SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2020

317: Rachel Hepworth is VP of Marketing @ Pilot, the startup that offers the best bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for growing businesses. Before Slack, Rachel spent 4 years at LinkedIn where she led the product marketing team for content experiences. Loving our podcast content? This episode is sponsored by TaxJar.

SMB 180

SMB Scale Startup Marketplace as a Service 180

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

The difference between the pace of a startup and large company. Vikas’ Journey from Sales Engineer to Managing a BD Team (22:20). Navigating the Pace and Pressure of a Startup (36:02). Vikas builds teams that follow this ethos. And that just wasn’t the job back in those days as a developer. What You’ll Learn.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 50

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

FastSpring

DECEMBER 7, 2023

As the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at WP Engine , Carl has worked on many acquisitions and partnerships, including brands like Flywheel, Perfect Dashboard, Block Lab, and recently, Delicious Brains. “This is everyday for me, so I love talking about it,” says Carl Hargreaves about mergers and acquisitions.

Software Review 136

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 136

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

In my experience, getting caught up in shiny objects (like great numbers) during the hiring process is a straight line to Disasterville, and when the cost of a bad hire is painfully significant , it pays to take a measured approach. Also: What are the top performers in my current team doing? This is a team effort.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 93

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. Here are five quick takeaways: Most sales and support teams talk about their jobs as a funnel.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. Building a great sales team: How Intercom fosters and maintains its sales culture. Onboarding, but make it remote. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2019

Ep 257: Justin Welsh is the former SVP Sales @ PatientPop, the startup that offers the first all-in-one practice growth platform that’s HIPAA-compliant and is proven to grow your practice. During his 5 years at PatientPop, Justin grew sales from $0 to $56m alongside the full build-out of the sales team.

Scale 140

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Interviewing 140

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? So as Lauren sort of alluded to, we started by focusing on SMB’s. So everything you do at a startup you’re treating it like an experiment, right?

Underperforming Technical Team 155

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 155

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Bansal shares this and other key milestones and frameworks for company building in conversation with a16z general partner Peter Levine; enterprise deal team partner Satish Talluri (who was a director of product and growth operations there); and Sonal Chokshi. the night before it was to IPO). Like, if you don’t know <Yeah.>

Product Marketing 81

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 81

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

Developer platform: a business where developers can build businesses on top of the business’s software and charge customers. The Weak Transition to Marketplace Arguments. There are three fairly weak arguments I don’t like, but I’ll present them anyway. #1 Take them from the marketplace team.

Marketplace as a Service 106

Marketplace as a Service Business Model Business Underperforming Technical Team 106

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Ep 255: Vikas Bhambri is SVP Sales and Customer Experience @ Kustomer, the startup providing Real-time, actionable views of customers with continuous omnichannel conversations and intelligence that automates repetitive, manual tasks. What is the right way for startup founders to address sales rep onboarding? Missed the session?

SaaS Payments 132

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 132

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And then I’ve watched, since she made this comment to me about 13 months ago, then I’ve watched with some startups I’ve worked with, where the first marketing hire comes in, and I asked them what their top five priorities are, and then I asked the CEO. What do you do with that lightly toxic person on your team?

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 205

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. But in other years, SMBs are jumping in the boat, so you get amazing growth long-term with a multi-segment strategy.

Sales Hiring 214

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 214

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

As for Krish, under Krish’s leadership the team has grown to over 300 people and over 5,000 clients making it one of the next generation in truly global SaaS businesses started in India. How does Krish think about purely serving the SMB market? How does he think about the mortality rate of SMBs? Loving our podcast content?

Scale 128

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 128

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

One of the biggest decisions you can make when setting up your sales team is whether to focus primarily on inside or outside sales. We’ll look at the strengths of each type of sales, why you need both of them in your team, and how to determine the best balance for your organization. What is inside sales? What is outside sales.

Sales Hiring 81

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 81

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. So taking us off, how did you make your way into the world of startups and how did you come to be CEO in UserTesting today? How does Andy think about discounting?

