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The Great Spending Showdown: AI vs SaaS in 2025/2026 — What Every B2B Leader Needs to Know We’re witnessing the most dramatic shift in enterprise tech spending since the cloud migration began 15 years ago. Meanwhile, SaaS — our tried-and-true darling — is projected at $295 billion with a “mere” 18.4% year-over-year.
Big Company M&A Is Incredibly Complex “Acquiring a company is a much bigger deal for a tech company than you think” “The soft costs are much, much more than the cash or stock” Integration can consume “10,000 hours of like expensive people’s time” 2.
Unparalleled Networking Opportunities SaaStr Annual brings together thousands of SaaS, Cloud and AI executives, founders, VCs, and industry leaders under one roof across our 40+ acre campus, May 13-15 in SF Bay! Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.
Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep? 31:55 Hiring for grit, curiosity & determination. What does Joe look like at that time?
Because as a SaaS founder especially, it can be hard to know. ” — Jason Riedel, founder/CTO of Aspireship. “When on New Year’s Eve, customers kept sending us signed contracts.” I recently asked on Twitter when folks knew their startup had something … great. 20% conversion.
They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. Jason has sat in on interviews with 50-100 VPs of Sales, and many of them don’t even know what the product was in their 4th or 5th interview. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag. 99% of the time, they probably don’t.
Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. So what’s a founder to do?
But as time went on, we shared lessons, what best practices were in customer success and revenue retention and all these things are, right. But it was super interesting that the two big interviews I did were with Ben Chestnut from Mailchimp yesterday and with Dharmesh and Brian from Hubspot. And I don’t mean in an edgy way.
Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?
What started as a series of interviews by co-founder Des Traynor soon bloomed into hundreds of episodes where we explore how businesses are driving growth through customer relationships and how to build successful products at scale. I’m recording the first in what I expect to be a series of interesting interviews.
Customer interviews are a powerful tool that can help you better position your B2B product to attract and retain more customers. That’s because B2B businesses address particular niches, where customers don’t spend as much time online. Believe it or not, it’s not rocket science: they perform customer interviews. Let’s dig in!
In my guest post on CustomerThink I talked about the benefits of community building and how it helps SaaS companies get a few steps ahead of their competition. To get more practical, I recently interviewed over 10 SaaS companies and asked them 4 questions: Which platform(s) do you use to run your community? . Final thoughts.
This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. Chris is a 20 year Silicon Valley veteran having launched the first part of his career at EMC before finding his way to Snowflake in 2013. Show Agenda and Timestamps.
In this presentation, Pluralsight co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard will discuss how Pluralsight successfully transformed its business to serve both individual and enterprise customers independently and will share his lessons for SaaS companies looking to tap into individual customers to sell into enterprises and vice versa.
Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam’s Corner [28:45]. Show Introduction [00:10]. Check them out.
A Couple SaaS Generations Ago… Traditional software companies managed sales, product development, finance and HR in siloed organizations by function. In the early SaaS days, management structure was essentially the same. The SaaS operating model requires execution across functional activities.
Instead, there’s one continuous streamlined customer-centric journey, leveraging the next generation of artificial intelligence, Outreach allows sales reps to deliver consistent, relevant, and responsible communication for each prospect every time enabling personalization at scale previously unthinkable. Are they hiring?
In today’s data-driven SaaS scene, these can affect hundreds of millions of users and cause damage in the billions of dollars, and as compliance frameworks become requirements to do business, businesses are turning to third-party services that can help expedite and facilitate the process. Caught your interest? The LinkedIn Incident.
Customer interviews are a powerful tool that can help you better position your B2B product to attract and retain more customers. That’s because B2B businesses address particular niches, where customers don’t spend as much time online. Believe it or not, it’s not rocket science: they perform customer interviews. Let’s dig in!
By Geoff Roberts Last year Clement Vouillon of Point Nine Capital wrote an article entitled The Rise of the Non “VC compatible” SaaS Companies. And it expressed a growing sentiment in the world of SaaS start-ups; for the majority of SaaS founders the traditional VC model is a clusterfuck that makes very little sense.
