SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate.

Scaling 304

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 304

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

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 252

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 252

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

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 296

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 296

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 303

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 303

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

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? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

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. Probably not.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 276

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 275

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 275

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?

Outsourced Development 212

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 212

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 263

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 263

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. The team comes from MongoDB and Elastic, bringing deep search expertise.

AI Search 177

AI Search AI Startup Scale 177

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 235

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 235

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). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. It’s one of our enduring topics on SaaStr. Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. I don’t wish to see more people in increasingly bad financial standing this year. Same holds true for developers.”

Underperforming Technical Team 324

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 324

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. We have team selling here that extends beyond the sales team. Want to see more content like this? Good afternoon.

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes. Scale winning behaviors. The opportunity to scale growth is understanding the behaviors of the top of your sales force.”. Scale winning behavior across the sales force. Create dynamic alignment on goals. Key takeaways.

Scale 327

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 327

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 319

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 319

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

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. It helps your leaders scale and creates a CXO pipeline for the company. Silicon Valley has a deep talent bench.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 296

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

So with that, let’s dive into what’s new at WordPress: Is Blogging on the Decline? Matt shares that blogging did decline for a while, and it does seem to be all over social how folks are quitting blogging or vlogging these days. What people love about a blog is a person’s voice and their story.

Underperforming Technical Team 332

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 332

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. How have the other two of you thought about building out your team?

VP of Engineering 296

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 296

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. That doesn’t make them bad people. Most valuable employees will want to grow and develop new skills. Business model. The same goes for your investors.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

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 274

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 274

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 162

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 162

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. Every week, there are significant new developments in tech. It’s a playbook you’re developing, and it’s not easy.

Scale 309

Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 309

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 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2022

Recovery from COVID has taught us that adapting and learning how to thrive in new ways in the face of change, whether good or bad, can lead to exponential growth. . He highlights the three key strategies that helped TripActions scale and boost their revenue. Develop a well-defined vision. Do not waste time developing a Plan B.

Travel 273

Travel Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Scale 273

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. Jyoti Bansal : And then he started talking about sales and Dev during the breakfast he convinced me if you can marry the right kind of sales scaling and execution then that’s when your business will really, really take off.

Sales Recruiting 263

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 263

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 303

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 303

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

After scaling from $0 to $100,000,000 in two years, Jones has a fair share of experience with things breaking. To thrive in those environments, they develop the skill sets needed. At Wiz, the leadership team thinks of the company as a child. While your team is small, your communication process can be simple.

Scale 287

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Communication 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. They were way more interested in this perspective, so they’d set a goal for their team to drive $100k in “Klaviyo” bucks. The bet paid off.

Revenue 310

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 310

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 293

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. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

Sales Recruiting 193

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 193

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. Together, we developed sales pitches, built out a robust sales process in just a couple of weeks.

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 287

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

You don’t want conflict with the sales team. How do you leverage that offer to develop relationships with partners? This is where they started, but startups weren’t adopting the product as much with a discount, and there was a lot of conflict with the sales team. During SaaStr Annual, Zendesk Sr.

Startup 265

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 265