SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? That when you make a mis-hire, you'll always look back and say you should have made a change 3-4 month earlier? A lot of classic SaaStr advice has been how to spot the best potential VPs. When to hire them.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

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. You get the picture.

Sales Hiring 256

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 256

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

Especially the money part. 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. As CEO, you need to find a way.

Part-Time VPE 348

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 348

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 290

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2023

A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there. Wait until you find a great partner here. Finally you have great customers and traction — but you can’t afford to hire all the people you need to meet their needs. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the startup.

Part-Time VPE 291

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 291

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

And if your team knows how to spend it, correctly — find a way to get them the capital they need to grow even faster than plan. A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs.

Part-Time VPE 281

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 281

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. Veterans of the SaaS journey.

Part-Time VPE 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 284

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

But I think the biggest, #1, mistake successful first-time entrepreneurs in SaaS make time and time again these days is they micromanage too long. I think it’s a byproduct, in part, of the fact that founders are just so much better these days. Engineering. Go hire them. In every single function.

Part-Time VPE 315

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Finance 315

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big. She can be your CTO forever.

Part-Time VPE 309

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 309

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales.

Scale 271

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 271

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

An organization that has come together voluntarily to take on a mission, at least in part. They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager.

Part-Time VPE 281

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 281

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Pick a few that work for you: Get That Key VP Hire Done in Q1. Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Drop other stuff to get this hire done. But anyhow — in January, find a way.

Part-Time VPE 323

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 323

The Angel VC

JANUARY 4, 2015

At the beginning of December we had the idea that it would be cool to put together a "recruiting advent calendar" with job openings from within the Point Nine Family. Contentful has an open position for a Sales Manager Referral bonus: A weekend trip to Berlin! Do you know a VP of Marketing for Gengo ? Tweet it!

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Engineering 133

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2024

1: Don’t hire a VP (or anyone in the early days) that you aren’t 95% sure is great. Founders between a million and $250M are talking about lowering the bar for hiring because they aren’t sure if the person is great or they’re trying to fill a gap. A great Head of Sales will move the needle. You can’t do that.

Sales Hiring 303

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Fractional VPE 303

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

As you try to hire up for your SaaS company, you’re going to be faced with a lot of choices and trade-offs. No hire is the perfect package. You can spend more time with prospects. Customers will expect more services, more account management, more configuration. One VP of Product. One VP of Marketing.

Fractional VPE 271

Fractional VPE Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Engineering 271

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2022

My general learnings: By 20-30 employees, you should have 1-2 good managers in place such that at least 50% of the company can run based only on weekly staff meetings, 1-on-1s, and “grab me when you need me-s” E.g., a great first VP of Sales that can just handle sales. management team by 50 employees or so.

Part-Time VPE 264

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

But it turns out, the hardest part isn’t the Magic and the Impossible. The hardest part is this phase: the Possible, But Painful. You’ll have a real sales team, the core of one — but not a large enough one to experiment, or add redundancy, or management layers. At least, hire 2 VPs at a time.

Scale 258

Scale Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scaling 258

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. 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.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2019

We then had our own mini rocketship, hitting challenges and being acquired, and then being part of an IPO. But I got to part of the management team and make mistakes, and work cross-functionally with the other leaders and managers. Third, I then managed a small team. And I learned to recruit.

Part-Time VPE 204

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 204

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. But great teams find great markets, so that doesn’t really matter}. At least an acqui-hire. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. At least a single.

Part-Time VPE 258

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 258

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2021

I wrote a piece some time ago here, a person favorite, about Our Year of Hell. When a bad hire at a key time, and some confusion on strategy, led us to our worst year ever on a Year-over-Year growth rate basis. For me back in the day, the answer was a “simple” matter of bringing in a great VP of Sales.

Part-Time VPE 281

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Business 281

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2019

And that’s really good when you’re scaling part of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome. You don’t know how to interview them.

Merchant Services 274

Merchant Services Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

you don't know what to do: 1/ Spend more time w/existing customers. 2/ Hire 1 great VP. 4/ Join more sales calls. Those are good times indeed. But there will be times when almost all of just not only struggle … but are just sort of out of ideas. Spend more time with existing customers.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Churn Engineering 283

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2020

Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, for the first time joined us at a SaaStr event, SaaStr Scale 2020. Customers believed in the early days — but many investors and potential hires often didn’t. But VCs and many potential hires thought the space was too small and simple in the early days. That is was “just a widget.”

Part-Time VPE 225

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Cloud 225

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2019

And that’s really good when you’re scaling part of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome. You don’t know how to interview them.

Merchant Services 222

Merchant Services Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 222

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2020

” In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, Aileen and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin take a deep dive on how Aileen finds deals, her tips for a winning pitch, and the state of VC in 2020. 347: Ready to hire your first VP Sales? You can see the full video here , and read the podcast transcript below. Aileen Lee: Yeah.

Part-Time VPE 191

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Payment Methods SaaS Payments 191

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2019

I know we all agree everyone in sales has to have commissions and a highly variable comp structure. But — I mean everyone that materially impacts the plan should have some variable comp. “Nah, my Director of Engineering doesn’t need variable comp” you say. At a time the world was ending.

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Banking 133

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And You’ll find out tomorrow. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.”

Part-Time VPE 287

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2019

I know we all agree everyone in sales has to have commissions and a highly variable comp structure. But — I mean everyone that materially impacts the plan should have some variable comp. “Nah, my Director of Engineering doesn’t need variable comp” you say. At a time the world was ending.

Sales Hiring 25

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Banking 25

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

We’ll have some time. It sounds minor or technical, but if you want to due diligence on a human being, I get to do it a few 100 times a year. I used it in kind of my breakfast pre warm-up, the crazy times we’re in. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high.

Investment 207

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 207

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 12, 2024

This time last year, 24 SaaS experts predicted big things for 2024. Next we’ll be hiring it. However this will take time, so until then, companies will experiment with usage based pricing, and continue the debate whether usage based or licensing is the better pricing model in the long run. What will 2025 bring?

Fractional VPE 40

Fractional VPE Software Review SaaS Part-Time VPE 40

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

Outseta

MAY 8, 2020

I find that refreshing. Beyond just being smart, I’ve routinely come across people in tech that are tenacious, objective, and have high emotional intelligence—so much so that I often find myself thinking, “It’s too bad so many of these smart people are building email marketing software!”

Part-Time VPE 102

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 102

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

They wanted real-time results. And so we actually had to make some major adjustments and look for an alternative way to deliver the software which clearly meant that we needed to move to the cloud full-time. Traditionally we’ve been around since 2005 and traditionally have been a software on-prem business. How can you automate?

Cloud 172

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 172

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product development, and representation in important regions and time zones. We got a chance to celebrate our initial public offering on the New York stock exchange back in September, which was a really exciting time for me.

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 184

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Alongside Atrium, Pete is also the Founder of Modern Sales Pros, a community of 15,000 focused on sales operations and sales management. Stop asking questions.

Part-Time VPE 279

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 279

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2021

You can catch up on YouTube on many of the top sessions here including : How to hire a Great VP of Engineering with Shopify’s VP of Engineering. How to scale a word-class sales team with Unity’s VP of Sales. How to execute self-service sales with Wix’s VP of Revenue.

Part-Time VPE 186

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 186