OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

It might be a little surprising to learn that the leadership style at Stack Overflow is decidedly not binary. Step 2: Adopt a flexible, non-dual approach to leadership. Prashanth takes a different approach for himself and the leadership style at Stack Overflow. Step 3: See what happens when you forge your own path.

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2023

Jessica Gilmartin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly, where she leads all aspects of marketing including brand awareness, creative, demand generation, and product marketing. Jessica brings nearly 20 years of marketing and leadership experience to Calendly.

Marketing 249

Marketing Leadership Engineering Enterprise 249

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 3, 2018

They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Either the company’s sales techniques are failing to persuade customers to buy the product.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Sales Leadership Startup 202

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

But the drive and passion remained, and leadership didn’t give up. Blosser comments, “The big thing I want to share with everyone is just stick with it if you feel like you have product-market fit. After the shift, the sales reps stopped chasing whales and working outbound ops with more than 5K employees.

Scale 204

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 204

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? The sales reps were friends, and accounts were shared.

AWS 205

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 205

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. If they don’t, they never will , and they’ll never learn the product.

Sales Hiring 252

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 252

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

“Typically that was the marketing hat in my case, but sometimes it was the sales hat or thinking about finance or other areas of the business. So you need context from leadership to what you ultimately need to deliver on in your function to be successful. Marketing should be built into the business, not bolted on.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 244

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2023

Dear SaaStr: None of The 3 SaaS Products I Developed Have Any Sales. You may not have product-market fit. You may not have built a product people will actually pay for. But assuming you have … well — are you doing any marketing ? It may well be no one needs your product. Marketing takes time.

Development 192

Development SaaS Sales Content Marketing 192

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Building revenue operations to support sales Deel had onboarded nearly 100 clients, reports showed good traction, and it was time to leverage this opportunity. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up. Support sales early.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 229

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 3, 2020

Editor’s note: This article is part four of a four-part series that covers the most crucial product marketing activities for an early-stage startup. As a new sales team starts going through training, we often hear them ask, “Where are our leads?!” And all heads typically turn toward a marketing leader or marketing team.

Product Marketing 71

Product Marketing Startup Scale Marketing 71

OpenView Labs

MARCH 9, 2020

When entrepreneurs start a company, they definitely think about product, customers and product-market fit. What they often forget to think about is the critical component of building their company: their personal leadership. Self-leadership. Invest in self-awareness to build your foundation of leadership.

Leadership 52

Leadership Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Investment 52

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

User Pilot

DECEMBER 10, 2023

Are you a product-led or sales-led kind of SaaS? Or perhaps you’ve managed to marry the two strategies and embraced product-led sales? If not, but you’d like to learn more, then why not watch the talk that Ben Williams , known as the Product-Led Geek, delivered at the recent Product Drive hosted by Userpilot?

Scale 105

Scale Sales Software Review Retention 105

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

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

We’ve collected some of the best product management webinars for 2024, so you don’t miss out. TL;DR A product webinar is a virtual seminar showcasing and discussing a product's features and benefits as a marketing and sales tool. You can use your findings and improve your in-app marketing with Userpilot.

Sales Hiring 105

Sales Hiring Generative AI AI Leadership 105

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 16, 2015

As he told me a few days ago, he has observed the lack of sales management and sales execution skills as one of the most consistent deficiencies limiting the potential of early stage SaaS companies. Sales execution deficiency manifests itself at roughly the same time as product market fit.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Compensation 183

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In leadership, there’s a great expression that “to those who much is given, much is expected.” This is a common mistake founders make — getting a new Head of X when you get to a certain point in business, missing a sales number, the product isn’t what you want, there’s too much churn, etc. Your average sales quota is $1M.

Scale 236

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 236

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? Should one hire sales reps 2×2? How does Andy think about hiring sales reps from adjacent companies and industries? How does Andy think about minimizing and optimising sales ramp times? I don’t subscribe to the servant leadership model.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 195

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

We now have a backdrop where it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build high-quality products. Markets are more crowded than ever, so building multi-product companies is the best way to compete. Lattice’s Timeline For Going Multi-Product — It’s Not Easy Lattice started in OKRs and performance and expanded out to other products.

Scale 230

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 230

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

Founder of Marketo, Phil Hernandez, and Marketo’s former EVP of Sales, Bill Binch, have had decades of experience tackling precisely these issues. Centering your work on customer experience helps train the whole organization in the process and hones your product-market fit. Optimizing to get your buyer to the demo.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 199

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

From B2C consumer-focused tech to the next B2B enterprise cloud giants, B2B, and B2C technology companies are springing up left and right and sprinting toward multi-billion dollar valuations (whether on the private or public markets) faster than ever. What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)?

