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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. She can be your CTO forever.
You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David’s first foray into SaaS was in 1999 when he joined a startup that would become PayPal, starting as the product leader and later as the COO.
For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should ProductMarketing Work for Product or Marketing?
Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success.
GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag.
As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.
Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?
If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. Larger technology companies can pay more, offer more benefits, and provide a more marketable brand on a candidate’s resume. Why is it so hard for SMBs to hire the best talent when competing with big companies?
2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.
Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.
Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.
Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate ProductManager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete.
But also, as a sole founder, you also can make a decision in a very timely manner. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. Speed is everything.
In this article, we’ve outlined the major roles that move the needle in terms of product growth alongside their KPIs and current salary ranges. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. AccountManagers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer accountmanagement matters.
A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Excited to be back emceeing. That was the start of the Month of Scale.
To build the initial team, to build the product, to build the initial go to market, to build the first customers and to build the ARR, the starting. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Pietro : This journey used to end at the legendary, mythical product/market fit. ” That’s not proven.
A Couple SaaS Generations Ago… Traditional software companies managedsales, product development, finance and HR in siloed organizations by function. Cross functional management was attempted but often not effective. In the early SaaS days, management structure was essentially the same. Chief Product Officer.
Product positioning describes the specific market you intend to win and why you are uniquely qualified to win it. It’s the underpinning of your go-to-market strategy and impacts everything from marketing to sales, to customer success and the product itself. Why positioning matters? Why should I give a damn?
They are expecting a discussion on security and scalability and so we have to bring partners to the table and there are some partners we work with that are more than willing to come into that sales conversation with us and these is other partners that aren’t. And you’ve just mentioned several things.
This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Identify ideal customers and hone sales personas. Get it done faster.
Plus, the ProductMarketing Alliance drops the ProductMarketing Salary Survey. What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? That’s what David Apple—customer success and sales guru at Notion— is asking. Along with: What’s the ROI of your customer success manager?
So we didn’t have productmarket fit for that. How did you think about, who do I want to target for that product given where we are now. So that’s where we found productmarket fit and productmarket fit is not binary, it’s more of like the stars align and you’re just like, Oh my God.
Or if you have products that require some configuration–think about Salesforce, Segment, things like that–someone needs to set it up. Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. Think Notion, Canva, Slack, all of those products.
Simply put, you conduct customer discovery interviews before launching a new product, or whenever you want to discover potential customers. User Interviews is an example of a product born out of customer discovery interviews. Speaking your customers’ language will accelerate your sales and make your brand more engaging.
Simply put, you conduct customer discovery interviews before launching a new product, or whenever you want to discover potential customers. User Interviews is an example of a product born out of customer discovery interviews. Speaking your customers’ language will accelerate your sales and make your brand more engaging.
We’ve discussed most before individually, but let me throw ’em together: It may well take 24 months to get to true product-market fit and Initial Traction. You really need a great CTO, not just a good business team. A mediocre tech team, a part-timeCTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there.
To handle this evolving requirement, it is important to build a competent profile to initiate progress in product development. This is where companies need another C-level executive to facilitate business growth via products. What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department.
He also founded SaaScribe to help founders, customer success teams , sales executives, marketing professionals, and growth hackers. Asia Orangio is a SaaS expert who helps SaaS companies and start-ups to craft a data driver strategy and implement award-winning marketing strategies to win the audience. Asia Orangio. Chris Orlob.
As for Erica, under her CRO role, she leads all go-to-market functions including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Success, Services, and Support. How does the move to enterprise fundamentally impact the sales team? How does the structure of the sales team change with the move? Where do many go wrong?
Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. We think we should hold off doing channels until we’ve debugged the sales model.
Katrina Wong, VP Marketing and Demand Generation @ Segment. Asawari Samant, Head of Marketing @ Anyscale. Amy Appleyard, VP Sales @ VMWare. Michelle Benfer, VP, Head of North America Sales @ HubSpot. Kady Srinivasan, Head of Marketing @ Klaviyo. Jessica Weimer Vice President, Global Revenue Marketing @ Podium.
Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? In terms of replacement, what does Bob believe will be the emerging trends in SaaS Go To Market that will replace it? * How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Why is this?
What does really effective productmarketing mean to Paul? How does Paul think about driving really effective change management? When engaging with bottoms up sales models, where does Paul identify the tipping points of going from bottoms up to top down? * Is it product decisions? Is there hiring decisions?
Previously, he was an operating partner at Fractal Software, helping launch vertical software companies and find product-market fit. Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. 13:17 Characteristics of top early-stage sales reps.
Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers. If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member.
Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. Enterprise sales cycles were painfully long with limited data points.
At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. Companies that have great, happy, productive employees do better by every single return. Brian and Dharmesh started the company out of MIT Sloan, so who did they hire?
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