SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? You can find the full slide deck from David’s presentation on Slideshare. Head of Product. Head of Sales. billion in 2012.

CTO Hire

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales.

Scale

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing?

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SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

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SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag.

CTO Hire

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

You can watch the full session , and if you missed the podcast with the first half of the interview, you’ll find that here. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Anything that you can find that cascades through the organization is critical.

CTO Coach

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete.

CTO Coach

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

In this article, we’ve outlined the major roles that move the needle in terms of product growth alongside their KPIs and current salary ranges. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

But also, as a sole founder, you also can make a decision in a very timely manner. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. Speed is everything.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

To build the initial team, to build the product, to build the initial go to market, to build the first customers and to build the ARR, the starting. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Pietro : This journey used to end at the legendary, mythical product/market fit. ” That’s not proven.

New CTO

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

A Couple SaaS Generations Ago… Traditional software companies managed sales, product development, finance and HR in siloed organizations by function. Cross functional management was attempted but often not effective. In the early SaaS days, management structure was essentially the same. Chief Product Officer.

Part-Time CTO

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

Product positioning describes the specific market you intend to win and why you are uniquely qualified to win it. It’s the underpinning of your go-to-market strategy and impacts everything from marketing to sales, to customer success and the product itself. Why positioning matters? They focused on SaaS.

Strategy

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

We needed to stay relevant along the customer’s journey and we needed to find our own cloud provider that was going to allow for us to scale quickly, to have the security that we knew customers were demanding when they were searching for cloud platforms. So I’ll give you a flip perspective from a sales and marketing standpoint.

Cloud

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Identify ideal customers and hone sales personas. Get it done faster.

Startup

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. Click To Tweet. You learn your customers’ language.

Interviewing

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Plus, the Product Marketing Alliance drops the Product Marketing Salary Survey. What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? That’s what David Apple—customer success and sales guru at Notion— is asking. Along with: What’s the ROI of your customer success manager?

Scale

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Seema: Would love to talk about finding those initial customers who you tested with. So we didn’t have product market fit for that. How did you think about, who do I want to target for that product given where we are now. I knew that we had something here when we were in the Postmates office in San Francisco.

Merchant Services

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. Tweet this quote. You learn your customers’ language.

Interviewing

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Today, a lot of the PLG SaaS tools require sales motion upfront because nobody understands those tools. Those types of tools actually require work in the initial days of the sales motion. Think Notion, Canva, Slack, all of those products. Can they go to your website, sign up, try the product, and checkout themselves?

Startup

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

To handle this evolving requirement, it is important to build a competent profile to initiate progress in product development. This is where companies need another C-level executive to facilitate business growth via products. What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department.

Part-Time CTO

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2023

We’ve discussed most before individually, but let me throw ’em together: It may well take 24 months to get to true product-market fit and Initial Traction. You really need a great CTO, not just a good business team. A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2021

Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Tolithia Kornweibel, Chief Revenue Officer @Gusto. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @Bandwidth. Dave Walters, CTO, Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success, Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO, Hired. Zach Kitschke, CMO, Canva.

VP of Engineering

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

He also founded SaaScribe to help founders, customer success teams , sales executives, marketing professionals, and growth hackers. Asia Orangio is a SaaS expert who helps SaaS companies and start-ups to craft a data driver strategy and implement award-winning marketing strategies to win the audience. Asia Orangio. Chris Orlob.

VP of Engineering

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. We think we should hold off doing channels until we’ve debugged the sales model.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

As for Erica, under her CRO role, she leads all go-to-market functions including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Success, Services, and Support. How does the move to enterprise fundamentally impact the sales team? How does the structure of the sales team change with the move? Where do many go wrong?

Scale

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Katrina Wong, VP Marketing and Demand Generation @ Segment. Asawari Samant, Head of Marketing @ Anyscale. Amy Appleyard, VP Sales @ VMWare. Michelle Benfer, VP, Head of North America Sales @ HubSpot. Kady Srinivasan, Head of Marketing @ Klaviyo. Jessica Weimer Vice President, Global Revenue Marketing @ Podium.

VP of Engineering

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

297: Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? Why is this? What are the drivers of its death?

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

What does really effective product marketing mean to Paul? How does Paul think about driving really effective change management? When engaging with bottoms up sales models, where does Paul identify the tipping points of going from bottoms up to top down? * Is it product decisions? Is there hiring decisions?

CTO Coach

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. So, I’m Chief Technology Officer, and years ago I was volunteered by my co-founder to work on culture.

Part-Time CTO

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Sara Hicks, VP of Product, Commerce @ Mailchimp. Devon Rutherford, Managed Services Program Manager & Pre-Sales Manager @ Leaseweb. Mariela Towers, Head of Marketing @ BEE. Jules Costa, Content Manager @ BEE. Amy Appleyard, VP Sales @ VMWare. Christine Spang, Co-Founder and CTO @ Nylas.

VP of Engineering

Sales Hacker

MARCH 11, 2025

Guest Speaker (Cassie Young): LinkedIn Primary VC Host (Scott Barker): LinkedIn Newsletter Find GTMnow (GTMfund’s Media Brand): Website LinkedIn Twitter/X YouTube Podcast Sponsor: Pursuit The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis.

Scale