Tom Tunguz

JULY 6, 2017

Every acquisition process might run a little bit differently, but these are some of the patterns that I have observed after about nine years in the venture business, and also having evaluated a handful of acquisitions when I was at Google. Large corporate often have very strong sales teams. Unsuccessful acquisitions don’t.

Startup 167

Startup Sales Recruiting Acquisition Development 167

Baremetrics

JUNE 30, 2021

You've got a brilliant SaaS startup idea. A startup financial model is the plan. In fact, we've already built the SaaS financial model you'll actually use — but let's take a look at why this is especially important for SaaS startups. 1 What Is a Startup Financial Model? What Is a Startup Financial Model?

Startup 98

Startup Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Deferred Revenue 98

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. I think things do catch fire and then acquisition will get more affordable. When you have one website, one marketing team, and one sales team, and you’ve got only one shot to talk about your product, how do you balance those two things?

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Acquisition 248

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. As a startup, it’s tempting to try and do everything.

Scale 233

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 233

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

At a16z’s recent Connect/Fintech event, a16z Partner Alex Immerman sat down for a broad conversation with Immad Akhund , co-founder and CEO of banking startup Mercury , and René Lacerte, founder and CEO of financial services company BILL. The opportunity is to leverage that trust factor to drive customer acquisition, and it has worked for us.

Payments 107

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 107

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. Yet in Mark’s experience working with and mentoring startups, he’s found that many entrepreneurs go with intuition over information.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Product Marketing Manager: This person is tasked with developing product marketing campaigns , crafting compelling marketing messages, and coming up with ideas to retain customers. Average salary: $46,035/yr.

Sales Hiring 96

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 96

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Founders may reduce staff, particularly in recruiting or new projects that the company prefers not to finance. All of the cost of customer acquisition for a SaaS company is borne in the first month or so. Each subsequent month, the startup receives another $1k in cash and breaks even on that customer a year later.

SaaS Payments 120

SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 120

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2019

Giraffe is a mobile job matching platform that helps medium skilled workers get access to opportunities and helps businesses to recruit staff faster, and easier, and more affordably than any other way. What does this mean for startups and tech companies? There is no startup ecosystem to speak of. I’m from South Africa.

Scale 163

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 163

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 20, 2020

Handling HR for large companies is vastly different than doing the same at a startup or small business. Always make sure to talk with a sales representative and be as detailed as possible about your current and future situation to make sure they can handle everything you need. The size of your business. Types of services.

Outsourcing Services 118

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 118

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2014

As I’ve watched a handful of startups grow, the pattern I see emerging from most of them is their ability to persistently transform chaos into process. At the beginning, each of these companies pursued product development with something akin to Lean Startup Method. And then continuously improve the way they do things.

Sales Recruiting 102

Sales Recruiting Development Startup Sales Hiring 102

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

In fact, Peter Thiel wrote about brand as a core asset of the best startups in his recent book, Zero to One. This long term view shapes the culture of a startup’s workplace and reinforce values that will attract talented people whose mission aligns with the business. Even if they can’t measure it.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Startup Branding Acquisition 111

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Though, if we narrow it down to just the highly successful ones—that is, startups that exit for more than $100 million—it takes nearly double that time: 11 years. As of this year, Bloomberg reports that the median age of founders of successful startup s (which they define as companies that exited at more than $1 billion) was 34 years old.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Marketing 82

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

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. Before Quip, Sam spent an incredible 3 years at Dropbox where he was the first enterprise sales rep in the entire company. Should you hire 2 at a time?

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Prior to Harness, Stephen was VP of Marketing at Glassdoor, managing a team of 52 in product marketing, helping grow B2B revenue from $19m to $90m in just 2 years, leading to their $1.2Bn acquisition. Steve has previously said, “Sales and marketing must be one team.” billion acquisition. billion acquisition by Cisco.

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 12, 2021

“One of my current retainer clients—a tech startup that we created a talent acquisition framework and did some diversity and inclusion roadmapping for—found me on LinkedIn and reached out,” Byrd notes. That LinkedIn Live has since been viewed almost 30,000 times.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Social Media Business Marketplace as a Service 81

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

One of the biggest decisions you can make when setting up your sales team is whether to focus primarily on inside or outside sales. They seem to be completely at odds, with one focused on clients with a high acquisition cost and high ACV (annual account value), the other focused on a high sales velocity.

