SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. Drive NPS up, and churn down. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. It can’t strategically improve sales software, financial software, quoting software, recruiting software, QA processes, call center software, etc. And when you hire a real, great VP of Sales. Truly qualified leads and prospects. I Don’t Have Budget.

Sales Recruiting 306

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Hire more sales reps in the areas where they are profitable. Invest in Your Brand and Customer Marketing. This is the one investment everyone skimps on, but always works. Not in April.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 321

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

To invest in you when there’s no logical reason to. But they are often just awful managers. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need. Manage People. Manage anyone you can, even if it’s not perfect. Being a CEO is tough. You have to convince people to join you. Especially in SaaS.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 280

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.

Benchmarks 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

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. For instance, Founders Fund doesn’t really invest in AI, health tech, or edtech, even if you’re growing 5x. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 294

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

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. He ran from the term.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 274

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

You can be like, “OK, our culture is we’re going to work super hard, and churn out a lot of features, and sell a lot of product.” I want to come be your VP of sales and, you’re going to meet me for the first time. Spencer : For me, the key things for a VP of sales is, “OK, tell me about your best reps.

VP of Engineering 286

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

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. SalesLoft, why was that Pardot, I tried to recruit this guy, Kyle Porter, to come run sales at Pardot.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 116

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 116

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

One is your churn. SaaS businesses have churn. Churn, think we’re all familiar with what churn is. Churn defines your average lifetime of your customer. We talked about churn. Five percent monthly churn gives you a 20 month average lifetime. MRR, obviously. Average Revenue per Customer.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

Where should you invest your resources? If you’re short on time, here are a few quick takeaways: You can’t balance short-term and long-term investments without considering the existing product strategy. Choosing the right investment is a balancing act of art and science. And yet, now might be a good time to hit the accelerator.

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And we’re also pleased, now to have almost a hundred thousand different SaaS products listed there, and being backed by a hundred million dollars from LinkedIn and some great investors that do allow us to keep investing in this marketplace. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital.

Software Review 247

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 247

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. If CTLV is high, churn can't be that big. along the way.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 16, 2019

So if scaling your sales organization is a priority in 2020, here are the things you need to be aware of to make sure you do so successfully. In my experience both as a salesperson and as a recruiter, it’s primarily been four things: They want the work they’re doing to matter to them. that you’re invested in their success).

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 53

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Your sales team is integral to your business’s success: not only do your salespeople bring in the big deals, but they also represent your company and culture to every new and potential prospect. So why is sales team culture still an afterthought for so many organizations? People all across the company are so proud of our sales team.

Sales Hiring 143

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 143

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 2, 2021

By failing to acknowledge the differences early, teams risk misallocating their focus and energy when solving problems, investing too much or too little in each one. “ Investment . Investment. If not, investment will be higher. That said, ranking investment shouldn’t be driven purely by estimating effort.

Innovation 251

Innovation Sales Recruiting Investment Strategy 251

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. This is really founder-led sales. With Twilio, for example, they expanded into email.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 229

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

What is sales? What is sales? Isn’t sales really around customer value creation? Sales is not about revenue generation, it’s around customer value creation. Why are we so obsessed with sales being focused on revenue? It’s all about churn and retention. Because churn is a silent killer.

Scale 265

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 265

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 150

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 150

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

Rajesh is going to walk you through the key elements of winning the long game in SaaS – how to win customers, how to create long-term relationships, and how to avoid churn. Churn management is a journey. And this is the moment of reckoning that you get to as a SaaS company is that a sale is not the end.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 200

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think if you ask how applicable is SEO, programmable is maybe a different question, but I tell you every single SaaS company I have invested in or worked with that has made a commitment to building at least one high quality piece of content per week has seen significant ROI from SEO over a period of months or a year.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2015

Over the course of the panel, we discussed the ways to recruit, structure, and manage vibrant customer success teams. In 2015, the company prioritize on-boarding to mitigate short-term customer churn by investing more time at the beginning of a relationship. Year Adoption Retention Expansion. 2014 20% 70% 10%.

Compensation 100

Compensation Customer Success Sales Recruiting Churn 100

Incredo

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

Do you want to grow your SaaS sales team and improve your processes? maintain healthy atmosphere in your Smarketing team, make smart choices regarding your SaaS sales model, strategy, pricing, . build smoother connections both with your prospects through optimized sales process. And from SaaS sales models to SaaS pricing.

SaaS Payments 157

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 157

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

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

This is what SaaS applications call “user churn,” and it can affect their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) , as well as their annual recurring revenue (ARR). Churn rate. Churn is the percentage of customers that end their subscriptions within a certain amount of time. Customer lifetime value.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

With the rise of AI, new sales technology and automation at the forefront of the sales echo chamber these days, we thought we’d take a moment to bring it back to BASICS – that’s why we’ve rounded up this complete glossary of sales terms and definitions to help you remember where it all started.

Scale 105

Scale Payment Methods Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments 105

InsightSquared

AUGUST 14, 2019

For sales professionals, AI is not only impacting your personal life, but it will soon influence your professional work too if it hasn’t already done so. Many of today’s forward-thinking companies have already begun using AI in their sales strategies. Strengthens Communication With Sales Leads.

Artificial Intelligence 91

Artificial Intelligence Sales Recruiting AI Forecasting 91

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Scale 106

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

When I first wrote this article, we were in a very different place, with unemployment at an all-time low and sales hiring a top priority. Part two of this scorecard series will help you create a sales interview scorecard to land that sales role you’ve been dreaming about. Sales chops. What sales system do we use?

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 124

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. And notice that I said investments, not cost or spend.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 240

Subscription Flow

MAY 10, 2024

As public interest in fundraising has grown, people are increasingly invested in supporting the causes that resonate the most with them. Maintaining consistent donors allows NPOs to focus their attention on other important tasks necessary for the organization’s running like recruiting new members, improving their public standing etc.

Payment Solutions 105

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments Payment Services 105

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2019

And so in Plaid, we build integrations into bank accounts focused on letting you interact with your money in your bank account in whatever way you want to in the web. Quovo had focused on investment accounts and allowing you to programmatically interact with your investment accounts through third-party applications.

Payments 214

Payments SaaS Payments Banking Underperforming Technical Team 214

Chart Mogul

APRIL 8, 2020

A cold call was usually initiated by a sales rep who, out of a blue sky, reached out to a potential buyer via phone and tried to talk them into purchasing their product or service. Cold email outreach as a strategy poses a number of challenges for sales reps. There are other ways to use it, from marketing to recruitment and networking.

Scale 98

Scale Sales Recruiting Startup Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hacker

APRIL 30, 2018

To see what selling on steroids looks like, check out companies with the best sales enablement strategies. You’ll discover a lively place, with a lot of things — like revenue, productivity, and win rate s — going up, and a lot of things — like speed to revenue, sale cycle period, customer churn, and staff attrition rate — going down.

Sales Enablement 101

Sales Enablement Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 101