SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should you hire 2 at a time? What does one look for in their first sales hire? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue? We were hired into the same role, same start date, competed head to head. Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook.

Scale 177

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 177

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. Buffer’s mission is to empower their customers to build their brand and engage their audience on social media. The Solution: Invest in a revamped data infrastructure.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

ProfitWell

JANUARY 24, 2020

We know brand awareness is important, but are you going too far? We know the idea of “brand affinity” has been this sort of buzz-worthy, industry-trending topic. getting people to actually like their brands. So they dropped a blog post all about the common problems that marketers face when focused too much on brand affinity.

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Having invested in 9 B2B marketplaces and gathered data from 20+ different investors, here are our findings on what it takes to raise money in 2021 for B2B marketplaces. A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Gaetan Gachet : All right, so usually the way I start this session is I ask the crowd which revenue stage they’re in. So when I joined we’re pretty much pre-revenue. I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. So you were the first sales hire. One and 10?

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

What’s the return on investment of your mom? What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? If we succeed, the benefits go beyond retaining revenue: successful customers spread positive word of mouth which makes it easier to attract more customers. How many CSMs should you hire? What is their ROI?

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 155

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 155

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Scaling a PLG company While it’s great to figure out a PLG model that allows you to scale your revenue with inbound, it cannot stop there. Strategy: To get started, identify playbooks that yield the highest revenue. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing. Once this is in place, start investing in paid channels.

Scale 184

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 184

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 240

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

Going above and beyond, being thoughtful and we try to say, how do we infuse Southern hospitality into our brand and make that a differentiator rather than being stressed about the fact that there are some negatives of being where we are. We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home.

CTO Hire 160

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 160

SmartKarrot

AUGUST 16, 2022

In QBR meetings, you can notice any signs of distrust in the brand. Customers choose a product with one goal, and this goal evolves over time. These annual executive business meetings are a wonderful time to discuss contracts. The idea is to provide customers with value to keep them invested with the company.

Technical Review 10

Technical Review Systems Review Business CTO Hire 10

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. You need to invest at least a year or even two years. That will never work.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Loren, among other things, has spearheaded Shopify Plus, which is Shopify’s enterprise platform from the early days, to now announced today almost 30% of the revenue. Is it wanting to control their brand? What’s the interaction here with owning your brand and owning your channel versus a third party?

Payment Methods 196

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 196

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic. Welcome to Episode 214!

Scale 166

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 166

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 151

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 151

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help.

Sales Hiring 136

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

I didn’t see the company as this consumer brand long term. We were talking to Sean Place, who was the co founder and CTO, and it turned out that they were just giving gift cards to these drivers, but they had no way to authorize the right transaction at the right time for the right amount. It’s us.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

And then the sale will commence as far as the people and this was, we were multiple millions of dollars of revenue until I took the first call. So look, again, we were, the product was out there, we were at revenue in our case. Okay, so what were the stages of investment rounds that you took? Jonathan : Oh wow. Vlad : No.

Scale 148

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 148

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2020

We’ve got an interview with Brandon Meyers , the chief revenue officer of ADARA. He even managed to help pivot the company from a programmatic transactional revenue model to a subscription model over the course of, not just the last three months during COVID, but over the course of the last few years. Show Agenda and Timestamps.

Subscription 107

Subscription Payment Features Scale Underperforming Technical Team 107

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

There’s typically direct responsibility for revenue performance, although the marketer’s impact on a business’ bottom line is less cut-and-dry than their counterparts in sales. This doesn’t mean that I’m making all of the right decisions or investments—far from it—but it does mean that I’m given the benefit of the doubt.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. Harry : MuleSoft’s revenue has to be Malta’s GDP.

Technical Advisors 160

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 160

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

I remember when I was in business school the internet was brand new and back then the hero was Jerry Yang. And at that same time I met two Stanford computer science students. And so once I had the idea I convinced my father to invest and become a customer. He was investing in internet companies.

Sales Recruiting 171

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 171

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Accurately forecast revenue retention and expansion. Drive new levers of growth.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Hull

JANUARY 22, 2019

These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. Selling has changed since Predictable Revenue was published. In 2002, Aaron Ross's Predictable Revenue playbook from his time at Salesforce was published. Here comes the problem with the Predictable Revenue playbook.

SaaS Payments 77

SaaS Payments Technical Advisors Engineering Payment Solutions 77

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 20, 2024

You could either spend, you know, you raise some venture funding, you could either spend some of that funding on hiring out a whole team and developing all those competencies, or you can spend that on making your model even better. And so almost no other platforms provide this kind of revenue share today. Adam: Yeah.

AI Search 143

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 143

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. You can invest in things.

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Software Review Technical Review Payment Solutions 140

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. You can invest in things.

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Software Review Technical Review Payment Solutions 40