SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

I see this all the time in marketing hires that come out of non-demand gen roles. Sometimes a marketing lead with a corporate marketing or even product marketing background actually signs up for a lead or other commit. More on that here. But sometimes I’m wrong. Net net, no VP can do it all.

Sales Recruiting 319

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 319

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Kate has a simple framework for going upmarket: Product, People, and Process. From a product standpoint, you might think you have product market fit. Scaling Enterprise vs. Mid-Market Sales: Key Takeaways from Calendly It’s a common blueprint to start with SMB and mid-market accounts as your ideal customers.

Scale 226

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 226

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

In the early days, UserZoom struggled with deciding whether its target market should focus on enterprise or SMB. This focus can be a risk because it is shrinking your market. Sales and marketing are still significant, but consider dedicating more research and design to the user experience. Know how to market your product.

Scale 212

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 212

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

You said before, to me, it’s the believing in kind of participatory leadership over servant leadership. I don’t subscribe to the servant leadership model. Harry Stebbings: I think that participation and leadership is almost like a luxury of later stage companies. Andy MacMillan: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Sales Hiring 196

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Technical Review 196

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2019

How does Andrew advise founders on the question of whether to start in enterprise or SMB? 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? I had Jason VandeBoom of ActiveCampaign on the show, and he said SMB first works.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 145

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

GirlsClub helps women sales reps navigate the tricky path to sales leadership with their management training, mentoring, confidence building, and community. She has strong leadership experience in inside sales, field sales, operations, and marketing. Her company #GirlsClub is dedicated to changing the face of sales leaders.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

And we then assumed, “hey, we’ve got product market-fit in the enterprise with these giant deals.” We had product-market fit in a very, very small part of a huge market. It’s also about how you sell that product. It sounds like it was mostly between GTM and product.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team 98

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

SMB Sales vs Enterprise Sales Process. If you’re able to confidently say “ YES ,” (and have a superior product), then the odds of closing the deal are stacked in your favor. SMB Sales vs Enterprise Sales Process. Rule #4: Establish Familiarity & Thought Leadership. What Is Enterprise Level Sales? Key Takeaways.

Scale 98

Scale Enterprise Marketing Sales 98

Kellblog

APRIL 25, 2022

One of the first press releases I reviewed when I took over product marketing at Business Objects (long, long ago) bore this title: Business Objects Ranked #97 on the Software 100. Most of the cases are consumer products, but the law remains the same in technology. Product Marketing Claims. Was that true ?

Technical Review 128

Technical Review Advertising Software Review Scale 128

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2019

Finally before YesWare, she was VP of Sales @ Engine Yard, where she tripled monthly recurring revenue, over course of 3+ year tenure, in 3 key leadership roles. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Bridget made her way into the world of sales and became the sales leader she is today, having started in the world of marketing.

Sales Hiring 114

Sales Hiring Scale Sales SMB 114

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Leadership. Leadership. Senior Vice President, Sales SMB. The Exceptional Leadership Institute for Women. Sales Manager, SMB New Business Acquisition. VP Sales, Mid-Market. VP, SMB Essentials Sales. Head of Sales – SMB New Business Acquisition. Head of Commercial Sales Marketing, NA.

VP of Engineering 121

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 121

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? Does one have to expand the product line to retain customers?

Scale 127

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 127

Sales Hacker

JUNE 20, 2018

Differences between startups with a product-market fit and those without. During her 18-year sales career, she’s held sales leadership positions at Andreessen Horowitz, VMware, Coverity, Meraki, CORAID, and Inktomi. They had a small SDR team—primarily Inbound and an SMB sales team. Jaimie Buss: Thank you, Sam!

Scale 83

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Interviewing 83

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Obviously, all of you have found a product market fit, it sounds like. But all of the training was done by what we called the SMB managers. So I didn’t realize that all of you are coming from larger companies. So we sort of artificially created segments in our business.

Scale 198

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 198

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Finding product market fit Moving from SMB to Enterprise or vice versa Achieving Enterprise repeatability Strategic expansion Borland has experienced all four stages at three different companies and knows what teams and functions look like for each stage of growth. Through customer stories.

Enterprise 226

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 226

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

What you do in product today will help you in revenue 2-3 years down the line. Once you have product market fit in the first product and revenue is coming in, that’s when you’ll have time to invest in a second product. The average SMB customer would buy 4-5 seats of Freshdesk. Why is this important?

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Scale SMB AI 234

SaaStr

OCTOBER 8, 2019

Katie Helton: Yeah, and from a rep’s perspective and being at previous earlier stage startups, I’ve seen CEOs grapple with this transition from founder to first salesperson, because after all they likely know the product best and are able to use customer feedback to measure product market fit in real time.

Sales Hiring 127

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 127

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

So I went with the Italian guy, and then I learned how to do product management, and I went from company to company really focusing in on product management as a core skill, and then extending that into product marketing, and operations, and then eventually a full blown … the whole kit and caboodle.

Scale 131

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 131

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Businesses must effectively evolve their strategies, operations, and overall product-market fit to target and win those enterprise accounts. But leadership at Airtable saw themselves moving into the overall agile workspace years down the road and chose their competitors based on that goal.

