SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

On the investing side of life, the toughest meeting of all for me at least is probably the Right Co-Founder, Wrong CEO start-up. But after that, it starts to break down when you have to recruit a true management team, and in many cases, additional capital. They’ll know … Who can best recruit a management team?

Sales Recruiting 279

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 279

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Throughout her time there, she scaled the SaaS company from $1M ARR to pre- IPO, along the way, creating the category of customer success software, and paving the way for Gainsight’s $1.1B Today, she advises and invests in companies on these topics and others. How you should you go about recruiting the right person?

Scale 299

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 299

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 300

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 300

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Do at least 20–30 customer interviews before you start writing too much code. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer. A 10x feature that customers will pay for, that the key competition doesn’t have.

Sales Hiring 318

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 318

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. More on that here and a great video discussion below: You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR. Ideally, have your VP of Sales on board in time to hire reps 3-300. But asking her to hire the first ones before you’ve proven it out yourself?

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2020

When I catch up with founders on the march from $1m to $10m in ARR, the number one topic has always shifted to recruiting. Where do i find a great VP of Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Customer Success, etc.? Some times, it seems like simply building a management team is all you have time for. This is true.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Management Engineering Customer Success 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

So backstage at SaaStr Annual this year, and in a number of other conversations since, I’ve had a chance to get a few quiet moments with maybe two dozen top CROs and VPs of Sales. Yes, macro issues come up, and how they have to sell to more stakeholders now, and sales cycles are longer. But the best long ago adapted.

Sales Recruiting 303

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales 303

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. For a team of dozen people, mostly concentrated on product and engineering, they all had their hands full with customer calls. Prioritize demand discovery Demand is a strong indicator of product market fit.

Sales Recruiting 265

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 265

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Personalized Event Recommendations : Demonstrate a deeper understanding of customer needs by recommending relevant events that align with their growth goals. Proactive Network Introductions : Use your network to make valuable connections, reinforcing your commitment to your customers’ success beyond the product itself.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur. It changes over time,” Jason shares.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of Customer Success at the revenue intelligence platform Gong. Moving upmarket means larger customers and higher revenue, but it’s not without its challenges. For Linda, it all comes down to your approach to customer success.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales? Continuing the conversation on effective team members, it’s important to hire the right people to manage SDRs. A VP of Sales might seem the logical place to have your first SDR team report. But if they’ve never managed a higher turnover SDR team, they often melt.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

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. Define your ICP as early as you can and segment your sales team accordingly.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 279

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2022

Then, decide how much time, money, and effort your company is willing to invest in the CAB. . Next, identify your most strategic customers. Which customer segments best represent your growth focus? Mapistry recruited a diverse pool by inviting both legacy customers and new customers. .

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Enterprise Onboarding Investment 246

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Luciana: I had been telling people that the inflection point came when Accel invested, but I guess it was market and product and all that good stuff. We do have a network of recruiters. Luciana: Right.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 280

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 266

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 266

Totango

MARCH 15, 2022

Efforts to scale customer success team activity often fall short because of failure to avoid common mistakes. Your human resources practices, your project management procedures and your technology strategy all need to come together in order for you to scale up without overextending yourself.

Sales Recruiting 102

Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 102

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2015

At the Gainsight Pulse conference yesterday, I moderated a panel with Boaz Maor, VP of customer success at Mashery and Mike McKee, SVP of customer success and services at Rapid7. During the panel, both men described their path to building substantial customer success organizations at their respective companies.

Compensation 100

Compensation Customer Success Sales Recruiting Churn 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2017

It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. They build a pipeline, learn the sales motion, and close a few accounts in the first few months.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 124

InsightSquared

MARCH 6, 2018

Sales operations has been around for quite some time, but lately the function has been gaining momentum. Instead of behind-the-scenes sales support, sales ops now acts as a strategic partner for sales VPs and leadership. Start building out your sales operations department by hiring someone to own your CRM.

Sales Recruiting 119

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 119

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Chuck is the co-founder of Blueprint Expansion , a GTM roles recruiting firm that has helped over 50 VC-backed companies make amazing Sales, Marketing, & Customer Success hires. By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase.