And hiring people who are better than you. Read more interviews with the most interesting humans in SaaS. ICYMI: Meet Mailchimp’s CTO Eric Muntz. Then I make breakfast for my kids, have a cup of coffee, take a shower and go to work. What are the most important qualities of a leader? Who is your role model?
We’ve got an interview with Angus Davis. Today’s sponsor is Outreach , the leading sales engagement platform that enables sales reps to humanize their communications at scale, from automating the soul-sucking manual work that eats up selling time to providing action-oriented tips on what communications are working best.
In my guest post on CustomerThink I talked about the benefits of community building and how it helps SaaS companies get a few steps ahead of their competition. To get more practical, I recently interviewed over 10 SaaS companies and asked them 4 questions: Which platform(s) do you use to run your community?
More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. That third-party firm does what they call IDIs, or in-depth interviews, to get a sense of the customer experience. We also need to change the way that we make hiring decisions.
The challenge in each case is the same—the company is hiring you at a lower level of commitment than a full-timehire, usually with the expectation that they will see some ROI relatively quickly. Full-time Head of Marketing I’ve been hired to lead marketing teams at four companies in a full-time capacity now.
When HubSpot first launched its culture code, Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Founder of HubSpot, felt it was important to share it with candidates. Since then, its culture code has been viewed more than 4 million times. Tell me, explain how you think about testing this in an interview. Chances are you'll hear some nuance in there.”.
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%.
But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).
Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. Is it sustainable?
This dynamic trio of SaaS experts share how to stay customer-centric and set yourself apart in today’s rapidly changing environment. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company. Bernadette Nixon: Sure.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Karl made his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of Lucidchart having been Head of Business Development for Google in China and Head of Patents. * How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? What works?
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. And my word, am I excited for our episode today as we welcome one of the most defining SaaS companies of the last decade. And so I saw an opportunity to get into SaaS early and have been loving it ever since.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Sam made his way into the world of SaaS with Dropbox and how that led to his leading the sales and success team today @ Loom. 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? Sam Taylor.
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. It came from pretty humble beginnings.
What we are seeing is that often there are companies with 2 co-founders, a CEO and a CTO, and marketing is often left behind. What are PR peculiarities for SaaS companies? If you have some sort of budget – I’d recommend hiring someone in-house. Networking with journalists in your industry could provide a huge advantage.
We’ve got an interview with Brandon Meyers , the chief revenue officer of ADARA. We’ve got an interview with Brandon Meyers, the chief revenue officer of ADARA. Now, without further ado, let’s listen to this interview with Brandon Meyers. And so I moved down there, I had an interview lined up.
What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. This episode is sponsored by Brex.
We did a song to launch our new mission, vision and values at SurveyMonkey, and I also rewrote “Shallow” for our CFO who left last year, then performed it with our President, CTO and General Counsel. Intellectual curiosity is something I look for in hires. Read more interviews with the most interesting humans in SaaS.
Below, we’ve shared the transcript of Harry’s interview with Yousuf. So tell me how did you make your way from the wonderful coast of the UK into the world of SaaS and come to now be one of the leading CIOs in the really rising mega wave of enterprise SaaS? My advice is hire earlier rather than later. Harry Stebbings.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Paul made his way into the world of startups with Twitter and Slack and how that led to his founding SaaS company, Balsa. Below, we’ve shared the transcript of Harry’s interview with Paul. An incredible company and founder making his foray into the public eye for the first time.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Bob made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Crossbeam. * What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? * Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? Below, we’ve shared the transcript of Harry’s interview with Bob.
53% expect employees to teach themselves AI tools, without any formal support 66% of C-suite leaders say they plan to hire AI talent externally , rather than upskill their workforce These survey results are pretty concerning because they contradict what we’re really experiencing inside the business, from business leaders outside of the C-suite. (see
At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. Dharmesh Shah : So, a quick confession before I start, which is like I love SaaS, I love it. Brian and Dharmesh started the company out of MIT Sloan, so who did they hire?
Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. Why is it no longer to come into large enterprises with a small contract and expand? How has Peter found the transition from CTO to CEO this time?
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