SaaStr

JULY 14, 2024

Hiring and Interviewing Tips: Jason emphasizes the importance of interviewing at least 30 candidates for a role and consulting with an expert in the field to interview the final candidate. Product-Led Growth (PLG) vs. Enterprise Sales: Jason discusses the evolution of PLG, noting that it’s essentially freemium with better analytics.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Interviewing 263

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

You need: Sales leaders who understand complex, multi-stakeholder deals Customer success teams ready for high-touch support Legal expertise for enterprise contract negotiation Product leaders who can balance current needs with future vision Pro tip: Hire enterprise reps in pairs. If both succeed, you’re ready to scale.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 240

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

As Colin describes it, “I went to the CEO and asked to generate more revenue and hire more people, which is counter-intuitive to the standard approach where revenue leaders may sandbag to over deliver and crush numbers.”

Scale 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 191

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Product marketing can be difficult, and managing product launches and rollouts can be complex. Your sales rise to a very high level You may realize that your sales are reaching high levels, but at the same time, you may encounter a situation where there needs to be more structure or control in your sales process.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Product Marketing Scale Marketing 263

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy shares his journey to more than $100M and the lessons he learned along the way for building a PLG motion and an Enterprise sales motion. As developers, they immediately started to think about a PLG, pay-as-you-go motion to get to market and engage with developers quickly.

Scale 316

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 316

Tom Tunguz

JULY 13, 2022

Yesterday, Office Hours welcomed Lars Nilsson, VP Sales Development from Snowflake to talk about his learnings across 5 companies he helped take public. Throughout the hour, Lars provided insightful perspectives on how to build sales organizations. Then, many founders opt to hire an AE. Hire for hunger.

Scale 324

Scale Sales Hiring Development Sales 324

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

Second, you’ll force yourself to spend more time tracking and managing candidates. Hire external recruiters — and be very good to them. Hire an internal recruiter, too, as early as you can. At least as early as you are hiring more than 1 new employee a month. A written critique of your product for a product hire.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, joined Matt Plank, VP of Sales at Rippling, to unlock the secrets to exponential revenue growth. Use carefully crafted messaging to seek the perfect buyers (people who haven’t engaged) and bring them to you. Your first few hires will typically be from your network.

Outsourcing Services 287

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 287

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2022

This famous quote from self-help author Robert Collier applies to every sales organization because excellent results come through repeatable activities, not one-off wins. The ratio of engaged vs. disengaged employees: 2:1 . Alice Katwan , SVP at Twilio , discusses how you can build a high-retention sales team while being remote.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale Retention Sales 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Combine Strategies To Drive Sales.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

Scale 321

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 321

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

The biggest structural difference is you have to hire all the VPs by employee 50–100. You won’t be able to scale this far without a full management team — VPs of Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Customer Success at least. I almost always see sales quickly fall in that case. You backfill the great ones.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Engineering 306

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

How can you engage these new users across the funnel? It’s less jack-of-all-trade hires, so the knowledge and questions they’ll ask will look a lot different. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. You’ll also need to look at your sales process.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 304

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

And often, if you are capital efficient, your marketing cost will be close to $0 at this point (you are barely spending anything to acquire most customers), and your sales costs are pretty predictable. Generally speaking, one Director of Sales can manage about 8 closers, account execs, max. Why would this be?

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 270

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2022

“The hardest part of closing any deal is finding it,” says Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake. Over his 35+ year career, Nilsson has managed 100+ Sales Development Representatives (SDR) across four continents, six countries, and ten cities. Jumpstart pipeline generation with your first five revenue hires.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Development Technical Review Management 246

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

If you want to hire your first sales rep and close more deals, you need to understand how the sales process works, what tools your team needs to be successful and learn to speak sales. Sales definitions you should know. CRM objects — Represent the sales relationship you have with a specific person or company.

Sales Hiring 321

Sales Hiring Startup Sales Outsourced Development 321

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

Q: What are the common mistakes in B2B sales in the early-ish days? The list could be endless, and it can vary a lot based on type of customer, type of sale, etc. The list could be endless, and it can vary a lot based on type of customer, type of sale, etc. No prospect enjoys going through a sales process for fun.

Scale 285

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 285

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. This is where product-led sales comes in.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2021

One thing all of us that have been doing SaaS for a while have learned is that, back in the day, we didn’t do a good enough job of specialization, especially in sales. And we didn’t do a good enough job of training new hires. I do this myself for a handful of VPs of Sales and Marketing at companies I work with.

Sales Hiring 325

Sales Hiring VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale Engineering 325

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

VP of Sales (once you have one). There are clear Pros and Cons to reporting to a VP of Sales. The Pros are: Usually, a VP of Sales is your best manager. So usually, she can easily also manage Customer Success as well as all her reps. Sales teams have to hire a lot of folks, quickly, and get them productive.

Customer Success 315

Customer Success Sales Hiring Finance Churn 315

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2022

Consistent with my experience that Free pilots only work for a subset of buyers, and where the vendor is really, really good at managing them. Otherwise, there is no engagement. 41% of you have sales do some customer onboarding, not just CS or other specialists. . #4. Should sales just disappear once the contract is signed? #5.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Pricing Scale Interviewing 340

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: He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. There’s no choice.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 17, 2023

This week we have a special 2 guest episode, with the best hiring guru’s in the game, Chuck Brotman & David Teichner. 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.

Sales Hiring 127

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing SMB 127

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

When the company started 20 years ago, it didn’t hire salespeople. So what should earlier-stage companies do: immediately build out a big sales team or focus on product-led growth? It wasn’t until 12 years in that they hired their first commission rep. Now they have sales reps, but still consider themselves PLG.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Enterprise Headcount Scale 264

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2022

My partial list: Hiring “too low” to save money. Why not just hire a manager for $80k, who can work with whatever budget you assign? The problem here is that instead of hiring an accretive resource, you hire a cost center than can’t deliver sales/leads/upsells. Settling on a VP hire. But not before.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 264

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

I walk them through this when I hire them. There are many stories of legendary exec hires. I hired the person with a great resume but who didn’t get our business, culture, or community. Lesson: Many times, I thought, “I need to hire for the role I’ll need 4 years from now.” Of course, sometimes that is indeed true.

Sales Hiring 331

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Scaling 331

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

First, you hire your sales team. Finally, growth occurs when sales, product, and marketing can come together. Mistake 2: Hiring with urgency. Founders often hire sales teams with urgency, even in a volatile market, resulting in hires who may not be successful salespeople for your organization.

Scale 288

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Marketplace as a Service 288

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Scaling a sales organization isn’t easy. Knowing which metrics matter and how to analyze them to increase your revenue and hit organizational sales goals is essential. . What makes a sales organization grow? What’s the best way to grow a sales organization? Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 297

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. Track it every month, all the time, and force your team to trend it downwards (and to trend engagement upwards).

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 278

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment. Lemkin acknowledges the challenge of meeting people’s high expectations and the existential nature of finding solutions to these hiring and motivation issues.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 298

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Hire a leader who will not only agree with you but someone you can disagree with in a respectful and productive way. Meet with people you can learn from and share ideas, even if it doesn’t convert into a hire.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 264

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2021

A few of the best: “Hire more relationship managers. Pay sales reps on renewals (enough to keep them from overselling year 1). Pay sales reps on renewals (enough to keep them from overselling year 1). Hire 9s & 10s ONLY. ” — Sam Blond, CRO, Brex. We all learn this again and again.

Churn 328

Churn Sales Hiring Headcount Technical Review 328