Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. The same is true of data - data informs decision-making, but doesn’t replace it.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

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 AI Headcount 279

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

And yet, downplaying your team’s needs undermines CS’s current impact and future revenue-driving potential. According to our 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study, CS teams are already underfunded and under-resourced. This is something that I’m doing with fractional headcount allocation. Now we have a name for this.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 98

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. For Natasha, the answer is a resounding yes.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

OPEXEngine

MARCH 9, 2022

How can Finance and Engineering management work together to diagnose weak areas, and shift R&D resources to produce better outcomes for the company? For over a decade, we have been benchmarking R&D expenses and headcounts. Work with engineering teams to understand how and where they’re getting faster or slowing down.

Software Review 59

Software Review Development Team Review Technical Review Outsourced Development 59

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. Rather, everything is an iterative process of building the service, rolling it out to users and keep improving it as you get new data and feedback.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

Pipeline analytics: Offers sales managers a view of their teams’ pipelines that goes beyond what’s available in their native SFA applications. Next highest priorities would be intent data (prefer 6Ssense), forecasting (Clari, Outreach, Gong), and content repository (Highspot). 1) Data/insights often lack.

AI 80

AI Revenue Scale ChatGPT 80

Chart Mogul

MAY 7, 2020

Onboarding a new member of your sales team is challenging on its own, but especially so when they have to call prospects out of the blue. Providing the right cold calling training can make or break the success of a new team member. According to data from RingLead, sales reps spend as much as 15% of their time leaving voicemails.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Headcount 121

User Pilot

MAY 11, 2022

You can use product usage data to develop an effective marketing strategy, improve products, retain customers , as well as to accelerate customer adoption. Utilize firmographic data for creating personalized onboarding processes. What product usage data should we capture to segment customers? Let’s find out.

SaaS 98

SaaS Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding Churn 98

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

It’s your secret to finding the diamonds in the rough when you need more qualified leads, without increasing headcount. SaaS companies, who often have complex sales cycles coupled with small but agile sales teams, can especially benefit from lead scoring, since it allows small teams to punch well above their weight class.

Sales 98

Sales Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review Headcount 98

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

In the data-driven technology space, this simple binary makes some sense. After all, data is usually clear cut: yes or no, this or that, zeros or ones. Take Stack Overflow , the world’s largest software developer network, community, and platform, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors. You have to think for yourself.” .

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

The same was true when I ran the People function at a software development consultancy that doubled its headcount to ~100 while reducing attrition from 40% to 5% voluntary in 18 months. The question becomes: “Who do I want on my team—and why?”. A final comment on purpose: It should come from your team.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. Now, what does the data tell us, are there any (or many?)

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Sales leaders have a bad habit of dumping people into a new job without properly preparing them to succeed. Although I went through two weeks of training with my team, they were underwater too. I’m going to share my top 20 sales onboarding secrets to help your team beat their 30-60-90 day plan. So tune in….

Sales Hiring 74

Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 74

Chart Mogul

MAY 7, 2020

Onboarding a new member of your sales team is challenging on its own, but especially so when they have to call prospects out of the blue. Providing the right cold calling training can make or break the success of a new team member. According to data from RingLead, sales reps spend as much as 15% of their time leaving voicemails.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Headcount 52

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 13, 2021

As Customer Success as a discipline has grown, it has also developed an accompaniment of misconceptions and myths, generating a lot of confusion about how to do it right and scale successfully. Reframe: Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help identify low value realization and, in conjunction with other data, can guide action to mitigate risk.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 52

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Those two data points tell you how much time a company has before it runs into real trouble, and therefore how much time you have to help it find solutions to its problems. Of course, just assuming the worst is almost as bad as assuming (and acting as though) everything will be okay, and simply continuing on as normal.

Forecasting 40

Forecasting Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Scale 40

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 15, 2021

During one of our BIG RYG Hyper-Workshops on budgeting for Customer Success headcount, Kristen Hayer of The Success League, framed this shift by explaining that as a CS leader, you’re not running a happiness team, you’re running a revenue team. Your team will start to get pushed on the money side of things.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Benchmarks Scale Underperforming Technical Team 97

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

For proof, might I suggest the classic post Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager , which presents a very different vision for the role of product manager than most of us have today). They know the immense value of user input and customer development. Team Alignment. 5 Common Pitfalls in Data-Driven SaaS Product Management.

