SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

Sales Hiring 316

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 316

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

A Philadelphia native, Colin started his professional career as a Business Development Representative (BDR) 14 years ago and worked his way up to his current role as CRO. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 192

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2022

Conversations about the state of the SaaS market in 2022 are everywhere, and it can seem overwhelming for entrepreneurs and business leaders to make sense of everything. In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR. The 2022 Economic Climate, Barriers to Growth, and Recruitment.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 264

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. If you don’t have the time to watch the whole session, here are the main metrics you should be mindful of. How good is my business doing?

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2021

When a company hires an executive, the business hires the executive’s network. That’s a reason the Redpoint SaaS metrics template includes Glassdoor score. The better the management hires for a business, the greater candidates' interest to work for a company. Of course, the team grew as the business did.

Sales Hiring 197

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Branding 197

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

SaaStr 606: Your Real Valuation: How Focusing on Delivering Customer Value Generates Business Value with Gusto Co-Founder Josh Reeves. ?. SaaStr 603: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents the Ultimate Guide to Sales Compensation, Quotas and Recruiting with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin. Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

Sales Recruiting 297

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 297

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 265

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 265

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 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. Or Partner.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 259

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

Imagine a coverage model, from end to end, for the full customer life cycle: from demand generation to sales to post-sales. In addition to marketing, do you also need business development representatives (BDR)? Sales Cycle. This includes everything from inside sales to account executives to strategic asset allocation.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 278

Kellblog

MARCH 17, 2020

Rephrasing Lewis Carroll, “if you don’t know what you’re recruiting for, any candidate looks great.” ” I liken executive recruiters to Realtors. ” That know-not-what, by the way, is that it’s for sale. Let’s switch to executive recruiting. Sound judgment and maturity.

Sales Recruiting 86

Sales Recruiting Sales Enablement Startup Pricing 86

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 265

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 265

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. Group related incidents or tickets by severity to help prioritize.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. 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. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team.

Scale 298

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Find out how you can build these same tools for your business at outgrow.co/saas. Jason Lemkin: This term founder-led sales is maybe overused these days, but it is true.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 240

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2021

– did their #1 key metric improve? Wait too long, and the business stalls out. 50% of the job of a real VP is recruiting. Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? But you can expect in the first 60 days for one key metric to improve.

Part-Time VPE 253

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Metrics 253

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. If you’re hiring a sales leader, you don’t pass up an awesome sales leader that has a killer track record of closing deals just because in their previous company they sold success software, and then with your company, they’re going to sell MarTech.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

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

OpenView Labs

APRIL 29, 2021

Recruiting top talent is the common denominator across all scaling startups. Nine out of 10 founders and CEOs I connect with are involved in recruiting on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Many of them are learning on the fly and trying to juggle being CEO and Chief People Officer/Lead Recruiter/Brand Evangelist all at once.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 81

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

Seeing a real demand for business courses in their consumer marketplace, the team identified an opening in the market to disrupt corporate training and hypothesized that employers would be more than willing to pay. 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

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. I’m 100% OK taking a lot of risk here because I know I can help them recruit a local team as much as necessary or desired. The reality is though most business process SaaS apps become dominant simply because they are the biggest.

Scale 344

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 344

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. 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. More on that here.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

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 300

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 300

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

JULY 11, 2023

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Sign up for free.

Sales Hiring 203

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 203

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I started a software company in college to make it easy to update websites called Content Management Software Now, and I had this idea for Pardot, I wanted to make it easy for marketers to run campaigns online and measure their results. We started the business in 2007. We sold the business in 2012. We sold Pardot.

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 202

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 3, 2017

Every startup’s sales commission plan is different. But it’s key to understand the theory and the benchmark data that governs the creation of sales commission plans to create a good one for your business. Sales compensation is communicated in OTE, On Target Earnings. At the upper end, they spent 11.5%

Sales Recruiting 160

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Data Sales 160

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 266

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 266

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. That’s how you know you have a good business.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 200

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. The go-to-market segment worked together on key metrics across the revenue board. For this, they made their BDRs laser-focused on behavior-based signals, ICP, and recurring processes to help them become account executives. .

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 241

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. Singular focus on sales. As the title would hint at, the VP of Sales should focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 122

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 122

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. We added 0.8

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 280

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 18, 2024

Jonathan Moss (EVP at Experity) showcased an Account Plan GPT that streamlines sales and marketing account research for outbound efforts. Examples of automating workflows to solve ongoing challenges: Everyone shared use cases they’re trying for sales account research and lead generation workflows. Link to GPT.

Sales Recruiting 108

Sales Recruiting Software Review Scale AI 108

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. Or, even if they’re leaning towards the latter, they’re often not using the right metrics. A data-driven framework for scaling.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

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

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

This is a guest article by Swati Garg , founder and CEO, Melo Associates , and Lindsay Lynch , senior recruitment consultant, Melo Associates , a recruitment firm focused on customer success hiring for SaaS and tech companies nationwide. Experience working with a specific customer base or similar stakeholders within a business.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring 52

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2017

It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. They build a pipeline, learn the sales motion, and close a few accounts in the first few months.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 124