OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no sales people. ‘No No sales’ became nearly as synonymous with Atlassian as ‘no software’ was with Salesforce. Atlassian now has a sales team. Public PLG Businesses Are Doubling Down on Sales.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

As sales leaders, most of us assume that many aspects of our sales machine will become inefficient during hypergrowth. As we think of ways to improve sales performance, a number of growth pains may come in the way: High acquisition costs. Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. It’s a byproduct.

Scale 56

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 56

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

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. Then, the sales team went to work. In his opinion, the hiring process is a preview of their sales technique.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 168

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 168

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

In the midst of a harsh market sell-off, many tech organizations, even some which, up until a few months ago, had been raising new rounds or had runway to spare, have started to announce spending cuts, layoffs, hiring freezes, and slowdowns. Those customer interviews you did 6 months ago that informed the decisions you made for 2022?

Sales Hiring 138

Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing Headcount 138

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. Your first SaaS customer success hire. The Davidson Hang Podcast with Linda Lin. Riding the hyper-growth wave.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 28, 2021

20 Customer Success Interview Questions to Ask CSM Candidates. Talk with any Customer Success leader or hiring manager today, and they’ll tell you that the demand for experienced Customer Success professionals is off the charts. How much ARR or customers should a CSM manage?”. How do I structure a budget for headcount?”.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Headcount Customer Success Outsourced Development 52

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 28, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Amyra Rand , VP of Sales & Strategic Partnerships at Criteria Corp. Amyra is also a member of the Revenue Collective & the Chapter VP at the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals; she is an MBA from Pepperdine. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast.

VP of Engineering 41

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 41

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

Luckily, we got an invitation to fly out to Mountain View, California and interview in person for YC. I remember we were sitting down on the couches waiting to get interviewed by Jessica Livingston and a couple other partners. ” Then we got … Right after that, we went in and interviewed. Why did we even fly out here?

Scale 112

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Scaling 112

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

The Horizons Framework is an effective way to categorise projects, which in turn helps with assigning budget, headcount and timelines. The key tenet is to understand the real job customers are using or “hiring” your product for. Having a fifth interview only provided an incremental benefit, yet increased costs (time) by a further 25%.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

This requires effort from your entire organization, and Handshake VP, Employer Partnerships Jessica Peluso outlines some changes that you can make to your brand, and your application, interview, and offer process that will help find the talent you are trying to attract and hire. Below is the transcript of Jessica’s session.

Sales Hiring 209

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 209

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 20, 2019

There’s been a lot of discussion around the role of SDRs in modern sales, and what’s changed about the role over the past decade. However, one thing that hasn’t changed is the following: almost every SDR’s goal is to be promoted into a closing sales role, usually as fast as possible. There are a few reasons behind this. Here’s why.

Sales Hiring 35

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Headcount 35

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2019

Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. I was originally hired as Head of Sales, but quickly transitioned to building out our customer success team in order to proactively improve retention. Sales as part of the Customer Success journey. Making Customer Success Scalable.

Scale 69

Scale Customer Success Scaling Sales Hiring 69

Neil Patel

JANUARY 8, 2019

And to give you an idea of how many companies are making this mistake… I interviewed 208 companies that generate over a million bucks in revenue. But because he is great at hiring and building up people, he is able to generate more revenue from the same amount of traffic. If you want to grow fast you need to hire people.

Marketing 111

Marketing Sales Hiring Technical Review Scale 111

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

Here’s some good news: there are tons of amazing product management resources out there. We’ve compiled our favorite articles, advice, podcasts and interviews in this guide. Inner Workings of Product Management at Product Led Growth Companies. Read on for more insights from OpenView’s interviews with product experts.

Management 55

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting 55

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 22, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Catie Ivey , Regional Vice President of Mid-Market Sales at Demandbase. Catie has experience both in sales and marketing roles at Meltwater News, Salesforce, Marketo, and other big-name logos. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. How Catie Got Into Sales [11:20].

