SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

Finding Superfans Early On Jason starts by asking the meta-question: “You’re at $900M of ARR, growing 35%, 112% NRR from SMBs, and 14% free cash flow. They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. Is there a downturn?” For Klaviyo, the answer is no.

Revenue 312

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 312

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. It’s an SMB SaaS company in the healthcare technology vertical. We’ll talk about some of the stuff that you do as you grow your team a little bit and then we’ll sort of wrap it up with some advanced stuff.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 304

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2023

Mistake #1: Viewing Investors Only As Capital As founders build a team, they focus on obtaining complementary skill sets. Of course, building great teams and finding product market fit is critical, but don’t forget about product investor fit. Enterprise will likely have a different problem set vs. an SMB. That’s a mistake.

Development Team Review 263

Development Team Review Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SMB 263

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 277

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 277

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. But let’s step back a minute, you’ve got three reps on your team already, doing whatever revenue, four, and you want to triple your revenue. Whatever you do, hire two.

Sales Hiring 290

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

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 22, 2019

Sales managers looking to stand out among their peers would do well to focus on four things: prioritizing work that will move the needle, making sure the right people are on their team, thinking about initiatives that will improve the business (not just themselves and their reps), and developing a solid decision-making framework.

Sales Hiring 123

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Management 123

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. No one has an engineering team with the time to build anything. Jason Lemkin: Yep. So, thanks.

Scale 272

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 272

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Turns out a founding team of six MBAs creating a full suite of products sold solely to SMBs can become a multi-million dollar public company in nine years – and continue growing rapidly ($77.6 Dharmesh : …said, “This is a very bad idea. million in 2013 to $115.9 million in 2014.). I said, “Holy crap.

Part-Time VPE 288

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 288

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Tara and her team used it to take a deep dive into the customer’s journey through the product and make a focused effort to truly understand each step along the way. There’s a tired stereotype that assumes that sales and marketing teams have competing priorities – and, in turn – don’t get along. Ultimately, that leads to churn.

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? So as Lauren sort of alluded to, we started by focusing on SMB’s. Today we’ll be talking about five ways to effectively move up market.

Underperforming Technical Team 198

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB compliance 198

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. When done correctly, your sales strategy will help your sales team execute with focus – SMB or enterprise, inbound or outbound, hunting or farming. 8 steps to develop a winning sales strategy. But that threshold exists.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

Chart Mogul

MAY 30, 2019

Ingmar, our VP of Customer Success, and our support team cracked the code on first response time and measuring NPS. As we grow, we’re able to spend more time developing the proactive tiers of the pyramid without de-prioritizing a strong foundation of fast, helpful ticket replies and features that delight.

Underperforming Technical Team 78

Underperforming Technical Team Development Strategy Management 78

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 5, 2018

No wonder you never want to eat out again… The Sales Development outsourcing industry is broken for that exact reason. Your cost of trying to build Sales Development in house is therefore $90,000 at a minimum. Rats in the kitchen doesn’t always mean the food is bad, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Outsourcing Services 80

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Outsourcing Underperforming Technical Team 80

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. Building a great sales team: How Intercom fosters and maintains its sales culture. Onboarding, but make it remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

If something bad happens, you’re going to have to cut your burn, probably. There is one thing, I love this quote and it’s a little bit of a crude quote, not that it’s bad language-. What do you do with that lightly toxic person on your team? I’ve spent three years deploying Gainsight. Aaron : No.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 223

Sales Hacker

JUNE 22, 2021

As a manager are you helping your team succeed with these conversations? In this talk with a Head of Sales and an SDR Manager, you’ll get the inside scoop on how to be the most effective leader for your teams. Jump in to hear how Cara and Gabrielle can change your management style and the performance of your team.

Underperforming Technical Team 65

Underperforming Technical Team Management Sales SMB 65

Sales Hacker

JULY 21, 2021

But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad. A strategy is how a team plans to reach their overarching goals and all of the steps to get there. Managers can energize the whole team by helping secure some quick wins. “Hi! Let’s synergize our teams to create a streamlined approach that leverages our core competencies.

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Sales Enablement 132

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Casey Accidental

MARCH 29, 2022

Non-sexy things include general user experience improvements, performance, developer velocity, infrastructure, technical debt, and, fortunately less than it used to be, growth. But I urge everyone I can in product to develop the intuition to support these initiatives without making teams jump through hoops to justify these investments.

