SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team. This practical, observable metric drove more decision-making than sophisticated dashboards or forecasting models.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 192

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Specifically, she champions a metrics-based approach for developing world class recruiting teams. Because of her position, Maia has observed recruiting patterns in hundreds of companies, and has developed best practices for startups. Maia reports these five strategic recruiting metrics to the executive team each quarter.

Sales Recruiting 113

Sales Recruiting Startup Sales Hiring Data Analysis 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2024

Kyle Norton CRO of Owner is kicking off a new podcast for Pavillion with revenue leaders, and we were lucky enough to be guest #001 here: It’s a great convo on many SaaStr themes — but from the perspective of a VP Sales / CRO. Prepare your presentations with this in mind, balancing metrics with high-level strategic insights.

Technical Review 304

Technical Review Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Revenue 304

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. And don’t make excuses for a deterioration in metrics after you make the hire.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 260

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 3, 2017

Every startup’s sales commission plan is different. But it’s key to understand the theory and the benchmark data that governs the creation of sales commission plans to create a good one for your business. Sales compensation is communicated in OTE, On Target Earnings. At the upper end, they spent 11.5%

Sales Recruiting 160

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Data Sales 160

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

Imagine a coverage model, from end to end, for the full customer life cycle: from demand generation to sales to post-sales. Sales Cycle. This includes everything from inside sales to account executives to strategic asset allocation. Post Sales. Execution is not just a sales process. Land the account.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 278

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

I really appreciate you coming to talk about how to attract, hire, and build a more diverse sales team in your organization. So I’ve been building top-producing sales teams for a really, really long time. So over the years, I’ve watched many sales leaders go out and say, “Brian’s my top producer.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 265

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Signal can come from many places (sales team notes, customer support tickets, etc) IT Incident Management: Similar to the security alert example. Generally you need to aggregate data from a number of places to “group.” I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment. The raw data is here.

Benchmarks 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

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. Today, not so much.

Scale 298

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 298

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Sign up for free.

Sales Hiring 203

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 203

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. I’m 100% OK taking a lot of risk here because I know I can help them recruit a local team as much as necessary or desired. Which is expensive, can take tons of sales reps, and isn’t done through the software / network effects per se.

Scale 344

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 344

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2021

. “Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data” Gorgias crossed 6,000 customer this week. “The 5 Metrics You Should Track to Maximize Your Company’s Valuation with Tomasz Tunguz” A great session from the recent SaaStr Build with Tomasz. #9.

Sales Recruiting 191

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Scaling 191

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

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I started a software company in college to make it easy to update websites called Content Management Software Now, and I had this idea for Pardot, I wanted to make it easy for marketers to run campaigns online and measure their results. SalesLoft, why was that Pardot, I tried to recruit this guy, Kyle Porter, to come run sales at Pardot.

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 202

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

When we do all hands meetings, we go through every KPI, every metric, ARR, margin, with every Gustee. I want to come be your VP of sales and, you’re going to meet me for the first time. Spencer : For me, the key things for a VP of sales is, “OK, tell me about your best reps. We’ve done that since day one.

VP of Engineering 300

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 300

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 18, 2024

Areas with the greatest data are those that are furthest developed” – Mike Levy (CRO of SalesIntel) Mike’s comment underscores the fact that while AI is rapidly advancing, there’s still much to learn, and the most progress is happening where data is abundant. “Lots of interesting things, but nobody has figured it out.

Sales Recruiting 109

Sales Recruiting Software Review Scale AI 109

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 200

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 200

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 122

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 122

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. This has created large amounts of data for running teams. . A data-driven framework for scaling.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

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. Familiarity with customer success frameworks, metrics, and best practices.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 117

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 117

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

We tell every CFO up that if you have an employee in finance that’s not doing data driven analytics, that’s what a robot should be doing. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. We do have a network of recruiters. We added 0.8

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 280

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

JULY 25, 2022

Here’s the thing about driving a car — and about running a sales org: Bumps in the road are inevitable. One of the best ways to ensure every part of your engine is running smoothly is to build sales performance dashboards for everyone on your team. What is a sales performance dashboard? What is a sales performance dashboard?

Sales Recruiting 117

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 117

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 7, 2015

LinkedIn attracts hundreds of millions of consumers to post resumes online and sells this data and access to its audience to advertisers and recruiters and salespeople. The intrinsic data and people network effects of the business create reinforcing feedback cycles that have helped the business achieve tremendous revenue growth.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Benchmarks Metrics SaaS 100

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 20, 2016

But, metrics alone aren’t enough. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit because in both the recent Software Engineering Daily podcast I did with Jeff, and the presentation I gave at Launch Conference, the question of the limits of metrics surfaced. In those conversations, we discussed two shortcomings of data.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Data Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

A recent study analyzed data from thousands of events over a five year period and found that approximately 70% of professional event speakers are male. Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 131

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 131

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

Solution : They used Userpilot's in-app surveys for feedback collection and beta tester recruitment, implemented in-app messaging for feature announcements , and leveraged product analytics to monitor performance and guide redesign decisions. Second, they used them to simplify beta-tester recruitment. Book a demo!

Sales Recruiting 105

Sales Recruiting User Experience Education Data 105

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2019

” Keith : And so in today’s world that can mean AI co-founder if you’re building a company that leverages data science. ” Keith : And so in today’s world that can mean AI co-founder if you’re building a company that leverages data science. You guys are awesome.

Merchant Services 274

Merchant Services Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 274

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 119

Scale Metrics Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 119

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 160

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 160

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. So for a bigger SaaS player, sales and marketing costs are the driver of profitability. But at the minimum, looking at these two metrics is a great start when you as an investor evaluate a SaaS company.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 21, 2017

What is Sales Operations? Sales operations refers to the unit, role, activities and processes within a sales organization that support, enable, and drive front line sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently. But perhaps more than anything else, sales operations brings a system to selling. Technology.

Scale 107

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 107

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

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. Prospects were confused over how the marketplace worked and the sales team struggled to explain it. Then we look at that on the business side too.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243