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A Founder’s Guide to Building and Scaling Marketing Channels: Lessons from Datadog’s CMO and First Marketing Hire

SaaStr

Alex Rosenblatt was the first marketing hire and Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog, all the way through IPO and beyond. The 10th marketing hire is the most critical inflection point for team scaling – This is where informal processes break down and requires a complete rethinking of how the team operates. The problem?

Scale 211
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Hiring Your VPs: When Can You Compromise?

SaaStr

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. So I’d hire earlier here rather than wait.

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From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship

SaaStr

His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product. Ron explains: “Wehire mostly technical backgrounds, but as our customers get larger and larger, you start to get global account managers, and they’re going to have much more business strategic account management experience.

Scale 176
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Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started?

SaaStr

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. Then, hire first 2 reps. To reproduce what CEO did, managed by CEO. Not just 1.

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A Look Back at Q1 '25 Public Cloud Software Earnings

Clouded Judgement

And no, this wasn’t all because of leap year last year (that would only account for a ~3% delta at most) The Hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) also declined net new adds year over year, but not by as much. In theory, any growth rate is possible with an unlimited budget to hire AEs.

Cloud 277
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The Top 10 SaaStr Posts of 2020

SaaStr

3. “Atlassian and AWS Say: Maybe Worry a Little Bit. A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan. 6. “What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One” Another SaaStr Classic that is just as relevent today. What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One. More on that soon!

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5 Simple Tips to Quickly Improve Sales Performance

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What are the best 5 points to improve poor sales performance? Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out. Decide who to hire, when, and how. Be more involved as the CEO with sales.

Scale 273