Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

Over the last decade or so, I’ve compiled a metrics sheet to summarise a SaaS business. Redpoint SaaS Metrics Template. The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics.

Metrics 250

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount 250

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics The first thing Secureframe thinks about is metrics. If you don’t know your key company or North Star metrics, talk to your investors or other experts to figure out what they should be. So they can take action on the metrics in real time if they’re going in a direction they don’t like.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 304

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. Colin joined Wiz in February 2021 when the company was near zero revenue. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.

Scale 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 191

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

Sales Hiring 316

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 316

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

OCTOBER 28, 2022

In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR. In 2021 there was a lot of emphasis on top-line revenue growth, what percentage year-over-year was the business growing, and less emphasis on things like gross margins and quality of revenue.”.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 263

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep. Move the bottom 10% out and give the best leads to your top performer, and watch sales go up 20%. The best VPs of Sales design comp plans so the team never wants to leave. You should be striving for zero voluntary attrition on your sales team.

Sales Recruiting 287

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 287

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 317

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 317

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. Average Revenue per Customer.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. When to hire her (more here ).

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

She brings in even better reps, and the revenue per rep goes up. A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. It’s hard enough just to maintain KPIs and metrics as you scale. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps.

Sales Recruiting 259

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 259

SaaStr

AUGUST 11, 2021

A ways back at SaaStr, we did a post “If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days” At first, so many VPs of Sales I know hated the post. A great VP can’t always double sales in a month or two. Shares the key metrics they plan to improve. They can’t recruit.

Sales Recruiting 312

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Scaling 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

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 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 306

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. Some sales-y, some very technical. CEO good at sales, but CTO not that great. — Jason 2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 6, 2022.

Investment 312

Investment Sales Recruiting CTO Startup 312

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

When approaching a GTM exercise, one thing needs to be very clear: the company’s revenue strategy. This revenue strategy consists of three core questions: What is the market opportunity—the problem that needs to be solved? Sales Cycle. Post Sales. Hire talent strategically and be two steps ahead with sales capacity.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 277

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

You can also totally change your sales team. And driving down churn increases revenue just as clearly and surely as closing net new deals. In a way, this is the same point as #1, almost — except you can recruit even more of the team here. The sales team can call back every single prospect, not just the good ones.

Sales Recruiting 351

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 351

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Those were the innocent days with no customers, revenue, or responsibilities. The way the co-founders looked at the stages in the early days of no funding and a community-focus were: Step 1 – No sales or customers, only building freely available open-source software.

Scale 297

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 297

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. Recruiting is easier, but the things that don’t change are customers don’t care.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

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

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

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. Still, some VCs want to see at least one solid VP on the team, or at least, one solid manager you can scale under. Some VCs will pay up even for very little growth and revenue so long as the management team is strong.

Scale 344

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 344

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

Sales Hacker

JULY 25, 2022

Your revenue organization works in the same way. Here’s the thing about driving a car — and about running a sales org: Bumps in the road are inevitable. One of the best ways to ensure every part of your engine is running smoothly is to build sales performance dashboards for everyone on your team. Activity metrics.

Sales Recruiting 117

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 117

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. Here are three things that helped 6sense reach this mark and beyond: Defining their revenue operating model by hiring for RevOps and not taking the common DevOps and SalesOps approach. The friction between sales and marketing.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 241

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. We had 13 million of recurring revenue, 100% year over year growth. I sat down with Kyle at lunch.

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 202

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

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 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

The first thing is, and this is a little crazy, but recruitment is incredibly overrated. How many people out here spend more than a third of your time recruiting? Tough Management Lesson #1. A lot of CEOs spend over half their time recruiting people. Tough Management Lesson #2. Okay, wow, that’s a lot.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 200

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. Singular focus on sales. And this is exactly why you hired them!

VP of Engineering 122

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 122

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Dropbox just hit one billion dollars in annual revenue. 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. If they’re saying, “Hey, this thing in recruiting is really messed up.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 18, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newslettr by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. Jonathan Moss (EVP at Experity) showcased an Account Plan GPT that streamlines sales and marketing account research for outbound efforts. Link to GPT. Link to GPT.

Sales Recruiting 109

Sales Recruiting Software Review Scale AI 109

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. Or, even if they’re leaning towards the latter, they’re often not using the right metrics. A data-driven framework for scaling.

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Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. What we do is look at all those metrics and our hope, goal is that every one of them continues to show this. We do have a network of recruiters. The technology is perfected. We added 0.8

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 279

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 131

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 131

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