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. in ARR in pretty short order, recruiting a great small team of reps under her, and had really nailed the formula. As founders, we often get obsessed with “right timing” hires. With basically no turnover.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale SMB 307

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

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 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2020

For example, Google put a lot of work into Google Hire, its recruiting SaaS product. Maybe, the only place an acquisition can move the needle really. Maybe, the only place an acquisition can move the needle really. Salesforce is really 4+ clouds that are all at scale (sales, marketing, commerce and platform).

Sales Recruiting 299

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 299

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

In this post, we’re featuring our Recruiting Manager, Elizabeth Faddis! As part of the P&C organization, I help to drive transformation and operational efficiencies within the talent organization and create talent attraction and acquisition programs. I was the first employee hired, and we built the team to up to 15 people.

Sales Recruiting 129

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Technical Review 129

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. 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.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

A Few Good Hires / Potential Hires. VCs can bring you 1-2 great hires, you wouldn’t get to otherwise. They have a good incentive to recruit almost as hard as you do, and network a lot to help you. Bad Hiring Advice. Block an acquisition. They get better at this the longer they work with you.

Sales Hiring 288

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Investment Acquisition 288

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

The question facing founders recruiting marketers is: which is the most important to prioritize? But the reason many marketing hires fail is the business doesn’t hire the right expertise at the right time. Which should you hire first? Each of these kinds of marketers have critical skills for a startup. Why is this?

Scale 255

Scale Startup Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 255

Tom Tunguz

MAY 28, 2019

They are are among the best engineers to recruit to the team and the first to join. Sometimes, management spins up new offices to start a functional team like support or success or sales development. This is different from starting a sales office with an AE covering a region.) Many hallway conversations happen in person.

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Startup Sales Hiring Engineering 278

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

JANUARY 24, 2024

She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. Lattice had a product-led growth flow on the website while the sales team was still trying to sell the PLG companies The good news is Lattice had a lot of activity and initiatives at play.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. And this is exactly why you hired them! Singular focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 122

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 122

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

The first thing is, and this is a little crazy, but recruitment is incredibly overrated. How many people out here spend more than a third of your time recruiting? Tough Management Lesson #1. A lot of CEOs spend over half their time recruiting people. Tough Management Lesson #2. Okay, wow, that’s a lot.

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 196

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Your marketing and sales budgets, and the personnel assigned to those teams, will also rise. A hiring plan is the basis for growing your team and organizing your future payroll expenses. A hiring plan allocates expected future expenses based on your revenue forecasts. What is a hiring plan? Evaluate your hiring process 4.

Sales Hiring 97

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Finance Forecasting 97

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 123

Sales Hiring Technical Cofounder Scale Sales Recruiting 123

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

Founders were able to recruit on-site. With Aaron Levie, Stewart Butterfield, David Sacks (fresh off Yammer’s acquisition for $1b+, which seemed so high at the time), Leyla Seka from Salesforce, David Ulevitch from OpenDNS (who sold to Cisco just a few months later for $800m, which again seemed enormous at the time), and the list went on.

Scale 307

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 307

InsightSquared

MARCH 6, 2018

Sales operations has been around for quite some time, but lately the function has been gaining momentum. Instead of behind-the-scenes sales support, sales ops now acts as a strategic partner for sales VPs and leadership. Who do you hire first? Let a sales ops expert handle the heavy lifting. Get Deals Done.

Sales Recruiting 119

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 119

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. I just don’t think sales have anything to do with product-market fit. But how fast should companies hire?

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function. As the Senior Vice President of Sales for Pipedrive , she’s currently responsible for building nimble sales teams who drive sustainable revenue.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 131

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 131

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

They started in the point of sale market, and then as the company scaled, they rolled out new value props and modules for payroll, or Toast capital, or ways to manage your employee base. You can also find your second act inorganically via acquisition as Twilio did with SendGrid. This is really founder-led sales.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 232

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2019

How to Design a Sales Comp Plan to Get You to $100M with Work-Bench, Movable Ink, MongoDB and Concert Finance. This panel will speak tactically to various comp design options as a way for management to determine and promote ideal behavior in their front-line teams. Meghan Gill | VP of Sales Ops @ MongoDB. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 155

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Founders may reduce staff, particularly in recruiting or new projects that the company prefers not to finance. All of the cost of customer acquisition for a SaaS company is borne in the first month or so. Growing this way requires a lot of cash to finance the acquisition investment. Second, slow sales hiring.

SaaS Payments 124

SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 124

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 92

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 92

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

One of the biggest decisions you can make when setting up your sales team is whether to focus primarily on inside or outside sales. They seem to be completely at odds, with one focused on clients with a high acquisition cost and high ACV (annual account value), the other focused on a high sales velocity.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 100

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Join Qualtrics Co-Founder and CEO alongside SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin as Ryan reflects on the survey software maker’s acquisition by SAP this year. Ryan Smith: The backstory here is we turned down an acquisition offer for $500 million in 2012. Jason Lemkin: Everyone stopped hiring salespeople. Think about that.

Acquisition 160

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 160

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 20, 2020

Always make sure to talk with a sales representative and be as detailed as possible about your current and future situation to make sure they can handle everything you need. Do you need help for the foreseeable future or just for a one-off event like a round of recruitment? Types of services. Short-term vs. long-term.

Outsourcing Services 118

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 118

SaaSX

JULY 12, 2020

Determining if sales or customer success should own customer expansion and renewals is the age-old SaaS question. If you are a SaaS founder, sales, or CX leader you have probably spent a lot of time thinking about this topic. Who you recruit will impact the success of the model. You may need hunters for new logo acquisition.

Sales Recruiting 90

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 90

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 3, 2020

Note: For purposes of this article, we’ll assume you’re hiring your first two AEs or SDRs. No one questions that hiring AEs is something you must do. Your salary costs, according to Peak Sales Recruiting , are 90K on average and $180K OTE (on-target earnings). Also, unlike the AE role, SDRs require a manager.

Sales Recruiting 124

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Investment Technical Review 124

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Those line charts showing fast-rising user acquisition or explosive ARR have been synonymous with the industry over the past decade. And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj: Well, it’s a pretty long one.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

A big part of why we are seeing this growth is that our customers have found that when they use Intercom to engage their website visitors, conversion rates and sales increase by more than 80%! That means we’ll be hiring 350 people over the next 18 months across our offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Chicago and Sydney.

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Engineering 195

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2014

After the prototypes were built, the founders needed more help building the product and developed a process to hire engineers to grow the development team. Next, these companiess shifted into sales and marketing mode, pitching and selling potential customers. In so doing, they defined and refined their go-to-market process.

Sales Recruiting 113

Sales Recruiting Development Startup Sales Hiring 113

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. And I’ve seen many startups who fail to make this distinction create a cycle of diminishing returns that impacts the trajectory of their growth for the long haul… especially in enterprise sales.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2015

In every sales process for every SaaS startup, there is one ultimate internal champion advocating the purchasing decision. Software companies targeting Human Resources and Sales teams are in aggregate each worth about $50B. Salesforce Sales 92%. Nevertheless, the majority of the revenue remains from sales teams.

Sales Recruiting 113

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Scale 113