Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. To do the first, we had to hire, train, and write a playbook – the building blocks of any team. Relentlessly measure impact.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2020

But with so much data to consider, how can you define the help desk metrics that matter for your team? This can empower teams to take strategic action to improve their overall support experience for customers. This metric represents the average amount of time it takes your customer support team to settle a case once it’s opened.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Metrics Technical Review Scale 211

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! That makes up about 35 percent of our revenue now. 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. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 333

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 333

SaaSOptics

MAY 2, 2022

There are several different ways to successfully launch and scale a SaaS company. In a sales-led model, sales processes and teams are the primary drivers of revenue growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but neither is better or worse than the other. For example, Zoom’s annual revenue increased 325.81%.

Scale 97

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 97

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

And yet, downplaying your team’s needs undermines CS’s current impact and future revenue-driving potential. According to our 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study, CS teams are already underfunded and under-resourced. But it’s not about driving revenue at all costs, cautions Jeff. Now we have a name for this.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 98

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

One of the biggest challenges businesses face when they grow is scaling effective , autonomous and quick decision-making. In short, they make it easy to see what each team, department and organisation is working on, omitting and their respective goals. Again, it was an easy to use model which scaled effective decision-making.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 2, 2022

Does your Customer Success team have the right structure, workload, and engagement model to hit its goals? Re-segmenting your customer base is a natural evolution of your company, product, and team’s growth. All CS leaders eventually undertake this exercise to scale engagement and improve the customer experience.

Headcount 98

Headcount Underperforming Technical Team Scale Outsourced Development 98

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

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Scaling Your Personalization. AI can help scale this, but we need to be careful not to rely too heavily on it. To scale your outreach you need to build a system to ensure your message gets seen. The system you set up becomes even more important once you begin doing outreach at scale, but I’ll go over that more later.

Scale 107

Scale Scaling AI Search AI 107

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

If you don’t want to manage all of the infrastructure around Iceberg (plus allocating headcount to do this!) One key component of a modern cloud-native data architecture is the data lake - which allows for cost-efficient storage of large amounts of data used for analytics and ML at scale.

Data 130

Data Government Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 130

Sales Hacker

MAY 21, 2020

It’s easy, it scales well, but by definition it puts a lot of the process out of your hands. There isn’t a continual feedback loop between teams. They may or may not have developed a follow-up schedule but are not continually testing. When inbound sales and marketing works, it’s great. Build in Feedback Loops.

Scale 132

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Technology 132

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of Customer Success at the revenue intelligence platform Gong. 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.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

I saw this as a client partner and then regional managing director at an eBusiness firm that scaled from 0 to 2,000 people in three years, organically. The same was true when I ran the People function at a software development consultancy that doubled its headcount to ~100 while reducing attrition from 40% to 5% voluntary in 18 months.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

If you’re in a position to fill a sales role, you’re likely already feeling the pressure, because your revenue targets are built on the assumption that your team is fully staffed. These factors can quickly derail a sales team. Do: Move quickly to hire sales talent — empty seats mean lost revenue. Is compensation too low?

Sales Hiring 76

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 76

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

And you and your team won’t waste your time working on bad opportunities. The first question sales leaders and their teams need to answer is: who is our customer? If you stay too high-level, the pain could be misinterpreted by your team and the rest of the organization. No more convincing them to buy. No spray and pray.

Scale 107

Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 107

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

When I left Buildium five years later we’d grown from a start-up to a business with more than 12,000 customers and $16M in revenue. I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. Buildium was 100% bootstrapped—no small angel round or anything like that—until the company reached about $6M in revenue.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Andreessen Horowitz

JANUARY 17, 2024

They know there’s 5 individuals with semi-automatic weapons in the car, SWAT team responds, and those people are now in jail. What I don’t think people know is quite the size and scale of the company today. But the only time the sheriff gets a phone call is when something really, really bad has happened.

