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5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. Let’s unpack the key strategies that drove this remarkable expansion. What is Codeium and Windsurf?
The result was a 5x increase over initial projections – growing from an $8M revenue target to $40M actual results – driven by a belief that market demand justified the investment. This approach required immense trust from the CEO to invest millions ahead of proven results.
Sessions typically focus on real metrics, strategies, and lessons learned, not theoretical concepts. Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies. Meet and Find Your Next VP / CXO!
Make sure you know how your customers buy and tailor your go to market strategy and messaging to that. When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc. Very early on it’s weighted towards product vision and sales.
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.
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.
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. If you’re a company that has a 100% sales-driven business model, it makes sense to hire a big-deal revenue person. Is a CRO right for you?
I thought it might be helpful to assemble a checklist of 22 reasons I almost immediately pass on investing in start-ups that are still interesting. Exit Strategy Slide. An Exit Strategy Slide almost by definition tells me you aren’t. You’re in sales. Recruit the VPs? Others bet on traction.
Associations face a unique challenge in marketing, in that they have to cater to a very specific audience and ensure they’re going to become long term members. And each association has different challenges to begin with, so traditional marketing strategies won’t work very effectively either. Its benefits aren’t felt right away.
One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Now, I just invest in SasS companies. SaaStr is Turning 10!
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. A bit more here. Great at engineering. More here.
Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. The team has great visionary, product, and execution capabilities and a solid go-to-market strategy. CROs should focus on capturing that unrealized demand which is not a sales-led effort.
Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. More on that here and a great video discussion below: You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR. Ideally, have your VP of Sales on board in time to hire reps 3-300. Earlier is better. IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m
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.
And so, now’s the time to start thinking about accelerating our business strategies and grabbing the opportunities it brings. Now that the worst seems to be over, what exactly should your strategy look like? Where should you invest your resources? Choosing the right investment is a balancing act of art and science.
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.
In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Growth Strategy Identify and implement new growth opportunities and revenue streams. Growth Strategy Identify and implement new growth opportunities and revenue streams. Sign up for free.
First, most founders don’t have a background in either sales or marketing, and even though they’re told to “ start marketing the day you start coding ”, they just don’t know where to begin, or they’re incredibly overconfident. George wrote a fantastic article detailing how to determine the product marketing strategy through beta products.
This was Storyblok’s strategy when it started expanding its team. Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitmentstrategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Outbound: including Account Based Marketing (ABM). Self-service.
The merry retail investors using Robinhood bolster the passive investment wave, and their market-shaping forces sustain stratospheric multiples in the public markets. I thought the remote trend would be a powerful recruiting advantage; I didn’t foresee a global pandemic obligating companies to work remotely.
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.
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.
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.
Daniel, you grew to 3 million in ARR before you hired a VP of Sales. You had all the reps and SDRs reporting to you, managed it all yourself. How’d you manage all that? Daniel : We followed a lean start up approach to building our sales process. An engineering team and the sales team was me with a laptop.
It’s so, so easy to stand out in recruiting if you’ve actually done your homework. Invest those extra cycles. At a C-level you are interviewing the client to identify culture fit, blockers, budget, vision and can you execute, fund and build your strategy.” A week later, he emailed me back — “Aha!
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. 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.
You were the shoulder I would go and cry on anytime I would have some sort of executive-level problem or executive recruiting problem. We’re coming at it from the lens of not being recruiters. And when you’re in the executive recruiting process, feeling is not scientific. Tell me what the priorities are.”
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. Sales courses are largely absent from college curricula.
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: Up until 2020, the wave of passion for events and content was so strong that all he could do was ride the wave with no strategy.
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.
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’re trying to recruit someone that’s way above our weight class, so that we can actually scale. You hire a search firm.
Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. A Multi-Segment Strategy You have to be intentional in your strategy to solve for the long tail. He ran from the term.
Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. The key here is knowing what your sales model is. And there are basically two sales models out there. Kind of extreme sales models out there for SaaS businesses.
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.
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.
Maria and Anthony present the CEO and CMO playbook of how the CEO and CMO can partner with other members of the team to grow sales and marketing. Maria : I mean, I’ve talked to over 60 recruiters. They’re investing in growth. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020. Maria Pergolino | frmr.
We like to invest in resilient CEOs,” say the investors. Find your target companies, which challenge people in the same ways you do, and then recruit their former employees. Also stay alert for professional people who may not have sales experience but are eager for a career change. A great example is sales.
So if you’ve got no idea what affiliate marketing is, it’s time to brush up on your knowledge, as you’re sure to be missing out on valuable additional sales! Many marketers are turning to affiliate marketing as a way to generate more leads and sales with less effort. It’s a cost-effective strategy.
Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. Moving upmarket means larger customers and higher revenue, but it’s not without its challenges.
By failing to acknowledge the differences early, teams risk misallocating their focus and energy when solving problems, investing too much or too little in each one. “ Investment . This type of innovation can factor into the business strategy, product strategy, and execution levels. Investment. How to rank.
Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline salesmanagers, 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 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.
You must employ marketing strategies that work. One such marketing strategy is direct response marketing. Unlike other marketing strategies that focus on building relationships with prospects first, direct response marketing seeks to turn prospects into customers in one step. Advantages of Direct Response Marketing.
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.
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