SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

Manage Team Expectations – Balance transparency with the need to keep the team focused on building the business. Different buyers value different aspects of your business – some want your technology, others your team or customer base. Leadership changes can kill deals instantly.

Technical Review 191

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 191

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. We disrupted this space and ended up pushing out software vendors that had been doing this for 25, 30 years. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. Good afternoon.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 273

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple software for the construction industry. The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Getting the team right is so key here.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. If you don’t work to keep your knowledge of the market fresh and current, you may be left with a narrow view that will inevitably catch your sales and product teams flat-footed. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 284

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 284

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 215

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 215

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. There wasn’t software that did this back in the 2010s when Klaviyo was founded. And we actually asked them, like, well, what software matters, and they all said marketing. Is there a downturn?”

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. The second one is the team, obviously depending on how earlier the team has a huge factor because you may be so early in your journey that there’s nothing else to point to, but the track record of the team. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. billion in revenue) so it’s safe to say Jeanne and her team have helped do exactly that.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. When I was hired, I came in with one salesperson and zero dollars in recurring revenue and over the next four years grew the sales team to over 140 employees and 55 million in recurring revenue. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 323

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 323

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

Take Stack Overflow , the world’s largest software developer network, community, and platform, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors. It might be a little surprising to learn that the leadership style at Stack Overflow is decidedly not binary. This doesn’t mean that playbooks and frameworks are always a bad idea.

Leadership 98

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. Knowing the common pitfalls won’t stop you or your team from making them, but it will help build the most important skill any manager can have: resiliency. SaaS = Software that scales.

Scale 175

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 175

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

Sales Recruiting 181

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 181

SaaStr

JULY 22, 2019

New Relic, provider of real-time insights for software-driven businesses has this formula figured out. That’s not a bad start. And that allows our customers to build better software, much more perfect software, to have better relationships, and to also build better businesses. We work with mostly modern teams.

Scale 224

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 224

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Sure, we’ll give you a million dollars a year, but you basically have to build custom software. Jason Lemkin: But usually your teams can’t do that.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. Talk: SaaS.City Bootcamp: Sales Leadership. In 2017, he co-founded B2B Stack, a software review marketplace that boosts the buying process of B2B tech in Brazil. Talk: SaaS.City Bootcamp: Sales Leadership.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Entrepreneurship Scale Sales Hiring 207

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

We surveyed and interviewed key people in our teams to understand how they worked and how they saw Intercom’s internal operations. Honest feedback can be hard to take, but it’s essential to develop the type of culture that encourages people to constructively criticize processes, leadership styles, or approaches. Paul: Yeah.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

User Pilot

MAY 27, 2025

Want to advance your career in product management or find top talent for your team? Mozilla: Director of Product, Firefox Growth Firefox is used by hundreds of millions worldwide, and the Director of Product for Growth plays a critical role in the product management team. Who would be a bad fit for this job?

Management 52

Management Underperforming Technical Team Scale B2C 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

As a core part of Matt’s philosophy, people need to have their own domain and run open-source software because it allows them to control the entire stack of what they’re putting online. WordPress is its own ecosystem, a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of people who create add-ons, plugins, and develop sites.

Underperforming Technical Team 331

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 331

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

Two important notes: There is an optional fourth part, sales development , i.e., managing the team of sales development reps (SDRs) who convert MQLs into stage-1 oppties. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate. The lines between these parts are not black and white.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 22, 2017

Modern sales teams need competent professionals with a variety of talents, skills and abilities. But in a hyper changing landscap e, which are the most crucial sales skills and traits that reps must possess (or develop) in order to exceed targets and deliver consistent sales success? Sales teams rarely operate as a one-person army.

Underperforming Technical Team 106

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Social Media 106

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

And there’s lots of examples and if you’ve seen these TED Talks, you hear about Apple, Think Different and you hear about Salesforce in their early days and no software. So most of my career was over the last 10 years was that Sage Intacct and we sold accounting software. And there’s a lot of companies out there.

Scale 230

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 230

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design. They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

Kellblog

JULY 18, 2019

Great core/founding team. Thus, there is a good chance one or all of the founding team will be around, and in influential positions, for a long time. Bad startups are feature addicts who pile feature upon feature atop a deteriorating architecture, creating an Augean Stables of technical debt. Startups are about people.

