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.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales? The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 349

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Many of you are familiar with this visual, most likely created by an investment firm. Naturally, demand is going to lead to a ton of supply. Think about the growth curve inflecting more at the top of the funnel with more leads. And almost all of it was lifted by better conversion rates and more leads. That’s unbelievable!

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Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 237

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Become Successful at Enterprise Sales? If you haven’t done enterprise sales before, the biggest thing to understand: you can do it. Many founders want the customers and leads and users to come to them. Learn your prospects’ business processes in detail, and how your product enhances them.

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Scale Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

“My CEO Told Me To Stop Selling So Much” Recently, I met with a sales leader I’ve known for years, and he told me The Most Curious Story. The freemium ones really have no acquisition costs at this point (the main lead source is mini-brand). And here, they just couldn’t safely invest. Balance Sheet Rule.”

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Construction 341

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

So there’s a sort of org chart you’ll probably end up with at least twice as you start scaling in SaaS: The “Headless” Sales Org. It’s a bunch of sales reps without anyone to manage them other than … you. But if you end up not hiring a VP of Sales at that perfect moment in time (and most don’t), you’ll end up headless.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 205

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

Q; Dear SaaStr: I Just Received a $1M investment for My 3-year old Industrial SaaS Product to Scale. 1m isn’t enough to scale anything, at least not in the U.S., To hire a true sales & marketing team, you’re going to need about $3m-$4m. You can hire a sales rep or ideally two to help you sell. Not to “scale”.

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Scale Sales Hiring Investment Scaling 187

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 22, 2020

This year, we launched Scale , a new content strand focusing on how industry leaders are propelling their companies forward by keeping their customers front and center. . When we created Scale, we had no idea what the year would hold in store; we simply knew that investing in long-term customer relationships was the key to success.

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Scale Scaling Customer Support Interviewing 220

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. They kept doing it after the economy changed, and they also scaled it. It’s cheap.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 173

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

A few ideas on how to help the sales team make this your best year so far: Hire dedicated sales / revenue ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations , even up to $10m ARR or beyond. Getting routing the right leads? Invest (more) in training and onboarding. But don’t waste leads.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Enterprise 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2022

Scale-ups are exciting. Scaling to satisfy customers’ demands depends on innovation and foresight combined with enterprise-ready technology and the right partners. On top of considerable dedication, creating a scale-up requires a functional edge—a unique and unreplicable capability compared to the players in the industry.

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Scale Scaling Marketplace as a Service Entrepreneurship 225

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

How CAC targets drive GTM strategies: If Your CAC Target Is Low You’ll likely focus on small-to-medium businesses and use tools like inbound sales and low-touch or no-touch self-service. The sales cycle at this stage may be very short. The sales cycle will be slightly longer at this stage. But over time, things change.

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Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 227

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2023

In last week’s Workshop Wednesday , President Sales & Field Engineering Chris Donato and SVP Business Development & Ecosystem Shelli Vivona shared how to scale out a go-to-market org. They’ve invested in in-person training, a three-day offsite where the training went deep and resulted in certifying.

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Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Engineering 180

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

How do you scale a company based that can be collaborative for everyone in your org — from finance to marketing? Ultimately, they developed a more hybrid sales approach because there are good parts to each experience. Invest in your own personal growth similar to how you would actively solicit venture investment for capital.

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Scale Software Review Scaling Sales Hiring 205

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. But before the years of rapid scaling, it took the company a little while to hit its stride. What Did WorkRamp Do Differently to Scale? But sometimes, the road less traveled is the path to success.

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Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 198

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

based SMB sales positions. SaaS sales execs with even a little bit of experience at other SaaS companies are looking for higher and higher OTEs, often with lower effective attainment and high support costs. based sales reps often aren’t really willing to work, or excel, at sub-$100k OTEs anymore. for non-enterprise sales.

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SMB Scale Sales Hiring Sales 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2021

Zendesk’s Sharon Prosser, VP Worldwide SMB Sales & XDR, and Astha Malik, VP GTM Strategy, Planning, and Enablement share some guiding principles about how their company has grown and enriched many markets. Move your sales teams into different areas of focus and get them to need each other. 3 Invest in people.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring SMB 203

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Check out the session here: Algolia also summarized their Top 5 take-aways here , and below: Most SaaS founders start out the same way— armed with ample expertise of the technical details that go into a product and with limited experience of other aspects of scaling, such as sales. On finding product-market fit in the early stages.

