SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2023

This is the reason 70%+ of SaaS companies that IPO are just new version of old, successful things: About 70% of SaaS Unicorns Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software | SaaStr But … but … Small markets can grow into large markets if you change the market or there is otherwise disruption in the market. One of the best sales people.

Sales Recruiting 213

Sales Recruiting Marketing Sales Hiring Market Segmentation 213

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at engineering. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 300

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. The same is true in software. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. When I say “execute”, I don’t simply mean the engineering challenges of building something.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2021

In fact, many founders and CEOs struggle with simply talking to their engineers and communicating their needs. The mysterious nature of engineers is also their superpower as they build products that make the seemingly impossible possible. At his core, Jeff Lawson is a software developer first, and the CEO of Twilio second.

Sales Recruiting 163

Sales Recruiting Development Software Review Management 163

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

I’ve never created LinkedIn content with the “goal” of lead generation or immediate-term sales. Another cool example I really like is Tito Bohrt — he stands out with the pseudo, “ Sales Mad Scientist ” — which demonstrates confidence and a unique identity online.

Sales Recruiting 127

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 127

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. Outbound: including Account Based Marketing (ABM).

Scale 199

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 199

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Sales. Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer. Positions Needed: FP&A Analyst, Accountant, HR, Ops, Recruiter.

CTO Hire 249

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 249

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

But now they are back to picking the types of risk they like to take: Lack of A+ Engineering Team Risk. In SaaS, VCs seem to split two ways on the engineering team. I’m 100% OK taking a lot of risk here because I know I can help them recruit a local team as much as necessary or desired. The Googlers. The Palantirians.

Scale 339

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 339

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. Recruiting is easier, but the things that don’t change are customers don’t care.

Sales Recruiting 249

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 249

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2023

The first goal of sales at a startup isn’t to bring in revenue — it’s to get customer feedback. I’ve used our sales process to iterate our way to product market-fit and wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way. Use sales conversations as a tool to get product feedback. So how do you get there?

Sales Recruiting 88

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 88

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. Chief Operating Officer: Responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations, providing strategic advice, and managing the company’s operations. Average salary: $192,383/yr.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 94

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve seen four stages in early stage software companies.

Compensation 153

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 153

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 121

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 121

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 178

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 178

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. If you’re hiring a sales leader, you don’t pass up an awesome sales leader that has a killer track record of closing deals just because in their previous company they sold success software, and then with your company, they’re going to sell MarTech.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Acquisition 248

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

Whether it’s creating better tools to write code and test code, better tools for customers to engage with reps, better tools for sales teams to engage with their prospects, all those things are happening inside of Bill. Alex: Immad has strong feelings about AI replacing engineers. GenAI comes in to make employees efficient.

Payments 107

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 107

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 185

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 185

InsightSquared

MAY 15, 2019

It’s one of my favorite questions to ask a fellow professional in sales operations. Insurance sales rep. Account Manager. Sales Operations is Still Developing. Sales operations as a profession is growing, yet it is a comparatively new function in businesses. Sales Ops is Many Disciplines in One.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 110

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long. Rather, they masquerade as an agency with a completely different engine, one powered by algorithms. In some cases, agencies sell their time.

AI 191

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 191

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

I’ve never created LinkedIn content with the “goal” of lead generation or immediate-term sales. Another cool example I really like is Tito Bohrt — he stands out with the pseudo, “ Sales Mad Scientist ” — which demonstrates confidence and a unique identity online.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 52

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

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. So in that shift from product-market fit to product-market-SALES fit, how much should you optimize your go-to-market for product… and even the other way around?

Product Marketing 81

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 81

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

When I ventured out to build my first Customer Success department at a tech software company, my leadership team thought I was nuts. At the time, I was a sales engineer, and my job was to close deals and move on to the next prospect. However, I found there were two flaws in our customer management process.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review Compensation 98

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 5, 2023

So, myself and my co founder, we were kind of software developers, like kind of engineers by background. So, as I said, we founded Plaid in New York City and there were a lot of people in the New York community that were interested in building software for financial services. We said, “Hey, we’ll publish an API.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Banking Outsourced Development 91

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2017

Or an engineer pushing a new devops tool to other developers? This might seem like a very logical argument for differentiating on sales processes, but it’s a fallacy. First, it presumes that the most valuable skill set in sales is building rapport. How many marketers are currently looking to move into sales right now?

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourced Development 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2015

Both companies eventually offered talent acquisition, performance management, and learning tools for human resources teams. Taleo initially focused on recruiting tools and SuccessFactors on performance management. Both Taleo and SuccessFactors spent roughly equal amounts as a percent of revenue on engineering.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Acquisition 100

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2020

But if you are a VP of Sales being told to reduce costs, what is the best way to approach these cuts to minimize damage to the company and your team? Sales should be one of the last places to reduce costs — after all, salespeople are the engine of the revenue machine. Recruit Newly Available Talent. Start Small.

Sales Recruiting 103

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Compensation 103

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 17, 2018

Winning teams I’ve been part of How winning teams are constructed is timely, as in my role leading sales enablement at Automation Anywhere , shortly we’ll be growing the team, and I want to be thoughtful about the work we do, the candidates we hire and the culture we foster on what we hope and expect to be a winning team.

Sales Recruiting 152

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Construction Strategy 152

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Steve has previously said, “Sales and marketing must be one team.” Where does Steve find common points of tension between sales and marketing? I mean, my career started as a software engineer, and out of frustration, I went into sales. Why does he believe this is so important? What works?

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. I don’t know anything about sales. More power to you.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 261

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2015

In every sales process for every SaaS startup, there is one ultimate internal champion advocating the purchasing decision. One way of looking at this question is to compare the successes of software companies targeting different departments. Salesforce Sales 92%. And it’s their budget that will be used to pay for it.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Scale 111

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2023

Despite not being classed as a C-level position, product managers are often leading multidisciplinary initiatives that start with your developers and end with the sales team so confident leadership is a must. How would you manage a team that works across time zones and remotely? Leadership. What is product vision?

Interviewing 82

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Management Sales Hiring 82

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2020

Prior to Work-Bench, Jessica was a Learning and Development Manager at Cisco Systems, where she worked with the Engineering organization on Agile transformation, innovation and culture. Where does Jessica find managers and founders do pipe reviews wrong? How should sales teams and CS respond to requests for discounts?

Sales Recruiting 176

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 176

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

You need a range of disciplines working together in a cross-functional team to make sure various product development processes go to plan, including product managers , developers, marketers , sales, designers , senior leaders , and more. Senior management. The final step is to launch your product.

Development 94

Development Software Review Sales Recruiting Technical Review 94

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

Ever since he was hired as the Director of EMEA Sales at BrowserStack , a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, he had to completely rethink how to successfully onboard hundreds of salespeople just as everyone was going remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

So, you just raised your series E one of the European software unicorns, congrats on that. I remember talking to Belgium investors at the time and everybody said, look, enterprise software is dead, there’s no opportunity through investment. Felix : There’s no way to be successful with enterprise software.

Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 177