Underperforming Technical Team 84

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Software Technical Cofounder 84

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 22, 2020

Instead, top reps are leveraging the latest thought leadership topics to form connections with prospects and spark mutually engaging conversations. It’s also one of the hardest to teach and develop. You don’t want a rep who bails on every sale at the first sign of trouble, but you also don’t want someone who never lets a bad sale go.

Sales Hiring 96

Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 96

ChurnZero

AUGUST 14, 2020

At ChurnZero, we’re humble enough to admit that Customer Success software can’t do it all, and quite frankly, it shouldn’t. We stick to our circle of competence and focus on our area of expertise: Customer Success software. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. Customer Support/Service Software and Ticketing Systems.

Payments 87

Payments Payment Solutions Customer Success Software Review 87

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 19, 2018

But as Jean and Edmond will now tell you, following years of engineering leadership at Quip, Quora, Medium and more, that simply isn’t the case. They’ve now started a company together, Co Leadership , to help pave the road for engineers to become leaders. Leadership is a mindset, not a title. Louis: How do you define leadership?

Engineering 135

Engineering Leadership Software Review Technical Review 135

Stax

MAY 6, 2025

Volume caps, poor integrations, manual reconciliation, and clunky mobile checkout are all signs your current system wont scale with you. Manual reconciliation is eating up finance team time Scaling businesses cant afford to waste time reconciling transactions by hand. Look for red flags that signal limits.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payment Services Payments 88

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

We pulled from my prior marketplaces experience and dove into their business quickly to develop a point-of-view on the opportunity. Prior to founding Instacart, Apoorva was a fulfillment optimization software engineer from Amazon. It truly has been a team effort. It was April 2014, and the company was raising its Series B.

Marketplace as a Service 140

Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale Construction 140

OpenView Labs

MAY 12, 2020

Those are some pretty great results for a small team—only about 50 people in the whole company—that needs to navigate the challenges of selling a horizontal product serving multiple audiences from single-player scenarios to enterprise deployments. Small businesses or teams who adopt it self-service.

Underperforming Technical Team 98

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale B2C 98

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

Agnes Bazin | Chief Development Officer @ Doctolib. She’s part of the founding team Doctolib, and the current chief development officer for the company. Okay, it’s not bad. We split our sales organization into four different teams. So, two teams cater to practices. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 117

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 117

Blulogix

DECEMBER 3, 2024

By BluLogix Team Planning for Growth: Using Revenue Insights Planning for Growth: Using Revenue Insights For businesses seeking to expand or enter new markets, strategic planning is critical to achieving successful outcomes. Growth initiatives require not only a vision but also precise financial insights that inform decisions and reduce risk.

Revenue 52

Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Payment Features Leadership 52

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 what we do is we help manufacturing and industrial companies comply with environmental regulations using our software platform. Want to see more content like this?

Underperforming Technical Team 209

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB Enterprise 209

User Pilot

APRIL 24, 2025

Want to advance your career in product management or find top talent for your team? Stripe They’re looking for a senior Product Manager to lead a pillar within our LPM Cost Optimization team. A collaborator experienced in working with cross-functional teams, including engineering, design, and external partners.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Retention Churn 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

Agnes Bazin | Chief Development Officer @ Doctolib. She’s part of the founding team Doctolib, and the current chief development officer for the company. Okay, it’s not bad. We split our sales organization into four different teams. So, two teams cater to practices. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 111

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

PMs prioritize product development and functionality, while PMMs focus on market adoption and product desirability. Leadership support , shared ownership of outcomes, cross-functional training, and celebrating collaboration can encourage PM-PMM alignment. What are some key differences in priorities between PMs and PMMs?

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MAY 22, 2017

Sales enablement is a relatively new, but rapidly emerging discipline that’s most common among software as a service (SaaS) and enterprise sized businesses. It will evolve over time, but for now it offers much needed clarity and perhaps more importantly, answers the basics of who we are as a sales enablement team, what we do and how we do it.

Marketplace as a Service 114

Marketplace as a Service Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 114