Sales Hacker

MARCH 15, 2022

Asad Zaman : We specialize in helping companies build their go-to-market teams. We went from sales to the entire go-to-market org, practices, technical sales, and executive search. Product marketing, customer success, etc. We established operations in Europe and Asia, building those markets out.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition Development 93

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

This sort of discipline leads to a top-notch product experience and unparalleled time to value, which is the healthiest foundation to layer on more concentrated sales and marketing investments. Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations. Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

OpenView Labs

MAY 14, 2020

What complicates it even more is the current macroeconomic environment—the hesitancy of many venture firms to make new investments, and the lack of clarity around what a “market correction” might look like in terms of pricing venture deals. Rarely does a company see an exit price larger than its addressable market size.

Venture Capital 64

Venture Capital Scale Compensation Pricing 64

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Jason now has 5 investments at $200m+ ARR that are all cash-flow positive (which is necessary today), and there’s one clear trend he’s seen in today’s new efficient world: The New Normal is 700 Employees at $200,000,000 in ARR (or $300,000 per employee) at the average public SaaS company. This starts to get tough.

Sales Recruiting 277

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

The right strategy to win means reassessing fundamental issues like the product-market fit and centering on the best ICP. The key to product efficiency isn’t moving many investment resources or adjacencies but rather having the right mix of product portfolio and proven cost structures. Strategy to win.

Consulting 40

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 40

OPEXEngine

JUNE 4, 2020

In the 2020 Benchmarks, we added a number of new benchmarks around compensation expense, plus, a measure of the SaaS Cash Conversion Rate, popularized by Bessemer. It is clear that increasing investment into the sector over the past 5 years has led to earlier stage companies spending at a greater rate.

Benchmarks 45

Benchmarks SaaS Technical Review Software Review 45

User Pilot

APRIL 19, 2024

Offering incentives like financial compensation or vouchers can encourage participation, but it’s important to manage these carefully to avoid biasing the responses. Building a Business Case : Provides evidence and data to justify investment in the new product.

Market Research 52

Market Research Sales Recruiting Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

OPEXEngine

JUNE 29, 2020

Think of it this way: most SaaS companies have high customer acquisition costs, as you have to invest heavily in sales and marketing in order to realize high growth. Since these companies aren’t growing quickly, they have to compensate with high cash flow and high EBITDA margins if they want to be seen as attractive.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Sales Hiring Scale 52

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

Dev Ittycheria: And in some ways even though I’ve been a VC, and an operator, in some ways as an operator, I’m just now investing my time, not my money. So when I looked at opportunities to pursue, whether to go back into an operational role, a lot of it was around how big is the market opportunity? So that’s easy.

Sales Recruiting 241

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 241

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2020

They don’t value marketing as much as they value the product, which means they under invest in marketing. They don’t see marketing as a way to compete. And I compete by doing insane innovation on the marketing side, investing as much on marketing through engineering as you can invest on your product.

Scale 131

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Engineering 131

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

We invest all over the country and very much in Europe as well including Paris. And the first person doing that was actually Jason Lemkin which was when we grew up we Jason invested and he said no guys now you need to go and do things properly like find the V.P. You have to invest in H.R. Thanks for joining us. very quickly.

Sales Hiring 114

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 114

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

Product-market fit has been really important. I remember talking to Belgium investors at the time and everybody said, look, enterprise software is dead, there’s no opportunity through investment. That’s when we found product market fit. Felix : We specialize in data governance and data cataloging.

Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 177

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

It was really like the early days, and from there I built with the team all of the go-to-market engine, from building the first sales team, then thinking about how to make the organization evolve as we were growing and finding product-market fit to where we are today. You have to make your team structure evolve.

Scale 162

Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions Marketing 162

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. OpenView is the expansion stage VC.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

Befofe that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. There’s a whole literature around product market validation and MVPs and product market fit and all that.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 141

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2023

The Ponzi Scheme of Venture: LPs Win Also Most people don’t know that the bigger LPs are compensated based on paper markups too. The One Investing Rule “Are you confident this next round will be 3x the previous valuation?” If every investment ends up a 3x, then you’ll have a 3x fund. If you’re confident, then do it.

Venture Capital 199

Venture Capital Scale Compensation Investment 199

Sales Hacker

MARCH 28, 2018

But I also learned that the biggest closed-lost-and-churn reason was, “no time, too hard” HubSpot asked customers to invest heavily in blogging. Interests outside of my own quota had led me to work with colleagues in Customer Training, Product Marketing, and Channel Sales. Software sales can be lucrative.

Sales Hiring 56

Sales Hiring Sales Leadership Software Review 56

Sales Hacker

MAY 8, 2018

Coordinating retention and revenue growth to ensure product-market fit. Particularly if you’re willing to give them some goals that they need to reach and some rewards for hitting those goals, not just compensation. From a product perspective—we can talk all day about product fit, product market fit and all that.

