SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Cash was tight and I didn’t know any great VPs of Biz Dev, so between myself and my VPs of Sales, Product and Customer Success, we all jointly managed our key partners. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. Enterprise customers need that VP of Engineering to trust you.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 286

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. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 278

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. with Aashish Krishna Kumar, Head of GTM at Togai Sales Enablement 2.0 – Elevate Rep Performance with Divanshu Goyal, Sales at GTM Buddy Common scaling pains for SaaS businesses and how to overcome them.

VP of Engineering 286

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 286

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have. In my first start-up, there was one engineer we had no choice about. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. But not someone that could manage engineering.

Part-Time VPE 278

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 278

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2020

Not launching 3 Truly Game-Changing Features doesn’t mean you didn’t ship any new code or features. That opens up entirely new segments of the market. Of course you did. A Truly Game-Changing Feature is something: That makes your customers’ and prospects’ jaws drop. That materially increases close rates.

New CTO 242

New CTO CTO Engineering Investment 242

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

It’s hard enough to build a second product, with all the constraints on product and engineering. A few thoughts, really a 3-part test: First, figure out if you’ve built an add-on or a true second product. ” If that works for your new product, sell it with your existing team. It so rarely does.

Scale 258

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 258

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

We identified some “ known unknowns” too; problems we needed to solve, but didn’t know how just yet – like integrating the new region into our billing system. And so our former CTO and co-founder Ciaran Lee decided we were just going to start. Once we started building, our engineering principles helped us to keep moving fast.

Scale 235

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 235

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2024

Some of the biggest use cases for AI in the enterprise are across customer support, sales and marketing, and engineering — ie helping developers test code and troubleshoot issues. Benjamin added, “I think a lot of people think about this new AI technology as something that’s gonna just come in and like work from day one.

AI 286

AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence compliance 286

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product.

CTO Hire 204

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 204

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… Marianna Tessel, Intuit CTO + Cathy Polinsky, Stitch Fix CTO + Robin Ducot, Survey Monkey CTO. We’re especially excited about this all-star, CTO panel from three publicly traded companies. appeared first on SaaStr.

New CTO 105

New CTO CTO Scale Engineering 105

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 184

Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 184

SaaStock

MARCH 8, 2019

After five years at Ernst & Young in New York, she served as Vice President at Citigroup in the Big Apple. Hooi Ling Tan is a mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur. Kathleen Ting studied at Cornell University before joining the financial service provider BlackRock in New York as Global Consulting Relations Analyst.

VP of Engineering 264

VP of Engineering CTO Coach Venture Capital SaaS 264

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 282

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 282

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

What once took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create, a lone developer could suddenly hack together in half an hour. The target audience for the press release is the new/updated product’s customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. AWS is now an $11.5B

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 161

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 161

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. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote.

Outsourcing Services 242

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 242

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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Well, in the past several years, there’s been a tremendous number of companies that have built specifically for developers and use this as a way to get into these new markets, to displace incumbents and disrupt the competition. Bottom-up sales. You have the opportunity to upsell new features and capabilities to them.

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

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 130

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 130

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

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In my opinion, the founder team of a SaaS startup needs to excel in three areas: engineering/technology, product/UX and domain/market expertise. You can hire people for sales and marketing later and you can acquire management experience or hire additional people over time.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

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. Not just in engineering and product, but in every level. You don’t really do it, but it goes through your mind because you’re the VP of sales and marketing and product. Henry Schuck: Right.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

At the beginning, my vice presidents were engineering, and product, and a designer. Then we needed to hire a sales guy who had experience selling to enterprise. We got the guy who ran enterprise sales at Rackspace. UberConference started as this freemium, kind of funnel builder for later sales product. Build the product.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

Kellblog

APRIL 1, 2021

Spokes, e.g., include: sales/AEs, sales/SEs, product marketing, analyst relations, customer success, customer support, professional services, existing customers, prospective customers, the CTO, engineering (e.g., technical debt), and more. built on an outdated one), shortcut-driven (e.g., wrote bad code).

New CTO 111

New CTO CTO Engineering Customer Support 111

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. As soon as you become good at a job - sales, product, marketing - you know enough to hire the person to replace you. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They love new ways of working and were happy to bring Slack into their functional teams and say, “Let’s experiment with this new way of working.” And it was very successful. All you have to do is enter your email to get started.

Outsourcing Services 216

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 216

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

“Understanding the guardrails we need to build means closely tracking meaningful change across Intercom and making sure we’re on top of new initiatives”. Understanding the guardrails we need to build means closely tracking meaningful change across Intercom and making sure we’re on top of new initiatives. Intercom is no exception.

Data 118

Data CTO Hire Technical Review Scale 118

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. And then, in the 50s, they introduced this new thing, and there was resistance.

Scale 212

Scale Software Review compliance Technical Review 212

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

No Person is an Island It is rare in B2B sales for a single buyer to make a noteworthy purchase in a vacuum, and according to the Harvard Business Review software purchases greater than $100k involve on average eight stakeholders. Going beyond the ICP Knowing your ICP definition is only half the battle in the sales process.

Part-Time VPE 113

Part-Time VPE Technical Review Forecasting Software Review 113

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Being an engineer can give you the upper hand as a CEO because you understand the product. And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Quick recap: Keep your pricing simple. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Hiring 136

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. 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?

Sales Hiring 89

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 89

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

Listen to Hang Black’s podcasts to learn about the future of sales enablement or how to lead with empathy. RevOps leaders are talking about trends in the market, and how the move towards RevOps will change everything from marketing to sales development to post sales. Fixing visibility issues in your sales org.

Scale 119

Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 119

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Average salary: $192,383/yr.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

With that in mind, before we welcome the new year and all the good things to come, we’ve gathered our favorite insights and nuggets of wisdom from 2021 in a special wrap-up episode. Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Maggie Hott , Director of Sales at Webflow. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Technical Review Scale Outsourcing Services 118

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sales enablement is easy. REGIE uses artificial intelligence to create entire outbound inbound, and even follow-up sales campaigns faster. We’re on iTunes.

Marketplace as a Service 110

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 110

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Benefits of using Expense Categories in SaaS The main expense categories for any SaaS company are: Cost of Revenue Research & Development Sales & Marketing General & Admin These four categories are the standard for describing costs and expenses of any SaaS company from Salesforce to Zoom to your startup. New Gross Margins?

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90