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Scale Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Scaling 238

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Gusto is a high-velocity, high-scale acquisition and expansion engine, and one we can all learn from. To be even more specific, Gusto realized the word “territory” was holding their sales team back. Today, many SaaS companies still divide up sales accounts in territories by city, country, or region, or round-robin them by rep.

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Scale Sales Marketing Construction 216

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

Cliff Bockard, Senior Vice President of Revenue at DigitalOcean, joined us at SaaStr Scale to discuss how businesses can serve SMBs and still bring in large numbers of revenue. . Transparent pricing makes their life easier than going on sales calls every day only to find out that your product is not financially viable for them. .

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Scale Scaling Revenue Enterprise 196

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Back in the day, premium comp for some software sales execs made simple and easy sense. Traditional software had 90% gross margins, and the classic enterprise sales reps, the best ones, could close a million or more dollars a year. Sales reps in low NRR and high churn environments got paid almost the same as enterprise reps.

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Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 314

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

A great VP of Sales to keep the engine scaling A great VP of Marketing to keep the leads coming in A great VP of Customer Success to make all those hard won customers happy After $5m-$6m in ARR or so, it’s really hard to scale without a strong VP heading most core functions. Upgrade the management team.

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Scale Sales Hiring Banking Engineering 269

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

E.g., Sales +Marketing Expenses < First Year ACV = Success ? But maybe not while you are scaling, you can often afford to invest more if you have funding. This is pretty much where most of us end up at, at scale. The sales team only brings in a minority of the lifetime revenue per customer. More on that below.

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Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 249

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2022

Confluent’s President of Field Operations, Erica Schultz, explores different tactics businesses can employ to scale revenue and increase efficiency in the current macro environment. As you look to scale your business and make your processes more efficient, it’s essential to foster a shared understanding of who your target customer is.

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VP of Engineering Scale Scaling Sales Hiring 195

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

You might feel confused about where to begin, how to scale up, which mistakes you should avoid, and things you should consider before expanding. Now, let’s look at ten learnings that Dorian gathered while scaling Grammarly from a Consumer to an Enterprise brand with B2B offerings. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

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Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 204

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

generate momentum, they will inevitably need to scale up. For whatever reason, the company is ready to exit startup status and prepare to scale-up. Dave Kellogg, Executive-In-Residence at Balderton Capital, breaks down the most common mistakes companies make when going from startup to scale-up. Be realistic in self-assessment.

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Scale Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Technical Review 195

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. They also hired a VP of Partners who knew how to scale B2B software. Partner: investing in different partnership channels. When StoryBlok got to this stage, they made the switch from a self-service to an enterprise model. Self-service.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 193

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

As a SaaS veteran who built and sold a software company for nine figures, invested in startups since 2013, 10x-ing his fund, and continues to build a powerhouse community of SaaStr fans, he offers some hot takes on the communities’ burning questions. Sales is much harder than in 2021. How Does That Impact Sales and Marketing?

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Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 214

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! He told me, you can invest time, talent, or treasure.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 267

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Doug Pepper, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth, has invested in software and SaaS companies for 22 years, from seed to growth stage. They initially double their ARR each year in scaling post $10M. On the other hand, the sales expenses form a larger share of operating expenses as the GTM motion is leveraged.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Venture Capital 204

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot, has many insights on how to serve SMB customers at scale. But because SMBs are rarely digital-first, their recent challenges allowed HubSpot to leverage their years of experience in marketing automation, as it became a core feature of how these companies worked to scale. Balanced Growth Drivers.

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Scale SMB Scaling Innovation 226

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Or do you actually have something worth scaling?”. This doesn’t simply mean that you’ve had a lot of sales, but instead that you’ve won over lots of repeat customers and have demonstrated a strategy that works. Build sustainable scale models. Do you have it right in your first market?

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 207

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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Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 144

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2019

If you have a good sales team, they are leaving nothing on the table. If they aren’t — you need a new VP of Sales). Whatever great work the sales team did in 2017 will be 100% behind them on Jan 2. A few ideas: Hire dedicated sales ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Investment 228

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Scaling a sales organization isn’t easy. Knowing which metrics matter and how to analyze them to increase your revenue and hit organizational sales goals is essential. . What makes a sales organization grow? What’s the best way to grow a sales organization? How: What sources are the most popular to gather leads?

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Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 235

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, Founders Fund Investor Sam Blond sits down with the SVP of Sales at Modern Health, Hannah Willson, to discuss how companies can adapt to the current sales environment and how to correct course when you don’t have a right-sized sales team. What Sales Team Size Is The Right Size?

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Strategy 130

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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Scale Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scaling 258