SaaStr

JULY 30, 2024

Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. Product-led outperformers generate ten percentage points higher in ARR and 50% higher in valuations than sales-led growth outperformers.

Underperforming Technical Team 276

Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise Scale Payments 276

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. The stage of scaling from $10 million to $100 million ARR may seem like a daunting task, but it is an exciting one. Turning a vision into reality.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner and CPO Kelsey Stevenson share the three secret ingredients that helped them when scaling to $100M ARR and what they could have done differently. You might have to rebuild your marketing team. Bitly had an Enterprise sales-focused team. While that might seem like a bad thing, it wasn’t.

Scale 293

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 293

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. You could watch it on YouTube or search on SaaStr on the blog about how ClickUp leveraged it. Jason Lemkin: Hey everybody. It was packed.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) community day event in Dublin about the technical strategies I’ve experienced that don’t work and the ones that have helped us to grow and scale at Intercom. But over time, we noticed that teams hated working on these services.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. If we want to queue up the conversation, we did a blog post on SaaStr last week, about how everyone from Salesloft, to Zendesk, to Salesforce, Workday said they’re really seeing no slow down. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Times are good.

Scale 267

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 267

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Unicorn companies often need to scale quickly to meet the demands of their rapidly growing customer base. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. ” – David Cancel.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

The 9 Disciplines of Great SaaS Companies remains one of the most popular posts on marketing on this blog. Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. You might score each on a 1 to 10 scale. Business Development. Comms Marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 340

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 340

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Some classics here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days. Your VP of Sales Shouldn’t Be Perfect. They hire weak, too junior folks.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. So a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. So big, big scale.

Scale 216

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 216

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? And I know you want to scale your customer success team in the right way. Well…maybe.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

Earlier this month, Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov sat down with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin at SaaStr Europa 2024 to talk about all things AI and the lessons learned while scaling to billions. What Does AI-Enhanced Sales Look Like In Two Years Everyone’s thinking about it. First, no drudgery. Yes,” Amit says.

Scale 299

Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting 283

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 283

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 320

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 320

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers. Stay Laser-Focused.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 320

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 320

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. Good afternoon.

Scale 267

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 267

SaaStr

JULY 22, 2019

Hear from Roger Scott, New Relic’s EVP and Chief Customer Officer as he shares his 7 tips and tricks for keeping your customers happy— and how to do so at a large scale. That’s not a bad start. We work with mostly modern teams. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Europa 2020. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 219

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 219

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People explains how asking hard questions, embracing feedback and making personal connections with your customers can move the sales journey from prospect to champion. We have heard a lot of sessions today around ramping up your lead gen, accelerating marketing. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 227

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 227

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. Businesses use us for customer support, leads qualification, and more.

AI Search 159

AI Search AI Startup Scale 159

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Often the Great Guy from Salesforce or Shopify or ServiceNow or LinkedIn or whatever other leading SaaS company. Only money.

Sales Hiring 333

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 333

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

We believe that in order for SaaS companies to unlock their next stage of growth, their financial operations tech stack must strike the right balance between flexibility, which allows them to pivot quickly in an ever-changing market, and complexity, which supports them as they scale their business, operations, and monetization strategies.

Scale 266

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 266

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Underperforming Technical Team 207

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 207

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

We remain optimistic about the prospects of cross-border SaaS. Companies in our region are good at achieving PMF and scaling to $1 million-$5 million ARR efficiently. They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. Org Building Ideas for Cross-Border Companies.

Scale 283

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 283

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Our team is in Room 111.

Scale 157

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 157

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

We can look back at how Datadog scaled. Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams.

Scale 311

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 311

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup.

Scale 292

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 292

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Almost everyone in sales seems to be into real estate, either “multi-family” real-estate or getting their broker’s license. Especially a VP of Sales, working on a big number, and with presumably, a big upside and OTE? About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

Underperforming Technical Team 316

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 316

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

It can be easy to consistently double revenue if you’re an early-stage company, but as you scale up, sustaining that becomes more difficult. Your CAC is how much you spend on acquiring and onboarding a customer, and can include marketing, communications, sales, and other expenses. Customer acquisition cost. More on that later.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche.

Sales Recruiting 258

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 258

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. Because at this scale, there will be room at the bottom. But then the leaders break through, achieve Scale, and the outlines become clear. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture. Not usually.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 268

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 175

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 175

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Stacks can be developed at the project, team, or functional level and are regularly used to improve internal collaboration, measure the impact of marketing activities and reach customers in new ways. Without this foundation, your marketing stack can become a set of siloed tools that will bog your team down in complexity.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2021

First, how does the knowledge that Terry is married and loves eating Smarties help your reps make a sale? Our guess is that poor Polly from purchasing is gathering dust on a noticeboard in the canteen or buried somewhere deep in your internal network of folders. Perfectly position the product/service to their prospects.

Scale 129

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Outsourcing Services Sales 129