Point Nine Land

MARCH 7, 2019

Lemkin recently posted a tweetstorm about his observation that most startups are bad at finance. No proper finance or account until even after raising millions, even to $5m+ ARR. If there’s a trade-off between hiring a CFO and, say, a marketing leader or 1–2 developers, most founders will understandably go for the latter.

Sales Hiring 72

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Payment Services Finance 72

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 18, 2021

Is your leadership team world-class? Could you grow faster if you replaced your head of sales? Does your board think you have the right leadership team? Heck, does your leadership team think you have the right leadership team? Are some of your executives holding your company back? Do your rank-and-file employees?

Leadership 113

Leadership Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Scale 113

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. For Natasha, the answer is a resounding yes.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times. Mark’s a seasoned startup executive, he’s go-to-market oriented, and he has some large-company chops that he developed earlier in his career.

Sales Hiring 138

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 138

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 11, 2022

So far, we’ve seen a slowdown in the venture market due to the drop in the stock market, inflation, an increase in interest rates, and a number of other issues. According to Crunchbase, valuations are declining, funding rounds are slowing, and some tech companies are freezing hiring or laying off employees to boost profits.

Scale 97

Scale Scaling Technical Review Venture Capital 97

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 14, 2022

What the soon-to-be podcast host and venture capitalist calls to mind is a somewhat forgettable scene where Peter Thiel becomes Facebook’s first major investor. It was the first time Harry came across venture capital, and, he tells us, he was instantly hooked. There’s no right way to do venture. Delighted to have you.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

So is developing a geographic strategy. Just as sports teams have an advantage when competing in their home stadium, European startups often have a (sometimes unacknowledged) home country advantage when competing in their home market. Hiring the wrong people. division II) players, or hiring big roles (e.g., It’s worse.

Startup 116

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 116

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. Even after we did our pivot to the accounting automation and optimization, we still had desperate moments. year sales cycles. You have to learn things like how do I scale my sales force? How do we sell to accountants? I’m not kidding.

Startup 270

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 270

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2020

So we’re really proud of that and our whole team is really proud of that. And one thing that’s been really cool starting the company 10 years ago in an economic downturn to today, about six months ago Matthew and I and our team took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. Which ones are we bad at?

Sales Hiring 175

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Recruiting 175

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Managing a technical team as a non-technical person [24:13]. Sales enablement is easy. More sales meetings, more money. We’re on iTunes. The result?

Marketplace as a Service 96

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 96

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? Should one hire sales reps 2×2? How does Andy think about hiring sales reps from adjacent companies and industries? How does Andy think about minimizing and optimising sales ramp times? How does Andy view the importance of offering trials?

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Technical Review 204

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Enough venture capital can certainly bridge that gap. I mean consumed a little bit of capital, but if 90% of them converted in the trial period, it all worked out on the hardware. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Like sales doesn’t like freemium. So that’s one question.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 226

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. Some of his first professional positions were Engagement Manager at McKinsey, as well as a management consultant at Value Partners. Starting as VP of Sales, in less than two years he became CEO.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2020

The first will be sharing five perspectives and things that I found to be useful in adjusting sales in the midst of a crisis or a turnaround. ” And then we debated like how across the leadership team to say, “Hey, can we afford this or not?” And that’s the job that Evernote was hired to do.

Scale 260

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Leadership 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

* How does David think about scaling sales teams? How does one know when is the right time to hire your first sales reps? What content and learnings should you have in place when you make the hire? What have been his lessons on optimizing payback period for sales reps? Why is 12 months so crucial?

Scale 187

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 187

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

You can think of Horizontal SaaS as broad-based tech that is industry agnostic; a sales person at a Cybersecurity company can use HubSpot the same way a sales person at a Health Supplements company might use it. We trust leaders to make decisions on what tools they need to get the most out of their teams.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018. Why is this?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

Kellblog

DECEMBER 27, 2021

My point was that this is normal and healthy: you can long Miami and Austin without shorting Palo Alto which, by the way, would have been a bad idea in 2020. Is web3 going to change everything because, as Chris Dixon argues, the best entrepreneurs and developers have learned not to build atop centralized platforms? Web3 hype peaks.

Blockchain 142

Blockchain Technical Review Venture Capital Sales Hiring 142

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was offered a job as Buildium’s first full-time marketing hire, pulling in a cool $38,400 annually. I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Matt Rizzetta , founder of North 6th Agency, which is a communications and PR firm based in New York City. Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. How to get better at sales [21:37].

