The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors SaaStr 141: How To Scale & Segment Your Sales Team Efficiently, How To Move Upmarket With Speed & How To Raise Over $50m in an "Unsexy" Industry with Classy Founder, Scot Chisholm
Scot Chisholm is the Founder & CEO @ Classy, the world's leading fundraising platform for nonprofit organizations As a result they have raised close to $50m in VC funding from the likes of Salesforce Ventures, our friends at BullPen Capital, Mithril Capital and many more great investors. With support and funding like this, since 2011, Classy has helped more than 3,000 nonprofits and social enterprises raise hundreds of millions of dollars and be named to "The World's Most Innovative Companies in Social Good" and to the "100 Brilliant Companies" by Entrepreneur Magazine. As for Scot, he is also a prolific angel investor, investing out of a fund called Mixture that includes investments in Change.org, inDinero, Iodine, Casetext and more.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Scot made his way into the world of SaaS and how a "pub crawl" came to be the founding story for Classy?
- What have been the key learnings for Scot in raising $50m for Classy, in an industry that is maybe not so sexy for investors? Why did Scot choose to raise both the seed and A round from angels? What advice would Scot give to aspiring founders, looking to raise?
- How has Scot seen the evolution of his sales team? What are the key inflection points in the scaling when elements tend to break? How important is it to segment the sales team? When should this be done? At what speed is optimal?
- How does Scot evaluate startups looking to move upmarket? How does the decision to move upmarket change the internal decision-making with regards to product roadmap and strategy? How does it change the role of CEO in the organisation?
- How does Scot look to balance the attainment of short term objectives with holding the vision for the future? How far is too far to plan ahead? How should founders think about investing in areas of the business ahead of time?
60 Second SaaStr
- What does Scot know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
- Challenges as a first time CEO/entrepreneur?
- The key challenges of building a SaaS company in San Diego?
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