SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2025

“Even with a bad hand, if the potential reward is great enough, taking a risk can make mathematical sense.” As second-time founders, Atiyah and his team raised an outsized seed round for Ramp, giving them the capital to tackle a space that most startups couldn’t touch. But this challenge also presents opportunity.

CTO Hire 210

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 210

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Do a lot more Business Development and Partnerships. Underperformers found it harder to hide after Covid, and many have already left or moved on. Respectfully move on from any other underperformers by year-end. Those of us who have been around for a while know what happens when office space goes from plentiful to nonexistent.

Underperforming Technical Team 334

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 334

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

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. Once you have solidified your company’s vision and have developed a strategic plan on how you will achieve success, don’t get too comfortable. Creating a category.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2020

Having a functioning product team will make that balance just a tad easier. . Sometimes as business owners and teams we make assumptions. A huge problem most teams face is homogeny. The curve can die off, and if you don’t know when to let go, it can be bad. . It’s easy to forget that you aren’t the customer.

Underperforming Technical Team 293

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Branding Investment 293

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

A smaller number of high-quality leads that convert at higher rates is vastly superior to a flood of poor-fit prospects. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business. Mix in the classic conflict between sales and marketing teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 204

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 13, 2020

ML products also require us to manage relatively large technology risks – this is an area where, unlike in most other product development, technical limitations might render the entire design impossible. Resolution Bot is a product that automatically answers the repetitive questions faced by customer support teams.

Artificial Intelligence 281

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Underperforming Technical Team Development 281

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

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? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

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. sales enablement: how strong are the materials sales teams use to pitch? Comms Marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 340

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 340

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 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

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 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

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 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. The Playbook For Building And Retaining A High-Performing Team .

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

Learn about your investors previous bad investments (this could determine your fate!). #2 Causes: Weak previous relationship. 5 Slow product development. Bad co-founder relationships. Discouraged or disengaged engineering team. How to prevent this: Have a product development cycle. 2 Investor = Boss.

Underperforming Technical Team 239

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 239

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2021

Don’t skip too many steps of development. But when I see folks skip 2+ stages of development, I’ve almost never seen that work out. A great boss will find ways to backfill your weaknesses, get you trained one way or another, get you into the right role with the right leads. From 60 days as an SDR straight to a quota-carrying AE.

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 345

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. I think the foundation of high performance teams is that they share five things.

Scale 250

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 250

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

This means having the right technology team in place, setting up ample customer support options, and ensuring that your team is available and trained to address software challenges when they occur. Bad software user experience User experience is everything when it comes to SaaS platforms. This helps alleviate confusion.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. 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. We have team selling here that extends beyond the sales team. Want to see more content like this? FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 292

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 292

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 325

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

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? Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient. That won’t work.

Startup 312

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. If you don’t work to keep your knowledge of the market fresh and current, you may be left with a narrow view that will inevitably catch your sales and product teams flat-footed. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 290

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 290

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

When sales slow how do you keep the team motivated and push through? Because your product, if it’s early, is feature-poor, bug-ridden, slow and does nothing. ” Question #3: When sales slow, how do you keep the team motivated? Dedicate the right resources to business development to channel and partner.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 277

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 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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. It’s one thing to invest in an area where only 5% of your business is today. The “I Give Up” VP Hire.

Scaling 306

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 306

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. It’s one of our enduring topics on SaaStr. Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

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? While mParticle has a killer, commercially focused CS team, inertia affected the team as well early on.

Underperforming Technical Team 122

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 122

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 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. Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water. These are bad ideas. This is where the cloud meets. Allen Gannett: Okay.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

More on that here: The $2 Million Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team. Now some bonus tips: Build an enterprise-only sales team. Once you have 1 top logo in a segment, put an amazing outbound team on everyone in that space. You need human beings to do this. Get zen about longer sales cycles.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 312

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 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. That doesn’t make them bad people. Most valuable employees will want to grow and develop new skills. Business model. The same goes for your investors.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

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 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? And I know you want to scale your customer success team in the right way. I know it’s a lot of pressure.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market. For instance, you can launch a CSAT survey after a customer interacts with your support team. Similarly, unhappy customers are more likely to tell others of their poor experience. Userpilot review on G2.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111