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.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It’s less jack-of-all-trade hires, so the knowledge and questions they’ll ask will look a lot different. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. There’s no choice.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

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 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

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. The bigger you scale, the harder this can be. Let’s dive into it.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. 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. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 Rico Mallozzi, Sr.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2022

But even there, to truly scale, they went more enterprise and built out a full enterprise sales and marketing function. Hiring some agency to write a bunch of low-value blog posts, or making a really junior hire than doesn’t know the product do some … rarely works. And it does happen, sometimes. More here.

Scale 332

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing SaaS 332

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 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount). What will your ACV really be?

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 284

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. Not none, just less. Growing remains jaw-dropping at 50% at $2.4 Billion in ARR.

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

But developers notoriously don’t want to talk to anyone ever, and they’ll still spend six figures and beyond without ever talking to sales. If the company wasn’t built around this purpose, it would be hard to scale. Head of Sales: They don’t understand what SAML means and don’t plan to learn it. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 289

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 289

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. The graph below shows the median net retention going back to 2020.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

But these days, there are so many innovative and impactful tools that can massively streamline your workflows and help to set you up for success as you scale. This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

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. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. Law number one, in the cloud economy, scale wins. If you look at the IAS vendors, they passed $130 billion revenue milestone this year. It is staggering. Let’s dive in.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

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. Are you growing and want to scale? Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

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

How To Buy Saas

MAY 21, 2025

In the fast-paced hiring landscape of 2025, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) has become an essential tool for companies of all sizes and sectors. Importantly, ATS platforms have evolved with AI-driven features , diversity and bias reduction tools , and deep analytics to meet todays hiring challenges.

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 52

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Nicole Wojno Smith , the VP of Marketing at Tackle.io. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Nicole is the VP of Marketing at Tackle.io, a company that helps ISVs sell their software through the cloud marketplaces. We’re on iTunes.

Sales Hiring 85

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing AWS 85

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Now, I have some background with luck because in between some long stints with other companies, seven years at Eventbrite and 15 years at Ticketmaster before, I spent five years of my life playing poker for a living and learned an awful lot about luck and positive outcomes as well. 18 hires a year I had to make in San Francisco.

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 184

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 159

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 159

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

I joined intercom remotely two years ago as the first person in Sydney, and since then we have scaled the APAC team (lovingly referred to as the APAC Alliance) to almost 20 people across 4 countries. Due to our rapid growth, we needed to scale the team remotely before opening an office. Returning from the mothership.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Sales Hacker

JUNE 1, 2020

Publicly-traded, PLG businesses grow faster than their peers and are less reliant on expensive sales and marketing investments to fuel their growth. With PLGs massive growth, many wonder if PLG and self-service solutions will replace Sales. Sales Isn’t Going Anywhere. Sales still makes up 25% of their headcount on average.

Sales Hiring 96

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 96

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. Sales enablement is easy: all you have to do is create perfectly targeted content, stay informed on email best practices, drive more engagement quarter over quarter, spend less money, and do all of this with less time. We’re on iTunes.

Scale 120

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

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 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Even though HubSpot grew 23% at $2.5B, there was weaker demand and longer sales cycles, and they had to do pilots with CEOs and CIOs. You can see the growth on the platform side with Azure, Google, and AWS and how much it’s accelerating in AI. Or Scale AI securing $1B. They’ve done well, but it’s not easier for them.

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. I was offered a job as Buildium’s first full-time marketing hire, pulling in a cool $38,400 annually.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. At Snowflake, he was the first rep and single-handedly built the outbound-engine on the way to scaling the business from pre-revenue all the way past $150M+ in ARR.

Scale 81

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 81

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. And I’ve seen many startups who fail to make this distinction create a cycle of diminishing returns that impacts the trajectory of their growth for the long haul… especially in enterprise sales.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? They can make donations for those charities.

Software Review 259

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 259

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Hire the VP of Marketing, MBA, the VP of Sales, MBA, the VP of Customer, MBA, the VP of Engineering, MBA, and now, the odds of any semblance of survival, let alone success, are vanishingly small at this point. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 7, if you round up from 6.3. Which brings me to sales and marketing.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

One thing we’ve learned in helping our founders and operators scale their businesses is that cash is one of their most precious resources. That’s why we’ve not only switched our own banking over at GTMfund, but we’ve also partnered with Flex to help companies improve the way they manage their cashflow. . Sponsor shoutout: Flex.

Metrics 122

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 122

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 113

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? Everyone’s always like, “how did you guys scale so quickly,” and like, everyone loves this product. Your sales team becomes more efficient, your customer success team becomes efficient, your customers like you more.

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113

OpenView Labs

JUNE 17, 2019

And unfortunately, on more than one occasion, I’ve seen this FOMO cause them to lose remarkable salespeople and sales leaders that were previously beyond excited to work with them. hire them immediately. One client of ours who hires like this has grown 5x in 2 years! There is a reason you need to hire, right?

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 53