SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and 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. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big.

Part-Time VPE 309

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 309

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 299

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 299

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

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. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 304

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Emboldened by this seeming endorsement, I dashed off what turned into a lengthy email on interviewing and recruiting, a topic about which I am passionate not because I think I am good it, but because I think I am not. Thoughts on The Recruiting Process. Remember it’s a mutual sales process. Consider a try-and-buy.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Finance 110

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 351

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 351

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. I don’t know anything about sales. More power to you.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 290

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2021

In addition to the lost time and execution of a failed executive hire, employee churn increases, employee tarnishes, and overall employee satisfaction suffers. Startups should expect successful management hires about 75% of the time. The management team at the time of the sale to Google collaborated for 5 years without turnover.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Branding 194

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

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. Never will. That hits quota or better. Never will.

Sales Recruiting 349

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 349

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

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 287

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 287

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 279

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 279

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

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. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Churn slowly increases. Then, manage a small team.

Sales Recruiting 259

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 259

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 317

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 317

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

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 290

Sales Recruiting Business Pricing Churn 290

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

They used the competitive advantage of recruiting out of the Midwest, where they knew the markets and the people better. As a manager, you have to do things differently. But if you know what success looks like in sales, support, engineering, etc., Half of sales and marketing resources might not exist in 24 months.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 298

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 316

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 316

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. It’s important to track the number of leads in the conversion rates to sales generated by sales.

Metrics 250

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount 250

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 281

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 281

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

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. This will drive up your net retention, drive down your churn, and drive up NPS. Not in April. Not by June. Get it Done.

Part-Time VPE 328

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 328

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 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 306

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need. Manage People. This is one of the best things you can do, because 50% of the job of a CEO is recruiting a team, leading a team, empowering a team, convincing a team. Because they don’t know it’s impossible.

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

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

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

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 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 278

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2019

I actually worked in sales for five and a half years and that’s probably why I have tended to gravitate to B2B marketing. Worked as an AE and then a sales manager. Decided to go to business school, did that for a little bit and then came out in management consulting, a company. So, they’re a B2B piece.

Sales Recruiting 235

Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 235

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 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

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 286

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 286

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

And, depending on the initial contract duration, high customer churn [1]. churn of 25%, and services margins of negative 66% when I started working with them [2]. Customers are left high-and-dry with failed or partial implementations that, if left unfinished, will likely lead to churn. High adoption failure.

Consulting 144

Consulting Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 144

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

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

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 223

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 223

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

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