SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

So just as supply chain logistics juggernaut Flexport was beginning to scale, founder CEO Ryan Petersen came to SaaStr Annual to share his top lessons — and mistakes. When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc.

Sales Recruiting 317

Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 317

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

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.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

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 305

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 305

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.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

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.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 268

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 292

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 292

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

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization? The go-to-market segment worked together on key metrics across the revenue board.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 241

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

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 275

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 275

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2020

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.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting New CTO Scale CTO 363

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2021

Agile principles can be a North Star for time-strapped support teams, helping them to keep the customer’s needs at the heart of their decisions so they can provide fast, personal support at scale. For many support teams, CSAT, average response time, and time to close are key metrics for assessing support team performance.

Scale 235

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Scaling 235

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

With Dreamforce and SaaStr Europa and Scale behind us, little tiny Team SaaStr is 100% focused on 2020 SaaStr Annual. The headline metrics: 15,000+ attendees. On everything on how to get more leads, do ABM right, work with mentors, build a world-class CS team, and so much more. Recruiting Fair. 4,000+ CEOs. 1,000+ VCs.

New CTO 329

New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 329

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

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

Or she brings in more leads for the same budget. 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. This is hard.

Sales Recruiting 253

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 253

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

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?

Sales Recruiting 339

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 339

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 300

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Scaling 300

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. And now it’s all about like, can you really scale and execute? Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 258

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 258

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure. Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

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 294

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 294

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

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.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 255

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

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 258

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 258

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. Because at this scale, there will be room at the bottom. But then the leaders break through, achieve Scale, and the outlines become clear. Harder to Recruit. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 293

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 253

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 253

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. They see it as a key differentiator to win as you scale. You never have a perfect management team until you are at $10m+ ARR, at the earliest, in 98/100 cases. Or their friends got 7 term sheets with good-but-not- as -good companies.

Scale 342

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 342

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

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

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. So I think that’s contributing to this importance of kind of investing in marketing and sales. Maria Pergolino | frmr.

Scale 286

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 286

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Inspired by the release of our book Intercom on Sales , we wanted to take a fresh look at three big topics – speed, automation, and growth. We wanted to know: what are sales leaders doing to bring velocity to their sales cycle? How are they using automation to bring new efficiencies to their sales orgs?

Scale 139

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Trends 139

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

It can be easy to consistently double revenue if you’re an early-stage company, but as you scale up, sustaining that becomes more difficult. SaaS Growth and Operational Metrics To Track One of the best ways to ensure that your SaaS operations are on the right track toward high growth is by tracking key metrics.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2023

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.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 269

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Regardless of what stage you are in, he provides a framework to systematically approach this stage and what you should focus on to get to scale faster. We are screwing up the scale. What is sales? What is sales? Isn’t sales really around customer value creation? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

Scale 265

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 265

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

Rick started Guru in 2013, after successfully founding Boomi (a cloud integration and data management company) and selling it to Dell. He joined me for a conversation on tackling issues that come up as you scale your customer experience. When scaling your customer experience, remember AI can’t simulate human empathy.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 156

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

APRIL 7, 2022

The company scaled from a hundred people to 800, last I know, but it changes every day. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. Bobby Patrick: Right. Luciana: It has been quite a journey.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 269

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 198

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 198