SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

We’re still learning what world we’re in — some people interview over Zoom, some are focused on how to build teams in the current age, and many are dealing with a weird overhang from the SaaS explosion of 2021, quiet quitting, layoffs, and team turnover. The last thing a VP of Sales wants to do is start without a team.

Sales Hiring 148

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 148

Chart Mogul

MAY 30, 2019

Ingmar, our VP of Customer Success, and our support team cracked the code on first response time and measuring NPS. As we grow, we’re able to spend more time developing the proactive tiers of the pyramid without de-prioritizing a strong foundation of fast, helpful ticket replies and features that delight.

Underperforming Technical Team 78

Underperforming Technical Team Development Strategy Management 78

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

Take Stack Overflow , the world’s largest software developer network, community, and platform, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors. In fact, the team intentionally takes a non-dualistic approach that relies more on empathy, flexibility, and context than on the concept of right versus wrong. .

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2019

235: Andrew Filev is the Founder & CEO @ Wrike, the cloud based collaboration and project management software that scales across teams in any business. What are the benefits of starting in SMB? How does the founder know when is the right time to start moving to enterprise? We had a pretty big team.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 145

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Before Quip, Sam spent an incredible 3 years at Dropbox where he was the first enterprise sales rep in the entire company. 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 does one look for in their first sales hire?

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2021

A made-up role so companies can hire more people to tell sales how best to do their job.” — Jason Henson , Manager, SMB Sales Development at Lytx, Inc. . In bad times, the shield is wielded in exec / BOD meetings to obfuscate real data. A neutral team.” — Adithya Krishnaswamy , Head of Growth at Everstage.

Sales Recruiting 91

Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Scale 91

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. Building a great sales team: How Intercom fosters and maintains its sales culture. Onboarding, but make it remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. These evolving demands from enterprise customers bring with them different skillsets customer success managers need to hone.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? So as Lauren sort of alluded to, we started by focusing on SMB’s. Yesterday in here, the CMO of New Relic was talking about how they moved to enterprise.

Underperforming Technical Team 156

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 156

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 26, 2021

All additional clauses in your plan were probably introduced because of a bad past incident by a rep. The industry ranges are around six to nine months for MM/Enterprise sales and three to five months for SMB sales businesses. Companies have a lot of reasons like a history of bad customers, bad sales, etc.

Software Review 95

Software Review Compensation Payment Features Underperforming Technical Team 95

Totango

JULY 8, 2021

To move away from this pattern, we suggest organizations put in place an early customer warning system that enables their customer success team focus on proactive customer retention. We find this solution works best for teams operating in a high- to medium-touch engagement model. How to Build An Early Customer Warning System.

Systems Review 65

Systems Review Underperforming Technical Team Payment Features Churn 65

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

As for Krish, under Krish’s leadership the team has grown to over 300 people and over 5,000 clients making it one of the next generation in truly global SaaS businesses started in India. How does Krish think about purely serving the SMB market? Does one have to move to enterprise? First, what is continuous customer development?

Scale 128

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 128

FastSpring

APRIL 4, 2024

As an experienced sales and GTM leader, John Eitel has more than witnessed how product-led growth (PLG) has affected the tech and SaaS space in the last few years — he and his teams have been up close and personal with how PLG increased in popularity as a sales strategy. “I And it makes up for a lot of bad product experiences, right?

Scale 130

Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 130

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

In my experience, getting caught up in shiny objects (like great numbers) during the hiring process is a straight line to Disasterville, and when the cost of a bad hire is painfully significant , it pays to take a measured approach. Also: What are the top performers in my current team doing? This is a team effort.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 93

FastSpring

DECEMBER 7, 2023

As the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at WP Engine , Carl has worked on many acquisitions and partnerships, including brands like Flywheel, Perfect Dashboard, Block Lab, and recently, Delicious Brains. “This is everyday for me, so I love talking about it,” says Carl Hargreaves about mergers and acquisitions.

Software Review 136

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 136

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Bansal shares this and other key milestones and frameworks for company building in conversation with a16z general partner Peter Levine; enterprise deal team partner Satish Talluri (who was a director of product and growth operations there); and Sonal Chokshi. Today’s episode continues our enterprise go-to-market podcast series.

Product Marketing 80

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 80

ChurnZero

JUNE 11, 2021

Customer health scores give Customer Success teams a deep understanding of a customer’s health and are a leading indicator that there may be an issue with an account or customer. Another example is creating a health score based on tiered implementation: SMB onboarding versus Enterprise onboarding.

