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. Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Sales Recruiting 331

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 331

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? And for good reason. TRANSCRIPT.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting 297

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 297

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

What’s the secret to SaaS success at YCombinator? Sam : We’re going to talk today about a lot of topics, but the general theme is, what’s the difference between good and great SaaS companies? The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Getting the team right is so key here.

VP of Engineering 300

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Not that they are just "great at sales" — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) January 12, 2023. So a while back we did a deep dive on why 95% of the VPs of Sales candidates just won’t thrive at your start-up. I think it’s important to repeat that analysis, but for your first few sales reps.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Together, we developed sales pitches, built out a robust sales process in just a couple of weeks.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 291

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 300

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. Good afternoon.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 290

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

While it can be frightening to think differently, doing so has helped him make Veeva the biggest vertical SaaS success story of all time. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! I was a software developer, a product person. ” I have apples for sale. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. SaaStr’s own Jason Lemkin shares the top 10 mistakes he sees during the hiring process during Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. The last 18 months have seen the biggest changes in the VP of Sales in his SaaS career.

Sales Hiring 163

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 163

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

So how feasible do you think that works for a typical B2B SaaS business that probably our user-base is not too knowledgeable about [inaudible] on the internet for something specific in their day-to-day use case? Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question?

Scale 299

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 299

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting 194

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 194

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2019

It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there, so I thought it would be worth digging in more on each point: Regrets are different than mistakes. Because later you’ll see just having gotten on one more jet, made one more key hire, and then a few years down the road, you might be $1m, $2m, $5m further along in ARR.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Sequoia Capital’s India arm put together a terrific summary of all their learnings about SaaS and Cloud from SaaStr Annual this year. They also did an A+ session at Annual with several top India SaaS founders, which you can catch below! Here’s 22 of the most relevant takeaways for India’s SaaS ecosystem.

Scale 299

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 299

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

JANUARY 22, 2020

If you think sales is a simple job, I have a few hundred professional connections who would like a word with you. There’s a range of key skills that separate the best from the rest, and success belongs to companies who can identify and hire reps who have those precious skills. By mastering your sales interview questions.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 100

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

You could do vanilla 101 SaaS practices and succeed. Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. Could something like the Greenhouse of 2015 even make it to market today?

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 287

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. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche.

Sales Recruiting 265

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 265

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. Let me start by telling you about my first role as a manager. Overwhelmed.

Scale 180

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 180

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 279

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

Scale 322

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 322

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. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively?

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 265

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Should your sales engineers also implement the software? For us in the early stages, we went down the path of hiring a solutions person (in this case the person was myself!)

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 121

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Almost everyone in sales seems to be into real estate, either “multi-family” real-estate or getting their broker’s license. Or other so-called “passive” income streams that really often take many hours to manage. About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

Underperforming Technical Team 325

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. Not only is Klaviyo a rocketship but also the first to IPO in over 2 years (since December 2021) when it went public in September of 2023.

Revenue 313

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 313

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

2019 is shaping up to be another fine year for those working in and around sales enablement. We’re seeing larger numbers of people work in the industry, more companies investing in sales enablement teams and numerous tools being developed to solve sales enablement challenges. But here’s the thing.

Sales Enablement 189

Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Sales Telecommunications 189

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

How do you build out a Sales Development (SDR) function at your SaaS company? First, they had six AEs before they started hiring any SDRs. First, they had six AEs before they started hiring any SDRs. When Sam joined, there were two AEs, and he hired four additional AEs. The answer didn’t show up in the data.

Sales Hiring 190

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Revenue 190

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. This has created large amounts of data for running teams. . This has created large amounts of data for running teams. .

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason Lemkin: One is, how do you penetrate tiny SMBs that aren’t Googling, searching, that don’t have time, and two, how do you subsidize hardware costs in SaaS? Subsidizing a little bit of hardware in the early days of SaaS isn’t that big deal. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales.

Scale 278

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 278

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2018

Customer success means wildly different things to different companies in the SaaS industry. Many organizations create customer success teams but there’s no clear definition as to how these teams develop long-term value for both the customer and the business. The role of customer success teams.

Sales Hiring 123

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Underperforming Technical Team 123

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

Demand generation (demandgen), responsible in a word, for generating opportunities (oppties) to feed sales [2]. Two important notes: There is an optional fourth part, sales development , i.e., managing the team of sales development reps (SDRs) who convert MQLs into stage-1 oppties.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145