SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO @ Stack Overflow recently shared with our community the four key pillars he feels are necessary to propel a company to scale upward. The four key pillars he lays out are: Product market fit & expansion. Go to market approach & expansion. 1 Product-Market Fit and Expansion.

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Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

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Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

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? But they should.

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Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 241

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

As you scale up a business, you’ll see an increase in demand for product, followed by an inevitable increase in sales. But how should you proceed when it comes to scaling your sales team? 5 ways to scale your SaaS and sales team. 5 ways to scale your SaaS and sales team.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Naturally, demand is going to lead to a ton of supply. It has become much cheaper to build software — You can build high-quality products cheaply in your dorm room with a laptop. We now have a backdrop where it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build high-quality products. That’s unbelievable! What are those incentives?

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Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 231

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

As companies scale, they evolve, so how should marketing evolve accordingly to add maximum value? Kady Srinivasan , CMO of Lightspeed Commerce, has been through every stage of marketing growth at companies like DropBox, Owlet, Klaviyo, and now Lightspeed Commerce. The reality is that a lot of things change as we scale.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 194

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

PST — Former VP of Customer Success and current founder and Managing Partner at Success Venture Partners, John Gleeson, shares his lessons learned scaling customer success from $1M to $300M in ARR. If you don’t know, it’s the hockey stick curve going from $2M to $6M to $18M to $36M and on and on after you’ve found product market fit.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential , Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Product Maturity.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense For Your First Marketing Hire Be a Product Marketer? Generally, the CEO or another founder will hack being both the head of product, and head of product marketing, at least until $1m-$2m in ARR, often longer. You need someone that knows how to get you leads.

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User Pilot

JANUARY 17, 2024

Scaling SaaS is not for the faint of heart. If you do not scale, you will be unable to reach a new pool of customers and your competitors will leave you in the dust. If you scale prematurely, you may struggle to satisfy customer expectations. Provide the necessary training for your sales teams.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Check out the session here: Algolia also summarized their Top 5 take-aways here , and below: Most SaaS founders start out the same way— armed with ample expertise of the technical details that go into a product and with limited experience of other aspects of scaling, such as sales. And then boom!”

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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

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. But because people convert by themselves, it creates a healthy product market fit.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 161

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. Michiel Rauws (@michielrauws2): So, my question is, we’ve been scaling our SaaS business. We can scale accounts, when we get them, very well. So the new sales leader is trying to figure out, can we go further up market?

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SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. But before the years of rapid scaling, it took the company a little while to hit its stride.

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Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 202

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. In some ways they’re a next-generation marketing automation system for restaurants, sort of a, they’re a Toast partner but a Toast Plus. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Times are good.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 216

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Overlapping responsibilities and conflicting priorities are just a couple of the many friction points between product managers and product marketing managers – leading to inefficient workflows and potential product failures. Product marketing managers focus on getting the product in the right hands.

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SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

If you don’t want your company defeated by change, you need to adapt your Go-To-Market strategy at every stage of growth. Managing Partner of CIPIO Partners, Rolan Dennert, shares how companies need to readjust and rethink GTM fit — and even product market fit — from time to time. The sales cycle at this stage may be very short.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market. In ServiceNow’s case, they were a single-product company focused on selling IT. Also, they had a direct sales team mainly selling to enterprises in a top-down sales motion. “[The

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Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2023

When a startup is born, founders lead sales. Design partners, pilots, or founder-led sales - they have many names - these customers work with a startup to solve a problem. Said another way, founder-led sales are sales engineering sales, not account executive sales.

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SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

Q: Dear SaaStr: What Were The First Five Hires You Made After Product-Market Fit? My first 5 hires at Adobe Sign / EchoSign, beyond the core founding+ team, once we had paying customers and first, if early, product-marketing fit: #1: Full-time sales rep at $8k-ish MRR. 5: VP of Sales at $1.5m

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SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

You might feel confused about where to begin, how to scale up, which mistakes you should avoid, and things you should consider before expanding. Now, let’s look at ten learnings that Dorian gathered while scaling Grammarly from a Consumer to an Enterprise brand with B2B offerings. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

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Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 208

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

You need to identify a niche in the current market, make yourself known, understand your main differentiators, and offer your users a ton of value for their money. Cliff Bockard, Senior Vice President of Revenue at DigitalOcean, joined us at SaaStr Scale to discuss how businesses can serve SMBs and still bring in large numbers of revenue. .

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SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

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Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 198

SaaStr

JULY 16, 2019

Join Rene Yang Stewart, Co-Head and Principal, Vista Equity Partners, and Monica Enand, Founder and CEO, Zapproved, as they discuss growing a company from product market fit to scale. Hear perspectives from both the investor and founder as the company scaled. Vista Equity Partners invested in Zapproved in 2017.

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SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

So just a little while back, Lenny Rachintsky had me on his hyper-popular podcast to talk about scaling sales, from the perspective of a founder who hasn’t really done sales. They really are a great checklist when you are starting to scale sales in SaaS: #1. And sales go down, not up. #2. More here. #4.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

The success of any company depends on its ability to consistently deliver commercially successful products to the market. Product marketing can be difficult, and managing product launches and rollouts can be complex. You found product-market fit You’ve found product-market fit, and you’re scaling.

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Sales Hiring Product Marketing Scale Marketing 205

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Businesses must effectively evolve their strategies, operations, and overall product-market fit to target and win those enterprise accounts. Airtable CEO Howie Liu shared Airtable’s journey into enterprise, what he’s learned from scaling the company, and his best advice for other SaaS companies looking to make a similar move.

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Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

To handle this complexity, some startups have split the role under two leaders: a head of product marketing and a head of demand generation. An identical query for VP Product Marketing yields 1.6m If you’re thinking about your marketing team’s structure, the dual lead approach is one to consider.

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The Angel VC

OCTOBER 3, 2017

but "What will your CACs be if you invest $10-20 million in sales & marketing?". It’s much harder to predict future CACs at bigger scale. When you’re raising a Series B or later round, you’ve achieved Product/Market Fit (which is hard to define, see me attempt here ) and you’ve got what Jason M.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Acquisition 233

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

Editor’s Note: This article is part three of a four-part series that covers the most crucial product marketing activities for an early-stage startup. Ok, we tested the product out with a few potential customers. Let’s start hiring a whole sales team!”. Welcome to Part Three, focused on scaling sales.

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2023

OpenAI’s Head of Sales, Aliisa Rosenthal, joined OpenAI a year and a half ago — before ChatGPT launched. She joined a team of two, and there was a lack of product-market fit beyond small groups of researchers. After the launch of ChatGPT, they went from 30 leads a week to 10,000. How did they get here?

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