Software Review 96

Software Review Systems Review Scale Underperforming Technical Team 96

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Jason : And two things, I founded EchoSign because we had SMBs and enterprise customers. The SMBs during the recession churned at a massive rate, right? And some folks would come back and say, “I want to renegotiate because the world has ended,” but enterprise software is budgeted. We were wrong. Aaron : No.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 205

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Selling to Fortune 500 companies is a different game than SMB. Sometimes all the emails, cold calls, tweets, and inMails in the world still won’t get the attention of key contacts at that enterprise account. At Ghostery, our tiny enterprise sales team has closed almost half of the top 25 eCommerce retailers.

Underperforming Technical Team 67

Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise readiness SMB Enterprise 67

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2020

Before Slack, Rachel spent 4 years at LinkedIn where she led the product marketing team for content experiences. 318: The first step in success with SMB clients is to recognize that it’s not a one size fits all scenario. Companies need a specialized approach for SMB accounts, different than the tactics used for Enterprise.

SMB 180

SMB Scale Startup Marketplace as a Service 180

CustomerSuccessBox

OCTOBER 5, 2021

Know your North Star KPI Setting up CS team as per those KPI Choose the right CS tool Track, Measure, Improve and build collaborative teams. Is your company’s core churn happening because of poor onboarding, lower adoption or just the upsell is not happening at the speed where you are growing.

Customer Success 59

Customer Success Technical Review Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 59

Baremetrics

JANUARY 24, 2021

A year earlier we’d launched the MVP of the model allowing SMB customers to input a credit card to get access to the platform, but we hadn’t had a chance to dedicate time or resources to optimizing a proper SaaS onboarding funnel. We educated them on key functionality and attempted to get them to book a call with a member of our team.

Churn 71

Churn SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Solutions 71

Sales Hacker

MARCH 18, 2019

And: “Our team has been A/B testing a statistically significant sample of subject lines and now we not only know which is the best, but we can tell you why…”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sales Development leaders of the future will be called “Sales Scientists” – you heard it here first. The Enterprise is Jumping on Board.

Technical Review 68

Technical Review Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team 68

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. On the other hand, their Enterprise segment is bigger and doing great. But in other years, SMBs are jumping in the boat, so you get amazing growth long-term with a multi-segment strategy. Daniel’s team is an anti-gravity device.

Sales Hiring 217

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 217

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 23, 2018

Chasing only enterprise deals. 1) Chasing Only Enterprise Deals. There’s a general tendency among most frontline sales teams to sell to enterprises and become the next Salesforce. It’s great to dream about bagging enterprise deals with the Fortune 500 companies. Starting off with SMB sales can be an advantage.

B2B 55

B2B Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review 55

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. Andy MacMillan: I started my career in tech actually as a developer. How does one instil volume based pricing without disincentivizing usage? Andy MacMillan: Excellent.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 202

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Here’s what Eyal and Megan talk about: How to develop software faster. But I think what it boils down to is also how newer technology is being developed and the ability for it to inter-operate with other platforms. It’s not an SMB where you’re getting volumes of 100 a day. Missed the session? So it’s that.

SaaS Payments 132

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 132

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

Join PagerDuty’s CEO, Jennifer Tejada, as she discusses the need for agility and innovation and how automation is aiding adaptability and allowing enterprises to surge ahead. This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Summit: Enterprise. How do you leverage your team to do that? This episode is sponsored by Linode.

Scale 159

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 159

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). You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. SaaStr is Turning 10!

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 263

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

Vikas’ Journey from Sales Engineer to Managing a BD Team (22:20). He leads Kustomer’s sales and customer experience departments, overseeing sales, business development, implementation, customer success, and support. Vikas builds teams that follow this ethos. And that just wasn’t the job back in those days as a developer.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 50

ChurnZero

JANUARY 4, 2019

the stuff that Customer Success teams are really meant to do). One customer success trend I’m seeing is the need to develop more repeatable customer education programs. The biggest trend I see emerging in Europe, which started at the end of 2018 is Customer Success Plans becoming a staple asset of Customer Success teams.

Customer Success 73

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 73

Upscope

JANUARY 4, 2021

Intercom developed one of those typical guidance systems you see when you sign up to a new website. They want to understand the pricing, the team management options, the possible future cost and lots more. You could ask them to book a demo with your sales team and some people prefer that. We need to get on it. "For

Software Review 52

Software Review Systems Review Technical Review Scale 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

The first step in success with SMB clients is to recognize that it’s not a one size fits all scenario. Companies need a specialized approach for SMB accounts, different than the tactics used for Enterprise. Agnes Bazin | Chief Development Officer @ Doctolib. Okay, it’s not bad. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 107

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 107

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

The first step in success with SMB clients is to recognize that it’s not a one size fits all scenario. Companies need a specialized approach for SMB accounts, different than the tactics used for Enterprise. Agnes Bazin | Chief Development Officer @ Doctolib. Okay, it’s not bad. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 108

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 108