SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2022

Investments I've made that didn't work out: – Momentum investment – CEO a bit of bulls**t artist – CEO good at sales but weak product team / CTO. Investments I've made that had so-so outcomes: – CEO not better than me – CEO couldn't control burn rate – Not really SaaS.

Investment 307

Investment Sales Recruiting CTO Startup 307

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.

Sales Recruiting 255

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 255

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

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. Invest in People You want to keep the bar high on talent, especially in hypergrowth, and not just in the early stages.

Sales Recruiting 299

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 299

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

Sandi Lin, CEO and Co-founder of Skilljar, and Kathy Lord, its CRO, know a thing or two about Chief Revenue Officers. You might never have considered a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) because it’s not been a common role until very recently, and because you might not have the kind of revenue that needs its own manager.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 299

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales. 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. . #1: 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. This one is newer.

Sales Hiring 304

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review 304

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. Lesson #3: Revenue Is Funding It’s harder and harder to raise money, and startups need to have more revenue.

Sales Recruiting 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 293

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. At Salesforce, at Box, the bottom end of the sales team churns out each year. First, do sales reps really compete with each other?

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 293

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

The list of problems is endless (this is one of the hardest parts of the job), but let me try to order a few of the biggest challenges roughly based on stage: Pre-Revenue: Finding a Truly Great Co-Founder That is Just as Committed as You. Then their collective revenues often only add up to Cappuccino money. It never ends.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 284

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. Turning over a sales team is very hard on the organization. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in gold.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople. Suddenly, people’s calendars went from six calls to two calls a day, but because they added more time to focus on qualified accounts, activity and conversion increased.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

The toughest part in the end is always recruiting. Recruiting. Over time, that’s recruiting more and more senior folks, so the target changes. You’ll have to be recruiting new ones all the time. That means you are constantly recruiting. Dear SaaStr: How Should I Design My First Sales Rep Compensation Plan?

Sales Recruiting 240

Sales Recruiting Scale Compensation Business Model 240

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Somehow, find enough cash to make it 24 months to first real revenue. Even if on their own, they aren’t enough revenue to really pay for all that much. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 313

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Whether in customer acquisition, the revenue growth spectrum, or elsewhere, know that you’ll need to find the bottleneck and apply enough pressure and attention to alleviate it and move it elsewhere.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

I probably will pass on investing in you if I don’t know you want money. We recently did a New New in Venture event and I asked the question of many top VCs including David Sacks, Keith Rabois, Aileen Lee and more. “Give the VP of Sales More Time” This is always terrible advice. In one sales cycle, or less.

Part-Time VPE 348

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 348

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2021

And then, I would have invested more wisely in Year 1 especially. Not Hiring 2-3 Sales Reps to Start. More on that here: When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two. I should have invested a little more in sales reps, more quickly, one we had some initial traction (see above).

Sales Recruiting 274

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. Every business is mostly running OK already with its tech stack, and it’s unlikely your little app, alone, is going to change the revenue/profits course of any customer. And when you hire a real, great VP of Sales. I Don’t Have Budget. Deliver it for her.

Sales Recruiting 312

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 312

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. Revenue multiples are a shorthand valuation framework. Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

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

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Hire more sales reps in the areas where they are profitable. Happy customers and second order revenue are your best secret weapon. Invest in Your Brand and Customer Marketing.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 325

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2021

1% equity considered low as a startup Director of Sales? What types of due diligence are undertaken by VCs before investing in a company? I’m Head of Product and I think our CEO is actively recruiting a VP of Product. He has met Adam Neumann for only 4 minutes and decided to invest $4.4 How much does a VC make?

Software Review 293

Software Review CTO Coach Technical Review Sales Recruiting 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Sign up for free.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

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. For instance, Founders Fund doesn’t really invest in AI, health tech, or edtech, even if you’re growing 5x. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 300

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

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

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. For example, sending a kickoff gift tailored to a customer’s recent experiences or interests shows you’re paying attention and invested in their journey.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

And at a sales perspective, they’ll move to optimizing revenue per lead, over closing every possibly lead. Once sales and marketing gets to be all about the top line, you need to let some marginal customers just go, if for no other reason than holding on price. Harder to Recruit. More on that here.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

I asked this CRO how he’d handle the fact that 66% of their revenue came from indirect and channel. It’s so, so easy to stand out in recruiting if you’ve actually done your homework. Invest those extra cycles. Then I’d let them know how I prepared for the meeting so they knew I invested my time to get ready.

Interviewing 273

Interviewing Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Consulting 273

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Additionally, they had to figure out how they would sustain the revenue stream to retain the staff. Self-service.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales? Continuing the conversation on effective team members, it’s important to hire the right people to manage SDRs. A VP of Sales might seem the logical place to have your first SDR team report. But if they’ve never managed a higher turnover SDR team, they often melt.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

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: You’ve got a billion in revenue per year at Box, and yes, some of it goes to hosting and storage. But this is software.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

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. For example, relationship managers who made more phone and video calls saw 4.8%

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

Sales Hacker

JUNE 10, 2021

There’s one thing recruiters are unanimous about. It’s that sales representatives are one of the toughest positions to hire for. The demand for sales reps is one of the highest of any job. Our recruitment team at EASI has gotten really good at this. It generated over $53 million in revenue just in 2020. Leadership.

Sales Hiring 128

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 128

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

So the other day I looked back at about 25 SaaS seed investments I’d made that had scaled well past $10m-$20m and reflected on the top themes. They are all avoidable : #1: Stepping Out of Sales Ok really this is mistake #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. Instead, how they spend time in sales changes. And so sales goes down.

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 312

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

And because of this, growth-stage investing has really slowed or has almost been nonexistent. Now, we’re back to only wanting to invest in the number 1 in a segment or space. With Blond’s background at Ecosign, Zenefits, and Brex, he’s joined companies with relatively little revenue and left them when they were much larger.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring B2B 244