SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. At Salesforce, at Box, the bottom end of the sales team churns out each year. Usually – no.

Scale 286

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 286

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. Turning over a sales team is very hard on the organization. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in gold. They have low attrition.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 363

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

No lead commit, or revenue commit. A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A head of customer success that doesn’t own churn, or net revenue retention in the first 90 days. I can go on. But the top VPs of Sales know you have to get it going soon.

Sales Recruiting 348

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 348

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. To get to $5m-$10m ARR and beyond, we’ll need a real VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 363

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Make the revenue recur, I’m interested. Who is over 20?

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople. Key Takeaways Creating Sales Acceleration at Lattice There are a few takeaways from Dini’s time at Lattice.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

SImple tips to Do Better in Q4 With What You Already Have: – Drive Down Churn – Drive Up NPS – Be More Grateful – Zoom with 10 Customers a Week – Promote Your Star(s) – Less Spam, more ABM – Weekly Webinar – Improve Lead Routing – Improve Lead Scoring – Talk to Every Prospect.

Sales Recruiting 350

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 350

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. When to hire her (more here ).

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Somehow, find enough cash to make it 24 months to first real revenue. Even if on their own, they aren’t enough revenue to really pay for all that much. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

She brings in even better reps, and the revenue per rep goes up. A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Churn slowly increases. Then, manage a small team.

Sales Recruiting 253

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 253

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2022

Going from sales-led to PLG is doable, but it is not easy. Sales-led organizations struggle to adapt to a PLG mindset.”. Let’s use sales-led organizations as a comparison point. If a company has started out with a heavy sales focus, its onboarding process within the actual product may not be intuitive enough for customers.

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Business Pricing Churn 278

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep. Move the bottom 10% out and give the best leads to your top performer, and watch sales go up 20%. The best VPs of Sales design comp plans so the team never wants to leave. You should be striving for zero voluntary attrition on your sales team.

Sales Recruiting 275

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 275

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales.

Scale 269

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 269

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

Today, the majority of revenue professionals likely work multiple side hustles. When March 2020 hit, you laughed when you heard stories of engineers working 4-6 hour jobs, but it became rampant on the revenue side of the industry. As a manager, you have to do things differently. They had no hiring expertise and little money.

Sales Recruiting 286

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 286

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. Bookings and Revenue illuminates the company’s performance in closing new business (bookings) and recurring revenue.

Metrics 250

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount 250

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. 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. And when you hire a real, great VP of Sales. I Don’t Have Budget. Deliver it for her.

Sales Recruiting 306

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 306

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

He provides an in-depth guide to driving revenue growth at your company and what to expect at each stage. Awesome revenue growth on the X axis, awesome revenue retention on the Y. Hundred percent revenue retention, 200% revenue growth. Thirty, 50% revenue growth. How fast you’re growing revenue.

Scale 265

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 265

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work. The best mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies grow their accounts 120%-160% as a cohort, inclusive of churn. It’s much cheaper to renew a customer than to acquire one. You have redundancy.

Scale 270

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 270

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. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 240

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. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 294

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. Happy customers and second order revenue are your best secret weapon. Not in April. Not by June. Get it Done. More than ever.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 321

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.

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. For example, relationship managers who made more phone and video calls saw 4.8%

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

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. Is Greenhouse multi-product?

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 274

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Average Revenue per Customer. And basically SaaS revenue models is just magical for investors and for businesses. And you can basically predict revenue ahead of time and therefore raise money early on to grow even faster. First one and the most important one is obviously the MRR, monthly recurring revenue. MRR, obviously.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Sales Hacker

JULY 25, 2022

Your revenue organization works in the same way. Here’s the thing about driving a car — and about running a sales org: Bumps in the road are inevitable. One of the best ways to ensure every part of your engine is running smoothly is to build sales performance dashboards for everyone on your team. Activity metrics.

Sales Recruiting 116

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 116

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2019

If you take the time to listen, understand and act on what your customers are thinking and feeling, you’ll create an army of advocates and drive topline revenue growth for good measure. I actually worked in sales for five and a half years and that’s probably why I have tended to gravitate to B2B marketing. So, that was huge.

Sales Recruiting 227

Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 227

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 had 13 million of recurring revenue, 100% year over year growth. I sat down with Kyle at lunch.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 198

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Dropbox just hit one billion dollars in annual revenue. 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. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT.

VP of Engineering 286

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

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

JULY 9, 2019

Giraffe is a mobile job matching platform that helps medium skilled workers get access to opportunities and helps businesses to recruit staff faster, and easier, and more affordably than any other way. Well, you have to build a direct sales force. We said, “How important is Giraffe to you in your recruitment process?”

Scale 219

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 219

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 5, 2024

He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance. Previously, he founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM that was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014. 17:58) The importance of accountability in sales management. (22:32)

Sales Recruiting 103

Sales Recruiting AI Search AI Sales 103

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2019

Gainsight’s customer success software empowers companies to increase revenue and decrease customer churn. He then led product management for XDegrees and spent over five years rising up through the ranks at Symantec. His sales focused, actionable content made an impact on the audience. appeared first on SaaStr.

Sales Recruiting 171

Sales Recruiting Software Review Technical Review PayPal 171

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

But what’s amazing today, the industry is almost doubled at 546 billion in total revenue. And here’s some interesting data also, on the challenge for SaaS vendors, for all of us, that we will, a lot … most of us will see increased churn. And so we will have additional churn challenges across SaaS.

Software Review 247

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 247

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

It may take a bit of a leap of faith to invest in a differentiation strategy that won’t immediately translate into ROI, especially in a pandemic, but you can’t sacrifice innovation and sustainability for short-term revenue. The only challenge there is your recruiting capacity, right? So you can hire more and hire faster.

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228