SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2023

It allows us to deliver reminders, call summaries, suggested next steps, custom prompts and easy to follow workflows directly to our market facing teams and leadership. As the CRO at Owner, Kyle leads a team of go to market professionals who help independent restaurants grow their direct, online takeout and delivery channels.

Scale 236

Scale AI Leadership Innovation 236

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 19, 2023

Last week, OpenAI suffered management team infighting over the key direction of the company. Microsoft has secured its leadership position. Microsoft counts members of the OpenAI team amongst its ranks. The schism inside the company resulted in Sam Altman’s firing & Greg Brockman’s departure. in run-rate.

Artificial Intelligence 227

Artificial Intelligence AI Government Leadership 227

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 3, 2020

This time I met up with Lisa Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer at Autodesk, to talk about leadership, the most underrated superhero, and the thing that’s always in her pocket. One is my team—I absolutely love my team. Early in my career, I had a mentor who always said, “Your team is everything.”

Leadership 52

Leadership CTO Coach CTO Interviewing 52

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

She was able to get into a leadership position immediately and coach people who were hungry for it in a slightly safer space than more tenured folks. Shifting from an operator and loving operations and data to a sales and revenue leadership role felt like a big jump. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 230

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 230

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.

Customer Success 224

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale AI 224

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 3, 2021

Managers tasked with creating a culture of collaboration within a distributed team will find the profile of a leader changes. A recent study found that the skills and traits of successful leaders in an in-person, office-based environment differ from those needed to lead distributed, remote teams. Achievement outshines ascription.

Leadership 279

Leadership Startup Management 279

FastSpring

MARCH 8, 2024

Here’s how FastSpring not only rose to the challenge but continues to impress Ovi and the SocialBee team, especially with: A dedication to listening to customers’ needs and providing communicative customer support. An actively involved leadership team that gets to know customers personally.

Merchant Services 133

Merchant Services Payments Subscription Payment Features 133

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? If daylight begins to grow between your team and another, the entire team can feel it—and those gaps will continue to grow if they go unaddressed.

Underperforming Technical Team 262

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 262

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Will has worked at Digg, Uber, Stripe, and is now at Calm and has seen many engineering teams endure and thrive through hypergrowth. The 4 states of an engineering team is a mental model that resonated with me, and I think it provides a framework for leadership teams and boards to understand the state of a developer team.

Engineering 363

Engineering Software Review Systems Review Technical Review 363

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2023

During that session, she alluded to a book sharing her expertise in building exceptional teams at two of the most successful startups. is a book a management team could take to an offsite to develop or re-imagine the entire operating system of a business. She provides lucid mental models to align teams to achieve great things.

Startup 223

Startup Scale Systems Review Compensation 223

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

You Won’t Know The Names Of All Your Employees Almost everything changes once you reach that scale of ten or tens of millions of revenue, including your leadership model. Your leadership style has to evolve to match that. How do you scale leadership? Give your team the latitude to make decisions quickly.

Scale 170

Scale Scaling Leadership Company Culture 170

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

Find the People: Find the team that is equipped to help you build your product, sell it, and run company operations. Once you have chosen your market and found the team to build and sell the product, you need to create systems that grow with you. People Plan: How many people do we need on our team? Who should we hire?

Scaling 198

Scaling Leadership Startup Product Marketing 198

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 1, 2021

Goal frameworks ensure that the priorities of the leadership team coalesce the priorities of the rest of the organization. When the leadership team shifted to set goals, they asked managers to track input metrics ( leading indicators ), operational metrics, and strategic metrics. Those dashboards predated goals.

Scale 257

Scale Scaling Payment Services Leadership 257

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 6, 2021

This level of success requires masterful leadership. Bringing with her over 20 years of experience in sales, product marketing and operational scaling, she continues to provide strategic counsel to Stripe’s leadership team as an Advisor. Today, Stripe is synonymous with payments and tallies more than 15 products.

Payment Services 286

Payment Services Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions 286

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Previously, Sarah worked at Spotify, where she led a team responsible for marketing Spotify’s advertising business globally. With a career focused on the intersection of storytelling, media, technology, and advertising, Sarah also previously held leadership roles at Ooyala, Discovery, and Viacom.

Advertising 215

Advertising Leadership AI Technology 215

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

Leadership needs to consider funding areas, not just a single feature, because more supplemental subfeatures and finetuning will be required every time. Leadership needs to find a way to keep a finger on the pulse of the hard realities of customers and internal teams. Leadership needs to delegate to the talent they have hired.

CTO Coach 175

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 175

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Dear SaaStr: One of Our Most Respected Team Members Quit and Folks Are Leaving. Promote someone great that everyone respects into a leadership role. More often, someone highly respected or at least with a lot of team loyalty quits. More often, someone highly respected or at least with a lot of team loyalty quits.

