SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

The $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) mark is a magnificent milestone for companies that indicates sustainable business growth. While every startup is eager to hit this mark quickly, it’s a process that takes time. If you want to preserve your culture as you scale, transform your team into an army of culture ambassadors.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. They initially tried to sell to other startups on the basis that Klaviyo could help you with your customer marketing. More on that here.

Revenue 300

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 300

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. Everyone wants “multiple revenue streams”, even if that means doing none of them as well as they could if they focused. Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. Well, maybe.

Underperforming Technical Team 316

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 316

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. Ensure that your data is clean and easily accessible, as poor data quality undermines the value of even the best customer success tool.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

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 286

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 286

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). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. 1/ Want the best startup VP Sales candidates in the world? Only money.

Sales Hiring 333

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 333

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 new product tends to dominate the discussions, yet by definition, is only a tiny percent of the revenues in the early days.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

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 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

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. These leaders act as partners and build out a strong team. Not every leader is created equally.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. So sort of going from older to more and more startup land. Who was the highest engaged teams?

Scale 237

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 237

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Azure ML revenue alone has increased more than 100 percent for five quarters in a row 4. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers.

Azure 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 256

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 197

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 197

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2021

Not necessarily in revenue, and often not in their core market. 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. Buy a pre-revenue startup in space with a strong team.

Underperforming Technical Team 264

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 264

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The path to Cheif Revenue Officer (CRO) is different for many people. Tracy Young , CEO and co-founder at TigerEye, sits down with three CROs to talk about how they navigated the journey to revenue leader. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup.

Scale 293

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 293

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Podcast Full Interview: Video Transcript Jesse Paliotto (00:04) Hello, everyone, and welcome to Growth Stage podcast, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. And then of course you generate revenue in much the same way as a blog.

Scale 119

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 119

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

Understanding SaaS sales models Before you start selling A typical sales process Sales and revenue operations Setting sales targets Hiring salespeople Understanding SaaS sales models There are three main SaaS sales models, each tailored to different customer types and buying journeys. Compare how your self-service vs sales-led revenue grows.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

Dennis amassed incredible insights through his experience as the Chief Revenue Officer of Procore, where he helped grow the company from $10M to $900M+ in revenue and guided it through a successful IPO. Build the team that builds the company.” – that is part of your go-to-market strategy responsible for growth.

AI 82

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 82

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! That makes up about 35 percent of our revenue now. 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. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 337

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

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

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 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

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 274

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 274

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. Don’t think VP of Sales — think “Revenue Engineer”. First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

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

JULY 1, 2021

Dropbox just hit one billion dollars in annual revenue. 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? How have the other two of you thought about building out your team?

VP of Engineering 286

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

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

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 284

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

You get something that truly works for you, and we get to connect with people who value what we offer and have the potential to become power users (and sources of sustainable revenue!). In fact, it was first created as an analytics tool, and only in recent years has it also developed an engagement suite. The alternative?

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage. Revenue & customers Product 2.1. Funding 1.3.

Social Media 124

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring 124

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 186

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 186

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? Helping the engineering teams run smoothly and being super productive thanks to mentoring.

Scale 311

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 311

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. When I first joined the Gorgias team, there were two founders, two engineers, and myself as the first non-technical hire.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 278

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups. They kept the focus on the core value proposition of helping teams write, plan and collaborate to create better workspaces, while still having the AI inclusion. Bad: We use AI to streamline sales workflows.

AI Search 85

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 85

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

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Podcast Full Interview: Video Transcript David Vogelpohl (00:05) Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their businesses. You get to work with a lot of different teams. And you can see your impact.

SMB 107

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 107

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 11, 2019

Startup marketing is tough. But today, marketing is the primary driver of revenue at your typical, fast growing B2B startup. But scaling a marketing team to the heights Segment have isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of A-players in a room and getting them to start churning out paid advertising. billion dollar valuation.

Scale 162

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Startup 162