There are no easy answers, but we do know one thing:
When things come back, you will need everyone great.
Marc Benioff said one of his top mistakes was not hiring enough salespeople in 2009, during the peak of the last downturn.
At almost every company, if we’re honest, the “bottom” 10% doesn’t contribute that much if any value. If you have to cut, start there. Every VP, every manager, and probably even most employees know who isn’t contributing enough. It’s about a 20-minute discussion to align on who the bottom 10% is. Beyond that is harder.
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Ben Braverman explains how Flexport entered a competitive market with a unique model and continues to grow. Hiring senior leaders can set companies up to fail and see how sticking with a current, successful model can be the key to hypergrowth. Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Ben Braverman | CRO @ FlexportFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOWThat was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. My name is Ben Braverman. I’m Chief Revenue Officer at Flexport. We do international shipping, so I’m honored to be speaking to people like you that were smart enough to get into high margin businesses. We are in a different business. We move boxes around the world for our
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Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Brendon Cassidy | Founder @ Cassidy VenturesFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Hey everybody, how you doing? So the title of my presentation is The Playbook To Hiring Your First VP Of Sales And Not Screwing It Up. I do this literally every day with a wide range of clients, sort of helping them in and around hiring a VP of Sales, maybe replacing a VP of Sales. So this is kind of what I do. I’ll toggle sort of between the Continue reading "The Playbook to Hiring Your First VP of Sales and Not Screwing it Up…….with Cassidy Ventures Founder Brendon Cassidy (Video + Transcript)"
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Ep. 311: Karl Sun is the Founder & CEO @ Lucidchart, a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. To date, Karl has raised $114M with Lucidchart from some of the best in the business including K9 Ventures, Meritech, Iconiq, GV and Kickstart in Utah. As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. As a result of his success, Karl was recently announced as EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
Pssst 🗣 Loving our podcast content? Listen to the start of the episode for a promo code to our upcoming events!In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
How Karl made his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of Lucidchart having been Head of Business Development for Google in China and Head of Patents.
How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does this requirement change as the company scales? How does Karl fundamentally think about finding great talent and keeping top of funnel full? How does Karl think about working with recruiters? What works? What does not work?
Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? How does Karl think about doing this at scale? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? Why do they have a hiring committee? What does the process look like? How do they assess and test for culture?
How does Karl think about retaining agility and flexibility with scale? How does Karl maintain employee empowerment with the implementation of process? How does Karl think about the balance between creating accountability without a fear of failure? What are the challenges of this?
Ep. 312: Starting a company can be daunting, exhausting, and expensive, but with the right focus and idea – extremely rewarding; take it from Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO of Wrike. In this session, he will outline the do’s and dont’s that he learned bootstrapping Wrike. Where it makes sense to invest your precious resources when to outsource, and how to save yourself money without cutting corners.
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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.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Lexi Reese | COO @ GustoFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
So a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. No big deal. Seems important to share where my experiences that I’ll be talking to come from. So I spent five years in nonprofits and public service and 15 years at American Express and Google and the last four years have been at Gusto.
And over that time, let’s say Amex was 150 years, Google was 9 years when I started, and Gusto was about 4 years old when I started. So sort of going from older to more
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Jason Lemkin moderates a panel of some greatest-of-all-time SaaStr speakers taking questions from the audience and over Twitter. The panel discussed navigating a future recession, building great office culture, app exhaustion and more.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Jason Lemkin | CEO and Founder @ SaaStr, Inc.Maria Pergolino | Former CMO @ AnaplanAnthony Kennada | Former CMO @ GainsightAaron Ross | CEO @ Predictable RevenueFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOWJason: We wanted to do an experiment this year of, what if we just brought back some of our most popular speakers from the past, the greatest of all time. So, we’ve got three of them here. Aaron’s going to talk about what in a few minutes?
Aaron: The playbook for reigniting growth.
Jason: All right. So, Aaron and I wrote a book together in 2014 or
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Ep. 297: Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. 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. Before that Bob co-founded RJ Metrics, where he built a global base of online retailers leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016.
Pssst 🗣 Loving our podcast content? Listen to the start of the episode for a promo code to our upcoming events!In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
How Bob made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Crossbeam.
As an entrepreneur, Bob has previously said, “No one is coming to save you.” What did he mean by this? What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? Is it the responsibility of the board to course correct at this early stage? How does Bob determine whether to be visionary and determined vs realizing when something is not working?
Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? Why is this? What are the drivers of its death? How important is it to own the entire customer journey? At what scale does that become impossible? In terms of replacement, what does Bob believe will be the emerging trends in SaaS Go To Market that will replace it?
How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? In the early days, partnerships can be a distraction, how does Bob determine between right and wrong when determining whether to engage in a partnership? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves?
Ep. 298: Startup success is not exclusive to Silicon Valley. With more companies launching and thriving outside of Silicon Valley, regions such as ‘Silicon Slopes’ in Utah and ‘Silicon Alley’ in New York City are gaining traction within the startup scene. Podium, an interaction management platform for local businesses, was founded in Utah and grew from five employees in 2015 to more than 300 in 2019 to become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the United States. In just four years, Podium has raised almost $100 million, with annual recurring revenue increasing to almost $60 million. Eric Rea, CEO of Podium, will share how he grew the company he launched from his spare bedroom into one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the country.
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Auren Hoffman is the CEO of SafeGraph and Co-Founder and former CEO of Live Ramp. Hear his top tough management lessons and mistakes he learned along the way to founding what is now a $3.8 Billion company. Live Ramp, a middleware company that connects marketing applications was acquired by Acxiom in 2014 for $310 million.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Auren Hoffman | CEO of SafeGraph and Co-Founder and former CEO of Live RampFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
All right. How you all doing?
Wait, are we at just an average B2B software company? How are all you doing?
All right. We’re at SaaStr. Okay, awesome. Awesome. Okay. Now, just a trigger warning. This is going to be pretty controversial, so you can still leave, you can still go away. We’re going to actually really dissect and go through a lot
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There is no shortage of options when it comes to building your marketing technology stack. But with the seemingly endless options, how do companies navigate what to handle in-house and what to outsource? This session weighs the options to create the right combination for your martech strategy.
Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.Guillaume Cabane | Founder, Growth @ Ex MachinaAlice Default | Co-Founder and CEO @ DoublePauline Fumeron | Marketing Automation Manager @ OpenClassroomsFULL TRANSCRIPT BELOWGuillaume: And today we’re going to talk about how to build your marketing stack. So I invited both Alice and Pauline because they represent different stages of startup life with different types of MarTech Stack progress, but first I want to give you a quick outlook on what I’m seeing. I’ve worked at multiple high growth SaaS businesses as a
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Recently on LinkedIn and Twitter I put together a list of things that later, once you are successful, even very successful, you’ll regret. It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there:
Regrets are different than mistakes. You will make so many mistakes. We all do. You learn, you move on.
No regrets are things that especially in recurring revenue companies, you’ll look back and say … well, I knew I should have done that at the time, and it wasn’t crazy hard, and it would have helped a lot … but I still didn’t do it. The flip side of recurring revenue is you will later regret things that you could have done earlier to help, that were sort of obvious, that would have helped more of it recur. Because later you’ll see just having gotten on one more jet,
That was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. My name is Ben Braverman. I’m Chief Revenue Officer at Flexport. We do international shipping, so I’m honored to be speaking to people like you that were smart enough to get into high margin businesses. We are in a different business. We move boxes around the world for our
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