Sales Hiring 81

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 81

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2015

In every sales process for every SaaS startup, there is one ultimate internal champion advocating the purchasing decision. Software companies targeting Human Resources and Sales teams are in aggregate each worth about $50B. Salesforce Sales 92%. Nevertheless, the majority of the revenue remains from sales teams.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Scale 111

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2015

Here’s my stab at that list: CRM, Marketing Automation, ERP, Expense Management, Analytics, Email, Collaboration, Document Storage, Payroll, HRIS, ATS, IaaS, Customer Support, Recruiting. SaaS startups are either competing within these categories or creating a new category. More than 20% of end users log in mobile; 2.5%

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting SaaS Data AWS 100

Unbounce

OCTOBER 18, 2021

Sounds like a big opportunity for talent-starved companies to recruit, right? How’d they grow from a small startup to a budding global player? Before launching allWomen, CEO and co-founder Laura Fernandez Gimenez found herself living and breathing in Barcelona’s budding startup and tech network. Looking at the Landscape.

Artificial Intelligence 136

Artificial Intelligence Marketing Scale Sales Recruiting 136

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

Today I'd like to tell you a bit more about what we at Point Nine Capital are looking for in SaaS startups (other sectors are something for another blog post). To put it as simple as possible, the health of a SaaS business is mainly determined by two factors: Customer lifetime value (CLTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

How does Krish think your customer acquisition and GTM strategy has to change with the movement from SMB to enterprise? Billion story from its launch in 2008 to its 2018 acquisition by Recruit Holdings. Billion acquisition is just one milestone in the early innings of the company’s story. Does it have to be in person?

Scale 128

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 128

Baremetrics

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Debt financing is preferable for sales and marketing acceleration since it has a lower long-term cost and enables the company to expand quicker. Venture Capital Funding Venture capital funds invest in high-growth prospects in startups and other early-stage companies on a pooled basis. Debt is acquired and repaid over time.

Finance 98

Finance Venture Capital SaaS Payments Payments 98

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

The new data reveals a similar picture for private SaaS startups. . But top performers have begun to far outpace their peers, especially for startups with less than $10M in ARR, and the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ has gotten wider than ever. The game has changed when it comes to recruiting.

Payment Services 80

Payment Services Benchmarks SaaS Payments Merchant Services 80

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we talk to Vikas Bhambri , SVP of Global Sales and Customer Experience at Kustomer. Vikas is a well-respected sales leader in NYC and comes from a sales engineering and product background, with more than 20 years experience. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 50

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

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

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 28, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Ellie Tamari , the VP of North American Sales at Namogoo. Today we are incredibly excited to have a recent friend, member of the Boston chapter of the Revenue Collective, and female sales leader that came to the role somewhat later in life — Ellie Tamari. What You’ll Learn.

Sales Hiring 67

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Management 67

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

How does a startup that launched during the financial crisis in 2008 become a unicorn company in 2019? Felix Van de Maele, Co-Founder and CEO of Collibra, will be joined by Teddie Wardi, Managing Director of Insight Partners, to unpack how he built a unicorn company from idea to conception to record growth. So it’s been awhile.

Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 177

ProfitWell

APRIL 15, 2019

An Intercom Updated Intercom launches new features to class up the customer journey, not least of which is an integration with Chargebee so you can sync subscription info directly into your account, enhance customer support, automate workflows, and convert leads faster. Bullhorn Stacked with Recruiting Automation.

Sales Recruiting 45

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Technical Review Subscription 45

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet. Economics and Acquisition ?? Economics and Acquisition ?? Proven ability to recruit.

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

We tried to come up with a framework where we set marketing, sales and finance which we call heavy burdens of the company. For instance, in an early stage company HR is focused on recruiting whereas if you are at a bit later stage you are more focused on HR process. Levers of scaling a SaaS company. In our case these are: 1.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting SaaS 52

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 19, 2018

Have you ever dreamed of becoming a VP of Sales? This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak to Dan Cook, SVP of Sales & Success at LucidChart, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the US, about what it takes to become a sales executive at a top company. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast.

Scale 73

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 73

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 157