SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2021

But, I know many of you have never hired a head of marketing before. There are basically 3 types of SaaS and business web marketers. And if you hire the wrong type — the more common type — then instead of more customers, you may end up with just a bunch of Blue Pens with your logo on them. Why’s that?

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Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Branding 357

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

The success of any company depends on its ability to consistently deliver commercially successful products to the market. Product marketing can be difficult, and managing product launches and rollouts can be complex. A PMM can also help define the new product’s positioning and value proposition.

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Sales Hiring Product Marketing Scale Marketing 260

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2020

I’ve been investing just long enough now to see start-ups fall out of product-market fit. But I didn’t get that apps with happy customers, and some real traction, could fall out of product-market fit. You fall out of product-market fit. You didn’t build up a true management team.

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Product Marketing Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 363

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

A CRO owns and directs the strategy over a company’s revenue cycle, but there’s not a set standard for operational or management decisions: in addition to sales and sales development, they might be responsible for customer success, lead generation and pipelines, and even marketing and brand development.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product. So if you’re not technical enough to understand the product and understand how it works, it’s hard to teach your customers. ( You gotta know the product cold.) Similar to most structures of a technical sales team.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 176

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Once you find product market fit in SaaS, what should your next steps be to take the market? Hire a VP of Demand Gen / Marketing. I hired mine at $20k in MRR, and it wasn’t too early. More on the math and why here: I Hired My VP of Marketing at $20k MRR. So go make the hire.

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Sales Hiring Product Marketing Marketing Customer Success 300

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

I’ve recently had several different conversations with founders looking to hire “PLG experts”. One wanted to hire “Mr/Ms PLG” to make their product more viral. Another wanted a “VP of PLG” to complement their marketing efforts. PLG, or Product-Led Growth, can mean, so many things. Probably in that order.

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SaaStr

JULY 3, 2023

Dear SaaStr: When Should You Hire Your First Demand Generation Marketer in SaaS? A deep dive on that and why here: I Hired My VP of Marketing at $20k MRR. In a recurring revenue model, you want to make every accretive hire you can. Or just hiring a junior marketer to start to save a few dollars.

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SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

The 4 Things Most Founders Get Wrong About Marketing: “We’re a product company, not a marketing company” – The hard truth is that 9 out of 10 B2B companies spend more on sales and marketing than R&D. You founded a product company, but you’re running a distribution business.

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Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 202

Tom Tunguz

MAY 2, 2022

A founder recently told me he would have built his company differently in another fundraising market. More capital enables this by permitting faster hiring, quicker software development, and perhaps less efficient unit economics. In my notebook, I sketched this 2x2. Today, it’s a quintuple-quadruple-triple.

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Product Marketing Sales Hiring Marketing Software Development 359

Predictable Revenue

MAY 23, 2022

One of the most common startup questions is when to begin hiring SDRs. The answer comes down to product market fit, and whether you’re in a product or sales motion. The post When’s the Right Time to Start Hiring SDRs? appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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Sales Hiring Startup Product Marketing Revenue 232

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2024

Hiring and Interviewing Tips: Jason emphasizes the importance of interviewing at least 30 candidates for a role and consulting with an expert in the field to interview the final candidate. Product-Led Growth (PLG) vs. Enterprise Sales: Jason discusses the evolution of PLG, noting that it’s essentially freemium with better analytics.

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SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

As Colin describes it, “I went to the CEO and asked to generate more revenue and hire more people, which is counter-intuitive to the standard approach where revenue leaders may sandbag to over deliver and crush numbers.”

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SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 326

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

” Enter the Compound Startup Conrad’s alternative is what he calls a “compound startup”a company building multiple products in parallel that are deeply integrated and seamlessly interoperable. This structure enables a seamless experience that starts when a company hires someone.

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Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 157

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 30, 2017

You suspect you have initial product market fit. Time to hire the first head of each department. Sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, product management. But rarely do they understand every one well enough to hire the right department chief. This is a common strategy for sales.

