Kellblog

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Going forward, while VCs clearly have dry powder , what’s unclear is their willingness to invest it. Some companies treat these as publicity stunts, talking a big vision, but not really investing. Management teams should prepare themselves for activist investors and adapt their financial profile to keep valuations high.

Software Review 118

Software Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 118

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

But boy, I can tell you from all the companies I have invested and worked with that have a hardware/software component, it really actually gets brutal as you scale. There was another company I invested in called Automile, that for a while was quite successful in SMB fleet tracking, tracking where your fleets of vehicles are.

Scale 202

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 202

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. No one has an engineering team with the time to build anything. Is that a good investment to make?

Scale 198

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 198

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2019

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community and leading early-stage SaaS fund with investments in Automile, TalkDesk, Algolia and more. What can founders do to their pricing model to extract as much value from each customer? How do the very best businesses structure their pricing for value extraction? *

Outsourcing Services 112

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring SMB 112

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 5, 2018

No wonder you never want to eat out again… The Sales Development outsourcing industry is broken for that exact reason. Most companies are competing on price, and when you hear about the $4.50 Your cost of trying to build Sales Development in house is therefore $90,000 at a minimum. You’re also getting food poisoning.

Outsourcing Services 76

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Outsourcing Underperforming Technical Team 76

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Turns out a founding team of six MBAs creating a full suite of products sold solely to SMBs can become a multi-million dollar public company in nine years – and continue growing rapidly ($77.6 Dharmesh : …said, “This is a very bad idea. million in 2013 to $115.9 million in 2014.). I said, “Holy crap.

Part-Time VPE 206

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 206

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 product and what you invest in proactively need to change as you move into enterprise? We had a pretty big team.

Sales Hiring 140

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 140

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. When done correctly, your sales strategy will help your sales team execute with focus – SMB or enterprise, inbound or outbound, hunting or farming. 8 steps to develop a winning sales strategy. But that threshold exists.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

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 144

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 144

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. This will result in poor open and response rates. Here, we’ve searched for organizations that raised Series A investment in the last 30 days. Apollo’s full plan comes with an SMB level price tag; as a startup, you probably want the basic plan.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Sales Hacker

APRIL 25, 2019

The SMB Decision: In-House vs. Outsourced Sales Development. As a high-growth SMB, your number-one focus is consistent sales. Without a sales development team, you can find yourself struggling when it comes to pipeline generation. The Four Costs of In-House Sales Development. Salary and benefits costs.

Outsourcing Services 75

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 75

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2019

As for Jeppe, prior to founding Pleo he was the CEO @ Nodes, a design and development house that worked with brands including Loreal, BMW and Lego. How does the product build in the early days differ when building for SMB vs enterprise? Why does Jeppe believe that building for SMB makes it easier to build a great culture internally?

Scale 117

Scale SaaS Payments SMB Sales Hiring 117

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? How does he think about the mortality rate of SMBs? What questions reveal the most?

Scale 123

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 123

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

* Why does Andy think the seat-based pricing model in SaaS will die? Why is volume-based pricing optimal? How does one instil volume based pricing without disincentivizing usage? What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? Andy MacMillan: I started my career in tech actually as a developer.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Technical Review 185

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Why is it so crucial to invest in enablement in the early days? 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. How should this enablement be structured?

SaaS Payments 128

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 128

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

Prior to joining the world of venture, Karen was a Senior Director at Apple and before Apple, Karen spent an incredible 9 years at Box as a founding member of the executive team, where she was responsible for defining and leading Box’s Industry GTM strategy. What were Karen’s biggest takeaways from seeing the hyper-scaling at Box?

Scale 167

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Investment Sales Hiring 167

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. As for pricing, how do you know you’re not leaving value on the table?

Product Marketing 74

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 74

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 199

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

Developer platform: a business where developers can build businesses on top of the business’s software and charge customers. The Weak Transition to Marketplace Arguments. There are three fairly weak arguments I don’t like, but I’ll present them anyway. #1 Take them from the marketplace team.

