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The 5 Characteristics of a Great Sales Leader

SaaStr

Q: What makes a great sales leader? The best sales managers / directors / VPs: Recruit great team members. Sales requires a linear number of hires to grow bookings. So you have to be a great recruiter to scale. But the best sales leaders know where they are #1. Decrease sales cycles.

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Why Founder-Led Sales Breaks Earlier Than You Think

SaaStr

Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. But you see growth start to decline in new bookings, that's a sign. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle.

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6+ Key Signs a VP Can’t Scale Beyond $5m-$10m ARR

SaaStr

Either by yourself, or with a Sales Ops / Marketing Ops / Some Sort of Ops leader under you. Look for dashboards, strong project management, strong pipeline projection after $5m ARR. If you don’t see things getting more organized, that manager can’t scale. Inability to hire great Directors / managers under them.

Scale 352
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30+ SaaS CEOs Share The Signs Their First VP of Sales … Just Wasn’t Going to Work Out

SaaStr

What was the first warning sign your VP of Sales wasn't going to work out? A new VP of Sales doesn’t always double sales in 30 days — although it can happen in SMB sales. The old playbook does help, but every great VP of Sales knows they quickly have to evolve it to any new role.

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Systematizing Go-To-Market Hiring

Tom Tunguz

It formed the basis for a career at HubSpot predicated on consistent quantitative analysis to scale the go-to-market, which he detailed in the Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. I think it’s still one of the best books on how to repeatably scale sales teams. What would the chart above look like for your sales team?

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What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One

SaaStr

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

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Startup Best Practices 21 - Your Startup's Recruiting Scorecard

Tom Tunguz

Specifically, she champions a metrics-based approach for developing world class recruiting teams. Because of her position, Maia has observed recruiting patterns in hundreds of companies, and has developed best practices for startups. Maia reports these five strategic recruiting metrics to the executive team each quarter.