Management 55

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting 55

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

If you are manually dialing, you are limited by the data set, so choose one with high-quality cell phone and direct numbers vs. switchboards (I recommend testing out several data sources in a bake-off to suss this one out). There are 35 custom fields in Outreach which allow you to pull in data of intent or technographic drops.

Scale 109

Scale Scaling AI Search AI 109

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

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. What was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? Sam Taylor: And so, I joined as a sales development rep at Salesforce, best move I ever made.

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 182

BetterCloud

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

One exec’s greatest failure: “I was seduced by a build scenario … it turned out to be a very poor decision”. After being “seduced by a build scenario,” Holst-Knudsen says he convinced the company to move ahead with it, which turned out to be a very poor decision. But software development and IT resources are still a cost.

VP of Engineering 45

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Engineering 45

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. Now, what does the data tell us, are there any (or many?)

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Tabular is a compelling data lakehouse solution, meaning it brings data warehouse functionality (SQL semantics + ease of use) to the data lake (cost-efficient and scalable). If you want your data platform to run like those at Netflix, Salesforce, Stripe, AirBNB and many others (i.e. Let's dive in.

Data 130

Data Government Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 130

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. billion in revenue) so it’s safe to say Jeanne and her team have helped do exactly that.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2019

Growing a sales team isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of A players in a room and getting them to start selling your product. When done right, your sales team won’t just accelerate your company’s growth; they’ll enrich your company’s culture and help build a better product too. 12 steps to build a world-class sales team.

Scale 156

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 156

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

We surveyed and interviewed key people in our teams to understand how they worked and how they saw Intercom’s internal operations. Honest feedback can be hard to take, but it’s essential to develop the type of culture that encourages people to constructively criticize processes, leadership styles, or approaches. Paul: Yeah.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 2, 2022

Does your Customer Success team have the right structure, workload, and engagement model to hit its goals? Re-segmenting your customer base is a natural evolution of your company, product, and team’s growth. We also had to think about how we were doing their variable compensation to incent fairness across the team.

Headcount 98

Headcount Underperforming Technical Team Scale Outsourced Development 98

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

At the forefront of this change is what we at Engagio call, Account-Based Everything (ABE), some people know it as Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD), and others call it Account-Based Marketing (ABM). We’re going to look at what data you need to develop an account targeting strategy and where to get that data.

Underperforming Technical Team 58

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Data Development Team Review 58

FastSpring

JANUARY 31, 2023

Luckily, most developers find it easy to integrate Stripe with most other software (however, you have to pay for each software separately). You’ll be able to manage all aspects of the payment lifecycle from your FastSpring dashboard without adding extra software or headcount. Stop bad actors before a transaction is even processed.

Payment Services 139

Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services Payment Features 139

Andreessen Horowitz

JANUARY 17, 2024

Flock Safety trusts its customers to handle local data governance issues, and instead focuses on providing them the tools they need to manage data appropriately. So, criminals don’t care about city boundaries, but for some reason, law enforcement has always had a struggle sharing data. Provide tools, not takes.

Technical Review 80

Technical Review Technology Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 80

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 9, 2021

Those same tools can also help with integrating financial data and easing the workload of the managers who must submit and approve budgets. If the new solution doesn’t produce this, then the implementation team has likely set its sights too low or has ignored significant value-creating and change opportunities.

Software Review 52

Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Headcount 52

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. Using Sales Navigator’s search engine, you can filter results by plugging in various titles, locations, industries, company headcounts, and so on, to come as close as you can to your ICPs. This will result in poor open and response rates.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

In August of 2016, Rachel Hepworth embarked on a unique challenge: start a growth marketing team at one of the most successful startups of this generation – one that had long relied heavily on word of mouth. I stumbled upon Eric Ries and Steve Blank, the concept of customer development – it was a revelation.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174