User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

Wondering how to scale customer success in SaaS and drive product growth ? If you’re a leading SaaS company, you know that growth is directly tied to helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. This article discusses ten tips that can help you to effectively scale customer success teams in SaaS.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 80%-100% YoY growth) to the next phase — Initial Scale. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business.

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OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Once dominated by relationships, sales today (especially SaaS sales) are equally propelled by technology. With the broad adoption of CRM, the rise of the sales tech stack, and the advent of social selling and other digital sales channels, the sales landscape has shifted dramatically. Scaling SaaS Sales.

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SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment. Revenue per employee has doubled since 2021, leading to budget cuts and the necessity for leaders to achieve more with fewer resources.

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Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

That result alone should encourage rethinking of AE interviewing. It formed the basis for a career at HubSpot predicated on consistent quantitative analysis to scale the go-to-market, which he detailed in the Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. Adam Grant delimited the types of interviews with the greatest predictive power.

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SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2022

Yes, sometimes it’s OK to hire a VP of Sales that everyone loves. At least 9 times out of 10, if everyone on the team loves a VP of Sales, it’s the wrong hire. And this especially matters because I often see CEOs picking between 2 final VP of Sales candidates. Even if they were, how many hired a VP of Sales at your ACV before?

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Totango

JANUARY 12, 2022

Being a Customer Success Manager (CSM) can be an extremely rewarding career. At Totango, we’re always looking for great candidates to join our growing team , so we asked some of our leaders to share their top Customer Success Manager interview questions and their ideal answers. Check out their responses below! .

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

And in fact, about 90% of SaaS companies that IPO still have their founder as CEO : SaaS CEOs That Go The Distance, To IPO … Tend To Be Founder-CEOs (Updated) Ultimately I see only one problem with founder CEOs: If they can’t constantly recruit, and recruit again, and recruit again , a world class management team. Recruiting is hard.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

Finding the perfect VP of Sales position can be daunting, especially in the middle of a global pandemic. Candidates need to find opportunities that not only fit their sales experience and stretch goals, but also companies that are coming out of the pandemic with momentum. Who is looking to hire a VP of Sales in January / Q1?

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ChurnZero

JULY 22, 2022

As Donna Weber , the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding, knows, onboarding is about more than completing product training and filling out checklists. I recommend you interview customers. I would interview 5 to 10 customers and ask what ah-ha moment made them glad they bought your product.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

To solve this, Deel interviewed 200 founders seeking answers to the question, “If you’re open to hiring internationally and remotely, what are your biggest challenges, and what kind of product can we build to solve them?” Manage scaling issues by using data to plan ahead and being team and customer-obsessed.

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Valuize Consulting

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Achieving Customer Success At Scale. As your customer base grows, the need to lead operations transformation, scale your CS team, manage intricate customer relationships and reach your customers across multiple touchpoints, is compounded. Q: What was your first job? How did you get started in Customer Success?

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OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

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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 I won’t give away too much of the lead here.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

As Managing Director of Salesforce Ventures, Nowi Kallen , shared at last week’s Workshop Wednesday, there are five main challenges of moving upmarket and tips to follow if you want to succeed at Enterprise sales in today’s macro environment. For many, moving upmarket makes sense to scale. The solution for this challenge?

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Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. But no sales team can afford to grow without intention. While building a sales team, we’ve focused a lot on our sales culture. Here’s how we went about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture-additive.

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Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

One of the most consistent errors made in sales projections and planning is mismatching the ramp time to the sales cycle. If my startup has a 9 months sales cycle and the VP of Sales projects a six month ramp time, my startup is committing this error. Leads have been nurtured in that territory for a while.

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User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

What’s customer value management? TL;DR Customer Value Management (CVM) is a business process that focuses on analyzing customer needs , building outstanding products that satisfy them, and enabling users to realize their value. Overall, customer value management can make your product more competitive. What are its stages?

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SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

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CustomerSuccessBox

JUNE 21, 2022

Yet, it’s often easy said than actually done, especially, when you’re looking for Customer Onboarding at Scale. To help you, we have compiled a list of the top 8 strategies that will enable you to carry out customer onboarding at scale. 8 Best Strategies for Customer Onboarding at Scale. Partnership Kick-off meeting.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Google Cloud has matured a lot over the last couple of years, invested in AI for such a long time, and being a part of a company that’s strongest in GenAI is what’s important for startups scaling in this direction. It was interesting because they got to interview a bunch of customers and sales executives.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a pre-Scale sales-driven SaaS company. Someone that knows, lives and breathes leads, funnels and funnel management, drip marketing, and all the rest. A Lead Commit. Or SQL commit. ” Pass.

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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. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first. Names stick.

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SaaStr

MAY 11, 2021

I’m not sure I’m a great giver of golden advice, but here’s my list of the best golden advice I’ve been given: Manage People — In General, and Earlier. The earlier in your career you can learn how to manage people, the faster you can excel in learning to scale. Managing people isn’t always fun. Get on a Jet.

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SaaStr

JULY 9, 2019

Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Now, unfortunately there are a lot of constraints in Africa, major constraints when you’re talking about setting up and scaling a startup. Well, you have to build a direct sales force. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

In two one-hour interviews, FastSpring sales leaders Todd Stellfox and Tony Markov each interviewed Kurt about pricing strategies that work in volatile markets and beyond. Stream both interviews below and see highlights from each. Schedule a demo to learn how we can help you scale across borders to go farther faster.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2021

The moment comes when it’s time to hire your first VP Sales. We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales , What a VP Sales Really Does , and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. So at this stage, the VP Sales, while necessary, sure looks expensive.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 210

FastSpring

AUGUST 3, 2022

There are several things you can do to prepare your go-to-market teams for changes in your prospects’ and customers’ buying behaviors and priorities. Another place to get fresher takes are industry thought leader interviews and posts. Account-based sales companies are accustomed to defining sales regions.

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Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. The Founder isn’t willing to be the first salesperson Many of the best founders we work with don’t have a sales background and are either product or engineering focused.

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SaaSX

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

This article should really be titled, “How to interview a product manager (if you aren’t a product person) “ Because customer success, marketing, sales, support, and other operational roles are key stakeholders in a SaaS organization they are often called into the interview process for product managers.

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Totango

JULY 28, 2021

Following best practices for hiring a customer success manager can make a critical difference in the quality of your customer relationships. Customer success managers serve as the face of your company in dealing with clients, playing a key role in ensuring satisfying experiences of your brand. What Is a Customer Success Manager?

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SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2021

We were fortunate enough to interview CEOs who were in the trenches navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, investors who were advising companies on how best to move forward, and operators who saw explosive growth given the shift to working from home. . Out of its headquarters in Utah, Podium scaled from 5 employees to over 300 employees.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit The Sales Rep Making $500,000 That Was Angry About His Base Salary Want Happy Customers? SaaStr 634: Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed  5.

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Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

In interviewing great CMOs , the product marketing leader is the first marketer most startups should recruit, and often the first key mishire. Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. This makes sense.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

How to interview them and qualify them. Some classics here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days. Your VP of Sales Shouldn’t Be Perfect. 10 Crystal Clear Signs Your VP of Sales Just Isn’t Going to Work Out. No alignment with sales.

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OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

Premature scaling is the leading cause of failure, but businesses with two founders are 19% less likely to scale prematurely, as well as raising 30% more money and enjoying 3 times more user growth. But scaling is a unique phenomenon which needs to be constantly managed. Use Automation. Employ Freelancers.

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