SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? 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. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft.

Part-Time VPE 311

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 311

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. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

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Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 287

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. Partner: investing in different partnership channels.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Hire more sales reps in the areas where they are profitable. Generally, they can scale and go further than you think. It’s time to add a new mentor to help you scale. Not by June.

Part-Time VPE 328

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 328

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

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.

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. Agile teams start small and move fast, collecting and incorporating feedback to iterate their way to bigger and better solutions quickly.

Scale 235

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Scaling 235

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

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

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.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

In this episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Hakim Myers , Business Recruiter at Nextdoor , where he recruits for people, finance, and legal functions for startups. Join us for a revealing conversation on sales and talent from the perspective of a recruiter in an executive search firm. powered by Sounder.

Sales Recruiting 108

Sales Recruiting Retention Scale Sales Hiring 108

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

Totango

MARCH 15, 2022

Efforts to scale customer success team activity often fall short because of failure to avoid common mistakes. Your human resources practices, your project management procedures and your technology strategy all need to come together in order for you to scale up without overextending yourself.

Sales Recruiting 102

Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 102

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

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

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Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2019

A great manager is highly aware and transparent re: who on their team is the best, mid-pack, and not performing. If they are too defensive about their non-performers, that’s a sign of a manager that can neither deliver nor scale. But never in a manager. . An NPS goal or a net retention goal. A number of leads.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale SMB 196

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 16, 2019

So if scaling your sales organization is a priority in 2020, here are the things you need to be aware of to make sure you do so successfully. In my experience both as a salesperson and as a recruiter, it’s primarily been four things: They want the work they’re doing to matter to them. Hiring sales leaders will get harder.

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 53

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. Often abbreviated to CLV or LTV, this is the amount of revenue generated by a customer as long as they have an account with your SaaS company. Customer acquisition cost.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

InsightSquared

MAY 15, 2019

It’s one of my favorite questions to ask a fellow professional in sales operations. Insurance sales rep. Account Manager. Sales Operations is Still Developing. Sales operations as a profession is growing, yet it is a comparatively new function in businesses. Sales Ops is Many Disciplines in One.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 110

User Pilot

MAY 20, 2024

Wondering how to improve customer retention? The article shares 20 actionable customer retention strategies for your SaaS! TL;DR Customer retention is your ability to keep users using the product. Without retention, a SaaS business doesn’t have a predictable revenue stream necessary for growth.

Retention 105

Retention Strategy Sales Recruiting Scale 105

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. The key here is knowing what your sales model is. And there are basically two sales models out there. Kind of extreme sales models out there for SaaS businesses.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. Then, the sales team went to work. When making a sales hire, Max pays attention to the way candidates approach getting the job.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 13, 2024

Passionate about customer engagement, her leadership has contributed to Iterable’s success in helping brands like Redfin, Priceline, and Volvo deliver individualized, harmonized and dynamic communications at scale. The importance of post-sale marketing and customer lifecycle management. Brought to you by IPS.

AI Search 123

AI Search Sales Recruiting AI ChatGPT 123

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 14, 2019

This is episode one of Scale, a brand new podcast series on moving from startup to scale up. “What I’ve always tried to do, for example when I’m recruiting for a customer advisory council, is to think very carefully about the company’s objectives. 6 ways to create a customer-centric culture.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Company Culture 178

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2021

As a sales leader, you want your sales reps to be the best they can be. However, if 100% of your sales reps are hitting their quota every single quarter, it may not be cause for celebration. A healthy sales organization should aim for about 60% of reps hitting their quota. Even as adults, we strive for 100%.

Scale 126

Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation Sales 126

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. Costs of goods sold are minimal for a company selling software over the Web, and costs like product development decrease as a percentage of revenue when you get to bigger scale. along the way.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

It was just a catch phrase we would use but became the cornerstone, if you would, of our customer retention strategy. Since land, expand, and explode is really all about customer retention and building long term customer value. And the other metric we maniacally track is what we talk about in terms of net retention.

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Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 203

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. Law number one, in the cloud economy, scale wins. But if you just take a step back for any kind of market that we’ve had success with, with cloud software companies, the majority of the market, say 50, 60, sometimes 70% goes to the scaled leader.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. Scaling a business isn’t easy. Two of the key challenges that come with scaling are getting the right talent and getting enough new customers. Read on to find out which decision is better for you.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 7, 2021

In 2018, it became clear we needed to scale, and fast – our APAC customer base had increased more than 900%, and about 10 to 12% of the company’s revenue was already there. Few things are better for employee retention than career development. Liam: Sam Hoare leads our sales team in APAC. Offices come later.

Sales Recruiting 118

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Investment 118

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. What “customer success” looks like evolves as your company and customers scale upmarket.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Strategy 177

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 19, 2021

What’s more, Forrester’s study, Drive Conversational Experiences For A Future-Ready Customer Support Strategy , revealed how conversational support can fuel customer retention and business growth across the entire business. Teams that benefit: Sales, marketing. Teams that benefit: Sales, marketing, customer success.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 129

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 13, 2014

But they can fund continuing employee education on a smaller scale the form of sales training, marketing workshops, guest speakers, management coaching. In the current recruiting environment, I expect this type of perk is be a strong selling point to prospective employees and a powerful retention tool.

Investment 100

Investment Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Hacker

MAY 28, 2019

SaaStock is a gathering of SaaS Sales Leaders, Founders, VCs, and anybody passionate about building a SaaS business. And make sure you’re following Sales Hacker on Instagram , Twitter , and LinkedIn. Panel Discussion: Landing, Expanding, and Growing @ Scale (June 5th, 10:10 AM). How Can I Get Live Updates?

Sales Recruiting 14

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 14

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

The question now is, how big should CS organizations be, and what’s the best way to staff and scale its success? To uncover how today’s CS leaders are successfully building and scaling their CS organizations, Valuize’s Founder and CEO, Ross Fulton, spoke to TSIA’s Vice President, Customer Success Research, Stephen Fulkerson.

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VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98