Technical Review 80

Technical Review Technology Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 80

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 13, 2021

As Customer Success as a discipline has grown, it has also developed an accompaniment of misconceptions and myths, generating a lot of confusion about how to do it right and scale successfully. Myth #1: You can create a powerful digital engagement model and scale your Customer Success organization without investing in Operations.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 52

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 15, 2021

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is an overnight sensation that’s been years in the making. 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.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Benchmarks Scale Underperforming Technical Team 97

Baremetrics

JULY 25, 2019

Because of its immense impact on warfare and commerce, weather forecasting has commanded significant research and development focus since the 1980’s, second only to cryptography in global consumption of compute cycles. Measuring Up: A Forecasting Maturity Scale. Where is your business on this maturity scale? Yes and no.

Forecasting 88

Forecasting Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 88

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

That’s because very few contingency plans accounted for the scale and nature of the disruption we’re all experiencing. And even though revenue forecasts might be highly uncertain, most managers have a good idea of how much it will cost them to operate their businesses under different scenarios. Monitoring and refining.

Forecasting 40

Forecasting Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Scale 40

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

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 was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue? I met my wife in sales boot camp.

Scale 171

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 171

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

ChurnZero

JUNE 3, 2022

VC and PE firms now ask founders about the metrics owned by CS teams, specifically NRR and GRR , within the first ten minutes of conversation. The switching costs are lower, bringing with it a new set of disciplines and KPIs we need to master if we’re going to retain those clients and keep that predictable revenue stream.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring B2B Technical Review 52

ChurnZero

JUNE 3, 2022

VC and PE firms now ask founders about the metrics owned by CS teams, specifically NRR and GRR , within the first ten minutes of conversation. The switching costs are lower, bringing with it a new set of disciplines and KPIs we need to master if we’re going to retain those clients and keep that predictable revenue stream.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring B2B Technical Review 52

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. 12 steps to build a world-class sales team. The “Why sales?”

Scale 156

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 156

BetterCloud

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

One exec’s greatest failure: “I was seduced by a build scenario … it turned out to be a very poor decision”. After being “seduced by a build scenario,” Holst-Knudsen says he convinced the company to move ahead with it, which turned out to be a very poor decision. But software development and IT resources are still a cost.

VP of Engineering 45

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Engineering 45

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

Salesforce, which turned 20 in March, surpassed $13 billion in annual revenue this year. That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Today’s SaaS powerhouses scaled with a dated playbook: sales led growth.

Scale 70

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 70

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. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. To find out, we sat down with Jeanne de Witte , Head of North America Revenue & Growth at Stripe.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

Many companies are strategic consumers of open-source software as a means to reduce the burden on their software engineering team to build everything from the ground up. Related podcast episode: How MongoDB Scaled Their Open-Source Product with a Bottom-Up and Top-Down Sales Motion.

Business 52

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 52

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. We hear from Tara Bryant again, on moving upmarket.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

Salesforce, which turned 20 in March, surpassed $13 billion in annual revenue this year. That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Today’s SaaS powerhouses scaled with a dated playbook: sales led growth.

Scale 51

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 51

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

Salesforce, which turned 20 in March, surpassed $13 billion in annual revenue this year. That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). Today’s SaaS powerhouses scaled with a dated playbook: sales led growth.

Scale 40

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 40

Sales Hacker

JULY 8, 2020

Michael is a member of Revenue Collective, but perhaps most importantly, he’s the chief sales and strategy officer for Compass, that fast-growing real estate behemoth. Michael talks about how he does that at scale and how he thinks about scale. Making something big even bigger with strategic revenue generation [12:03].

Scale 113

Scale Scaling VP of Engineering Technical Review 113

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. How does this requirement change as the company scales? How does Karl think about doing this at scale?

Sales Hiring 217

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 217

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

In August of 2016, Rachel Hepworth embarked on a unique challenge: start a growth marketing team at one of the most successful startups of this generation – one that had long relied heavily on word of mouth. I stumbled upon Eric Ries and Steve Blank, the concept of customer development – it was a revelation.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174