VP of Engineering 93

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 93

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Their responsibilities include product discovery, developing product vision, prioritization , roadmapping , analyzing product performance and its iterative development, and leading the product team. Product marketing sits between product development and the market. What is product marketing?

Management 104

Management Marketing Market Research Product Marketing 104

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

These deep-dive topics can be functional in nature, such as delving into the product roadmap or the sales hiring plan. One hour, every other month for seed companies or companies that are pre-product market fit. Plan to cover one or two deep-dive topics: This is ideally what the board meeting is all about.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Startup 240

User Pilot

JULY 23, 2023

Key members of the GTM team: Go-to-Market Manager: Responsible for overseeing and coordinating the entire GTM process , ensuring alignment across go-to-market teams and successful product launches. How to build a team to implement your go-to-market plan: Set clear milestones for your team. Who is part of the GTM team?

Marketing 96

Marketing Customer Lifetime Value SaaS Advertising 96

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Define your ICP as early as you can and segment your sales team accordingly.

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 227

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

When considering product market fit and seeing value back when Docebo got traction in 2012, they gave away a ton of value with ridiculously low ARR. When a new sales leader comes in, they usually say the data is messed up, difficult to comprehend, and unclear about where leads are coming from.

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 198

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2021

Do your sales reps know who they’re supposed to be targeting? Recent research indicates that at smaller sales organizations, the inability to identify decision-makers is still a major deal killer. Involving decision-makers is a major part of successful sales. Not involving the decision-maker. Equally as important?

Scale 119

Scale Technical Review Sales Underperforming Technical Team 119

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Build the baseline by checking leadership assumptions. However, they were wrong about these assumptions, which kept them from identifying gaps and assessing the extensibility of their Enterprise product-market-fit. Simply because their product was being used in a professional setting didn’t mean it was a product-market fit.

Scale 209

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 209

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2024

A highly curated group of 200 GTM leaders, 85% director level and above across Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships. Because they’ve already established their brand, audience, and distribution , launching a product to their supporters garners immediate sales. A chance to tour (and maybe even race on?)

VP of Engineering 71

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS AI Search 71

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

If you don’t know, it’s the hockey stick curve going from $2M to $6M to $18M to $36M and on and on after you’ve found product market fit. Even if you think you’ve passed the stage of product market fit, it’s always worth keeping a lens toward it and understanding the needs of your customers as you evolve from early to later stages.

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 159

User Pilot

AUGUST 30, 2023

Get ready to dive into insightful discussions, practical strategies, and real-world examples that will empower you to create and manage products that meet user needs and leave them truly satisfied. Product management and leadership speakers. Join us to learn from top experts and companies.

Scale 105

Scale AI Growth Hacking Innovation 105

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. One of the first steps when you’re preparing to move into a new market is to create a cross-functional, go-to-market strategy. But as you likely know, global expansion isn’t easy. Hire the Right Leaders.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Technical Review 82

Sales Hacker

MAY 26, 2021

There are many moving parts in a successful sales organization. If you know that you love strategizing to increase sales but don’t want to be an account executive, sales operations may be the right place for you. What is Sales Operations? Why do we need Sales Operations? Average sales cycle duration.

Scale 60

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 60

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2020

— Doing Freemium and sales-driven sales at the same time – Lessons learned from Mixmax. — 5 Customer Marketing Strategies That are Guaranteed to Grow Your Business with Sprout Social. — Deep Dive: The What, When and Why of Product Marketing with Twilio. Mar 11, 9:00am – 10:00am.

Scale 186

Scale Leadership Churn Benchmarks 186

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

One of the primary problems that Asthana found — both in his own journey, and the journeys of other founders — was that companies presumed that a product-market fit would take the form of a singular event. Leading the way in an evolving market. Verify product-user fit. Listen to sales.

Underperforming Technical Team 238

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 238

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

But what I learned, after years of procrastinating on tough moves for our leadership team, is that the leaders’ teams suffer greatly through that inaction. Instead, I set a big sales number for each of those years (based upon the biggest trap ever—a sales rep capacity model) and totally missed each time!

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 261

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. Jyoti Bansal: Let’s switch topics to sales. Jyoti Bansal, Founder and CEO of harness.io

Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 247