Sales Hiring 43

Sales Hiring Scale Management Sales 43

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Yes, it does not scale, but the beauty is the product. I mean so simple that you get so much time and mind share to polish the product to create best in class, which compensates for a lot of competition that you don’t inherit with the business that grows with customer. In terms of the product market fit falling apart.

Scale 127

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 127

SmartKarrot

MAY 4, 2021

Ensure that customers derive maximum value from their investments with us and fully leverage our products on an ongoing basis. Collaborate with RESTORE’s Clinical team, product management, and developers to ensure product-market fit. Own the customer success and feedback process.

Customer Success 10

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Compensation 10

ChurnZero

JULY 12, 2019

Exactly as your promotional material might be the first point of contact with your brand, your onboarding process is the first point of contact with your product. It takes effort to convince a company to invest time in you and invite you to a job interview (or to get invited to the live show at AGT :D). Don’t Delay Interaction.

Scale 75

Scale Onboarding Customer Success Underperforming Technical Team 75

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Prior to Harness, Stephen was VP of Marketing at Glassdoor, managing a team of 52 in product marketing, helping grow B2B revenue from $19m to $90m in just 2 years, leading to their $1.2Bn acquisition. How can a CEO determine when is the right time to fundamentally invest in devops? billion acquisition.

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. So mid-market, we’re about 40 to 50K ACV enterprise. Gaetan Gachet : … structure for sales and at product market fit? Laura Bilazarian : And how did you structure sales compensation initially?

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify, and Gremlin all prior guests on the show, I hasten to add. Before joining Redpoint, Tomasz was the product manager for Google’s AdSense social-media products and AdSense internationalization. What is Tom’s favorite book and why?

Scale 113

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 113

Casey Accidental

OCTOBER 18, 2021

In the Reforge Product Strategy course, we teach that there are four different types of product work : Feature development: adding new things to the product that improve value proposition e.g. Uber’s Split Fare. Product/market fit expansion: adding totally new products that create new value propositions e.g. Uber Eats.

Technical Advisors 140

Technical Advisors Technical Review Scale Marketplace as a Service 140

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 2, 2023

and as far away as Morocco Initial capital invested: $5,000 Financial support for business: Sold stock from a former employer for startup costs; $7,000 loan from family Revenue streams: The Global Grant Writers Collective : An online course, community, and coaching program priced at $500 per month. Business Snapshot Years in business: 6.5

Payment Methods 114

Payment Methods Sales Hiring Payments Business 114

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

As for David, prior to Hashicorp, he held some incredible roles including VP Marketing at Github and Hortonworks, Senior Director of Product Marketing @ VMWare, and then also spent over 5 years at Microsoft. As for David, prior to Hashicorp, he held some incredible roles, including VP of Marketing at Github and Hortonworks.

Scale 181

Scale Leadership Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 181

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2020

We invest in companies that transform the way people work. We mostly do seed-stage investments and a little bit if Series A. The verticals we focus on are obviously the office productivity, dev tools, but also some of the more antiquated industries, including construction, agriculture, manufacturing, et cetera.

Technical Review 143

Technical Review Payment Methods Travel Development Team Review 143

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies. Because this drives investment decisions.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And diversifying, if you’re still early, before 10, 20 or 30 million revenue, that could be a sign that things just aren’t working, that you don’t actually have product market fit, which is unfortunate, but you need to be honest about it. You need to be honest, if you have product market fit.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 202

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

Peter Kazanjy: So at TalentBin, that was kind of like my first training wheels, SaaS business, and also the place where I started to learn and appreciate go to market. So I went from being a business generalist founder, so prior to that I was in product marketing and product management at VMware, so big enterprise software company.

Part-Time VPE 193

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 193

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

There’s no amount of positive output that can compensate for someone who’s outputting negativity because their blast radius is so big, and it actually affects the core team that is actually getting stuff done. We ended up so totally nailing product market fit because we were laser focused on the customer.

VP of Engineering 252

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 252

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

Sweat equity and credit cards, personal lines of credit, direct cash investment into the business in the form of an equity stake or a related-party loan to the company, deferring cash-pay compensation. Future capital providers love to see that you’ve invested more than your time into your endeavor. Company Stage. Typical Amount.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

And the other job was to be an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. And I was talking to my dad, and he said, “I don’t think you’re an investment banker, Leyla,” which was good advice. Leyla Seka: So I ultimately ended up in Salesforce 11 years ago, and a lot of that was luck.

Scale 131

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 131

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

And, the second system is what I call the product marketing system. What I find is that if you think about the product marketing calendar this way, it makes it a little bit more like the sales finance calendar where sales is about selling to customers, sales don’t work unless a customer buys what you’re selling.

Startup 271

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 271

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

What does David believe is the crucial step missing in B2B when it comes to finding product market fit? How should founders think about sales rep compensation? What have been David’s learnings on how to integrate sales and marketing so tightly? How does marketing and customer success intertwine to be successful?

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 189

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

It’s clear that faster-growing businesses are taking advantage of more creative pricing models, however, the switch to usage-based pricing can represent a host of challenges from revenue recognition to sales compensation. These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73