Scale 195

Scale Enterprise Scaling Management 195

Point Nine Land

APRIL 21, 2021

Why would you come up with a 24 months roadmap when you just have funding for another 6 months and still didn’t figure out your product-market fit? This is an exercise that should be done with input/feedback of the leadership team. Product Marketing.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Software Review 52

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

Second, product market fit. Product market fit matters more than ever and technology is what’s going to get us out of this, the understanding of data and getting the insights and how fast we move in tech. And really our approach to our customers and the market had to pivot immediately. And so we built.

Travel 175

Travel Marketing Scale Outsourcing Services 175

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2019

And they were broken down roughly a third, a third, a third by targeting the SMB, the mid-market, and the enterprise. And what you’ll notice is that looking at the heat map, what we’ve got is, in the mid-market, the vast majority of respondents actually use an annual contract. What does this mean? This surprised me.

Scale 207

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Payment Services 207

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? It was this nascent software as a service offering and they competed with Salesforce in the market and we had an instinct that it was going to be a big part of the future. In terms of the marketing, how does that change?

Scale 167

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 167

Unbounce

JUNE 16, 2020

especially for SMB SaaS startups. Today, small and medium SaaS businesses are discovering the power of using partners to help sell their products. Treat it like a checklist: First, have you achieved some level of product-market fit? Will your leadership team prioritize and scope the program across the organization?

Outsourcing Services 131

Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting Scale SaaS 131

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. Whitney is also an advisor to companies funded by the YC Continuity Fund, focusing on enterprise strategy, go-to-market strategy, leadership and execution.

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team 132

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

And, the second system is what I call the product marketing system. What I find is that if you think about the product marketing calendar this way, it makes it a little bit more like the sales finance calendar where sales is about selling to customers, sales don’t work unless a customer buys what you’re selling.

Startup 275

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 275

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And diversifying, if you’re still early, before 10, 20 or 30 million revenue, that could be a sign that things just aren’t working, that you don’t actually have product market fit, which is unfortunate, but you need to be honest about it. You need to be honest, if you have product market fit.

Scale 210

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 210

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

For example, our Product team could decide to build a data export API after learning our fastest growing segment exports their conversation data far more often than other segments ( you can already do this in Intercom ??). Informing our approach to the market. Assessing progress on our strategy.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

What about SMB vs. Enterprise Sales? 281: Rene Yang Stewart, Co-Head and Principal, Vista Equity Partners, and Monica Enand, Founder and CEO, Zapproved discuss growing a company from product market fit to scale. 280: How do you manage a sales team when you’re at a company with both Free and Freemium Sales-Driven Segments?

Scale 100

Scale Interviewing SMB Enterprise 100

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2019

It’s helpful to start to map out the funnel, but at the end of the day it’s about pipeline generated and then pipeline closed is really what I care … and I commit to … it varies dependent on the sales team, but for our growth and SMB sales team, I think marketing sources around 80-90% of their total revenue.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Software Review 131

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

How does this differ between SMB and enterprise? Peter Kazanjy: So at TalentBin, that was kind of like my first training wheels, SaaS business, and also the place where I started to learn and appreciate go to market. This is why you see SMB focused sales organizations like Zenefits, or Yelp, or Yaxed, or what have you.

Part-Time VPE 198

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Our private membership connects you with a network of thousands of like-minded peers and resources, where you can tap into leadership opportunities, training, mentoring, and other services made for high-growth leaders like you. She was VP of product marketing at Smartsheet, a leading work management software company.

Sales Recruiting 82

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 82

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

If you can create a scenario where others are building on top of your product – and therefore evolving it in ways you may not have the resources to do yourself – your offering suddenly becomes even more valuable to your customers. Here, Ceci unpacks her thinking for Intercom’s Group Product Marketing Manager, Jasmine Jaume.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2019

Gong is my fourth company in a leadership position, I’ve been founding team member of Click Software that brought it from zero to an IPO, that was traditional enterprise software product. I think one interesting thing to touch on is where you sit in the market. Be it enterprise or SMB. Harry Stebbings: Can I ask?

Outsourced Development 132

Outsourced Development Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 132

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

What’s the go to market motion look like? What does the product marketing look like, and the battle cards look like? And so there’s this whole area around product releases where historically, I released the product and I got in the sales all hands and went, “Check this out. Jason Lemkin: I see.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 242

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

In 2015 Randy had kept pace with the growth in the market. Competitors were increasing their market share and Randy was falling behind. FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT. To achieve growth, you have to identify the following during Product/Market Fit: WHAT is the value proposition that prioritizes the solution offered.

Scale 89

Scale Growth Hacking Scaling Sales Hiring 89

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2019

And so it’s a lot to ask of someone, okay, not only do you have to move cargo, but you’re responsible for retaining this customer spend, for increasing their spend over time, for understanding the pain points of all of their senior leadership. So they are now graduating from our SMB segment into our midmarket segment.

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring Systems Review Marketplace as a Service 100