Marketplace as a Service 106

Marketplace as a Service Business Model Business Underperforming Technical Team 106

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

And, the price should be within your budget. UserGuiding is a product adoption platform that offers interactive product walkthroughs, checklists , resource centers, and more – all at an affordable price point. With a multitude of options available on review platforms, selecting the most suitable tool can be difficult.

Software Review 52

Software Review Technical Review Onboarding Outsourced Development 52

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. Many of these are names that you know, and this is actually the largest we’ve seen in history. I think it’s a really staggering stat. We talked about growth.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

You also need to ensure that the price of your chosen tool matches your budget. Its implementation can be time-consuming and challenging for non-technical team members. Nonetheless, Walkme pricing is expensive and it’s mostly used by Enterprise companies. But it all comes at a price. Pros of Pendo?

Software Review 52

Software Review Technical Review Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

What are the core metrics founders should measure to determine the effectiveness of their reps and sales teams? How does this differ between SMB and enterprise? Something that we did really poorly at TalentBin early on was not really focusing on a very crisply defined ICP and insufficiently investing in customer success.

Part-Time VPE 187

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 187

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

Historically, growth of a sales team was based on the revenue starting with $0M on day 1 of the year. However, in a SaaS model , the customer acquisition team can grow revenue to $1M in year 1. If the same team keeps performing at the same growth it will achieve $2M in year 2 – whilst the renewals come in at 100%.

Scale 87

Scale Growth Hacking Scaling Sales Hiring 87

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2019

During his 5 years at PatientPop, Justin grew sales from $0 to $56m alongside the full build-out of the sales team. As a manager observing their team, what are signs that an individual is burning out? What actions and communications must they adopt to ensure that this feeling of culture over performance is accepted by the team?

Scale 133

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Interviewing 133

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Never believe that doubting yourself is a bad thing. That company only lasted another year before they were out of business, so it was a poor use of my energy, time, and being away from my family – a lesson I work to pass on to others new in roles today. Invest in your development internally and externally.

Scale 130

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 130

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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2019

Before Assist, Liat spent 6 years at Twitter where she first hand saw their hyper-growth, managing a team of 40 across New York and SF and also Liat achieved 102% to quota on average every year. Pricing? * As for Liat, prior to Airtable, she was the Chief Revenue Officer @ Assist. How does it impact messaging and brand?

Sales Hiring 107

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team 107

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 25, 2020

But Sapper Consulting has built REGIE to keep the promise of sales enablement and keep your team doing what they do best, which is winning. REGIE uses your targeting to inform your campaigns and decreases the time your team spends creating campaigns because that’s a pain in the ass.

Management 72

Management Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Development Team Review 72

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 49

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 49

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

She manages a huge global team. It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? Sam will have a lot of interesting perspectives on how he manages his team through these times. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 168

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 168

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 6, 2019

For instance, many teams build apps on Intercom so users can leverage their workflows and services within our live chat Messenger and messages. But how do you decide when to build an app for your product and what platforms to invest in? But how do you decide when to build an app for your product and what platforms to invest in?

Scale 190

Scale Branding Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise 190

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Nick Mehta: Power of the developer, or the API economy, both of you play very much in both those trends. How do you help your team make that link to value? We’ve got a lot of training to do with our sales teams to get them to start to speak in these types of terms versus feature function. Nick Mehta: Yeah.

Payment Methods 185

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 185

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

And we had a variety of software offerings, everything from WordPress themes and plugins, a local development tool called Local and then had very SaaS like elements to our offering there. And then, for seven years, the role I had right before FastSpring, I worked for a company called WP Engine. I think that was surprising for me.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

As for Allison, in her 5 years at Gainsight her list of achievements in endless from running all functions that drive value for Gainsight customers, now a 150 person team, to building out the corporate development function to being the right hand to the CEO. How can one approach setting up a services team for scale?

Engineering 25

Engineering Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success 25