SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

With 10+ years as a CMO at companies ranging from $1M to $1B in revenue, another 10+ years as CEO of companies in the $0-$100M range, and extensive experience as an independent director on startup boards, Dave offers a 360-degree perspective on marketing’s role in SaaS success. This isn’t a generic Marketing 101 course.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 202

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 262

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 262

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 332

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 332

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.

Technical Review 269

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 322

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 322

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 294

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 294

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

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 336

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 336

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

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?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

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 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 293

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 249

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 249

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 281

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 281

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.

VP of Engineering 190

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 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 256

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

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

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

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 269

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 269

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

I built a marketplace for specialty food and I’ve worked in the Valley based in San Francisco across a number of, well across one startup and then a very established online publishing business called Lonely Planet, which of course at one point in It’s the biggest guidebook publisher in the world. Blake Hutchison (28:59) Yeah.

Scale 118

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 118

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

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.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 144

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

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 290

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

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 300

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 300

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 Machine Learning 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.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

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 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

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 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Investment Communication 49

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 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

Sales Recruiting 191

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 191

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US poses numerous, often unique, challenges for a European technology startup. So is developing a geographic strategy. This series was both a lot of work and a lot of fun. I was able to leverage many of my Balderton colleages (e.g.,

Startup 128

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 128