SaaStr 153: How To Build and Scale Sales Teams As A Technical Founder, How To Scale The Sales Learning Curve & Why No One Actually Cares About Your Product with Spenser Skates, Founder & CEO @ Amplitude

Spenser Skates is the Founder & CEO @ Amplitude, the only analytics solution built for modern product teams that helps you understand user behaviour and ship the right solutions fast. They have raised over 55m in VC funding from many friends of SaaStr and 20VC including Eric Vishria @ Benchmark, Neeraj Agrawal @ Battery Ventures, the teams at IVP, Data Collective, Box Group and SV angel, just to name a few of their incredible investors. Prior to Amplitude, Spenser founded Sonalight, an app that allowed users to text while they drive, backed by the likes of Y Combinator.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Spenser make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Amplitude?  
• How did Spenser look to build and scale his sales team, as an engineering focussed founder? Where does Spenser see most engineering founders go wrong in their approach to sales?
• What were the stumbling blocks that Spenser found hard in this learning process? What is his biggest advice to technical founders to scale the learning curve fast?
• How does Spenser view the importance of a customer’s willingness to pay? Does that suggest a correlated amount of value? How should this propensity to pay, change with the stage of the provider? How does Spenser suggest founders mitigate discounting?
• What have been Spenser’s core learnings in creating an incentivised sales team? What are the core drivers that yield the behaviour desired? How does Spenser look to align this with engineering teams, traditionally disgruntled with sales’ compensation packages?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Spenser know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of Amplitude?
2. What is Spenser’s fave SaaS reading material? How does that vary according to stage of business?
3. How does Spenser view discounting?

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

Spenser Skates