Investment 139

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Scale User Experience 139

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2021

A made-up role so companies can hire more people to tell sales how best to do their job.” — Jason Henson , Manager, SMB Sales Development at Lytx, Inc. . In bad times, the shield is wielded in exec / BOD meetings to obfuscate real data. A neutral team.” — Adithya Krishnaswamy , Head of Growth at Everstage.

Sales Recruiting 102

Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Scale 102

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

We’re still learning what world we’re in — some people interview over Zoom, some are focused on how to build teams in the current age, and many are dealing with a weird overhang from the SaaS explosion of 2021, quiet quitting, layoffs, and team turnover. The last thing a VP of Sales wants to do is start without a team.

Sales Hiring 162

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 162

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

She manages a huge global team. It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? Sam will have a lot of interesting perspectives on how he manages his team through these times. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 232

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 232

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

And it’s not without good reason: nearly all software products with dominant market share started as apps but grew to the point where third-party developers began building valuable integrations on top of what these companies had already created. New Relic’s General Manager, Mark Weitzel, weighs in on how you can support your developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

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. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

But it sounds like the bad news is you’ve got a limited runway. It’s not the investor’s problem if you have an expensive team. They know everyone, and if they don’t, someone on their vast team does. Like if you have a three people in a team, what do you think that is recession proof right now?

Scale 241

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 241

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Nick Mehta: Power of the developer, or the API economy, both of you play very much in both those trends. How do you help your team make that link to value? We’ve got a lot of training to do with our sales teams to get them to start to speak in these types of terms versus feature function. Nick Mehta: Yeah.

Payment Methods 262

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 262

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 26, 2021

All additional clauses in your plan were probably introduced because of a bad past incident by a rep. The industry ranges are around six to nine months for MM/Enterprise sales and three to five months for SMB sales businesses. Companies have a lot of reasons like a history of bad customers, bad sales, etc.

Software Review 106

Software Review Compensation Payment Features Underperforming Technical Team 106

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Develop a Full Marketing Strategy 2. SMB SaaS companies tend to have higher churn rates due to their lower demand and less sophisticated needs. High churn is understandable for newer startups, but it does indicate that a tool may be a poor market fit, have limited demand, or struggle to compete against similar products.

SaaS Payments 105

SaaS Payments Technical Review Development Team Review Software Review 105

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

There was another company I invested in called Automile, that for a while was quite successful in SMB fleet tracking, tracking where your fleets of vehicles are. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product. And you have to allow that, in fact, you have to support that in your sales team.

Scale 274

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 274

Sales Hacker

APRIL 25, 2019

The SMB Decision: In-House vs. Outsourced Sales Development. As a high-growth SMB, your number-one focus is consistent sales. Without a sales development team, you can find yourself struggling when it comes to pipeline generation. The Four Costs of In-House Sales Development. Salary and benefits costs.

Outsourcing Services 83

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 83

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. So how do you create a strong, enterprise-ready team? Not just support on steroids: How to build a customer success team.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

In my experience, getting caught up in shiny objects (like great numbers) during the hiring process is a straight line to Disasterville, and when the cost of a bad hire is painfully significant , it pays to take a measured approach. Also: What are the top performers in my current team doing? This is a team effort.

Sales Hiring 104

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 104

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. How quickly you’re able to accelerate growth depends on your ability to build a nimble sales org and develop a strong sales strategy. These lay the foundation that enables your team to run as efficiently as possible.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

Developer platform: a business where developers can build businesses on top of the business’s software and charge customers. The Weak Transition to Marketplace Arguments. There are three fairly weak arguments I don’t like, but I’ll present them anyway. #1 Take them from the marketplace team.

Marketplace as a Service 106

Marketplace as a Service Business Model Business Underperforming Technical Team 106

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

Take Stack Overflow , the world’s largest software developer network, community, and platform, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors. In fact, the team intentionally takes a non-dualistic approach that relies more on empathy, flexibility, and context than on the concept of right versus wrong. .

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. This will result in poor open and response rates. Apollo’s full plan comes with an SMB level price tag; as a startup, you probably want the basic plan. We recommend starting with LinkedIn’s own Sales Navigator.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Management teams should prepare themselves for activist investors and adapt their financial profile to keep valuations high. Companies who sell to SMB may see increased amounts of uncontrollable churn as customers cease operations. Frequent readers already know that Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is my favorite book on corporate strategy.

Software Review 120

Software Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 120