Leadership 223

Leadership Strategy Management 223

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 14, 2022

I asked him to share his views on land & expand team structure & quotas. Logo-based quotas focus the team on speed to close. The company’s leadership should calculate sales efficiency on the combined OTE (on-target earnings) to quota ratio of these teams. But we covered much more.

Startup 311

Startup Construction Sales Compensation 311

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2022

By contrast, when a company grows larger and teams grow siloed, it becomes much harder to achieve that same level of collaboration and quality output. Another critical piece in building a highly productive team is to promote from within. Despite having a ton of leadership experience, Anu started at the bottom of the totem pole.

Compensation 203

Compensation Leadership Company Culture Headcount 203

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2024

He made many great leadership points, but one in particular rattles around my head a lot and I think deserves its own post: You usually won’t know if you’ve made a 10x hire … when you make the hire. At Adobe Sign / EchoSign, I knew a lot of our sales team, from Brendon Cassidy to Sam Blond (now at Founders Fund and ex-CRO at Brex) were great.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO CTO 212

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

Some folks have fallen behind because they: Don’t have strong enough tech teams to add AI Resist it Those companies will struggle because everyone expects innovation from AI. ARR asks Jason how he sees the best companies steering into metrics and KPIs to drive performance at a leadership level. Fire anyone that isn’t metrics-oriented.

Scale 221

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 221

SaaStr

APRIL 29, 2022

Managers often grapple with how to create and scale a global product team. Scaling a team isn’t about increasing the size, rather it’s about increasing the output of the teams and producing tangible value. For that reason, scaling teams require different leadership chains inside the company.

Scale 208

Scale Scaling Company Culture Leadership 208

Mattermark

AUGUST 22, 2017

Technical audiences spontaneously cheer when one of the team is presenting, and people stop me on the street in SF to ask technical questions if I’m wearing a Postman t-shirt. The post Leadership Tips, Team Culture, Choosing First Investor, and more – Mattermark Daily appeared first on Mattermark.

VP of Engineering 40

VP of Engineering Leadership Venture Capital Technical Review 40

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Each will have a unique leadership style, sell different products, target different markets, lead different teams, and build distinctive growth strategies. Until now, you have been doing most of the sales and have a small AE team. You will be looking for someone to manage and scale the team. Leadership experience.

Sales Recruiting 182

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 182

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 22, 2020

Managers tasked with creating a culture of collaboration within a distributed team will find the profile of a leader changes. A recent study found that the skills and traits of successful leaders in an in-person, office-based environment differ from those needed to lead distributed, remote teams.

Leadership 235

Leadership Management 235

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2022

Yet, sales team targets are often set extremely high, with management expecting their teams to miss. This might bring success for the company, but it leads to negative experiences for the sales rep, and your teams may ultimately fail to perform to their fullest potential. Your team needs to track performance and monitor pace.

Sales Hiring 211

Sales Hiring Sales Systems Review SaaS 211

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

When a new leader joins a startup, their impact hinges on their ability to build their teams. Whether you manage a team of engineers, a team of regional sales managers, or the company, your first responsibility is to hire and successfully manage the seven people who will form your leadership team.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Management Leadership 239

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2021

It was a change in sales leadership that just enjoyed hunting $1m+ deals. The sales leadership you bring in will favor a certain price segment most of all. But after that, your sales leadership will make a huge impact. The post Your Deal Size is Your Sales Team as Much As It Is Your Product appeared first on SaaStr.

Sales 244

Sales Leadership Enterprise Startup 244

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

Founded in 2015, Chorus operates a SaaS platform that provides valuable insights from conversations – say with calls, video conferences and emails — for revenue teams. Building technology for revenue teams requires both a 10,000-foot view of the industry and real-life experience. This brings the total amount raised at $85.2

Scale 344

Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 344

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2023

So a little while back we had a deep dive on just how much of a product expert your VP of Sales needs to be, and your sales team in general. I repeated the survey for CS, and found more what I’ve personally experienced — the CS team needs to know the product cold. More on that here. They just plain fail in my experience.

Customer Success 192

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Leadership 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Theoretically, the relationship between sales and marketing should be easy –– after all, these teams are responsible for pulling in more business and increasing revenue. However, it is often the case that relationships are complicated between these teams, and sometimes they can even butt heads.

Enterprise 251

Enterprise Marketing Sales SaaS 251

Stax

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Early in his career, he worked at Microsoft, advancing in technical and leadership roles over 17 years. These leadership changes follow a number of new executives joining Stax’s team, including Rowe as CEO, as well as Stax’s acquisition of Atlantic-Pacific Processing Systems.

CTO 88

CTO Stax Payments Merchant Services 88