Maria Pergolino is the CMO @ Anaplan, the company that allows you to accelerate decision-making with effective planning. To date, Anaplan have raised over $299m in funding from the likes of Meritech, Salesforce Ventures, Shasta, DFJ Growth and more incredible names. As for Maria, prior to Anaplan, Maria was Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Sales Development at Apttus, where she directed go-to-market strategy, sales development, customer advocacy, demand generation, strategic events and communications initiatives. She also has held leadership positions at Marketo, Shunra Software (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), and Chubb Ltd. It’s also important to note, Maria is renowned for building world-class teams that drive growth, product differentiation, and category development.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Maria made her way into the world of B2B marketing? What were her biggest lessons from the days of Marketo?
• How does Maria balance between instinct driven decision making vs data-driven in B2B marketing? Is there anything wrong with instinct driven? How can marketers confidently back up their thesis with substantive proof? How does one successfully sell that to leadership?
• Maria is famous for rallying teams around her ideas, what has Maria found to be core to the success in gaining this collective approval and excitement? What is the right way to approach the marketing portfolio of strategies as a whole? What channel or segment is Maria currently most excited for?
• How does maria evaluate the current event landscape in terms of effectiveness? Are we in a B2B event bubble? How can companies determine whether this is the right strategy for them? Would Maria agree with Joe Chernov, “to do events, you have to have an appetite for losing money? What does Maria and her team do to get the most out of events?
• What does the term “marketing playbook” really mean to Maria? What does Maria mean when she suggests that marketers can let their own playbook get in the way? Why does maria think it is absurd for there to be misalignment from sales and marketing?

Maria’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Maria know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. Who does Maria believe is killing it in B2B marketing today?
3. Advice commonly stated in SaaS that Maria disagrees with?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Maria Pergolino

Cristina Cordova leads the Payments Partnerships and Platform Partnerships teams at Stripe, the new standard in online payments that handles billions of dollars of business every year for forward thinking businesses around the world. To date, Stripe has raised over $680m in funding from some of the very best in the business including Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Thrive, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global. As for Cristina, at Stripe she manages partnerships with some of the biggest global players including Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat Pay and more and has also held roles such as Head of Diversity and Inclusion and Manager of Partner Engineering. Prior to Stripe, Cristina was Head of Business Development @ Pulse (acq by LinkedIn) and was in the marketing team at Tapulous (acq by Disney).

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Cristina made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Head of Partnerships at one of the fastest growing startups in the world, Stripe?
• Does Cristina agree with the common notion that certain people are destined for certain stages of a company’s life? How can one determine whether some has the ability to scale or not? What are the leading indicators? What have been some of Cristina’s biggest lessons in scaling from 28 at Stripe to 1,300?
• What does Cristina believe is the key to success when it comes to adapting to new roles? What worked? What did not work? Where does Cristina see many go wrong? How should employees think about title both when joining and when at a high growth company? What is the right way for them to think about and approach equity?
• What does Cristina believe is so special about partnerships with early stage startups? How can partnerships be fundamentally dangerous for early stage companies? How can startups determine when is the right time to engage with partners? What are the key questions and terms startups should focus on when partnering with incumbents?
• What makes Cristina lean in on a partnership for Stripe? What does Cristina believe is the right way to communicate this excitement and set expectations? For the larger player, what does the optimal agreement look like? What are the commonalities in the reasons that Cristina passes on potential partnerships?

Cristina’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Cristina know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
2. Who is killing it in SaaS partnerships today?
3. When is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Cristina Cordova

Claire Hughes Johnson is the COO @ Stripe, the new standard in online payments that handles billions of dollars of business every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. To date, Stripe has raised over $680m in funding from some of the very best in the business including Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Thrive, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global. As for Claire, prior to Stripe she spent over 10 years at Google in a range of different roles from VP of Google's self-driving car division to VP of Global Online Sales to VP of Google Offers. At Stripe, Claire has helped take Stripe global in February 2016 with the launch of Atlas, a toolkit that enables any business, anywhere in the world, to incorporate in the United States. If that was not enough, Claire is also a Board Member @ Hallmark Cards.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Claire made her way into the world of SaaS with Stripe following her leading of Google’s self-driving car division?
• What does Claire mean when she discusses “founding documents”? What is the right way to go about creating them? What element do they need to contain? How can one optimise internal decision-making process with these documents? What question must one always try and ask when making big decisions?
• How does Claire define a truly special COO? What does that truly great look like? When is the right time for founders to hire that COO? Where do the majority of people go wrong in their assessment of when and what they need in a COO? What is the optimal relationship one can have between CEO and COO?
• How does Claire think about what Stripe have done right to hire so effectively at scale? What does it take in terms of benchmarks and standards to do so? What does Claire mean when she says you have to step function up your capabilities with scale? What are the core challenges in hiring at scale?  

Claire’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What would Claire say are her biggest strengths and weaknesses?
2. What does Claire know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
3. A moment in Claire’s life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way she thinks?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Claire Hughes Johnson

Dan Reich is the Founder & CEO @ Troops.ai, the startup that is the ultimate slackbot for sales teams. To date, Dan has raised over $17m in VC funding with Troops from many friends of the show including Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, First Round, Nextview, Susa Ventures and even Slack. As for Dan, he is also the Co-Founder and President of TULA, a private equity backed health and beauty business that has developed the world's first line of probiotic skincare products. Before that, Dan was a Co-Founder of Spinback (acquired by Buddy Media in May 2011, then acquired by Salesforce in June 2012).

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Dan made his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of Spinback? How that led to his founding of the ultimate slackbot for sales teams in Troops? How the experience with Spinback affected his operating mindset with Troops today?
• Why does Dan believe that the current modelling of org charts is fundamentally upside down? How does Dan think about when is the right time to insert the first level of managers? What should one look for in those managers? Does Dan believe you have to hire “logo players” from big firms at some point in the journey?
• Why does Dan believe that your customer success has to be obsessed with asking why? Taking a step back, how does Dan think about when the right time is to hire your first CS rep? How has Dan seen the best companies do post mortem analysis on churn? What can be done to ensure seamless communications between product and customer success teams?
• Dan has a knack for knowing where the puck is going with large enterprises before anyone else. How? What does this ideation process look like? Once the idea has been created, what does Dan believe is crucial to the success of partnering with the behemoths of Salesforce and Slack?
• How can startups navigate the internal politics of these mega enterprises? How can they use this exercise to not only understand the politics themselves but also build credibility and trust with the organisations once inside? Where does Dan see most founders going wrong both in introductions to enterprise and then building trust once inside?

Dan’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Dan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. What is Dan’s favourite story of hustle? Why that one?
3. Who does Dan believe is killing it in the world of SaaS today?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Dan Reich