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 313

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 313

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. All good stuff.

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. More here: Should You Fire an OK-but-Not-Great VP of Sales?

Sales Recruiting 256

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 256

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. If you don’t have the time to watch the whole session, here are the main metrics you should be mindful of. It’s basically lost customers.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

This is a guest article by Swati Garg , founder and CEO, Melo Associates , and Lindsay Lynch , senior recruitment consultant, Melo Associates , a recruitment firm focused on customer success hiring for SaaS and tech companies nationwide. For example, “Enterprise Customer Success Manager”.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

The headline metrics: 15,000+ attendees. With power, snacks, and more, we’ll have lounges just for Founders; just for Sales + Marketing professionals; just for Builders (Dev + Product), and just for VCs to issue term sheets. Recruiting Fair. March 10-11-12 in San Jose, CA just south of San Francisco. 4,000+ CEOs.

New CTO 329

New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 329

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

You can also totally change your sales team. In a way, this is the same point as #1, almost — except you can recruit even more of the team here. Every single employee knows something to do to make customers happier, and thus drive up NPS. The sales team can call back every single prospect, not just the good ones.

Sales Recruiting 350

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 350

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2021

– did their #1 key metric improve? 50% of the job of a real VP is recruiting. Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? But you can expect in the first 60 days for one key metric to improve. Sales — for a VPS.

Part-Time VPE 248

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Metrics 248

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. The way the co-founders looked at the stages in the early days of no funding and a community-focus were: Step 1 – No sales or customers, only building freely available open-source software. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team.

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2023

Daniel, you grew to 3 million in ARR before you hired a VP of Sales. You had all the reps and SDRs reporting to you, managed it all yourself. How’d you manage all that? Daniel : We followed a lean start up approach to building our sales process. An engineering team and the sales team was me with a laptop.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 274

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

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 18, 2024

Jonathan Moss (EVP at Experity) showcased an Account Plan GPT that streamlines sales and marketing account research for outbound efforts. Examples of automating workflows to solve ongoing challenges: Everyone shared use cases they’re trying for sales account research and lead generation workflows. Link to GPT.

Sales Recruiting 107

Sales Recruiting Software Review Scale AI 107

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. Singular focus on sales. As the title would hint at, the VP of Sales should focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 121

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 121

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 259

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

The first thing is, and this is a little crazy, but recruitment is incredibly overrated. How many people out here spend more than a third of your time recruiting? Tough Management Lesson #1. A lot of CEOs spend over half their time recruiting people. Tough Management Lesson #2. Okay, wow, that’s a lot.

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 196

Totango

JULY 19, 2021

And in this customer-centered economy, your customer success (CS) team is invaluable. The team’s goal is to retain your hard-won customers and help them grow by deepening the customer relationship and ensuring they are realizing value with your product every step of the way. 1: Recruit the Right People.

Customer Success 126

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Compensation Scale 126

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 131

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 131

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Maria and Anthony present the CEO and CMO playbook of how the CEO and CMO can partner with other members of the team to grow sales and marketing. But you’ve really focused in the area of customer success. Maria : I mean, I’ve talked to over 60 recruiters. Want to see more content like this? Photo’s up.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 290

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

Kellblog

MARCH 13, 2020

In days of yore, chief revenue officer (CRO) was just a gussied-up title for VP of Sales. If someone was particularly good, particularly senior, or particularly hard to recruit you might call them CRO. Chief revenue officer meant chief sales officer meant VP of Sales. Frank, the head of Sales, had a $1B number.

VP of Engineering 98

VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Recruiting Acquisition 98

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

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 118

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 118

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

Sales Hacker

MAY 20, 2021

You should approach this tactically with honed and consistent metrics. You need to measure and repeat so you and your sales team only put effort into promising prospects abroad. Develop a focused sales approach. More than any other time, with limited travel, companies must be very focused in their international sales approach.

Scale 118

Scale Metrics Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 118

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

So first off, I’m saying we start with customer success. What is sales? What is sales? Isn’t sales really around customer value creation? Sales is not about revenue generation, it’s around customer value creation. Why are we so obsessed with sales being focused on revenue?

Scale 265

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 265

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

Unbounce

JUNE 16, 2020

For example, ActiveCampaign’s reseller program offers beefier discounts to partners as they grow, letting them set their own pricing and pocket the difference: ActiveCampaign’s reseller program offers deeper discounts on pricing as more sales are made, creating an incentive to go big. Is your sales process simple and streamlined?

Outsourcing Services 131

Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting Scale SaaS 131

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

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

At the helm of Udemy for Business’ customer acquisition machine is their VP of Marketing Yvonne Chen. When Yvonne joined in 2016, the business unit consisted of just 10 people across product, engineering, sales, and marketing. Turning a sales objection into a unique differentiator.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243

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

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 91

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 91

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. He will also provide insights on the differences between commercial and enterprise customers and the key metrics to keep an eye on as you grow your business.

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 202

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 18, 2020

With each passing year the Customer Success industry matures and meets new challenges along the way, and this year has been nothing short of challenging in many ways. . Q&A Recap: Speakers: Megan Macaluso , VP Customer Success & Operations, ESG. Jay Nathan , Chief Customer Officer, Higher Logic.

Customer Success 87

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Finance 87

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Generally, success hinges on a company’s ability to acquire a deep understanding of the metrics that most accurately gauge company performance and profitability. A Quick Glossary of SaaS Metrics. Essentially, this metric is the marketing component of CAC (see below). Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Big mistake.

Benchmarks 71

Benchmarks Scale Metrics Sales Recruiting 71

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 8, 2021

Elements of Successful Global Sales Expansion. “Be Successful global expansion is all about capitalizing on the right opportunity at the right time. So, let’s look at four keys to a successful global sales expansion. It takes a particular type of sales leader to be the first in a new country or region.

Sales Hiring 115

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Technical Review 115

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Sales is a hyper-social, customer-facing role that can get highly stressful. In this article we talk about the top indicators of sales burnout and how to tackle them. We all know Sales is the job for the people person — the high-flying, always-on-the-go charmer that’s on the phone, in meetings and/or closing deals.

Sales Recruiting 87

Sales Recruiting Sales Metrics Strategy 87

Incredo

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

Do you want to grow your SaaS sales team and improve your processes? maintain healthy atmosphere in your Smarketing team, make smart choices regarding your SaaS sales model, strategy, pricing, . build smoother connections both with your prospects through optimized sales process. And from SaaS sales models to SaaS pricing.

SaaS Payments 157

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 157