Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

This is the theoretically ideal organizational chart of a startup. There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. This is the org chart of the typical startup. Is this so bad? That won’t work.

Startup 312

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 312

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner and CPO Kelsey Stevenson share the three secret ingredients that helped them when scaling to $100M ARR and what they could have done differently. You might have to rebuild your marketing team. Bitly had an Enterprise sales-focused team. While that might seem like a bad thing, it wasn’t.

Scale 294

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 294

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. Businesses use us for customer support, leads qualification, and more.

AI Search 162

AI Search AI Startup Scale 162

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. Unicorn companies often need to scale quickly to meet the demands of their rapidly growing customer base. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Let’s get it going. Times are good.

Scale 268

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 268

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 a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. So big, big scale.

Scale 227

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 227

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

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. Some things to think about as you craft your offer are: Does it align with your sales motion? You don’t want conflict with the sales team.

Startup 256

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 256

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2025

Companies are discovering that hiring AI talent or upskilling existing teams takes much longer than anticipated. Many organizations are stuck in “pilot purgatory”—running successful experiments but unable to scale them. This favors companies with strong enterprise sales capabilities over those relying on viral adoption.

130

130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers. 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 278

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 284

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). Often the Great Guy from Salesforce or Shopify or ServiceNow or LinkedIn or whatever other leading SaaS company. Only money.

Sales Hiring 333

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 333

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

You might say it’s one of the strongest advantages a startup has. But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. If you’re a leader, he says, don’t try to scale your job. Michael Redbord has an answer for that.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

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. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Almost everyone in sales seems to be into real estate, either “multi-family” real-estate or getting their broker’s license. Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup.

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

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups. Dont lead with tech. Lead with the real problem your buyer is facing. Bad: We use AI to streamline sales workflows.

AI Search 82

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 82

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. Considering aspects of sales and GTM strategies. A good range for this hire might be between 2-8 sales reps. Enablement.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

Businesses also win if, as a result of AI, teams are able to create more white-glove moments that turn users into customers for life. He joined me for a conversation on tackling issues that come up as you scale your customer experience. When scaling your customer experience, remember AI can’t simulate human empathy.

Scale 157

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 157

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. 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

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Our team is in Room 111.

Scale 157

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 157

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

JUNE 4, 2021

We can look back at how Datadog scaled. 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.

Scale 311

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 311

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. Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 183

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 183

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. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

Sales Hacker

JUNE 6, 2025

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. AI is transforming how go-to-market teams operate. SDRs are prospecting faster. SDRs are prospecting faster. Skill gyms” by function Sales: Live call blitzes, objection sprints, AI call debriefs.

AI Search 53

AI Search Scale AI Outsourcing Services 53

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche.

Sales Recruiting 258

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 258

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

The Challenge That SaaS Companies Face: Failed Operations and Limited Growth Opportunities Despite being a financially lucrative space with investors and startups, the SaaS industry is littered with thousands of failures. As a SaaS company, the best lead generation asset is your product itself. Customer acquisition cost.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person. I’ve never even played a sales person on TV. 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.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

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.

Revenue 300

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 300

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

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? Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. 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

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 247

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 247