SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

ARR, Zendesk today gets 14% of new business from startups. On top of that, if you look at their top accounts globally, 33 of the top 50 customers by ARR are startups. You have to think about how you will differentiate and craft your offers from the rest of your marketing. You don’t want conflict with the sales team.

Startup 253

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 253

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. The Showpad executive team strives to continually lower talent attrition.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

If you’ve been paying attention to any loud marketing efforts over the last few years, you have definitely heard about multi-cloud. Even thinking about implementing a multi-cloud architecture is prematurely optimizing for practically all businesses – especially startups – and not a trap you want to fall into.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2025

Be prepared to talk about the team youve builtwho you hired, why you hired them, and how they performed. Be ready to share specific examples of how youve developed and executed sales strategies that drove revenue growth. Talk about how youve taken small teams and turned them into revenue machines.

Sales Recruiting 190

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Scale 190

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. Best customer success software for startups and small companies. Top customer success management platforms for mid-market and enterprise companies. Defining a customer success tool and other FAQs.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

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. Don’t be scared to explore new markets.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing. The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. Or VP of Eng, or whatever. Only money.

Sales Hiring 335

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 335

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

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

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 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 293

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

To adapt Julius Caesar’s famous opening line of the Gallic Wars : marketing as a whole is divided in three parts. Product marketing (prodmkt), responsible in a word, for the message and how well it resonates with customers in the market [1]. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

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. So marketing owns a pipeline, not just a megaphone.

Scale 266

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 266

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

He joined SaaStr Workshop Wednesday LIVE to do a deep dive with Jason Lemkin on his 10 Point Checklist when you sell your startup. Manage Team Expectations – Balance transparency with the need to keep the team focused on building the business.

Technical Review 188

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 188

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 272

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 272

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? Where does marketing allocate its resources? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. A second product can’t bail out your sales team. I wish I had some magic answers.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

I built a marketplace for specialty food and I’ve worked in the Valley based in San Francisco across a number of, well across one startup and then a very established online publishing business called Lonely Planet, which of course at one point in It’s the biggest guidebook publisher in the world.

Scale 118

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 118

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. For example, how do you think about ICP, and what markets should you go after? Not every leader is created equally. Enablement.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 244

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams.

Azure 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 256

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2021

Not necessarily in revenue, and often not in their core market. But in a related market that becomes strategically important. Some examples: Okta basically won the corporate side of identity (rocketed to #1) but wasn’t #1 on the developer side. Smaller deals can sometimes just be about experiments, and teams.

Underperforming Technical Team 266

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 266

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

At Procore, he led all customer-facing functions—Sales, Marketing, CS, RevOps, and BD. But behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team – and building that team is one of the hardest and important parts of the journey. Product and Go-To-Market. And that’s people.

AI 80

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 80

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 11, 2019

This week on Scale , we’re getting an inside look at how marketing helped them grow to a $1.5 Startup marketing is tough. But today, marketing is the primary driver of revenue at your typical, fast growing B2B startup. content marketing), organic costs are rising fast too. billion dollar valuation.

Scale 162

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Startup 162

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 2, 2020

It’s around this time that some businesses start to consider startup funding. Access to more capital means implementing better growth tools, expanding the team, and generally making the journey to profitability much smoother. Does your business need startup funding? How Do I Get Startup Funding for My Business?

Startup 145

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Government Investment 145

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Known as the Martech 5000 — nicknamed after the 5,000 companies that were competing in the global marketing technology space in 2017, it’s said to be the most frequently shared slide of all time. – lie beyond the realms of this article but one thing is clear: this market is HUGE. What is a marketing technology stack?

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

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. Here, customers usually find your brand through marketing channels and then engage with it through tools like interactive self-guided demos, free trials, or freemium versions of your product.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The Worst Days of a CRO The job of CRO is a tough one, with lots of natural tensions in place between sales and marketing, sales and product, etc. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team.

Scale 299

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 299

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.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

It was a big milestone for the company and the markets as it had everything you want in a company going public: 39% annual revenue growth, 16% free cash margins, and 117% NRR. They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. More on that here.

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

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 292

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 292

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence 203

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US has a massive total available market (TAM), which accounts for between 40% and 50% of worldwide technology spending. Much as Paris is a bellwether for the future of fashion, the US market is a bellwether for technology. It’s worse.

Startup 139

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 139

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 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

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.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency. The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

When Greenhouse started, it was at a time when the market was growing up, and there weren’t any playbooks. Could something like the Greenhouse of 2015 even make it to market today? Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. They did it.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 278

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. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams. We can look back at how Datadog scaled.

Scale 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

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.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

No one knows this better than Sprout Social’s Director of Marketing Strategy, Tara Robertson. Tara joined the company in 2017 and has been instrumental in helping the company scale and retain more customers through a unique customer-centric approach to marketing. . A different approach is the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34