SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Together we combed through AngelList and found companies that we saw potential in, however, most were not hiring. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 291

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

Scale 322

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 322

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Yes, there is the classic situation where a big company wants to give you a lot of money, but overwhelm your engineering resources. This always works.

Scale 299

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 299

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche.

Sales Recruiting 265

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 265

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. Now, over the next decade, they need to think about other things their customers do in hiring that aren’t done well and could be scaled.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 299

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. Let me start by telling you about my first role as a manager. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 178

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 178

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. They relied on a great product, with a passionate userbase that helped kickstart an organic growth engine which sold the product for them. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively?

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 265

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Should your sales engineers also implement the software? For us in the early stages, we went down the path of hiring a solutions person (in this case the person was myself!)

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 121

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. X sales force, X meta.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108

Sales Hacker

APRIL 25, 2019

My cost-conscious lens (plus our proven outbound sales program) has served my company, Leadium, well. I am passionate about helping small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) accelerate their growth with outbound sales. The SMB Decision: In-House vs. Outsourced Sales Development. The Four Costs of In-House Sales Development.

Outsourcing Services 97

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 97

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Their goal is to build a cohesive revenue engine with ever-growing disjointed parts. That’s why I’ve built out the Revenue Engine Framework to help drive you to success. And it’s not just for CROs; if you’re a marketer, SDR, sales rep, manager, VP, or CRO, this one’s for you. Simple right?

Technical Review 137

Technical Review Development Team Review Systems Review Engineering 137

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

In this episode, Bob and I chat about his new book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. What is it about sales that makes academia hesitant to teach it? Bob wondered where all the sales professors were and discovered that perhaps as a profession it required more art than science.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They built one platform that does it all, but also made it simple so that these small businesses they wanted to serve, could actually use it to grow revenue without needing a developer that they didn’t have. ’ That’s what I got was one tweet from a junior product manager. But in consumer that just doesn’t work.

Revenue 313

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Almost every week, Iceberg RevOps’ founder Taft Love gets messages from executives and CEOs at growth-stage companies asking for help with their first revenue operations hire. These leaders are looking for the right person to own the implementation and management of their company’s go-to-market tech stack. Teams need to scale, fast.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Consulting 93

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Classic agencies don’t value the software enough to engender pricing power, develop fast sales cycles, or change the operations of their business to maximize the value of the ML innovation. Consequently, product market fit is weak. And they ought to develop that pricing power. Third, how to employ the labor force?

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person. I’ve never even played a sales person on TV. All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. Yes, yes, I know.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

As an engineer by training, in pressure situations he tends to “lean to the quant.” It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. Mark Roberge knows which he prefers.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

Henrique: So, we applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. It was, kind of, like a developer friend who had a startup, so they saw their transactions on the terminal. And we had a lot of experience with payments, and engineering, but with U.S.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 219

Sales Hacker

MARCH 8, 2018

Sales interviews are nerve-wracking. Not just for candidates, but also for hiring managers. You may have to pass on hundreds of excellent sales hires—it’s definitely frustrating. Prepare For Your Next Sales Interview with These 5 Pro Tips. Demonstrate the depth of your skills, not the breadth.

Sales Hiring 79

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 79

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

374: ZoomInfo founder and CEO Henry Schuck shares how he built a business from scratch and grew it into one of the most successful IPOs of the 21st century—and what it was really like…the good, the bad, and most of all, the ugly. If you think of this from a market size standpoint, there’s often this debate, is that good or bad?

Sales Hiring 228

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 228

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. Starting as VP of Sales, in less than two years he became CEO. Patrick Campbell, CEO, ProfitWell.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Being an engineer can give you the upper hand as a CEO because you understand the product. 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. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Hiring 146

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 146

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. Know who is the foundation of your product and build your product for that user (in Stripe’s case, developers).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 163

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2023

The Team Matters More Than The Operating Model Snow’s greatest piece of advice is to choose your team wisely. He believes the team is more important than the operating model because you can have the best models in the world. But if you don’t have the underlying team and structure, it won’t work. They didn’t.

Strategy 246

Strategy Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. They moved to a more traditional SaaS inside sales model, and they started shipping out these hardware devices, and only 30% to 40% of the customers would end up paying for them. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product.

Scale 278

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 278

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 19, 2021

And for your support team, using the right conversational support tool and framework allows them to maximize their resources, so they can focus on solving complex queries and building long-term customer relationships. But conversational support doesn’t just benefit your support team. Teams that benefit: Sales, marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 129

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 129

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People explains how asking hard questions, embracing feedback and making personal connections with your customers can move the sales journey from prospect to champion. And then we transition them to support and then we give them to the account manager and then we do their renewal. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 234

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 234

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2018

This is part one of a five-part series to help you develop the sales coaching approach that’s guaranteed to make you an unstoppable sales leader! 4 Steps to Approach Sales Coaching Carefully and Tactically: Use role perception to improve your sales coaching model. Commit to Being Relevant to the Entire Team.

VP of Engineering 110

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Sales 110

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.

Outsourcing Services 206

Outsourcing Services Scale Software Sales Hiring 206

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

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

You are getting enormous levels of organic traffic … Full of enthusiasm, you rush to your sales manager to check the sales status. And your jaw drops seeing you’ve got little to none sales from all of that traffic. You have to make consistent sales if you want to scale your business fast. No, I’m serious.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 144