I think going to your point, Nathan, what folks miss a little bit is how much crap VCs are digging out of, and that leads to a lot more hard nos. But it sounds like the bad news is you’ve got a limited runway.

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Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 241