SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. Folks come out differently here, but while Amplitude charges per volume, in part, it doesn’t make a material amount from overages. Rather, it uses overage events to trigger a call from sales to buy more. #4. The engineering team is also surprisingly lean. #7.

Scale 282

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 282

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. From $1m to $10m ARR or so, as you build your first management team: You shouldn’t be the VP of Sales Anymore As You Scale. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. Add a layer. the prospects).

Part-Time VPE 278

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have.

Part-Time VPE 278

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 278

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired.

Part-Time VPE 278

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 278

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE 191

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 191

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows.

Sales Hiring 360

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 360

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. Much of the success here depends on how competent and motivated the CTO and their team is.

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 95

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

Merchant Services 178

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 178

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 181

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 181

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. Bottom-up sales. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform.

Underperforming Technical Team 191

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 191

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Most growth-stage CEOs I work with know how to tell if they’re efficiently allocating capital in every part of their budget with one glaring exception: research and development (R&D). Focus on performance management of your product and engineering teams as early indicators for what R&D investments are working, and which aren’t.

Underperforming Technical Team 124

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 124

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

analyzing how often Directors and Executives are involved in the sales process. Scott pulled the research from Chorus, which reported that over five weeks (~May-June 2020), 88% more directors have been joining calls and 72% more executives are joining sales calls on the sell side. Playing the right roles.

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 121

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Even without any breakdowns, obviously the CEO was fully aware of the company’s increased spending in sales and marketing. Even without any breakdowns, obviously the CEO was fully aware of the company’s increased spending in sales and marketing.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. They wanted to sell the Amplitude product, I forget, to sales or somebody else, and that was their mistake. Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And the learning is sell two things to buyers.

Outsourcing Services 197

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 197

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Shipping is our heartbeat ” has been the motto of the Intercom R&D org from the very beginning and engineers ship code to our customer-facing production app dozens of times a day. Shipping quickly and securely. Continuous risk management.

Data 118

Data compliance Technical Review CTO Hire 118

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How does a First Time Founder Identify 10x Hires? How do you hire a great CTO, a great VP of Product, a great VP of Sales … if you’ve never worked with one? There’s a reason almost every founder you talk to had a mis-hire for their first head of sales. It’s hard.

Sales Hiring 216

Sales Hiring CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 216

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Maggie Hott , Director of Sales at Webflow. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. There are plenty of resources and advice on unlocking the secrets of the engineering management career path. Webflow’s Maggie Hott on building a scalable sales team from the ground up.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 101

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 101

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success. At Hired , we help top R&D, engineering, and tech talent find jobs they love. – once.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

If your plan is to create a bloated piece of enterprise software with an ugly interface and make it up by hiring a large field sales force from the get-go you might succeed as well, but in that case please don't ask me for advice. :) Let's start with the founder team. If you don't have product and engineering knowledge that's tough.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Which is why you should sign up for the 2 for 1 Insider Sale and get two people for the price of one. That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. Get marketing and engineering working together. Full post. . Full post. .

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 256

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 256

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. Q: Based on your acquisition experience, are for-sale businesses focusing on the customer and NPS? We also need to change the way that we make hiring decisions.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? Why is this? What are the drivers of its death?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 333

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. Eyal Manor: So I’ve been building SaaS services for over 10 years now in an engineering capacity, and just before we start can we get a sense from the audience, I know it’s kind of hard to see but who here is kind of in a technical hat? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

Cloud 171

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 171

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? 300: When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. You’re doing it from a sales perspective. What must startups always remember when pitching CIOs? *

CTO Hire 134

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 134

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

OpenView is thrilled to announce our recent $9M Series A investment in Loopio , a software platform that helps sales teams respond to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires seamlessly with up-to-date, accurate, and approved content. Loopio co-founders from left to right: Matt York, CTO; Jafar Owainati, COO; Zakir Hemraj, CEO.

Investment 40

Investment CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

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.

Sales Hiring 161

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 161

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

There are enough stories of data breaches and cyber attacks to chill even the savviest security engineer to the core. An aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, Adam learned early the best way to earn trust was proving you deserve it. Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees. Caught your interest?

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 9, 2020.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 255

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

Unlike traditional databases, our technology is built using a hybrid of database and search engine technology and thus provides excellent capabilities for storing, indexing, and rapidly querying both structured and unstructured data. That takes a lot of hiring and on-boarding risk off the table. swagger Drivers vs. passengers.

Startup 99

Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

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. Early signs that sales and marketing can scale: At the seed stage, we usually see founder-driven sales as opposed to a well-oiled sales machine. Market Characteristics ?? See the section above!

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

AI is coming for sales and marketing, and Jason is a super fan of AI in marketing. Because hundreds of the best founders are radically ripping through post-sales AI, and now it’s time for marketing. It’s challenging to find super high-quality folks unless you’re in B2C, where customer support is sales.

AI 253

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 253

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 268

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 268

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

Scale 200

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 200