SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

About Dave Kellogg Dave Kellogg brings a rare combination of marketing and executive leadership experience to his analysis of SaaS businesses. You founded a product company, but you’re running a distribution business. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business.

Sales Hiring 190

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 190

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

So when it comes to building your technical strategy, you need to assess each component in relation to what success will look like for your business. They’re based on my experiences working in technology, the practical application of methods in varied use cases, and speaking with peers about their strategies and successes.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

While competitors invested in huge sales teams, Atlassian actually restricted direct customer interaction. The “Feature Request Arbitrage” Strategy Hidden gem in their marketplace origin: They turned their biggest product weakness (feature request backlog) into their greatest strength.

Sales Recruiting 197

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale 197

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 12, 2021

As a support leader, you already know how important it is to take care of your customers – but it’s just as important to take care of your support team. Here’s why human support is so crucial for any customer-centric organization, and how it can have a significant impact on your team, your business, and your customers.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Payment Methods Payments 222

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. The Playbook For Building And Retaining A High-Performing Team .

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

It wasn’t the case 20 or even 10 years ago, where the business models of the internet were more focused on eCommerce, marketplaces, or even advertising. The second constituent there is the developer. Why do developers love SaaS products? The last kind of constituent here is investors and business owners.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Pricing 246

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

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 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

FastSpring

APRIL 24, 2025

Accessibility isnt just a legal requirement its a growth strategy. How new global laws like the European Accessibility Act will impact digital businesses. If you’re a founder, marketer, or product leader looking to grow your business while doing the right thing, this episode is a must-listen. Is that a fair point?

Business 108

Business Software Review Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 108

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

As brick-and-mortar businesses closed worldwide, companies and customers alike had to pivot to digital-first ways of doing business. Most support teams have seen an influx of support queries since COVID-19 hit – and those issues are more complex than ever. Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. How selling an investment business is very different from getting VC funding.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. Considering aspects of sales and GTM strategies. These leaders act as partners and build out a strong team. Enablement.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

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. Without great teamwork, business productivity is next to impossible to achieve. Starting a business is a huge undertaking.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2023

The Team Matters More Than The Operating Model Snow’s greatest piece of advice is to choose your team wisely. He believes the team is more important than the operating model because you can have the best models in the world. But if you don’t have the underlying team and structure, it won’t work. They didn’t.

Strategy 245

Strategy Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 245

BetterCloud

MAY 13, 2025

Every IT team is grappling with the same reality: the ever-widening chasm between the demands placed on IT and the resources at their disposal. Automated systems, on the other hand, can provide continuous vigilance, ensuring consistent application of security updates and proactive identification of potential weaknesses.

Headcount 52

Headcount Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 313

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 313

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. Gusto now serves 100,000 small businesses. Who was the highest engaged teams?

Scale 221

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 221

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

As a SaaS business leader, reducing software user churn is an important part of maintaining your customer base and increasing revenue. By pinpointing the exact reason for user churn, you can determine how to avoid it and ensure that your business continues to have strong profits. This helps alleviate confusion.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 23, 2019

This proves onboarding isn’t just good for your acquisition strategy — it’s also good for your wallet. Introduce concepts and vocabulary that might be new to your users and explain how they bring value to their business. A poor onboarding experience can lead to refunds or cancellations that you can’t afford.

Onboarding 199

Onboarding Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development 199

User Pilot

MARCH 25, 2024

What will you give to reduce customer attrition rate and drive business growth? In this article, we explore what customer attrition is, why it matters, and 15 effective strategies for strengthening customer relationships, boosting loyalty, and driving long-term growth. Customer attrition is the loss of customers by a business.

Underperforming Technical Team 104

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Solutions 104

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2022

A crisis can strike at any time without warning, and it can be especially stressful when business leaders are not prepared for the unknown. Many businesses are struggling to survive after the pandemic triggered unprecedented challenges, crippling the global economy as a whole. Develop a well-defined vision.

Travel 268

Travel Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Scale 268

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

The current economic climate presents new challenges for businesses. Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely. Strategy to win.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 26, 2022

In today’s modern age, support teams simply need to redefine what being “personal” means. At Intercom, our mission has always been to make Internet business personal. But with the development of automation, like bots and contextual help content, we’ve significantly changed our perception of what being personal means.

Underperforming Technical Team 209

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support Scaling Development 209

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 274

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 4, 2019

The exact same is true in business. That clarity is one of the main reasons I was so excited to join Intercom earlier this year – the company entered an industry dominated by impersonal and disconnected tools like ticketing systems and email with a vision to “make internet business personal.”.

Branding 209

Branding Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Airlines 209

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 271

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 271

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. They can also route customer conversations to the team best equipped to handle their questions and can even provide answers to simple customer questions like, “How can I add more users?”.

Underperforming Technical Team 279

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support Headcount AI 279

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom. Attract and develop talent and invest in supporting resources like onboarding, sales enablement, and sales engineering. It was the start of the wave of the cloud.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? Often, product-oriented founders think they’ve created a technology business that seeks distribution when in reality they’ve founded a distribution business that makes technology.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 261

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

It’s particularly hard (and confusing and incredibly time-consuming) if you’re relatively new in business. Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your direct competitors’ companies, products, and marketing strategies. Competitor analysis can be hard. Most of the data is ridiculously difficult to get.

Social Media 122

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring 122

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? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

One of the biggest challenges businesses face when they grow is scaling effective , autonomous and quick decision-making. It has a compounding effect - the more good decisions a business makes, the better the results will be. Strategy - annually changes. Good decision-making is extremely important.

Underperforming Technical Team 215

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 215

User Pilot

DECEMBER 18, 2024

Unfortunately, the research backs this up, with a staggering 90% of users reporting that they stopped using an app due to poor performance. Poor performance includes slow loading times, complex design, confusing navigation, and unresponsive features. To assign meaning to whether the numbers are good or bad, context is crucial.

Data 105

Data Underperforming Technical Team Outsourcing Services Technical Review 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. Application SaaS has matured and increasingly there are fewer niches available to build large businesses. In return, they will spend a certain number of hours per month with your team. Learnings on GTM.

Scale 289

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 289

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

While this talk really shows his love of thinking about the bigger picture – this is the Strategy stage after all – Peter actually spends 90% of his time on execution. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 339

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 339

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 2, 2020

But obsessing over efficiency can mask what’s most important, and most rewarding, to support teams – actually helping customers. Support teams exist to solve customers’ problems, not to deflect them or find the fastest way to hit the “close” button. Listen to the full episode above or get Pam’s key takeaways below.

Outsourcing Services 253

Outsourcing Services Investment Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development 253

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Lizzie Mintus Founder and CEO of Here’s Waldo Recruiting and host of The Heres Waldo Podcast about her thoughts on: The most effective recruiting strategies for SMBs.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108