SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. This is where product-led sales comes in.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Hiring a global team to achieve the vision What do you do when your company’s location limits your access to talent? You spread your hiring net and draw in as much talent as possible.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Go-to-Market matters because sales and marketing spend remain the biggest proportion of SaaS spend, so honing in on that spend to build an engine and drive growth is paramount. Because founder-led sales worked really well for most of the early stages, but you eventually start running out of juice around $15M ARR.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 278

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. How do you drive business around that? They want the overall pie to be as big as possible, and their entire business model is predicated on capturing a small piece of what is hopefully an extremely large pie.

Scale 297

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 297

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2022

It’s the never-ending stereotype –– marketing and sales are eternal “frenemies.” However, this push-and-pull doesn’t have to be part of your organization as long as you hire and empower the right leadership. Tip One: Don’t Believe the Hype As You’re Hiring. Tip Four: Know Your Model, Or Be Clear That You Don’t.

Leadership 244

Leadership Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 244

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

When the company started 20 years ago, it didn’t hire salespeople. So what should earlier-stage companies do: immediately build out a big sales team or focus on product-led growth? Atlassian’s PLG Model To understand and potentially replicate Atlassian’s success, it helps to understand what made them different. Here’s why.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Enterprise Headcount Scale 264

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Back in the day, premium comp for some software sales execs made simple and easy sense. Traditional software had 90% gross margins, and the classic enterprise sales reps, the best ones, could close a million or more dollars a year. Not a bad thing per se, but it also put a lot of pressure on business models.

Scale 345

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 345

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment. Lemkin acknowledges the challenge of meeting people’s high expectations and the existential nature of finding solutions to these hiring and motivation issues.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. So, if he wanted to hire customer support, it could be a biomechanical engineer. Instead of hiring for skill, he focused more on core traits like empathy, patience, and being detail-oriented.

Sales Hiring 289

Sales Hiring Scale SMB SaaS 289

SaaStr

MARCH 29, 2023

Obsess how you bring on talent Hiring processes are loose and inconsistent in even the biggest businesses. As a $20M business, you likely can’t afford an HR chief, making your hiring standards and disciplines even more important. Your earliest hires are significant in shaping your company’s success.

Sales Hiring 241

Sales Hiring Scale Strategy Metrics 241

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

They built their sales funnel in the same fashion to empower customers with autonomous product discovery and conversions. Smaller organizations don’t typically respond to the long sales cycle or constant conversations and negotiations that an enterprise needs. However, this does not mean that you should abandon sales teams.

SMB 244

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 244

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 5, 2023

The richer the balance sheet & the more solid the business model, the greater the growth rate & ability to win market share. Companies with greater presence in the market will build brand, hire more sales teams, pitch more prospects, close more customers. NDR ; constant sales efficiency. [2]

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Startup Business Model Strategy 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2022

If you’re only investing in sales and marketing, you’re missing a huge revenue opportunity. This allows you to present a frictionless renewal and expansion process to your customers, rather than handing them back to Sales. However, your business model will dictate how large the book of business is for each CSM.

Customer Success 246

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Leadership 246

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. How defendable is the technology of the product or the business model?

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. How can you capture, qualify and convert the right leads for your business while working within your means?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. For every company that’s executing the freemium model successfully, there are hundreds more that struggle and the tension it can create between sales, marketing, and product teams.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

A successful, growing business depends as much on its metrics as it does on its people. Founder of Marketo, Phil Hernandez, and Marketo’s former EVP of Sales, Bill Binch, have had decades of experience tackling precisely these issues. Even if monthly quotas don’t seem to fit your business model, Bill would suggest it anyway.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 245

SaaStr

DECEMBER 6, 2023

SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin chats with Box CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Levie to talk about what’s new at Box, SaaS fatigue, hiring a new COO, operating margins and efficiency, the future of AI, and what to expect for 2024. They get to talk to brand-new businesses in completely different industries all the time.

AI 292

AI Sales Hiring Scale Artificial Intelligence 292

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

Leveraging survey data from 66+ enterprise SaaS companies, Matt Garratt, Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures shares the landscape of how businesses are shifting their sales & GTM strategies to react to today’s uncertain times. Adnan Chaudhry | SVP of Sales @ Salesforce.

