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I found, when I was a SaaS CEO, that the CEOs that complained about needing a COO early, that it was too hard (which it is), etc. I felt part of your core job as CEO was to assemble a management team, not complain about how you couldn’t get it all done. Or didn’t want to do sales. Or couldn’t stand your CTO.
Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? 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. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. Check who they hired.
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m He asked which to hire first. If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. Hiring is so hard as it is. And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%.
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. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap.
To convert an idea into a successful venture, startups need to be equipped to scale. Hiring a reliable team is an all-encompassing issue where startups dive in head-first but fail to optimize it for success. . Hiring an expert produces 1000x better results than someone with interests elsewhere. . Build an irreplaceable team .
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. In The End, The “Covid Boost” in SaaS Was a Bust. Growing & ScalingSaaS Businesses from $1M to $500M in ARR with Intercom CEO Karen Peacock.
Unparalleled Networking Opportunities SaaStr Annual brings together thousands of SaaS, Cloud and AI executives, founders, VCs, and industry leaders under one roof across our 40+ acre campus, May 13-15 in SF Bay! Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.
Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. But they should.
Do you anticipate scale issues presently or in the future? While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. How does the percentage of their projects launched on-time and on-budget compare to upfront estimates? cto , product , saas
Founded by Sanjit Biswas, former CEO at Meraki and John Bicket former CTO at Meraki[link] Samsara builds software to manage physical operations: truck fleets, mining, food & beverage, oil & gas. Sales Efficiency. -. 71% is the public SaaS company median. But these contracts produce compelling economics.
A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. Anyhow the one thing I learned, beyond getting help screening and hiring for these positions from domain experts, is to look for Flags.
There, Amplitude has become part of the core product stack for many SaaS and software leaders for product analytics. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. Folks come out differently here, but while Amplitude charges per volume, in part, it doesn’t make a material amount from overages.
As your SaaS company grows and you go through various fundraising stages, your company size also grows. 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 Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments.
No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired.
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. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales.
You’ll never truly understand how to lead a SaaS company until you’ve done it firsthand. Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. Software is Fractal A SaaS product is richly nuanced and contains multiple layers.
What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. We do that with a combination of industry-leading content and community connections. And SaaStr Europa brings 2,500+ SaaS execs, founders, and VCs together to Europe every summer.
The top SaaS companies grow faster than ever these days. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Veterans of the SaaS journey. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it.
In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. the prospects). You still need to spend 15-20% of your time in sales. And see where that takes you.
Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt 2. SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaSSales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh 3.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?
They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. It did work — we got the scaling done. A senior product lead that engineering wouldn’t work with.
Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years.
Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. 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. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? Top Videos This Week: 1.
Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.
In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo? ” And there can be some truth to that, right?
When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Of course, not at scale.
In it, we cover the SaaS community’s most pressing questions about Artificial Intelligence (AI), pricing, efficiency, and funding. AI is coming for sales and marketing, and Jason is a super fan of AI in marketing. Because hundreds of the best founders are radically ripping through post-sales AI, and now it’s time for marketing.
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. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.
Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. Keep the promise of sales enablement and keep your team doing what they do best, which is winning.
With 3 full days of sessions, featuring over 300 speakers from the best SaaS companies around the world, SaaStr Annual will be filled with actionable thought leadership to help grow your business. Get your tickets to the SaaS show everyone will be talking about! I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO.
Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!
As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. You’ll also learn how leadingSaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Want to see more content like this session?
WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. Bottom-up sales. The contract size grows. Doing Business with Developers.
Last year, the message was that it’s harder, so what is the theme for many SaaS companies this year? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his take on the current SaaS landscape midway through 2024 and what might be coming next in 2025 at the opener to this year’s SaaStr Europa. Or Scale AI securing $1B. Just build.
Pricing is a SaaS company’s most efficient profit lever, but it’s also one of the easiest things to screw up. Nailing your SaaS pricing strategy requires more than just picking the optimal price and forgetting about it. It includes the latest and greatest SaaS pricing resources, as well as some timeless staples.
When you treat your cloud provider as a fractional colo. The B2B SaaS arms race will be won by those who can consistently translate technical debt into development versatility: adding new features, integrating new data sources and workflow integrations, trying new technologies, retiring locked-in dependencies.
I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. When you find the right partner, the right investor, what they can do in terms of helping you grow and scale a company is just invaluable. year sales cycles. You have to learn things like how do I scale my sales force? Therese Tucker: Turned out I liked it.
This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. Chris is a 20 year Silicon Valley veteran having launched the first part of his career at EMC before finding his way to Snowflake in 2013. What You’ll Learn.
Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.
Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?
The margin for error is slim in the fast-paced world of Software as a Service (SaaS). To ensure your SaaS application stands out and thrives, it's crucial to avoid common pitfalls that can hinder your success. It’s a factor of their size as they become successful – it’s hard to innovate at a very large scale.
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