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. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. Make NPS a top company metric. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 313

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even, in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but wasn’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

Scale 343

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 343

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. MRR, obviously. We talked about churn.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

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. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

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 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 261

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. 20 VCs do come to me to invest in the company now. Jyoti Bansal: Let’s switch topics to sales.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

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.

Benchmarks 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 300

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. And at a sales perspective, they’ll move to optimizing revenue per lead, over closing every possibly lead. Harder to Recruit. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture. More on that here.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

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

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 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

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 201

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 201

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. The technology is perfected. No, I’m joking.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 274

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2019

Keith Rabois is an investment partner at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on consumer Internet, education, enterprise, financial services, and digital health investments. Because you’ve done a lot of angel investments in your time as well. I probably invested in 80 or so, maybe 85 companies. You guys are awesome.

Merchant Services 274

Merchant Services Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 274

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

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

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

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years. You have two partners and one or two other investing?

Investment 210

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 210

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

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

JUNE 23, 2019

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund where he focuses on consumer Internet, education, enterprise, financial services, and digital health investments. Because you’ve done a lot of angel investments in your time as well. I probably invested in 80 or so, maybe 85 companies. You guys are awesome.

Merchant Services 222

Merchant Services Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 222

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. Provided that there is some data on these two metrics, that is.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

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. When Yvonne joined in 2016, the business unit consisted of just 10 people across product, engineering, sales, and marketing.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243

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

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

And can you talk a little bit about touching on the hiring point, because you did say that you focused a lot on talent, and recruiting. And coming from Brazil without a big network in Silicon Valley, un-launched, without a website, it was actually really hard to recruit the first ten people. And it’s very helpful. Anu: Got it.

Sales Hiring 214

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 214

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function. As the Senior Vice President of Sales for Pipedrive , she’s currently responsible for building nimble sales teams who drive sustainable revenue.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. This is really founder-led sales. With Twilio, for example, they expanded into email.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 232

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

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 22, 2025

The metrics for success are evolving as rapidly as the tools themselves. Of course, this modern interview won’t exclude the other critical components of a high quality process , identifying characteristics of teamwork and sales skills or marketing expertise. Will they feed legal briefs back into AI systems for cross-examination?

Interviewing 113

Interviewing AI Sales Recruiting Construction 113

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

  Thankfully for folks like me, there are many brilliant tools to help you keep on top of your content marketing metrics (little to no math required). Then, to add a little nuance to the discussion, we’ll deep dive into the metrics that matter the most to several top content marketing teams (including Buffer’s).

Content Marketing 134

Content Marketing Metrics Social Media Marketing 134

Kellblog

MAY 10, 2021

In this post, I’ll present what I view as the minimum sales management framework for an enterprise SaaS startup — i.e., the basics you should have covered as you seek to build and scale your sales organization [1]. Pipeline management rules, with an optional stage matrix. Quarterly metrics. Value (e.g.,

Sales Hiring 118

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Enterprise 118

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2012

In AdSense operations, the average account manager supported more than 10,000 customers (!) Trying to change the tires on the bus as it’s traveling 60 miles an hour is tough - but it’s worth the investment. It was the only way we could scale. because of the tools. Like Google, startups build many of these tools in house.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Travel 100

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 8, 2021

Elements of Successful Global Sales Expansion. “Be So, let’s look at four keys to a successful global sales expansion. Make Investments Across the Board, and Make a Plan for the Resources You Have. Global expansion requires strong business partners in all functions, and committed investment across the board.

Sales Hiring 117

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Technical Review 117

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. He is leading DGF Investimentos’ specialized early-stage investment group – DGF Inova. Starting as VP of Sales, in less than two years he became CEO. Talk: SaaS.City Bootcamp: Sales Leadership.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

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. I want to tell you what those metrics are for Egnyte because you could go, “Well, this guy is up here talking for 30 minutes. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 202