SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

I’ve recently had several different conversations with founders looking to hire “PLG experts”. One wanted to hire “Mr/Ms PLG” to make their product more viral. Where there’s a viral boost to acquisition. It’s too early in this PLG cycle to hire a “VP of PLG”. PLG, or Product-Led Growth, can mean, so many things.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Acquisition 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customer success, and post-sales team. But at the start of its expansion play, Checkr’s enterprise motion failed, and sales cycles were slow, taking up to a year for $100k & up deals.

Revenue 299

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 299

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

” – Colin Jones, CRO Emeritus at Wiz You may have seen the news that Google is making its biggest acquisition — by far — of Cloud and SaaS security leader Wiz for a stunning $32 Billion (!). Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.

Scale 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 191

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

.” Cross-selling generates $5M+ in new monthly revenue – Rippling’s cross-sell motion alone drives over $5 million in net new ARR each month before counting any new customer acquisitions. This structure enables a seamless experience that starts when a company hires someone.

Startup 162

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 162

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2019

I still see most startups way behind on their 2020 planning, and most importantly, hiring, at this point in the year. Second, you have to try to hire as many of the sales reps you’ll need for the end of Q1 … by mid-Q4. So you sort of have to get them all hired by the start of Q4 the year before. More on that here.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Revenue 242

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Only 21% of Salesforce’s Revenue is from … Sales This has been true for many years, but it often comes as a surprise to those that don’t know the company as well as they know its CRM. #2. The Big Acquisitions Are Doing Well. Salesforce Growth: FY26 $40.9B (guidance) FY25 $37.9B That’s a material drop. #4.

Scale 207

Scale Sales Hiring Azure Cloud 207

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 29, 2022

In 2017, SaaS companies reported their cost of customer acquisition had increased by 65% in the previous five year period. We can examine the sales efficiency of public software companies to get a sense. Since 2016, the average public software witnessed its sales efficiency winnowed from 52% to 47%, a decline of about 10%.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Acquisition 317

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

You want people who have stuck with it when the year was lean or went through a messy acquisition and came out on the other side. Other Learnings in the GTM Journey GitHub has had to adjust to new sales stages and new buyer personas. You need to be able to react quickly to what’s happening in the market and make adjustments as you go.

Scale 264

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, joined Matt Plank, VP of Sales at Rippling, to unlock the secrets to exponential revenue growth. Instead, they focused on how it’s the one that takes away busy work beyond payroll by helping with new hires’ IT requirements, saving founders significant time. Logo acquisition (i.e.,

Outsourcing Services 287

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 287

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

Scale 321

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 321

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. Will AI let ICs do more, with fewer managers? AI in Sales and Marketing AI is disrupting sales and marketing, particularly in support and SDR /BDR functions, due to the shortage of skilled workers and the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 306

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 304

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2024

Canva Head of Sales and Success for EMEA, Jorge Bestard, and Head of Strategic Sales for EMEA, Daniela Nyarko, share Canva’s journey from PLG to Enterprise, strategies to navigate the PLG trap, and why it’s so attractive. You get traction in the market and raise a round to build a marketing and sales team.

Scale 288

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Enterprise 288

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

“My CEO Told Me To Stop Selling So Much” Recently, I met with a sales leader I’ve known for years, and he told me The Most Curious Story. The freemium ones really have no acquisition costs at this point (the main lead source is mini-brand). His SaaS CEO asked him to stop selling so much. We can’t afford it.

Scale 344

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Construction 344

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

Hiring for Customer Success When Braze was looking for their first customer success hires, you couldn’t find a CSM with seven years of experience in software because those people didn’t exist yet. Every incremental hire with a small team matters, so it’s worth being clear on what you want.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 296

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2021

The other day, I met with a great founder who talked with me about how he was about to top his VP of Sales. For example, while things weren’t all roses after our acquisition, that same team that was killing it at $1m a month in MRR was far better at $2m and $3m MRR than they were at $1m. This VP had gotten him from $0 to $1.5m

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale SMB 312

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

First, you hire your sales team. Finally, growth occurs when sales, product, and marketing can come together. Mistake 2: Hiring with urgency. Founders often hire sales teams with urgency, even in a volatile market, resulting in hires who may not be successful salespeople for your organization.

