SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. While at Gorgias, I expected to leave with as much knowledge to earn me an honorary bachelor’s in sales. On my second day of work, I was fully immersed in the sales pipeline and conducting demos for new prospects alongside the CEO.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2022

Q: Sales team has a 7% win rate over last 6 months. CEO has put full revenue accountability on the marketing team. How do I keep sales from failing? Do you need better sales leadership? Are you providing your sales team enough training on FUD and competitive advantages? Are you nurturing leads properly?

Sales 298

Sales Leadership Engineering Revenue 298

SaaStr

MAY 30, 2024

Sales-Led vs. Product-Led vs. Hybrid What are the pros and cons of different motions? Let’s start with a sales-led motion, which is traditionally how B2B software has been sold. Hybrid combines product-led and sales-led motions, and they work closely together. How does that collaboration and hand-off with sales work?

Scale 305

Scale AI Search Azure Sales 305

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2021

Way, way too many senior marketers think CRO is “the next step” for them. But here’s what happens: They don’t know how to recruit an A+ sales team. Maybe they recruited a few BDRs to work with them in marketing, but that’s not the same. Even if they’ve owned a revenue commit — they’ve never owned a true sales number.

Sales Recruiting 321

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Growth Marketing 321

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? Maybe 10 SDRs.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 270

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

A ways back, we did an extremely popular post entitled, Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them. The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a pre-Scale sales-driven SaaS company.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Marketing 244

User Pilot

MAY 24, 2021

Growth marketing involves experimentation and optimization across the marketing funnels. Marketers today are moving from the traditional “set and forget” approach to a continually evolving growth-focused approach. Analytics Tools for Growth Marketers. Email Automation Growth Marketing Tools for SaaS.

Growth Marketing 98

Growth Marketing Software Marketing SaaS 98

User Pilot

OCTOBER 15, 2023

Marketing your SaaS is a complex task involving many roles, one being a growth marketer. But you may be thinking, what exactly is the role of a growth marketer, and how do they help grow your product ? The structure of a growth marketing team depends on the size and needs of your company.

Growth Marketing 105

Growth Marketing Marketing Customer Lifetime Value Scale 105

User Pilot

JANUARY 23, 2023

A properly-crafted growth marketing framework brings clarity and direction to your SaaS business. It identifies and stirs you towards the most important things you need to achieve sustainable product growth. This article discusses the best growth marketing strategies within the AAARRR funnel. Let’s begin.

Growth Marketing 98

Growth Marketing Marketing Growth Hacking SaaS 98

Sales Hacker

JUNE 3, 2021

Why is growth marketing essential knowledge for the sales team? How can marketing help your team be more successful? Gaetano Nino DiNardi leads this talk on the alignment convergence of sales and marketing by looking at what truly works in growth. 6 truth bombs for Marketing and Sales [14:28].

Growth Marketing 76

Growth Marketing Marketing Sales Branding 76

SaaStr

AUGUST 29, 2023

So there’s a situation I see happening with many (not most, but many) SaaS companies as they build out the first management team: They hire a VP of Sales that doesn’t think much of the VP of Marketing. Does this always fail, when sales and marketing don’t really talk, and aren’t a team?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Interviewing 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2023

We’ve got at least 6 roles open: Director of Email / Growth Marketing. Take over our complex email campaigns to drive event attendance and ticket sales, as well as our 4 weekly newsletters. Senior Sales Executive. Build relationships with the top marketers in SaaS! We’re hiring at SaaStr!!

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Healthcare Growth Marketing Sales 299

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2024

Today, AI is heavily taking over sales roles, so this information is geared toward outbound, and how do you make the most of this switch. Key Takeaways Outbound lives within growth marketing ops. If we go back before 2018, even to 2015, it was a world where SDRs ran outbound. Embrace it because it’s not going back.

Scale 297

Scale AI Marketing Advertising 297

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2020

GC has led the rapid expansion of Confluent’s growth, marketing and developer relations functions. Previously, GC served as Vice President of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox, and also led Product Marketing for the Developer Tools Division at Atlassian. Both companies were at hyper growth stages during his tenure.

VP of Engineering 232

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise readiness Software Engineering 232

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2024

Mistake #1: A VP of Sales that Can’t Sell or Demo the Product “Whatever you do, do not hire a Head of Sales who can’t demo the product before day one,” Jason says. If the VP of Sales needs someone to do the demo for them, or they won’t carry a bag… you guessed it. What was this Head of Marketing’s previous role?

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Scale AI Search AI 311

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2024

You can optimize these channels, as well as layer them, to drive meaningful growth. The channels include: Search Social Educational partnerships Conferences Influencers Outbound sales Keep reading to learn how each channel can help you grow and the tactical steps to implement them for your company. #1 That’s never fun.

Scale 290

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Social Media 290

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 2, 2021

Sales teams and marketing teams' task is self-evident. Those sales cycles are fast and the contract sizes are large, which means cash in the bank. And this GTM strategy means tacking the mid-market first, because not many large enterprises will trust their infrastructure to a fledgling service.

Cloud 279

Cloud Sales Hiring Banking Enterprise 279

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2016

They prioritize revenue growth, market share and profit maximization differently. Maximization (Revenue Growth) - maximize revenue growth in the short term. Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale.

