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. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

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. Current Needs.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

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 277

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 277

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. More here: Should You Fire an OK-but-Not-Great VP of Sales?

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

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 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

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 259

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 259

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 344

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 344

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

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 264

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 264

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

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 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

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 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

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

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

OpenView Labs

APRIL 29, 2021

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.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 81

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. Josh : I made probably the first 50, 60 offers in the company personally, and that does not scale. It’s kind of an inside joke, but basically that’s a way to scale something that we knew was important early on, but I was no longer able to go do myself.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

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

MAY 2, 2021

“Lessons in Scaling a Low Code Platform with Airtable’s CEO Howie Liu” How did Airtable remake a cateogy? 5. “How to Build a Unicorn in 8 Simple Charts with SafeGraph” Just a great session on how to scale faster and easier with Safegraph CEO Auren Hoffman. #6. Learn from CEO Howie Liu here! #3.

Sales Recruiting 191

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Scaling 191

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 279

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 279

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

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 202

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 202

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

We’re basically going to talk about the seven “people” things that nobody tells you when you scale a B2B company. 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.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 200

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

APRIL 23, 2019

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. I’m going to go, and scale it up.”

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 218

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

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running. It never works, folks!

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

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

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

When Yvonne joined in 2016, the business unit consisted of just 10 people across product, engineering, sales, and marketing. Our Senior Director of Demand Generation Brian Kotlyar recently spoke with Yvonne about her experience scaling Udemy for Business. Turning a sales objection into a unique differentiator.

Marketplace as a Service 243

Marketplace as a Service Scale Sales Recruiting Business 243

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2017

It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. They build a pipeline, learn the sales motion, and close a few accounts in the first few months.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 124