Scale 106

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 106

Point Nine Land

MARCH 15, 2022

If you take a look at a 50 person sales team, you’ll likely find it to be very data-driven. They usually track low-level metrics about their app performance or errors, and agile teams have burn-down charts. But because the data lives in different systems (e.g. Big brother is watching you. Enter Athenian.

Investment 52

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 52

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2019

Why does Parker believe it is fundamentally better to wait for as long as possible before hiring customer support? Why should your engineers be heavily involved in the customer support hiring process? How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team?

VP of Engineering 130

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review 130

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

million round of financing led by Grotech Ventures in 2017. Grotech Ventures is a team committed to helping creative and driven entrepreneurs build technology companies that last. Interest from channel partners and sales via channel partners can be another meaningful indicator. . ChurnZero raised a $2.5

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success Payments Underperforming Technical Team 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Ophelia Brown | Founder, Partner @ Blossom Capital. Emilie Maret | Fellowship Team @ The Family. Evgenia Plotnikova | Principal @ Dawn Capital. Christina Fonseca | Venture Partner @ Indico Partners (moderator). I’m the founder of Blossom Capital.

New CTO 145

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 145

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

The age-old sales funnel has worked fine for decades…until now. Why is the sales funnel alone, no longer an appropriate way of thinking about customers? Hilarie Koplow-McAdams – Venture Partner at NEA. Brian Halligan: Whether we all like it or not, trust in sales and marketing is at an all-time low.

Scale 106

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 106

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

It’s an important question, as your target growth rate determines your hiring plan, budget, and fundraising strategy. What makes things tricky is, first, the uncertainty of how your CACs will develop at increasing scale and of how your churn rate will develop over time. I’ve created a very simple model that illustrates this.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2020

Think about what you could be doing to bring more diversity into your teams and be more inclusive as a company, and go actively out of your way in order to achieve set goals. Hire people who can point those out and help you to constantly progress. Perhaps you could just give us a bit of background – why did we hire you as CEO?

Payment Solutions 209

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 209

Outseta

MAY 8, 2020

What I’m hoping this post provides is an objective look at the world of technology start-ups—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Before I lived it, I thought of the tech world as being very business oriented—a place owned by analytical types and developers writing rigid blocks of code that looked like gibberish to me.

Part-Time VPE 102

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 102

Sixteen Ventures

DECEMBER 31, 2019

In 2019 I worked with amazing companies, venture capital firms, and startup accelerators around the world. Customer Success Management Defined. How to Develop a Customer Success Strategy. True Customer Relationship Management. The Role of Customer Success in… Customer Development. Customer Acquisition.

Customer Success 136

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 136

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

Do I have the right team? And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year. And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 120

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

Choosing the right combination of funding for your business is just as fundamental as choosing the right co-founders (or not), the right market, the right product, and the right team. million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

Kellblog

AUGUST 13, 2019

The rest of us, to varying degrees, all need to make intelligent trade-offs in facing what is effectively a Groucho Marx problem [1] in our career management. Working for TBH , i.e., working for a boss who is to-be-hired. Tuck-ins and acqui-hires still happen, but typically for very early-stage companies and not at great valuations.

Software Review 76

Software Review Startup Sales Hiring Software 76

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 4, 2019

An existing SaaS customer spends more, on average, than a new customer, and are more than seven times more likely to churn (leave your business) to go to a competitor because of poor customer service than they are for a better product. Chorus is a leading conversation intelligence platform for sales teams. Consistent updates.

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

Kellblog

APRIL 4, 2021

We are team members in an organization, after all. Manager response: “Well, I know a CAC of 1.7 is high but we are ramping quickly and carrying a lot of unproductive sales capacity that hurts the CAC ratio.” We don’t have a sales model, so why are you calculating its efficiency? Founders own the team.

CTO Coach 99

CTO Coach CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO 99

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

Start with your existing sales and see where there’s interest from existing buyers. How to Take Advantage of Emerging SaaS Consumer Markets [4 min clip] In our 2022 Emerging SaaS Customer Markets report , we highlight 25 countries and three regions with emerging consumer markets for SaaS and software sales. David used the U.S.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

I’m a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners, which is a venture capital firm, which was very lucky to be a part of SendGrid’s journey. We collectively as a company were fortunate in doing all those things and, boy, was it a heck of a team effort, and it was a lot of fun. I won’t lie.

Scale 130

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

394: Where is Venture Capital today? Sunil Dhaliwal: I was at one of the biggest firms around and I think we had a $200 million fund and people were like, I can’t believe we’re running $200 million in venture capital. And how do you hack it? This episode is sponsored by Outgrow. Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting 166

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 166