SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

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. Invest in People You want to keep the bar high on talent, especially in hypergrowth, and not just in the early stages.

Sales Recruiting 299

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 299

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

A CRO owns and directs the strategy over a company’s revenue cycle, but there’s not a set standard for operational or management decisions: in addition to sales and sales development, they might be responsible for customer success, lead generation and pipelines, and even marketing and brand development. Is a CRO right for you?

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 299

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Today, she advises and invests in companies on these topics and others. COOs have become more common in management teams as ways for founders & CEOs to build the management team to scale a business. In conversations with management teams, the concept of a COO remains murky. How does the role work with the CEO?

Scale 299

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 299

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

The toughest part in the end is always recruiting. Recruiting. Over time, that’s recruiting more and more senior folks, so the target changes. You’ll have to be recruiting new ones all the time. That means you are constantly recruiting. Dear SaaStr: How Should I Design My First Sales Rep Compensation Plan?

Sales Recruiting 240

Sales Recruiting Scale Compensation Business Model 240

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

From $1m in ARR, and Then Forever After: Recruiting Great VPs. You need to learn to become great at recruiting. With only say 30–40 employees to service $4m-$6m in revenue, even the loss of one key hire can seem almost fatal to the business. Why is my sales team less efficient at $20m ARR than at $2m in ARR?

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 284

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2020

When I catch up with founders on the march from $1m to $10m in ARR, the number one topic has always shifted to recruiting. Where do i find a great VP of Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Customer Success, etc.? Some times, it seems like simply building a management team is all you have time for. I know you are busy.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Management Engineering Customer Success 363

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Every business will have its own set of challenges. It doesn’t work.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 261

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. No one needs another piece of business software. Every business is mostly running OK already with its tech stack, and it’s unlikely your little app, alone, is going to change the revenue/profits course of any customer. I Don’t Have Budget.

Sales Recruiting 312

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 312

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 4, 2019

Every prospect championing a software purchase will be asked by the opponents of the sale and decision-makers : “Who else is using the software?” Software vendors are in the business of selling promotions. And the best way to fight the inertia in sales is to equip your champions. Logos confer credibility.

Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Recruiting Banking Branding Software 247

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

I really appreciate you coming to talk about how to attract, hire, and build a more diverse sales team in your organization. So I’ve been building top-producing sales teams for a really, really long time. So over the years, I’ve watched many sales leaders go out and say, “Brian’s my top producer.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 261

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. And we were like less than 10 million ARR and business was doing very well.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

I probably will pass on investing in you if I don’t know you want money. We recently did a New New in Venture event and I asked the question of many top VCs including David Sacks, Keith Rabois, Aileen Lee and more. “Give the VP of Sales More Time” This is always terrible advice. In one sales cycle, or less.

Part-Time VPE 348

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 348

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2021

1% equity considered low as a startup Director of Sales? What types of due diligence are undertaken by VCs before investing in a company? I’m Head of Product and I think our CEO is actively recruiting a VP of Product. He has met Adam Neumann for only 4 minutes and decided to invest $4.4 How do VCs vet businesses?

Software Review 293

Software Review CTO Coach Technical Review Sales Recruiting 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even, in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but wasn’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

Scale 343

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 343

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments. In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. David Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorn companies, including Airbnb, Bird, ClickUp, Facebook, Slack, and Uber. Head of Sales. VP Sales (45 Employees).

CTO Hire 284

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 284

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Signal can come from many places (sales team notes, customer support tickets, etc) IT Incident Management: Similar to the security alert example. They each have some of the largest cloud businesses in the world in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud respectively. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2021

He gets what goes on in a developer’s brain and the detailed process of building software, but he understands that businesses are motivated to move quickly. Also, an all-time SaaStr fan-favorite, Jeff Lawson recently chatted with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin to discuss his thoughts on collaborating, managing and working with developers.

Sales Recruiting 239

Sales Recruiting Development Software Review Management 239

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 300

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Basics: The Building Blocks of the Finance Team To understand how finance teams impact an organization, it’s helpful to break down various functions and how they support the business. Team members are responsible for putting together a company’s financial plan, budgeting, and building a financial roadmap for their business.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment. The raw data is here.

Benchmarks 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

“The shift from serving just consumers to serving consumers and companies is a massive one” For Udemy, investing in a B2B arm seemed too obvious, and too good, an opportunity to ignore. Today Udemy for Business boasts 80% of the Fortune 100 – the top 100 largest US companies by revenue – as customers.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2022

When you have a customer-centric culture, your business has a greater chance of growing and thriving. But how can businesses create spaces for customers to engage in productive dialogue? . Then, decide how much time, money, and effort your company is willing to invest in the CAB. . Next, identify your most strategic customers.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Enterprise Onboarding Investment 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Self-service.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

It’s so, so easy to stand out in recruiting if you’ve actually done your homework. Invest those extra cycles. Then I’d let them know how I prepared for the meeting so they knew I invested my time to get ready. I ended the interview (politely) after 10 minutes and told him to watch the video. Now I see who they sell to!”

Interviewing 273

Interviewing Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Consulting 273

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

For example, sending a kickoff gift tailored to a customer’s recent experiences or interests shows you’re paying attention and invested in their journey. GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

And focus, at least to some extent, on the higher ROI parts of the business. And at a sales perspective, they’ll move to optimizing revenue per lead, over closing every possibly lead. Harder to Recruit. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture. More on that here. Fair or not, it’s just a fact.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

Sales Hacker

JUNE 10, 2021

There’s one thing recruiters are unanimous about. It’s that sales representatives are one of the toughest positions to hire for. The demand for sales reps is one of the highest of any job. Our recruitment team at EASI has gotten really good at this. Sales courses are largely absent from college curricula.

Sales Hiring 128

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 128

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

At our inaugural Saastr Europa in Paris in 2018, Sequoia (then Accel) Partner Luciana Lixandru and UiPath CMO Bobby Patrick discussed what breaks when your business goes into hypergrowth mode (hint: pretty much everything). A business user could do their own, build their own robot and things really took off. Bobby: Yes.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 274

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

It really is more of an inward facing, introspective journey to figure out, why did you come together as a founding team, and why did you start this business in the first place? It literally makes every employee on your team an owner of the business. ” In our business, it’s about service. That’s the first.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

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. Suddenly, people’s calendars went from six calls to two calls a day, but because they added more time to focus on qualified accounts, activity and conversion increased.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

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 has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur. Businesses have to make money.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

Employees went remote, restaurants closed for business, and the streets deserted. . And because of this, growth-stage investing has really slowed or has almost been nonexistent. That said, Founders Fund is always looking for great founders, great businesses, and great deals that continue to happen in the earlier stage. .

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring B2B 244

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years. Aileen Lee | Founder @ Cowboy Ventures. Jason Lemkin | Founder @ SaaStr.

Investment 210

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 210