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Here’s an uncomfortable truth about SaaS companies: the majority of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it past 12 months. The 30-Day Evaluation Framework Test #1: Did They Bring in 1-2 Great Sales Reps in the First Month? The 30-Day Evaluation Framework Test #1: Did They Bring in 1-2 Great Sales Reps in the First Month?
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. Create Compelling Economic Incentives For sales talent, compensation is critical.
Dear SaaStr: I’m Starting as a New VP of Sales. A new VP of Sales can add value immediately by focusing on a few critical areas that drive results and demonstrate leadership from day one: Assess and Support Top Performers : A great VP of Sales will immediately identify the top-performing reps and double down on them.
Really, what you tend to see when you keep a stretch VP too long in their current role is flat metrics. For example, a great Stretch VP of Sales might get you to from $50k to $500k a month in new bookings. But a VP whose metrics are flat for more than a quarter rarely if even finds a way to reaccelerate growth later.
Sessions typically focus on real metrics, strategies, and lessons learned, not theoretical concepts. Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies. In addition, this year Mayfield is sponsoring our VC AI Pitch Stage and will invest from $500k-$5m in the winner!
When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc. This will allow you to be much more targeted with your messaging when reaching out and will help you optimize your sales funnel. Pricing is always evolving.
What was the first warning sign your VP of Sales wasn't going to work out? A new VP of Sales doesn’t always double sales in 30 days — although it can happen in SMB sales. The old playbook does help, but every great VP of Sales knows they quickly have to evolve it to any new role.
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 recruitingmetrics.
The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic. The original version here on Lattice Engines’ Sales and Marketing Hub.
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 salesmanager or regional manager.
Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. Metrics That Matter. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Here’s how I did it.
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.
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.
Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team. This practical, observable metric drove more decision-making than sophisticated dashboards or forecasting models.
You should already know your MRR, cash burn, NPS, all your key metrics almost immediately after the month ends. List your top few key metrics (MRR, growth, cash burn, NPS, etc). Your investors and others will learn a lot more hearing about sales from your VP of Sales, your CTO co-founder … and not you.
In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR. Still, the good thing is that companies have the power to use levers to help improve their efficiency metrics: “There is the ability to control that gross margin on the expense side,” says Blond. A New SaaS Playbook.
Specifically, she champions a metrics-based approach for developing world class recruiting teams. Because of her position, Maia has observed recruiting patterns in hundreds of companies, and has developed best practices for startups. Maia reports these five strategic recruitingmetrics to the executive team each quarter.
So I always have to pass here, no matter how good the metrics look today. “Quarterly MRR”, 100% Gross Margins, and Other Crazy Metrics. But if your metrics make truly zero sense, to me, that’s a flag. Gaming the metrics doesn’t help here. You’re in sales. Recruit the VPs?
That’s a reason the Redpoint SaaS metrics template includes Glassdoor score. The better the management hires for a business, the greater candidates' interest to work for a company. Often, employee satisfaction follows (also a metric in the template). Startups should expect successful management hires about 75% of the time.
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.
Kyle Norton CRO of Owner is kicking off a new podcast for Pavillion with revenue leaders, and we were lucky enough to be guest #001 here: It’s a great convo on many SaaStr themes — but from the perspective of a VP Sales / CRO. Prepare your presentations with this in mind, balancing metrics with high-level strategic insights.
SaaStr 603: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents the Ultimate Guide to Sales Compensation, Quotas and Recruiting with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin. Live: SaaStr Workshop Wednesday with Battery Ventures on SaaS Metrics. Hosted by Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund. ?. Top Videos This Week: 1.
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.
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. And don’t make excuses for a deterioration in metrics after you make the hire.
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.
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 ).
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.
The headline metrics: 15,000+ attendees. With power, snacks, and more, we’ll have lounges just for Founders; just for Sales + Marketing professionals; just for Builders (Dev + Product), and just for VCs to issue term sheets. Recruiting Fair. March 10-11-12 in San Jose, CA just south of San Francisco. 4,000+ CEOs.
Rephrasing Lewis Carroll, “if you don’t know what you’re recruiting for, any candidate looks great.” ” I liken executive recruiters to Realtors. ” That know-not-what, by the way, is that it’s for sale. Let’s switch to executive recruiting. Sound judgment and maturity.
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.
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.
A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. Not really.
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.
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.
You can also totally change your sales team. 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. NPS is A Great Core Metric. There are only 40-50 hours in a sales week. Drive up NPS.
Imagine a coverage model, from end to end, for the full customer life cycle: from demand generation to sales to post-sales. Sales Cycle. This includes everything from inside sales to account executives to strategic asset allocation. Post Sales. Execution is not just a sales process. Land the account.
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.
Recruiting top talent is the common denominator across all scaling startups. Nine out of 10 founders and CEOs I connect with are involved in recruiting on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Many of them are learning on the fly and trying to juggle being CEO and Chief People Officer/Lead Recruiter/Brand Evangelist all at once.
– did their #1 key metric improve? 50% of the job of a real VP is recruiting. Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? But you can expect in the first 60 days for one key metric to improve. Sales — for a VPS.
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.
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.
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.
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. Matt Oberhardt: So, we have metrics that kind of roll up as a team. We’re coming at it from the lens of being advisors.
A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. If you’re hiring a sales leader, you don’t pass up an awesome sales leader that has a killer track record of closing deals just because in their previous company they sold success software, and then with your company, they’re going to sell MarTech.
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