Revenue 41

Revenue Scale Strategy Sales Hiring 41

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. If you want to build a revenue engine that will fuel long-term growth, you need to build and scale your sales org with intention. and many more to talk about how they’ve built sales teams from the ground up.

Scale 156

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 156

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

. * How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? * Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? How does Karl structure the hiring process today?

Sales Hiring 215

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 215

ChurnZero

AUGUST 23, 2019

Much like the evolution within the Sales team and the creation of “Sales Ops”, Customer Success is on a similar trajectory. There was also mentioned of combining Revenue, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success ops to one team. What was the sales process? Q&A: Why It’s Time to Build a ‘CS Ops’ Role in Your Organization.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Retention 40

Sales Hacker

APRIL 29, 2021

Your sales org is fundamentally different today than it was a year or two ago. With the advent of sales engagement platforms (SEPs) and other tools which make it easy to scale outbound sales communications, Rolodexes and spreadsheets are things of the past, with technology taking over many formerly manual steps.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 103

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2022

To maintain quality as you scale, don’t compromise your bars on hiring – even if you’re doing it under pressure. Using bots to triage conversations or solve simple queries frees your team to focus on more complex issues and allows you to scale without adding headcount. Liam Geraghty: Macrina, what are your thoughts on this?

Benchmarks 104

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Scale Strategy 104

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

What started as a series of interviews by co-founder Des Traynor soon bloomed into hundreds of episodes where we explore how businesses are driving growth through customer relationships and how to build successful products at scale. I’m recording the first in what I expect to be a series of interesting interviews.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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. The people you’ve spent so long hiring and setting up for success will likely know where the company can improve if you’re humble enough to listen. We’ve done interviews.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

Sales Hacker

JUNE 16, 2021

If you could spend a day with sales teams from some of the most successful companies in the world, what would you see? They’re all on board – marketing, sales, product, customer success, and executive leaders. Their sales tools are integrated effectively, coaching is readily available, and sales reps are happily using their CRM.

Sales Enablement 101

Sales Enablement Scale Sales Hiring Technical Review 101

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 12, 2018

As VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, Elad Gil was a key player as company headcount skyrocketed from 90 to 1,500 employees. This wasn’t Elad’s first experience with hyper growth – Google grew headcount 10x during his time as a product manager there – nor the last. What to consider when hiring a COO.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 120

Chart Mogul

MARCH 10, 2023

But in reality, many PLG success stories leverage traditional inside sales motions alongside self-service to speed up customer acquisition. This is called product-led sales. But in reality, many PLG success stories leverage traditional inside sales motions alongside self-service to speed up customer acquisition.

VP of Engineering 52

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Compensation 52

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

I recently hosted Rachel on our podcast to learn why Slack needed to invest in growth marketing, what her team prioritized first, how they’ve partnered with Slack’s rapidly scaling sales team, and more. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our interview. We got sales leads. We were closing deals.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174

Point Nine Land

APRIL 21, 2021

There are many posts out there explaining how startup co-founders should “land the first sales, then hire the first 2 sales and when to hire a VP sales”. But, in my experience, there’s very little written about what is the equivalent for Product Management. A quick HR interview 2.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Software Review 52

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

First, digital CS will become a way of life due to flat or reduced headcount. Customer sentiment, intention, and level of trust can be surfaced and incorporated into more predictive customer health scores while providing valuable insights and feedback to CSMs and account managers. Post-sales functions will get a rebrand.

Trends 98

Trends Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale 98

Kellblog

JANUARY 2, 2024

Some found themselves blown up (aka Slootmanned ), often in hasty lose/lose transactions leaving customers dissatisfied with reduced attention levels and sales unhappy with additional work without additional resource or pay. Per LinkedIn , headcount is up 240% over the past two years. They continue to rapidly innovate on product.

AI Search 109

AI Search Technical Review Technical Advisors ChatGPT 109