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. I feel like the core team is generally a bunch of natural athletes. Is it a time?

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

With 10+ years as a CMO at companies ranging from $1M to $1B in revenue, another 10+ years as CEO of companies in the $0-$100M range, and extensive experience as an independent director on startup boards, Dave offers a 360-degree perspective on marketing’s role in SaaS success. This isn’t a generic Marketing 101 course.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 199

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

While that doesn’t sound very bad, according to Corey Quinn, the world’s most notorious Cloud Economist, it goes against best practices or “sensible defaults” and is “ the worst practice to be avoided by default.” Day one of your startup is probably not the time to be learning Kubernetes.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

While every startup is eager to hit this mark quickly, it’s a process that takes time. Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. As you scale, you’ll have more stakeholders to manage and unify.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. With so much to accomplish manually, a lot slips through the cracks, leaving an unfulfilled gap in the arena of customer success management needs. Best customer success software for startups and small companies.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Or other so-called “passive” income streams that really often take many hours to manage. Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side?

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this? .”

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 284

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

Founders are responsible for ensuring a startup always has enough money, setting the vision for the company, and driving things forward. Lesson #1: If You Aren’t Making Mistakes, You Aren’t In A Startup If you do things that always work and maintain the status quo, you’re likely at a major company like Microsoft. And it was true.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. ” – David Cancel.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

David Frankel is Managing Partner at Founder Collective, a successful seed fund with investments in companies like The Trade Desk, Olo, and Coupang. He joined SaaStr Workshop Wednesday LIVE to do a deep dive with Jason Lemkin on his 10 Point Checklist when you sell your startup.

Technical Review 202

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 202

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 14, 2018

Looking for an example of a happy, high performing product team? Rather than suggesting a model startup, advisor and author Laura Klein is likely to point you toward her favorite heist film. Adam: You’ve also managed to write two books. I was working with a bunch of different companies and teams of all different sizes.

VP of Engineering 190

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach New CTO 190

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 15, 2018

As a startup scales, the importance of infrastructure engineers simply can’t be overstated. Will Larson has managed infrastructure teams for some of the biggest names in software. All the while, he’s been sharing his latest thoughts on infrastructure, devtools, management and more, on his Irrational Exuberance blog.

Engineering 214

Engineering Management DevOps as a Service Merchant Services 214

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

In the early days, it was about setting expectations that startups are hard and you must work hard to succeed. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 286

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. They seek out someone for campaign management and leveraging the right tools for marketing. Not every leader is created equally.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. The last thing you want the team doing is chasing a shiny penny, when what really matters is hitting the plan for the quarter.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

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. Getting access to the crown jewels and highly sensitive data as a four-person startup is hard, but if it’s a segregated piece of data and a pilot.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

Self-service sales model This is when customers explore and experience your product independently without needing hands-on help from your sales team. Your sales team may need to map out all potential targets and how to access potential buyers within those larger businesses. What does “Qualified really mean for your team?

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Listen for the full insights into: How Flippa.com works to connect for-sale businesses with buyers while managing the complexities of valuation and seller expectations. I mean, it’s a managed marketplace. As I mentioned, I was an entrepreneur myself. Blake Hutchison (16:30) Absolutely, Jesse. It’s two-sided.

Scale 121

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 121

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

Scale 321

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 321

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

At nine figures in revenue and 550 people, the CEO of Lattice, Jack Altman, has seen every stage of building a startup. Most of the time, a missing teams view or the ability to integrate with one more system isn’t the answer. They may hit you up with great startups to buy, important summits, and other valuable opportunities.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Investment Communication 49

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team.

Scale 305

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 305

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Wouldn’t it take away from allowing managers to manage and coach — not to mention the monstrous to-do lists of VPs and CEOs? Scott’s newsletter makes a great point: as buying teams get bigger and bigger, our sales teams need to grow with them. In other words, the partners balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

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Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 130

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

While your product managers use our analytics reports to track product usage, your engineering teams can use our session replays to uncover bugs, and your customer support team may use our in-app help center feature to offer self-service and reduce support tickets. Userpilot is perfect for non-technical teams.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times.

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Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me. The math won’t work.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! We’ve evolved around content management. When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. Most startups do fail.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

User Pilot

MAY 27, 2025

Want to advance your career in product management or find top talent for your team? This article shares exciting product manager roles focused on Product-Led Growth (PLG) and showcases standout candidates in the field. Recommended product manager job openings in the PLG field Looking for a job in PLG companies?

Management 52

Management Underperforming Technical Team Scale B2C 52

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

You get to work with a lot of different teams. Is your big company doing a return to office and you have to badge in for four hours every day to sit on Zoom with your team that lives in Virginia? And I hear a lot of startup founders, they’re like, oh, I want someone that’s so into working for equity.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., Expanding internationally means managing differences not only in language and time zone – but in culture, business norms, law, taxation, labor, employment, compensation, and competition. So is developing a geographic strategy. It’s worse.

Startup 137

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 137

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. The great part about having a couple of thousand startups using your product every day is there is so much innovation.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 286

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

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? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. It’s a timely conversation for us, coming hot on the heels of the release of our book Intercom on Sales last month and Steli’s own book The 2020 Startup Sales Playbook this week. to Close.com.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

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. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2022

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they’re building. Without an accessible onboarding process , customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Onboarding 195

Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Technical Review 195

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 190

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 190

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. It is important that these friendly connections represent the target persona market you have outlined, as otherwise, the feedback loop is likely to be weak. Iterate the product based on feedback.

Startup 178

Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178