Kristen Habacht

Startups are built for fast and consistent growth, and everything you do must be planned.But sometimes, it's hard to adapt to the changes that happen pretty quickly in a startup. For example, it happens that you need to hire 50 people at once and adding so many people to your team can lead to chaos.Kristen Habacht, President and COO of Shogun, points out that sometimes it just looks like you need more people; so, she advises a detailed analysis to ensure that you have a solid foundation for acceleration.In this episode of Taking the Lead, Kristen describes her journey from an office manager to becoming a female president and COO of a tech company. Kristen and our host Christina Brady get into constant changes in startups and how to adapt to them, employment in a fast-growing startup, and the relationship between PLG and sales. They also discuss how to properly incentivize a new business rep and the importance of looking at your mix of the comp to base.

"How do I think about org in productledgrowth?"We've had many listeners ask us about this. So we are sharing a masterclass in all things org!Kristen Habacht is a PLG veteran. Before joining Shogun as CRO, she led revenue teams in Atlassian and Trello.Having seen so many flavors of org structures, and designed revenue orgs herself, she's super qualified to teach us about all the tough choices and trade-offs.Listen to this episode if you are part of a growing revenue team.Topics we covered include:What are the most gnarly questions when it comes to org structures?Org is all about trade-offs. There is no perfection. So what are the key trade-offs to think about?What should the revenue org look like at $10m ARR, $50m ARR, and beyond that?The common mistakes people make when it comes to orgKristen's path to being CRO and how to chart your own progression in revenue leadershipConnect with Kristen on Linkedin for more information.Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.

Today I’m chatting with Kristen Habacht. Kristen is one of the most successful salespeople I’ve ever met. From joining the sales team at Fog Creek, to basically building the sales department from scratch at Trello, and now killing it in her current role as global head of EDR sales at Atlassian - Kirsten has seen and been successful at every stage of sales in a company’s lifecycle. In this episode, Kristen shares her advice on what founders *need* to know about a broad range of sales topics. Including enterprise sales tips, how and when to hire your first sales reps, and the positives (and negatives) of a freemium plan.  You can find Kristen on Twitter or LinkedIn. And don't forget - the Sales for Founders course opens for enrollment on the 10th of December! If you’re interested in checking it out, don’t wait 'til then - sign up for the earlybird waitlist at salesforfounders.com today, and on the 3rd of December I’ll be sending out the only discounts I’ll ever give on the course - and spending an hour video chatting and answering your questions about the course, and sales or growth more generally! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/message

In this episode of the Heresy podcast we talk to Kristen Habacht, VP Sales at Trello. The conversation was recorded in the last week of December 2016, just days before Atlassian announced they were acquiring Trello for a whooping $425 million. During our conversation Kristen describes what the Sales team at Trello looks like and how that has changed during the two and a half years since she's been there. We also discuss their sales compensation, their recent growth and future plans as well as the challenges and opportunities they have faced selling a freemium product.========================================================Content and Timings: - 0:54 - 4:20 - Kristen talks about her sales career, how she met Joel Spolsky & Michael Pryor, the FogCreek days and how she eventually ended up as VP Sales at Trello- 5:00 - 6:50 - Selling Trello in the early days and how the pitch has changed - 7:20 - 12:10 - Kristen talks about Trello’s sales team, their culture, the importance of team cohesion, how they are structured and why - 12:10 - 18: 50 - The evolution of Trello’s sales team - how and why the team transitioned from a “full-stack” sales model to role specialisation, and how that helped with scaling - 18:53 - 21:00 - Kristen talks about “experiments” that did not work and lessons learned- 21:00 - 22:45 - The importance of Sales Ops- 23:00 - 24:15 - Kristen talks about recent growth and projections for the future - 24:25 - 27:35 - Trello’s commission structure - from, simple to simpler - and why Kristen changed their initial commission structure- 27:40 - 34:40 - The challenges of selling freemium products - why traditional qualification models such as BANT don’t work, what can reps do to create urgency and why there’s no sales “playbook” at Trello- 34:50 - 38:45 - SMB vs Enterprise sales at Trello - sales cycle duration and how the process differs - 39:00 - 42:15 - The challenges of managing a remote sales team and tips, and tools to make it work - 42:15 - 45:00 - Lessons learned at Trello & Kristen's best sales advice - the importance of being able to walk away==============================================================Music credits: - Intro - Qvkata DLG, Duis Taban- Outro - Victor Hugo

Kristen Habacht joined us in the studio this week to talk about the impact of freemium SaaS on b2b businesses. Launched in 2011, Trello remains one of the best examples of freemium done right with now over 10 million users and a ton of happy business customers such as The New York Times, Google, Pixar, and Adobe. Kristen is currently the VP of Sales for the business and joined after their initial launch of the business class product in 2013. We dig into a number of discussions in the podcast including how to think about setting up freemium at launch, the various types of freemium SaaS and what might work or not work for your business, how marketing and sales work together at Trello, what indicators sales should look out for to know when to upsell someone, and finally some big tips and tricks that Kristen has seen work well at Trello.