SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. How defendable is the technology of the product or the business model? So that’s easy.

Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 247

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments. David’s first foray into SaaS was in 1999 when he joined a startup that would become PayPal, starting as the product leader and later as the COO. In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Product.

CTO Hire 245

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 245

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.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

The Angel VC

APRIL 1, 2017

At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. Being willing to invest in an internal recruiter or talent manager (or more broadly, an HR person) early on requires pretty big balls a lot of confidence.

Sales Hiring 168

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Software Review 168

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 94

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 15, 2021

Invest in great managers early. They write code, author blog posts, publish the website, attract customers, with the goal of achieving product-market fit. Post-PMF, the organization must evolve: it has to grow headcount and then manage that headcount well. On the left, the startup is flat. On the right, three.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 363

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

I was the new Vice President of International Sales & Managing Director for a work management software company called Wrike. Starting Your International Sales Team. The key to starting an international sales team is having the right people in your landing team. A mercenary is driven by the sale.

Sales Hiring 99

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 99

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE 181

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 181

User Pilot

APRIL 19, 2024

This segmentation helps in personalizing marketing and sales strategies effectively. Recruiting Participants for Primary Research Choosing the right participants for primary research is a crucial step in market research. Building a Business Case : Provides evidence and data to justify investment in the new product.

Market Research 52

Market Research Sales Recruiting Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

The market need for SaaS products has exploded and investment in SaaS companies has accelerated, requiring more talent to grow and scale. Competitive pressures and changing customer needs can be captured by a great marketing or product marketing lead. Accelerate hiring of internal recruiters.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 8, 2021

Elements of Successful Global Sales Expansion. “Be So, let’s look at four keys to a successful global sales expansion. Make Investments Across the Board, and Make a Plan for the Resources You Have. Global expansion requires strong business partners in all functions, and committed investment across the board.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Technical Review 82

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

Whether it’s creating better tools to write code and test code, better tools for customers to engage with reps, better tools for sales teams to engage with their prospects, all those things are happening inside of Bill. We’re experimenting with it, but we haven’t made a massive investment.

Payments 107

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 107

Kellblog

JULY 17, 2022

Create a product. Get product-market fit (PMF), i.e., determine some problem you solve for some person with some product. Go sell some software to prove there’s a market. Let’s understand what these three elements mean and think about how much to invest in them. Go sell some software.

Branding 132

Branding Startup Software Sales Recruiting 132

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Once a startup has found an initial product market fit, the business must evolve the way it models its growth. Before product market fit, a startup’s financial projections focus on costs. In other words, how much cash investment is required to double or triple or quadruple revenues in the next year.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Revenue Startup Sales Hiring 111

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Prior to Harness, Stephen was VP of Marketing at Glassdoor, managing a team of 52 in product marketing, helping grow B2B revenue from $19m to $90m in just 2 years, leading to their $1.2Bn acquisition. Steve has previously said, “Sales and marketing must be one team.” Why does he believe this is so important?

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 26, 2021

The exciting thing about prototypes is that large-scale experiments can be built through open-source projects , which companies like Netflix and Linkedin will do as a strategic way of recruiting top talent. . Why startup founders should treat fundraising like a sales funnel. Milestone: First traction and product-market fit .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Marketing 82

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

How they came up with the idea of Brex, and product market fit. One of the things that I feel like fintech companies really struggle with is what is product market fit? Did you have a product? How do you really … because it takes a long time in fintech for product market fit. Henrique : Yeah.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 156

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 29, 2021

“You need at least a couple folks on the team who are experienced—not necessarily in the startup process, but with product management or even just business operations.”. Nikita’s Non-traditional Recruiting Approach. Create a Profile of Your Ideal Product Manager. Finding and Recruiting the Right Product People.

Sales Hiring 60

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Management 60

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2019

As for Ryan, prior to G2 he was Senior Director of Global Marketing at Hubspot where among many other achievements, he scaled HubSpot’s marketing-generated sales revenue by 330% year-over-year. We would generate 10x what we invested into that based on those people. Which is a super useful tactic.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Software Review 131

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

As they get larger or introduce new product lines too quickly, we often go too broad with the market that we’re serving and start losing touch with the customer’s needs. In other words, the product-market fit becomes weaker for some of the target audience. The product momentum gap by Dave Martin.

