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What’s The #1 Challenge After $1m-$2m ARR?

SaaStr

You can’t hack it forever. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft. You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big.

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Don’t Hire VPs With The Wrong Titles

SaaStr

These folks rarely have any idea how to do demand gen, ABM, growth hacking, etc. A “VP of Sales & Customer Success” for a VP of Sales job. Product Marketers know how to explain how a product fits. Corporate Marketers know how to expand your brand. But neither has any idea how to get you more leads.

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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

SaaStr

But a great head of demand gen (or maybe growth hacking if you are SMB) should be very accretive at even $20k in MRR. You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Customer Success by $2m-$3m in ARR. This will seem crazy early to many of you.

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The Double-Stretch Hire Rarely Works Out

SaaStr

corporate marketing or growth hacking) insisting on being your CMO. A customer success leader that was good at upsells — which is sort of, but not really, sales — that insists on being your VP of Sales. A director of marketing experienced in one area (e.g.,

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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. You’ll find a way to be decent at some aspect of marketing in the early days on your own (PR, virtality, growth hacking, outbound, cold calling, who knows).

Scale 271
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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Get Traction After We Have A Few Paying Customers?

SaaStr

Customers and prospects attend them, after all. Growth hacking. Most of us are bad at making events pay. But done right, they can really perform. Especially, try to do the 1–2 largest events in your industry. Building lists and spamming, er, emailing them often fails. Or even creates backlash. Favors + Warm Intros.

Scale 281
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Every Department Must Recognize the Value of Customer Success

Sixteen Ventures

Customer Success teams continually strive to advocate for their significance, often finding themselves undervalued by other departments. Heads of Customer Success are no strangers to this feeling, and while the importance of their roles is crystal clear to them, they sometimes feel isolated in this perspective.