Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%. A recent survey showed the typical company would halve its costs by managing its own servers.

Sales Hiring 266

Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 266

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

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!

Venture Capital 318

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 318

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

For context, Docebo is a learning management platform addressing the needs of corporations that train an audience internally and externally. Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable. Let’s dive into it.

Sales Hiring 192

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Scale 181

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 181

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Are there categories where outbound sales just doesn’t work? The old sales playbooks of 2009 and even 2019 may not work as well in 2021.

Sales Hiring 355

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 355

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3.

Sales Recruiting 178

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring AWS 178

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. Stay late with the sales team when they’re trying to close the last deals of the quarter, and take ’em out for drinks after. Hire People Better Than You (and That Aren’t Your Friends). You can hire up-and-comers, that’s OK.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 278

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Over time all of that changes. Well… maybe! But not for us.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake. Not none, just less. Growing remains jaw-dropping at 50% at $2.4

Headcount 190

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 190

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Tech companies realized that this cloud thing might be for real, but the word on the street was that AWS was too hard and complex for customers to realize its benefits. Figure Out The “Jobs To Be Done” Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School worked with Mcdonald’s to increase milkshake sales. It didn’t impact sales at all.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount). Build it for you : How will you get your customers? And what mix? What will your ACV really be? How can that scale over time? What will it really, truly cost?

Scale 197

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 197

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. They have massive distribution (installed customers + sales teams), and margin to play around with. Companies could end up hiring less SDRs but booking more sales demos. What do I mean by this?

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : It’s like saying, “Hey, you want a sales rep to carry 10 times the quota they do today. You can’t, you have to invest in that sales infrastructure.”

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 204

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 190

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 190

Kellblog

AUGUST 19, 2022

As someone who’s recruited candiates, been recruited as a candidate, and even once hired via a backdoor search, let me say that I don’t like them. If you somehow manage to pull one off, the candidate gets off to a rough start , typically never having had met with anyone on their team. Colloquially, you rip off the band-aid.

Sales Recruiting 87

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AWS Company Culture 87

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 121

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 121

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. One option was to double down on MongoDB, hire some experts and really commit to running this software ourselves. Mid-stage startups.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 3, 2019

The Data-Driven Sales Manager. The average tenure of a sales VP these days is just 19 months, according to Xactly CEO Chris Cabrera, who expects that number to drop lower as businesses become increasingly data reliant. Here’s how he sees data changing sales management. They also hire more diversely.

Sales Enablement 84

Sales Enablement Artificial Intelligence Branding Sales Hiring 84

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

If you’ve ever tried hiring, onboarding and training a brand new team, you know how challenging that can be. You can get an awful lot of focused work done in the quiet of your own home, and of course you’re free to rock your pyjamas all day long if you please. We felt like we were growing something from scratch.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 194

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

292: Manny Medina is the Founder & CEO @ Outreach, the market leading sales engagement platform that turns your team into a revenue driving machine. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Manny made his way to found the leader in sales engagement from product management at Amazon and Business Development @ Microsoft. *

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 141

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Sales Hacker

MARCH 4, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Dan Fougere , CRO of Datadog. Dan is a 20+ year veteran of technology sales and has seen 4 of his last 5 companies become unicorns. Dan talks about the key qualities of great sales leadership and how to be an effective executive in addition to being a great sales leader.

Leadership 62

Leadership Scale Sales Hiring Sales 62

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 240

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 240

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

They told us they would do tons of all this pricing stuff and help us with hiring and introduce us to customers, and all of these things. Your sales team becomes more efficient, your customer success team becomes efficient, your customers like you more. Atlassian famously does not have a sales team. There’s no UX engineer.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 13, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). It’s a Rough Time to Be a Startup – Here’s What You Can Do About It. SaaS is now ubiquitous. This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Benchmarks AWS Scale 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

tech ops, AWS, technical support). In some ways, I just delegate this to accounting because it’s a generally accepted accounting principle (GAAP) and, while I’m interested in how they do it, ultimately, you’re just taking it right off the profit and loss (P&L). BUT NO ONE DOES THAT.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

OPEXEngine

JUNE 29, 2020

Think of it this way: most SaaS companies have high customer acquisition costs, as you have to invest heavily in sales and marketing in order to realize high growth. Those PPC ads that you run and the sales reps that they hire don’t come cheap, and as such, this eats into your profit margin.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Sales Hiring Scale 52

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

And if you’ve just hired a cohort of 10 sales reps six months ago and everybody’s failing? Don’t go hire 10 more. I don’t care if you hire them a coach. The board wants you to hire “better than you” or more experienced than you. Even though the model says you were supposed to.

Sales Hiring 115

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 115

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 166

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 166

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2020

333: Bridget Gleason is the Head of Sales and Customer Success @ Tidelift, the company providing managed open source, backed by maintainers. Before Tidelift, Bridget was VP of Sales @ Logz.io and before that was VP of Corporate Sales @ Sumo Logic where she drove ARR up by a record 237%. What core elements does it change?

Sales Hiring 193

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 193

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Sales, marketing, finance, support, and R&D all use the roadmap for different thing. Sales want to sell it, marketing needs to plan for it, finance needs to model it, support needs to be able to explain it, and R&D needs to be excited about it. As you grow functions, the audience for your roadmap widens. Paul: 13th, yeah.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Sales, marketing, finance, support, and R&D all use the roadmap for different thing. Sales want to sell it, marketing needs to plan for it, finance needs to model it, support needs to be able to explain it, and R&D needs to be excited about it. As you grow functions, the audience for your roadmap widens. Paul: 13th, yeah.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Sales Hacker

MAY 19, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Tom Williams , Cofounder and CEO at DealPoint. DealPoint is the first sales platform for customer-centric sales teams. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. But the ultimate milestone isn’t the contract. We’re on iTunes.

Scale 91

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Sales Hiring 91

Upscope

JUNE 9, 2021

Working as a apple tech was awful but for the rude customers I would put on hold while I went outside to chat with co workers or grab something from the vending machine. In another article I saw a management directive not to put people on hold. You could be written up for not pitching a sales offer on EVERY CALL that came in.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Management Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hacker

APRIL 26, 2019

when interviewing for a sales position? You answered the sales interview questions in a way that made you look like a winner. In this article, we’re going to review the 27 most common sales interview questions, PLUS the types of answers your interviewer is looking for, so you can raise the bar on your interviewing skills.

Sales Recruiting 21

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 21