Sales Hiring 200

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 200

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 15, 2021

During one of our BIG RYG Hyper-Workshops on budgeting for Customer Success headcount, Kristen Hayer of The Success League, framed this shift by explaining that as a CS leader, you’re not running a happiness team, you’re running a revenue team. Your team will start to get pushed on the money side of things.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Benchmarks Scale Underperforming Technical Team 97

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

If you look at any SaaS startup, in the first couple reps, they always find one guy or gal that’s just amazing, just killing it. You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. Whatever you do, hire two. Who did you hire?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 261

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

This is season two of Scale , Intercom’s podcast series on moving from startup to scale-up. Tara and her team used it to take a deep dive into the customer’s journey through the product and make a focused effort to truly understand each step along the way. But, ultimately both teams have a shared end goal: increasing revenue.

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34

The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication

APRIL 8, 2019

Internal Team: Hire your own Sales Development Rep (SDR) team that is 100% dedicated to outbound prospecting. Pros: No one will know your “stuff” better than internal people, it’s the best long-term solution for most companies, and begins your sales Farm Team. You build a team of four Outbound SDRs.

Outsourcing Services 40

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. No one has an engineering team with the time to build anything. Jason Lemkin: Yep. So, thanks.

Scale 215

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 215

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

I’ve been in software since the ’90s and for over 20 years, nearly that entire time, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products, and our services in a way that’s optimized for a digital world.

Scale 158

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 158

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

And we had a variety of software offerings, everything from WordPress themes and plugins, a local development tool called Local and then had very SaaS like elements to our offering there. EJ Brown 06:10 I think there’s a common idea that startup culture in particular. I think that was surprising for me.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source 16 Startup Metrics by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy, a16z We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. This will result in poor open and response rates. To prospect for startups, Crunchbase Pro 's database is the place to go. Apollo’s full plan comes with an SMB level price tag; as a startup, you probably want the basic plan.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Turns out a founding team of six MBAs creating a full suite of products sold solely to SMBs can become a multi-million dollar public company in nine years – and continue growing rapidly ($77.6 Dharmesh : …said, “This is a very bad idea. million in 2013 to $115.9 million in 2014.). This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 224

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 224

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales.

Part-Time VPE 201

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 201

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason Lemkin: So you have like a great profile irrespective of what your startup’s doing. And so combine all that, the stress, markdowns… Blackbird today announced they’re marking down Canva, which is one of the most iconic startups out there. Colin here, CEO of a startup, B2B SaaS, and raising a seed round right now.

Scale 198

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 198

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams? * During his time at Optimizely, the company grew from from $7 to >$90M in ARR and from 40 to 400 people.

Underperforming Technical Team 158

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Services Technical Advisors 158

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2020

406: Kate Taylor is Head of Customer Experience at Notion, one of the fastest-growing startups of the last 5 years with over $68M in funding from some of the best in the business including Index, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Josh Kopelman and Aydin Senkut to name a few. Why does Kate not believe that in startups you can “do it all”?

Scale 166

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 166

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. When done correctly, your sales strategy will help your sales team execute with focus – SMB or enterprise, inbound or outbound, hunting or farming. 8 steps to develop a winning sales strategy.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2019

As for Whitney, she directly leads the organization’s go-to-market efforts, including sales, marketing, business development and customer operations. When is the right time for founders to think about building out their first exec team? What are the questions that suggest an individual has a startup culture to them?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team 132

Point Nine Land

JUNE 18, 2023

And yet, most startups that we’re talking to haven’t looked into cohort analyses yet.” You can also see right away that, for instance, month 5 was an unusually bad month for the April 2020 cohort. a churn or retention rate you’d be happy with), red for “bad” values, yellow for “OK”, and gradients for values in between.

SaaS Payments 128

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments SaaS 128

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. We recently sat down with Maggie to chat about all things sales – from laying down a solid foundation to hiring the right people and, finally, scaling the team into hyper-growth. Look for the team players.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118