SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Weave started off as a dental ERP and comms platform (including VoIP / phone), and then expanded beyond that as it scaled. It’s a tough outcome for a team that is working hard to scale well into the nine figures of ARR. But I thought I’d take a deeper look at one example, Weave. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

If you want to hit the plan for Q1'22, You need to be hiring all the sales reps you'll need then … Now. With precise headcount and budget needs. Second, you have to try to hire as many of the sales reps you’ll need for the end of Q1 … by early Q4 at the latest. Now that’s magic. How many reps.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Acquisition 267

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 13, 2022

SaaSco’s sales have slowed in the second half of 2022 selling to mid-sized enterprises. SaaSco’s sales cycle is six to nine months. . If the Saasco executive team acts on that suggested benchmark, they will need to devote a significant part of their sales team’s capacity towards current customers.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Scale Headcount Software Review 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 16, 2022

It’s been a tough couple of years, Sales Hackers. What do the changing market conditions mean for RevOps and sales? What do the changing market conditions mean for RevOps and sales? VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io. Your prospects may share that they’re pausing on projects or vendor meetings. Ralph Barsi.

Scale 91

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 91

Sales Hacker

JULY 22, 2021

Marketing and sales team alignment is the mythical holy grail for most companies. Good cooperation between these two can skyrocket your growth, while the opposite might turn out to be a dead-end for further scaling. Salespeople complain about the quality of leads they are getting. Sounds familiar?

Scale 109

Scale Sales Marketing Metrics 109

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

And once a customer has paid back the initial acquisitions costs to acquire it, all future streams of revenue can loosely be described as a cash flow annuity. This brings me to AI (everything leads to AI these days…). But this is changing - many categories are becoming commoditized leading to massive pricing pressure.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2019

But how do organizations make customer success work at scale? Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. The challenge was retention. Focusing on retention kills two birds with one stone.

Scale 69

Scale Customer Success Scaling Sales Hiring 69

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

Sales is the Growth Engine. Sales is the engine driving SaaS company value. Top and bottom line performance are totally dependent on the sales organization and its performance. And sales expense is typically the largest expense item on a growth SaaS company’s income statement. Typical SaaS Sales Metrics.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 171

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 171

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2019

With precise headcount and budget needs. Second, you have to try to hire as many of the sales reps you’ll need for the end of Q1 … by mid-Q4. Even in the best of cases, it takes 60 days to scale a rep. If you don’t get the leads you need in Q4 as well … you’ll miss Q1 and even Q2 badly as well. How many reps. This is key.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Revenue 184

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter – read by over 50,000 revenue professionals weekly to scale their companies and careers. A highly curated group of 200 GTM leaders, 85% director level and above across Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships. A chance to tour (and maybe even race on?) Austin’s F1 track.

VP of Engineering 71

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS AI Search 71

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 9, 2012

If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it? Should you pony up the money to feed a full-blown sales and marketing effort? The cash you're using to pay for sales and marketing needs to come from somewhere.

Acquisition 124

Acquisition Scale SaaS Headcount 124

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. The complexities of scaling a support team. Natasha: It really is.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no sales people. ‘No No sales’ became nearly as synonymous with Atlassian as ‘no software’ was with Salesforce. Atlassian now has a sales team. Public PLG Businesses Are Doubling Down on Sales.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

Ever since he was hired as the Director of EMEA Sales at BrowserStack , a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, he had to completely rethink how to successfully onboard hundreds of salespeople just as everyone was going remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

OpenView Labs

MAY 24, 2021

Tip: Look at the ratio between R&D spend vs. Sales and Marketing spend*. If a company’s product plays an important role in their revenue generation—whether through acquiring, converting, or expanding customers—we should expect that company to spend relatively more on R&D and relatively less on Sales and Marketing.

Scale 98

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Benchmarks 98

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 74

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 74

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

Throughout all of my experience at early-stage growth companies, there’s been an overarching theme: From inception, it’s the people you attract, hire, train, promote, and “communify” who enable and accelerate your time to market and your customer acquisition and satisfaction. The chronological hiring plan and sheer numbers.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

ChurnZero

JULY 14, 2021

This metric helps determine which customers are your most profitable and can be useful both pre-sale to focus on acquiring highly valuable customers but then also post-sale to make sure your Customer Success team is able to focus their efforts on retaining your customers with the strongest lifetime value.

