Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

You might say it’s one of the strongest advantages a startup has. 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. Here are five quick takeaways: Most sales and support teams talk about their jobs as a funnel.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Ep 255: Vikas Bhambri is SVP Sales and Customer Experience @ Kustomer, the startup providing Real-time, actionable views of customers with continuous omnichannel conversations and intelligence that automates repetitive, manual tasks. What is the right way for startup founders to address sales rep onboarding? Missed the session?

SaaS Payments 132

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 132

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

In my experience, getting caught up in shiny objects (like great numbers) during the hiring process is a straight line to Disasterville, and when the cost of a bad hire is painfully significant , it pays to take a measured approach. Also: What are the top performers in my current team doing? This is a team effort.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 93

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? So as Lauren sort of alluded to, we started by focusing on SMB’s. So everything you do at a startup you’re treating it like an experiment, right?

Underperforming Technical Team 153

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 153

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And then I’ve watched, since she made this comment to me about 13 months ago, then I’ve watched with some startups I’ve worked with, where the first marketing hire comes in, and I asked them what their top five priorities are, and then I asked the CEO. And notice that I said investments, not cost or spend.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 205

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. the night before it was to IPO). Like, if you don’t know <Yeah.>

Product Marketing 83

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 83

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2019

Ep 257: Justin Welsh is the former SVP Sales @ PatientPop, the startup that offers the first all-in-one practice growth platform that’s HIPAA-compliant and is proven to grow your practice. During his 5 years at PatientPop, Justin grew sales from $0 to $56m alongside the full build-out of the sales team.

Scale 139

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Interviewing 139

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. Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. But in other years, SMBs are jumping in the boat, so you get amazing growth long-term with a multi-segment strategy.

Sales Hiring 210

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 210

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? Loving our podcast content?

Scale 127

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 127

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. So taking us off, how did you make your way into the world of startups and how did you come to be CEO in UserTesting today? How does Andy think about discounting?

Sales Hiring 196

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 196

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

Now, I just invest in SasS companies. If you look at any SaaS startup, in the first couple reps, they always find one guy or gal that’s just amazing, just killing it. You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 258

The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication

APRIL 8, 2019

Internal Team: Hire your own Sales Development Rep (SDR) team that is 100% dedicated to outbound prospecting. Pros: No one will know your “stuff” better than internal people, it’s the best long-term solution for most companies, and begins your sales Farm Team. You build a team of four Outbound SDRs.

Outsourcing Services 40

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 40

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

I’ve been in software since the ’90s and for over 20 years, nearly that entire time, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products, and our services in a way that’s optimized for a digital world.

Scale 158

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 158

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

To retain more customers over time, you must invest heavily in understanding who your current and prospective customers are and what problems they’re trying to solve. This is season two of Scale , Intercom’s podcast series on moving from startup to scale-up. But, ultimately both teams have a shared end goal: increasing revenue.

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34

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. EJ Brown 06:10 I think there’s a common idea that startup culture in particular. I think that was surprising for me.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

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 211

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 211

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason Lemkin: So you have like a great profile irrespective of what your startup’s doing. You would take three to four years to deploy it for new investments, not follow-ons but new investments. There’s dealing with your startup that was growing 80% last year and is growing 0% this year, and has 12 months of cash.

Scale 194

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 194

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2020

406: Kate Taylor is Head of Customer Experience at Notion, one of the fastest-growing startups of the last 5 years with over $68M in funding from some of the best in the business including Index, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Josh Kopelman and Aydin Senkut to name a few. Why does Kate not believe that in startups you can “do it all”?

Scale 166

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 166

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source 16 Startup Metrics by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy, a16z We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

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. To prospect for startups, Crunchbase Pro 's database is the place to go. Here, we’ve searched for organizations that raised Series A investment in the last 30 days.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

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.). This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 220

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 220

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams? * During his time at Optimizely, the company grew from from $7 to >$90M in ARR and from 40 to 400 people.

Underperforming Technical Team 158

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Services Technical Advisors 158

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales.

Part-Time VPE 198

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 198

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.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2019

As for Whitney, she directly leads the organization’s go-to-market efforts, including sales, marketing, business development and customer operations. When is the right time for founders to think about building out their first exec team? What are the questions that suggest an individual has a startup culture to them?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team 132

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

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. We recently sat down with Maggie to chat about all things sales – from laying down a solid foundation to hiring the right people and, finally, scaling the team into hyper-growth. Look for the team players.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

In this conversation recorded at ELC 2023, Segment’s former CRO Joe Morrissey and former chief product development officer Tido Carriero discuss how they turned sales-product tension into a successful $3.2B The problem is the sales team. The sales team don’t know how to sell the product. It’s a familiar story.

Sales Hiring 97

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team 97

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

And it’s not without good reason: nearly all software products with dominant market share started as apps but grew to the point where third-party developers began building valuable integrations on top of what these companies had already created. New Relic’s General Manager, Mark Weitzel, weighs in on how you can support your developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 30, 2019

Justin is the former SVP of sales at PatientPop and a current advisor to it, as well as a tremendous number of SMB SaaS companies. Lessons Justin learned from a career in startups. Creating a culture of winning means investing in employees. Lessons Learned from Startups [9:45]. Lessons Learned from Startups [9:45].

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team 52

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. And had the opportunity, my first startup experience was at Prosper.

Scale 173

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Investment Sales Hiring 173

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Going forward, while VCs clearly have dry powder , what’s unclear is their willingness to invest it. Some believe that capital won’t flow again until after an extinction-level event for startups in 2023/2024. Some companies treat these as publicity stunts, talking a big vision, but not really investing. Bankruptcy.

Software Review 120

Software Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 120

Sales Hacker

APRIL 25, 2019

Early in my career, I saw firsthand how a $20M funded company went from startup to NASDAQ IPO to being delisted in the span of three years due to frivolous spending (but that’s a story for another day). The SMB Decision: In-House vs. Outsourced Sales Development. As a high-growth SMB, your number-one focus is consistent sales.

Outsourcing Services 75

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 75

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. Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. How do I increase them?

Outsourcing Services 114

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring SMB 114

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 197

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 197