Pricing 241

Pricing Startup Strategy Consulting 241

Sales Hacker

JUNE 30, 2022

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a growth tactic and revenue accelerator, but many sales reps and even sales leaders are skeptical about this approach. ABM doesn’t work without tight sales and marketing alignment. To get there, sales needs to be all in. The sales leader’s role in change management.

Management 126

Management Marketing Sales Leadership 126

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 244

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2023

Low CAC, scalable growth strategies Growth engineers (this is super important!) MarTech stack and budget (always be on the lookout for cutting-edge platforms) A growth mindset Scalable, Low CAC Growth Strategies “One example that works well for sales-led SaaS businesses is outbound,” says Cabane. Map it all out.

Scale 246

Scale Sales Hiring Banking AI 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

The four stages of growth are: Early stage Early growth Growth Pre-IPO Each of those stages has key GTM milestones, benchmarks, and team-building strategies that allow you to grow effectively. According to ICONIQ’s data, many successful companies hit a growth plateau at around $15M ARR.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 278

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 24, 2018

When used correctly, data can powerfully enrich sales and marketing efforts and help any business fuel growth. Here are five quick takeaways: At Clearbit, all marketing falls under growth marketing. We provide data for modern sales and marketing teams across all the products they already use.

Data 182

Data Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 182

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 9, 2020

Objections are a part of life in sales, but they can be especially difficult to deal with in B2B sales. The best thing you can do is handle objections early and often in your sales cycle. The best thing you can do is handle objections early and often in your sales cycle. Don’t shy away from them. The Price Isn’t Right.

B2B 103

B2B Sales Payment Services Payment Solutions 103

Kellblog

MAY 4, 2023

So much fun, in fact, that we ran long and they ended up splitting the episode in two parts: one focused on founder sales knowledge (material derived from the Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales that I wrote and about which I’ve blogged here ) and the other focused on sales & marketing alignment.

Sales 98

Sales Marketing SaaS B2B 98

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2021

On lead poor vs lead rich sales environments … And how to get more revenue per lead pic.twitter.com/DpWU1RjdMV. both have about the same number of folks on the sales and marketing teams, respectively. both have a somewhat complex sale. both have a somewhat complex sale. the other had 1,100. What the heck. #2

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Sales Revenue Enterprise 305

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 28, 2019

You capture the buyer at the point of maximum intent and reduces the activation energy of the sale. You educate the market on your product. You should have a pricing plan that clearly separates the customers that will close by themselves at a lower price from those that will pay more but ask/require sales help.

Startup 214

Startup Acquisition Education Pricing 214

Inturact

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

That's why when Gary Amaral, former executive at BlackBerry and Hootsuite turned startup founder, shares his insights on AI in sales and marketing, it's worth paying attention. His message? The truth about AI's impact lies somewhere in the middle – and businesses ignoring this reality do so at their peril.

Artificial Intelligence 59

Artificial Intelligence AI Marketing Sales 59

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

Have sales do a hard sale. It took HubSpot years to penetrate CRM/sales even after building deep relationships with marketers. But if your NPS is low, they won’t. So my #1 best practice is get your NPS up. Then, basically any approach will work. Have customer success do a soft sell. And if your NPS is low, segment it.

Customer Success 298

Customer Success Sales SaaS Marketing 298

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2021

But really, it means you aren't doing any effective marketing. Few things will demotivate your sales team more than a very low win rate. Do you need better sales leadership? Are you using sales folks to try to close deals at ACVs they aren’t experienced enough at? A very high close rate sounds great.

Scale 299

Scale Market Segmentation Leadership Engineering 299

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

Force marketing and sales and product to sign up to do their fair share of them (maybe this is all 1 or 2 people in the early days). And upcoming webinars are a great thing to add to both your sales and marketing drip campaigns. A new feature update, for example. Some can be from industry experts.

Branding 358

Branding Marketing Sales SaaS 358

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2024

But it can reduce friction in the sales process. It’s more a tactic to win deals vs. an establish. brand, once you have the prospect in your funnel. Pricing “cheap” won’t get prospects to come find you, not usually. And reducing friction is key to scaling in the early days … and maybe even later. Brands matter.

Scale 316

Scale Pricing Branding B2B 316

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Ok we’ve talked a bit more on SaaStr over the years on how to hire a Great VP of Sales , but hiring a Great VP of Marketing is just as important. Maybe in some ways more so, in that you can generally hire a great VP of Marketing earlier. From $1k-$3k ACV, marketing is growth hacking. Not just in sales.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Growth Hacking B2C SMB 306

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 5, 2021

On the one hand, you need a shorthand for your sales and marketing efficiency — and that’s Magic Number. Magic Number is your growth in ARR over a quarter divided by the sales and marketing spend in the prior quarter. no marketing spend) and that auto-upgrade (i.e., limited to no sales expense).

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Acquisition Benchmarks 299

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2019

Really Big sales deals don’t close every day. Or push out that incredible growth marketing campaign no one else thought work would. Whenever you get together, you’ll remember that crazy sales trip. A few things that surprise you especially as a founder: Things are sort of … slooow. You have to learn to hustle.

Startup 251

Startup Sales Hiring Finance Acquisition 251