Customer Lifetime Value 98

Customer Lifetime Value Scale Headcount Churn 98

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded. While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

CustomerSuccessBox

MARCH 9, 2022

In the glorious business of the SaaS space, one underlying truth that determines the growth and scaling of the business is that it takes several months to recover the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and get to the profitable zone at a unit economics level. However, only one of them performs tasks at scale.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

As companies scale, they evolve, so how should marketing evolve accordingly to add maximum value? PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. The reality is that a lot of things change as we scale. The answer isn’t simple.

Scale 200

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 200

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

How do you enter a highly competitive marketplace, carve a niche for yourself, and then scale the business to $100 million+ ARR? Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, joined Matt Plank, VP of Sales at Rippling, to unlock the secrets to exponential revenue growth. Scaling your go-to-market efforts.

Outsourcing Services 222

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 222

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure. Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

Then, we hear from Kyle Poyar over at OpenView on bringing sales into a self-service business. Sales in a product-led initiative: feat. Kyle Poyar , VP of Marketing Strategy over at OpenView , shared his expertise with me on sales, particularly regarding his piece on the OV blog: Your Product Sells Itself. Now Hire Sales.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

That’s what David Apple—customer success and sales guru at Notion— is asking. And in this article he explains why, and proposes a different approach to thinking about the optimal CSM headcount to help you build a more effective customer success organization. What’s the return on investment of your mom? What is their ROI?

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 28, 2021

The rule of 40 states that at scale, a company’s revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should be at least 40. It was one of my critical measurements of how efficiently we were scaling. Ideally, as a company scales, headcount doesn’t scale exactly in tandem. There are a few ways I think about it.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Software Review Software Payments 52

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded. While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

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. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter – read by over 50,000 revenue professionals weekly to scale their companies and careers. If you’ve used big-name prospecting tools before, you know that they all share one, massive problem: Bad data. So how did Wisely go from $11 in the bank to selling for $187M? Let’s get into it.

Banking 89

Banking Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 89

Neil Patel

JANUARY 8, 2019

Start off small and as long as the numbers work out, scale up as fast as possible. But that wasn’t my mistake because I was smart enough to look for keywords that had a high cost per click, as that is a leading indicator that the keyword is more valuable. For example, he hired Nick Roshon as our VP Sales, who is amazing.

Marketing 111

Marketing Sales Hiring Technical Review Scale 111

SaaSOptics

MAY 2, 2022

There are several different ways to successfully launch and scale a SaaS company. The two most common go-to-market strategies are sales-led growth (SLG) and, more recently, product-led growth (PLG). . In a sales-led model, sales processes and teams are the primary drivers of revenue growth. Image Source: SaaStr 2021 ).

Scale 97

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 97

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2024

How Does Vimeo Handle Long-Tail PLG vs. a Very Sales-Led Motion? Customer acquisition. One thing about moving away from paid acquisition to higher quality revenue is it requires a re-emphasis and reinvestment into free. Do you see massive disruption in workforces and marketing headcounts shrinking because of AI? “I’m

AI Search 234

AI Search SaaS Advertising Sales Hiring 234

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Inspired by the release of our book Intercom on Sales , we wanted to take a fresh look at three big topics – speed, automation, and growth. We wanted to know: what are sales leaders doing to bring velocity to their sales cycle? How are they using automation to bring new efficiencies to their sales orgs?

Scale 139

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Trends 139

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Up until this point, to understand our customers, we had primarily relied on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework , product sense, research insight, sales input, and a belief that our customers were companies just like us. For example, our Sales team is now able to give segmented customer feedback to our product leaders to influence our roadmap.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

Hitenism

JANUARY 16, 2017

In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution. Reduce sales ramp time by 30-50% via sales enablement. Double headcount every 6-9 months. They raised $65 million dollars with that plan.

Scale 147

Scale Venture Capital SaaS Headcount 147