SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

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. So, let me just share with you what a rogue former marketer as done with a culture and people ops team, and how we approach culture, and how we measure it at HubSpot.

Part-Time CTO 258

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 258

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. To IPO, companies need to triple their market share in their core market and have a churn rate of less than 3-4% per month. The market is flooded with capital, leading to higher valuations and unrealistic expectations.

CTO Hire 181

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 181

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. SaaStr 565: Classic Episode: The Importance of Company Values, a Great Hiring Process, and Ownership Culture with Gusto Co-Founder & CEO Josh Reeves.

CTO Hire 221

CTO Hire CTO Sales Hiring Scale 221

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. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? There is no silver bullet.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 241

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 154

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 154

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. That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10.

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 357

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Sales.

CTO Hire 245

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 245

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.

Part-Time VPE 271

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 271

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2021

Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @Bandwidth. Dave Walters, CTO, Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success, Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO, Hired. Jenn Knight, Co-Founder, CTO, AgentSync. Amisha Gandhi, SVP, Marketing @ Tipalti.

VP of Engineering 271

VP of Engineering New CTO CTO Hire Sales Hiring 271

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

CTO Hire 182

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 182

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be.

Part-Time VPE 232

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 232

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Katrina Wong, VP Marketing and Demand Generation @ Segment. Asawari Samant, Head of Marketing @ Anyscale. Amy Appleyard, VP Sales @ VMWare. Michelle Benfer, VP, Head of North America Sales @ HubSpot. Kady Srinivasan, Head of Marketing @ Klaviyo. Jessica Weimer Vice President, Global Revenue Marketing @ Podium.

VP of Engineering 269

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 269

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

How do you build a best-in-class go-to-market model to get to 100mn ARR and beyond? 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. 20 million?

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 192

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

There’s a slide I see again and again from start-ups: 2 of the early sales reps are at 100% of quota, sometimes 150%-200%. You’ll continue to see that over time to some extent. So why so often, do only 2 of the first 8-10 sales reps perform? They get CTO training. You have to join their first few sales calls.

Scale 339

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 339

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Brittany Bingham, VP of Marketing @ Guru. Devon Rutherford, Managed Services Program Manager & Pre-Sales Manager @ Leaseweb. Mariela Towers, Head of Marketing @ BEE. Jules Costa, Content Manager @ BEE. Amy Appleyard, VP Sales @ VMWare. Asawari Samant, Head of Marketing @ Anyscale.

VP of Engineering 263

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 263

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

There are roughly 2 types of start-up management teams. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. Veterans of the SaaS journey.

Part-Time VPE 233

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 233

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. In my first start-up, there was one engineer we had no choice about. You see this all the time.

Part-Time VPE 271

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 271

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. You can do the drip marketing campaigns if you have to. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is.

Part-Time VPE 264

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 264

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 254

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 254

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: What All First-Time CEOs Should Know About Fundraising. If You Leave the Low End of the Market … You Probably Can’t Go Back. SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire CTO 172

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 183

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 183

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

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).

Part-Time VPE 204

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 204

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 249

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 249

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. We think we should hold off doing channels until we’ve debugged the sales model.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 91

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2019

I remember my CTO once arguing with a Fortune 500 company on a “security” concern they had which really made no sense. More here: I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited | SaaStr Not hiring a full-time RFP person. They are too much work to just dump on a product person, success person, sales leader, etc. Didn’t matter.

Sales Hiring 169

Sales Hiring Enterprise CTO Hire CTO 169

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 171

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 171

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. In a market that requires companies to earn their customers’ business each and every day, it can literally make or break your entire business model. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

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. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.

Sales Hiring 243

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 243

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

In a tougher public market for SaaS commpanies, VCs are pulling term sheets again, and deals are also falling apart again after soft commitments. Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. But now we’re back full circle.

Finance 278

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

You have to be careful to pair that with someone strong to manage the relationship, that has more time and that also can be trusted. As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. We all underresource customer success vs. sales. Are we sure?

CTO Hire 276

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 276

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

Therese : We were the ones to pioneer this market in the first place. My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. Even after we did our pivot to the accounting automation and optimization, we still had desperate moments. year sales cycles.

Startup 270

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 270

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

But also, as a sole founder, you also can make a decision in a very timely manner. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. 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. Speed is everything.

Sales Hiring 129

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 129

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

This could be explained by the fact that it was women, more often than men, who had to step down and work part-time to take care of stay-at-home children during the pandemic. It was an iPad interactive brochure and sales tool for sales centres. Sima Banijamali – Sr. I knew nothing about tech.

Technical Review 103

Technical Review CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire 103

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 169

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 169

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

. * How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? * Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? How does Karl structure the hiring process today?

Sales Hiring 215

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 215