Scale 89

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Software Review 89

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Arthur is a Principal at Knight Capital – an investment firm that specialises in B2B software businesses. We found out that there is a lot of content surrounding product-market fit, there is also a lot of content around a company doing an IPO and the founder reflecting on the journey. Levers of scaling a SaaS company.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting SaaS 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? Pipedrive sold for $1.5B.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 241

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Billion story from its launch in 2008 to its 2018 acquisition by Recruit Holdings. Hear about the early days of Glassdoor; tactical lessons on scaling—from building a business model and recruiting an all-star management team to advice on building a compelling, innovative company culture; and learn whyGlassdoor’s $1.2

Scale 127

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 127

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

Product-market fit has been really important. I remember talking to Belgium investors at the time and everybody said, look, enterprise software is dead, there’s no opportunity through investment. And so again we would just have added to more kind of friction in the sales cycle and there was a whole video long sales cycle.

Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 177

Sales Hacker

MARCH 17, 2021

Strict sales volume does go a long way in achieving long-term revenue growth, but processes and cross-department alignment are what allow sales volumes to scale in the first place. More often than not, first-stage growth was accomplished on the back of a lean management team, potentially just the CEO. The problem?

Scale 93

Scale Revenue Startup Sales Recruiting 93

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2019

How does the product and what you invest in proactively need to change as you move into enterprise? I was personally responsible for my action, to any concurrent projects on the delivery side, I was responsible for managing digital marketing, recruiting. What are the benefits of starting in SMB?

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 145

FastSpring

MARCH 27, 2023

It really took a few pivots, and even name changes to get just the go to market efforts and product market fit right. on just how to bucket the messaging from our product marketing perspective. They recruit sports athletes, and offer a bunch of things for the sports athletes pretty cool. Check it out.

Payment Solutions 95

Payment Solutions Payment Services SaaS Payments VP of Engineering 95

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

The backup of 2020 was great, 2021 comes in and somehow we have 600 unicorns and everyone can burn 500 million a year or have huge sales teams. But the meta point is this, if you’re recruiting in 2024, beware of the “Lost Generation” candidate and persona you may come across. This starts to get tough.

Sales Recruiting 285

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 285

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. along the way.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

Matt Turck talks with three hyper-growth stage Co-Founders and CEOs on three roadblocks when scaling past $15M ARR: hiring, culture, and sales. We invest all over the country and very much in Europe as well including Paris. So we decided to take you to know three specific topics which are hiring, culture and sales.

Sales Hiring 114

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 114

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 16, 2018

Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of “if you build it, they will come”, it’s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Understand the role of product marketing. Start creating your product marketing plan.

Product Marketing 223

Product Marketing Strategy Marketing Sales Recruiting 223

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

I passed on one company where we were really excited to invest in, but then the verbal metrics did not match up with the reality,” recalls Sanjiv. “In If they made an investment in an adjacent space that went poorly, they might choose to swear off the space entirely.” . It’s all about nailing product-market fit.

Technical Review 73

Technical Review Scale Development Team Review Software Review 73

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2019

Most people know the YC Accelerator, but YC actually has a number of programs now, including Amook, the Accelerator, a Series A program to help companies raise Series A, and a growth program to help companies expand post product market fit. Sometimes we call ourselves experts in failure. Like any good list, I have a top ten list.

Sales Hiring 167

Sales Hiring Scale Payment Solutions Banking 167

SmartKarrot

APRIL 12, 2022

Role: Director of Customer Success Location: New York, NY Hybrid Organization: Crealytics As a Director of Customer Success, you will develop strong connections with key client stakeholders to understand their needs and invest in their long-term success. Provide guidance to a team of account managers and ensure we deliver to expectations.

Customer Success 19

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Scale Advertising 19

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

It depends on your personal ambition, the kind of company you want to build, how big the market opportunity is and the market dynamics. The next steps for a SaaS Company that has product-market fit, lots of paying customers and is ready to raise a seed round. You basically want to run it like a sales process.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Venture Capital Investment Technical Review 52