SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? 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. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft.

Part-Time VPE 310

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 310

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 299

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 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. It does mean a well-oiled machine that hires strong reps of all backgrounds, and gets them the help and training so they can scale up and succeed.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 363

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 293

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? 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. Key Takeaways Creating Sales Acceleration at Lattice There are a few takeaways from Dini’s time at Lattice.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

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. in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. With less drama.

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 281

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 281

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 10, 2022

A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. It’s hard enough just to maintain KPIs and metrics as you scale. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps.

Sales Recruiting 256

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 256

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does it get easier or harder to scale SaaS as your company grows? Generally, it gets easier to grow at a “good”/modest rate at you scale, but harder to grow at an outsize rate. Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 276

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. Generally, they can scale and go further than you think. It’s time to add a new mentor to help you scale. Not by June.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 325

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 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 300

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

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2021

Agile principles can be a North Star for time-strapped support teams, helping them to keep the customer’s needs at the heart of their decisions so they can provide fast, personal support at scale. Agile teams start small and move fast, collecting and incorporating feedback to iterate their way to bigger and better solutions quickly.

Scale 235

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Scaling 235

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

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. They did it. He ran from the term.

Sales Hiring 281

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 281

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. 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.” Josh : I made probably the first 50, 60 offers in the company personally, and that does not scale. How do you hire?”

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

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

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). It can be easy to consistently double revenue if you’re an early-stage company, but as you scale up, sustaining that becomes more difficult. Churn rate.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

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 201

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 201

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 117

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 117

Sales Hacker

APRIL 8, 2024

In the competitive arena of B2B sales, mastering the art of prospecting is key to ensuring a healthy sales pipeline, daily demos booked, and hitting your sales quota. Fortunately for you, we’ve sifted through the clutter and done all the legwork to bring you the top 10 sales prospecting tools. Wiza reviews 4.5/5

Scale 125

Scale Sales Recruiting B2B AI Search 125

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

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? And so we will have additional churn challenges across SaaS.

Software Review 254

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 254

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. Hiring sales leaders will get harder.

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 53

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 155

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 155

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. Costs of goods sold are minimal for a company selling software over the Web, and costs like product development decrease as a percentage of revenue when you get to bigger scale. along the way.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2021

As a sales leader, you want your sales reps to be the best they can be. However, if 100% of your sales reps are hitting their quota every single quarter, it may not be cause for celebration. A healthy sales organization should aim for about 60% of reps hitting their quota. Even as adults, we strive for 100%.

Scale 126

Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation Sales 126

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. Then, the sales team went to work. When making a sales hire, Max pays attention to the way candidates approach getting the job.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

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

Sales Hacker

APRIL 5, 2021

In 2020 I was building my sales team at Livestorm , and at the time we were going through a big hiring boom. For the first time in my life, I was in charge of vetting and hiring new team members at scale. Over the course of time, I’ve interviewed and talked to hundreds of sales candidates. Value-based recruitment.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Company Culture Interviewing 125

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. Law number one, in the cloud economy, scale wins. But if you just take a step back for any kind of market that we’ve had success with, with cloud software companies, the majority of the market, say 50, 60, sometimes 70% goes to the scaled leader.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 232

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 202

Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 202

Totango

DECEMBER 13, 2022

But CS recruiting has its own special challenges as a nascent industry where job titles, reporting structures, and inter-departmental collaborations vary considerably from one company to the next. To make it easier, give recruiters more input on what CS is, the careers and paths to advancement it offers, and criteria for an ideal candidate.

Sales Hiring 99

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Customer Success 99