SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

ARR, Zendesk today gets 14% of new business from startups. On top of that, if you look at their top accounts globally, 33 of the top 50 customers by ARR are startups. You don’t want conflict with the sales team. How do you leverage that offer to develop relationships with partners? At 16 years and $1.6B A free term.

Startup 267

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 267

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

My top suggestions: Hire those “Bay Area VPs” now while they’ll (still) work with startups HQ’d anywhere. Do a lot more Business Development and Partnerships. Underperformers found it harder to hide after Covid, and many have already left or moved on. This one is perhaps the most actionable.

Underperforming Technical Team 334

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 334

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

While that doesn’t sound very bad, according to Corey Quinn, the world’s most notorious Cloud Economist, it goes against best practices or “sensible defaults” and is “ the worst practice to be avoided by default.” Day one of your startup is probably not the time to be learning Kubernetes.

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Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

While every startup is eager to hit this mark quickly, it’s a process that takes time. Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. The Showpad executive team strives to continually lower talent attrition.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. Best customer success software for startups and small companies. Ensure that your data is clean and easily accessible, as poor data quality undermines the value of even the best customer success tool.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. 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? Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. That was the rough rule.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this? .”

Scale 292

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 292

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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

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). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. 1/ Want the best startup VP Sales candidates in the world? Only money.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

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.

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Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

The session that I’m talking about is basically about the board dynamic and about how to survive this valley of death and bring not just yourself and your team but your extended team, including your board, across that until you cross the $1 million mark, and then the $10 million mark and keep going beyond. There we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

Founders are responsible for ensuring a startup always has enough money, setting the vision for the company, and driving things forward. Lesson #1: If You Aren’t Making Mistakes, You Aren’t In A Startup If you do things that always work and maintain the status quo, you’re likely at a major company like Microsoft. And it was true.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

One of the most popular sessions at SaaStr Annual, Busting the Myths About Startup Success with BlackLine CEO and Founder Therese Tucker is up at the top of our must-watch list. My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. Don’t be that guy with your startup. The reality is most startups fail.

Startup 290

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 290

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 sort of going from older to more and more startup land. Who was the highest engaged teams?

Scale 250

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 250

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

In the early days, it was about setting expectations that startups are hard and you must work hard to succeed. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

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. Think about startups, right? It could be a hit among a small group of startup CEOs. Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 246

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 14, 2018

Looking for an example of a happy, high performing product team? Rather than suggesting a model startup, advisor and author Laura Klein is likely to point you toward her favorite heist film. I was working with a bunch of different companies and teams of all different sizes. Laura: Exactly.

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VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach New CTO 190

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 2, 2020

It’s around this time that some businesses start to consider startup funding. Access to more capital means implementing better growth tools, expanding the team, and generally making the journey to profitability much smoother. Does your business need startup funding? How Do I Get Startup Funding for My Business?

Startup 145

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Government Investment 145

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 255

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 255

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. These leaders act as partners and build out a strong team. Not every leader is created equally.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2021

Some examples: Okta basically won the corporate side of identity (rocketed to #1) but wasn’t #1 on the developer side. Smaller deals can sometimes just be about experiments, and teams. Buy a pre-revenue startup in space with a strong team. Buy a pre-revenue startup in space with a strong team.

Underperforming Technical Team 274

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. The last thing you want the team doing is chasing a shiny penny, when what really matters is hitting the plan for the quarter.

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Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

Self-service sales model This is when customers explore and experience your product independently without needing hands-on help from your sales team. Your sales team may need to map out all potential targets and how to access potential buyers within those larger businesses. What does “Qualified really mean for your team?

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times.

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Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 144

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. First, identify your team member’s strengths and weaknesses. Business case development and IT/tech strategy.

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Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

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. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me. The math won’t work.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 305

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 305

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.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence 203

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. It’s a timely conversation for us, coming hot on the heels of the release of our book Intercom on Sales last month and Steli’s own book The 2020 Startup Sales Playbook this week. to Close.com.

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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. Getting access to the crown jewels and highly sensitive data as a four-person startup is hard, but if it’s a segregated piece of data and a pilot.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

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.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 321

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

At nine figures in revenue and 550 people, the CEO of Lattice, Jack Altman, has seen every stage of building a startup. Most of the time, a missing teams view or the ability to integrate with one more system isn’t the answer. They may hit you up with great startups to buy, important summits, and other valuable opportunities.

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Underperforming Technical Team Startup Investment Communication 49

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

If you look at any SaaS startup, in the first couple reps, they always find one guy or gal that’s just amazing, just killing it. 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. Whatever you do, hire two. Who did you hire?

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