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Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing Engineering 185

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy shares his journey to more than $100M and the lessons he learned along the way for building a PLG motion and an Enterprise sales motion. It was founded by three developers who owned a consulting firm previously, helping startups come to market.

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Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 312

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

To handle this complexity, some startups have split the role under two leaders: a head of product marketing and a head of demand generation. An identical query for VP Product Marketing yields 1.6m By hiring two focused people, the startup is free to find the best person in each role. 464k results.

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SaaStr

MAY 28, 2024

If you’ve read SaaStr or have been around for the last decade, you might be familiar with some of the repeated GTM mistakes founders tend to make, but the world of hiring, people, scaling, and workplace expectations are significantly different today than they were before March 2020. Don’t make the hire. They weren’t getting any leads.

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Sales Hiring Scale AI Search AI 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential , Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 317

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

So just a little while back, Lenny Rachintsky had me on his hyper-popular podcast to talk about scaling sales, from the perspective of a founder who hasn’t really done sales. They really are a great checklist when you are starting to scale sales in SaaS: #1. And sales go down, not up. #2. It’s a tough job.

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Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 311

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.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 2, 2020

My 7 top tips to increase sales quickly. Hire a great VP of Sales. Hire a great VP of Sales, and even if nothing else changes … she’ll increase the revenue per lead by 20–100%+. In one sales cycle or less. More here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. Hire more CSMs.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

There is a lot to do in marketing. But a new VP of Marketing will really only do 3 things. Ask them what those top 3 are before you hire them. I’ve interviewed 100s of VP of marketing candidates over the past years and I can tell you one think — it’s easy to spot the ones that won’t work out.

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Interviewing Sales Hiring Marketing Branding 356

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing?

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SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Unlike product-led or sales-led growth, Notion is focused on community-led growth. You can get this wrong.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

On a sales front, how do you evolve past founder-led sales, or together with it, so that you can scale your organization? Founder-led sales can be an immense strength and rapidly become a limiting factor. PST, Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico, shares how to scale beyond founder-led sales on your path to Series B.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 277

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2021

Ah, the first sales rep. Being the first salesperson into a start-up in a rewarding — but very tough job: Your Founder Boss likely will never have managed a salesperson before. Whichever founder was doing sales, likely thinks that may be the way to do sales going forward. The sales “hacker”. Everything.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Startup Sales SaaS 274

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 15, 2021

There’s a simple secret to hiring quickly and building a strong team. Invest in great managers early. They write code, author blog posts, publish the website, attract customers, with the goal of achieving product-market fit. How many hiring managers are in each of the two hierarchies from above?

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 363

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Adjusting Your Assumptions Now you have strong product market fit, you’re listening to your customers, and you’re customer zero. You have to listen on the product front and the GTM front. Eighteen months ago, no playbook existed for taking an AI product to market. Deciding where you don’t want to spend your time.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2022

If the VP of Sales Doesn't Believe, It's All Over. It’s the moment in time when … a VP of Sales just doesn’t believe. That’s on you for hiring them, but it happens. This is especially common when you hire a VP of Sales from a Very Big Tech Company. Things just aren’t closing.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Startup 293

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

How do you build a sales organization from scratch? What about moving from founder-led sales to building a sales team and scaling your revenue growth? Product-Market Fit . Hitting $1M ARR is the benchmark to figure out if you have a product-market fit.” – Veronika Riederle, CEO @Demodesk.

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Sales Hiring Scale Revenue Sales 246

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 16, 2018

Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of “if you build it, they will come”, it’s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Understand the role of product marketing. Start creating your product marketing plan.

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SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. " @searchbrat @zapier @kippbodnar @HubSpot @jasonlk pic.twitter.com/dUudpe9s2Q — SaaStr (@saastr) April 16, 2024 HubSpot and Zapier’s CMO had us on their “Marketing Against the Grain” pod / videocast. Consistency is key in marketing.

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Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 301

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

You have to be scrappy at this stage, and Braze was trying to find product market fit with no product, no revenue, and no customers. In the chart above, showing the growth from $2M to $20M, you can see what product market fit looks like. Determine the skills you want and how you’ll discover them in an interview.

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SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

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