Sales Hiring 216

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 216

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2022

Or, it might originate as an intrinsic reason, such as when Atlassian decided to move their business model to become a SaaS platform. Atlassian spends about 40% of its budget on R&D and only 15% on sales and marketing, which is a different approach than many companies take. Building a Community.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service Construction 278

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2024

The State of Sales Jobs From week to week, it can feel like sales roles are up, and the next down. The TL;DR: Sales role hiring is rebounding in 2024 after a difficult 2023. Mid-level roles like Managers, Directors, and Leadership positions tend to have the longest tenures (2.5 Help your team close more deals.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Sales AI Search 125

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

But you can’t base your business model purely on gut instinct: you need to understand the problem by conducting serious research. Sales and marketing are still significant, but consider dedicating more research and design to the user experience. UserZoom CEO Alfonso de la Nuez and CMO Sophie Chesters have a few suggestions.

Scale 246

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

You have to be careful to pair that with someone strong to manage the relationship, that has more time and that also can be trusted. As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on.

CTO Hire 328

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2021

By all means, if you can build a $100m self-service SaaS business without the need for a sales team, a client success team, webinars, getting on planes, and all that — go for it. One con is that these businesses often are tougher to gain a longer-term competitive advantage in unless there is a network effect (e.g.,

Revenue 264

Revenue Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value Churn 264

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Payrix

DECEMBER 18, 2024

Software companies are increasingly integrating payments as a core component of their business models rather than treating them as ancillary features. Takeaway #4: Addressing operational complexity Michael emphasized the challenges software companies face in building operational models to support Embedded Payments.

Payments 130

Payments Embedded Payments Merchant Services Payment Services 130

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2023

Market demand exceeds your capacity to fundraise or hire a larger team. When you decide to consummate the partnership, ensure the business model is aligned with yours, and the company will support your startup’s growth journey. The following considerations can help you answer the question above. Visit the SAP.iO

Technical Review 264

Technical Review Startup Scale Software Review 264

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

Before proceeding, let me say that if you have a low-touch, high-velocity, easy-adoption business model — and the product to go with it — then you don’t need to read this post [3]. A sales enablement app, it’s training your first reps. For example, one company had a CAC of 4.0, They’re worth it.).

Consulting 144

Consulting Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 144

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. They moved to a more traditional SaaS inside sales model, and they started shipping out these hardware devices, and only 30% to 40% of the customers would end up paying for them. Like sales doesn’t like freemium. It was literally yesterday, sales versus PLG.

Scale 277

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 277

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Pursue Diverse Revenue Models. Sometimes, it takes innovative thinking to pull more revenue out of a current customer base or business model. You can use both organic and inorganic tactics to grow your business. Leverage M&A aftermarket parts to fuel your business’s growth. Hire for Tomorrow, Not Today.

Revenue 264

Revenue Sales Hiring Leadership Scale 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

.” In the context of the larger article, he’s making the case for manufacturers to adopt a SaaS playbook: become customer-centric, hire Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to engage customers more deeply, deploy technology to manage the customer relationship beyond the initial sale, etc. It’s all we know.

Sales Hiring 173

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding 173

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Classic agencies don’t value the software enough to engender pricing power, develop fast sales cycles, or change the operations of their business to maximize the value of the ML innovation. There are four models: as full time employees, as channel partners, as customer employees, or in a true marketplace.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Here you can see the magic in MongoDB’s business model. As you build up a great sales team, they’ll get better at getting revenue up front, and that’s great up to a point. Some people want to move to a PLG model because they think it’s cheaper than Enterprise sales. And that includes its biggest customers.

Revenue 245

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 245

Kellblog

JANUARY 14, 2021

In the prior post we introduced repeatable sales process as the Holy Grail of enterprise software sales and, unlike some who toss the term around rather casually, we defined a repeatable sales process as meaning you have six things: Standard hiring profile. Standard sales methodology. Standard onboarding program.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales Software Review 98