Sales Hiring 127

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing SMB 127

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

Level Up Your Customer Success Organization. In the subscription economy, there’s no debate about whether or not to invest in Customer Success (CS); 70% of rapidly growing businesses say that Customer Success is extremely important ( Hubspot , 2017). The fourth challenge is complexity.

VP of Engineering 98

VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

“Researchers acknowledge and invest in the ‘ what’, but often forget to slow down and understand the ‘ why’ – the people behind the numbers and emerging trends”. To achieve this, researchers capture online movements, behavioral changes, and customer information (with customer consent, of course!).

Sales Recruiting 156

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Trends 156

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Sales leaders like Florin Tatulea (Director of Sales at Barley) feel the impact from the past few years alone: “Pure cold outbound is 3x harder than it was in 2021.” Sales team members should capable of understanding at least a few key signals and knowing which subsequent actions based on those signals will have the greatest impact.

Sales Recruiting 126

Sales Recruiting Strategy Systems Review Sales 126

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Founders may reduce staff, particularly in recruiting or new projects that the company prefers not to finance. This company invests $12k in month one to acquire a customer and receives $1k in payment, netting -$11k in cash flow. Growing this way requires a lot of cash to finance the acquisition investment.

SaaS Payments 124

SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 124

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 13, 2014

Nor the management class on having difficult conversations with colleagues, among countless others. Returning to Google reminded me that great companies constantly invest in their people, helping them to understand the world inside the company and outside the company. The loyalty engendered is hard to overstate.

Investment 100

Investment Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

Companies need a specialized approach for SMB accounts, different than the tactics used for Enterprise. Andrei Brasoveanu will sit down for a conversation with Agnes Bazin Doctolib on how to create a targeted and effective sales process tailor-made for SMB. The topic of the day is secret to SMB sales. That’s fantastic.

Sales Recruiting 128

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 128

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

I was the new Vice President of International Sales & Managing Director for a work management software company called Wrike. Starting Your International Sales Team. The key to starting an international sales team is having the right people in your landing team. A mercenary is driven by the sale.

Sales Hiring 127

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 127

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

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.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

“The shift from serving just consumers to serving consumers and companies is a massive one” For Udemy, investing in a B2B arm seemed too obvious, and too good, an opportunity to ignore. At the helm of Udemy for Business’ customer acquisition machine is their VP of Marketing Yvonne Chen.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

However, it’s tough to predict the future alone — so we asked Customer Success leaders across the industry to share their top trends for 2023. Second, the power of AI in customer experience will become more evident and accessible—an innovation we at ChurnZero have jumped on with the introduction of Customer Success AI.

Trends 98

Trends Customer Success Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence 98

ChurnZero

JANUARY 26, 2021

A J oint Success Plan is a simple but powerful tool for outcome-based customer success management. It’s designed to help solution providers align with their customers’ business goals and objectives. Customer success continues to evolve as a practice within companies that enjoy recurring revenue models.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management 98

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

As ChurnZero recently secured a Series B investment bringing our total funding that has been raised to date to $35 million, we thought we’d take a look back and see the role that Customer Success plays at each respective stage of funding for SaaS companies. Early-Stage Funding & Customer Success.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success Payments Underperforming Technical Team 98

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And we’re also pleased, now to have almost a hundred thousand different SaaS products listed there, and being backed by a hundred million dollars from LinkedIn and some great investors that do allow us to keep investing in this marketplace. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital.

Software Review 260

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 260

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

One of the oldest truisms in sales is that recruiting new clients costs more than retaining them ( five to 25 times more costly, depending on the industry). More than ever, customer success teams must be in complete lockstep with their sales teams—both should treat any renewal as a joint effort and success.

Sales Recruiting 134

Sales Recruiting Technical Review B2B Benchmarks 134

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2019

Companies need a specialized approach for SMB accounts, different than the tactics used for Enterprise. Andrei Brasoveanu will sit down for a conversation with Agnes Bazin Doctolib on how to create a targeted and effective sales process tailor-made for SMB. The topic of the day is secret to SMB sales. That’s fantastic.

Sales Recruiting 114

Sales Recruiting SMB Scale Sales Hiring 114

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Companies were growing their sales organizations and bringing in more revenue. Companies everywhere have frozen their hiring and laid off workers — with sales reps often among the first to go. I’ll be honest: as the leader of a sales-focused recruiting company, this has been tough for me and my team.

Sales Hiring 127

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 127