Scale 288

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Marketplace as a Service 288

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

All of the sales and marketing dollars invested to obtain persuade the buyer to put digital ink to pdf have been recouped immediately. Contract As don’t require burning equity dollars to hire more AEs; the company reinvests customer revenue dollars to scale. But the contracts are substantially different to the company.

Sales Hiring 352

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Payment Solutions 352

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2020

With a VP of Sales, it’s hard to create urgency and sell ahead, and compete in new segments. You hired the wrong management team. Sometimes, a startup gets funded and hires a management team that is just bad. The root cause here really is not hiring a great VP of Demand Gen (see prior points).

Product Marketing 363

Product Marketing Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 363

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2025

Hire a dedicated partnership manager from day one. Treat this like a sales pipelinetrack leads, co-selling efforts, and revenue generated from these partnership. Expect your sales cycle to double when working with partner s. It takes time to build trust, align incentives, and close deals together.

Scale 147

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Enterprise 147

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

Thats why HG Insights created The Next Generation of Sales AI report to calm the FOMO and help you bring AI to your GTM teams. It includes a breakdown of the Sales AI landscape, adoption of GenAI and Sales software across buyer groups. Plus, an analysis of the top 75 trending sales AI tools. Youre not alone.

Scale 103

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 103

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

We’ll share the answers in today’s brand new episode of CRO Confidential, where our host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund, sits down with Toast CRO, Jonathan Vassil to talk about their proven customer acquisition strategies that led to its record-breaking growth. Jonathan joined Toast as the SVP of Sales in 2017.

Payment Methods 272

Payment Methods Acquisition Scale Payments 272

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Many companies strategically use the event to meet potential hires, conduct interviews, and build their talent pipeline.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

I walk them through this when I hire them. There are many stories of legendary exec hires. I hired the person with a great resume but who didn’t get our business, culture, or community. Lesson: Many times, I thought, “I need to hire for the role I’ll need 4 years from now.” Of course, sometimes that is indeed true.

Sales Hiring 331

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Scaling 331

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2024

1: Spend more time on hiring than you likely want to. While we all know it’s important to spend time hiring the best people as a CEO, actually doing it when your inbox is full and you’re talking to customers is much harder. It’s worth your time, though, especially for those first hires. 2: Hire slow, fire fast.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Company Culture 264

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

Mark Roberge published The Sales Acceleration Formula about Hubspot’s journey. Account executive to SDR ratios, sales cycle lengths, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime values, net dollar retention. Salesforce championed it. Buyers don’t know how to use it or how to buy it.

Software 304

Software Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value Scale 304

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. 8/ Specializing the sales team earlier.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2021

You can’t hire some magic salesperson to “get you more sales”, at least not at first. Once you have 10, 15, 20 customers … you can hire someone to help. Freemium is a funnel management strategy and done right, later it can accelerate viral acquisition. If you don’t know — you won’t get funded. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 348

Sales Hiring Acquisition Investment Product Marketing 348

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Another strategy we often see is moving from a PLG model to a sales assistive model with a more established sales team that can sell the product to the customer. . Mergers and acquisitions. As SaaS businesses expand, we are seeing more technology, business acquisitions, and inorganic growth. Hire ahead of the curve.

Scale 246

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 246

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

And Salesforce noted it’s slowing down hiring, and taking a break from bigger acquisitions, for now. Take it from Gartner, who is now predicting SaaS to grow 20% overall next year to $200 Billion in total sales. That’s still a cautious note in Salesforce’s optimism and blow-out numbers. Don’t just take it from me.

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 347

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, continues a mini-series on founder-led sales with Colin Zima, founder and CEO of Omni. Leverage Your Network First When you’re ready to hire your first AE, don’t create a job posting and see who comes in. Instead, leverage your network.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Social Media Sales 246

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

He brought up a very interesting topic that many GTM leaders / founders face as a challenge when scaling a startup; highlighting the 3 stages of executive hires as you scale and what to look out for qualitatively. You need to hire people who are very much think like you, as a founder. First bullet is definitely creative grinders.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Technical Cofounder Scale Sales Recruiting 125

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

The CEO wants to hire someone with demand generation experience. What’s your advice when hiring a CMO? When you think about how to hire a really good CMO, you’re actually thinking about how to hire somebody that’s gonna do that. They may fix those problems, but they’re maybe going to do that through hiring.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Hire a leader who will not only agree with you but someone you can disagree with in a respectful and productive way. Meet with people you can learn from and share ideas, even if it doesn’t convert into a hire.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 264