SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

But I see this company structure more frequently across SaaS startups. In interviewing great CMOs , the product marketing leader is the first marketer most startups should recruit, and often the first key mishire. If you’re thinking about your marketing team’s structure, the dual lead approach is one to consider.

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Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 247

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? 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. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft.

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Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Unparalleled Networking Opportunities SaaStr Annual brings together thousands of SaaS, Cloud and AI executives, founders, VCs, and industry leaders under one roof across our 40+ acre campus, May 13-15 in SF Bay! Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.

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Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. Recruiting. Talk to them.

Part-Time VPE 352

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 352

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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

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. Want to see more content like this?

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SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2023

In particular, hiring for your sales team is critical in an uncertain economic outlook. Additionally, sales professionals looking for a new role should choose their next company wisely. Great Companies Attract Great Talent Blond and Braverman have enjoyed successful careers as sales leaders in high-performing companies.

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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.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 311

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. How did it come to be?

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

So just as supply chain logistics juggernaut Flexport was beginning to scale, founder CEO Ryan Petersen came to SaaStr Annual to share his top lessons — and mistakes. When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 322

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Nothing matters but recruiting and using your personal network. 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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 191

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

A ways back, I asked Brendon Cassidy, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, Adobe Sign / EchoSign, and Talkdesk to put together his playbook for double sales. … How We Increased Sales Nearly 100% In One Quarter at HackerRank – Brendon Cassidy. I thought it was a great checklist for all of us to take a look at.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 284

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales. 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. . #1: 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. This one is newer.

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SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

What does it take to scale a team from 2 to more than 1,100 people in just a few short years? When Remote had 120 people two weeks into 2021, they planned to scale to 600 that year. At the same time, you want to give trust and power to people who recruit, and you do that by ensuring they understand what the culture is.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 261

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. Flock Safety is a hardware-enabled SaaS company dedicated to stopping crime.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 255

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. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Combine Strategies To Drive Sales.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

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

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. Let’s jump right into the questions.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2021

One of the starkest differences I see between First Timers in SaaS and Second Timers is when they hire their VP of Marketing. Most of us can’t afford to hire a VPM 12 months before we have our first customer, and we can’t survive through 10 sales reps without one. In the early days, Revenue Per Lead is critical.

Sales Hiring 352

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 352

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. Reps have to fight for the best leads, prove the highest close rates, exceed the mean of the bell curve, to not just thrive, but survive.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

But I thought I’d take a stab at the Top 10 Pieces of Classic SaaS Advice … that, in my experience at least, are usually Just Plain Wrong. If a VP of Sales can’t improve things in one sales cycle or less — she never will. In one sales cycle, or less. SaaS compounds. Not always, but usually.

Part-Time VPE 348

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 348

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.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Throughout her time there, she scaled the SaaS company from $1M ARR to pre- IPO, along the way, creating the category of customer success software, and paving the way for Gainsight’s $1.1B COOs have become more common in management teams as ways for founders & CEOs to build the management team to scale a business.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 299

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2023

So one recent survey we did really brought out a healthy debate: does your VP of Sales really need to be a product expert? Many of the comments said it was more important a VP of Sales understand process and leadership more than the product itself. If they are just saying the wrong things to customers and prospects. Be present.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 291

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. She can be your CTO forever.

Part-Time VPE 310

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 310

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 16, 2024

Onestream is the latest SaaS IPO. On the other hand, if I were selling sales and marketing tools, I’d be all over social media, especially LinkedIn. In the middle is recruiting. He didn’t see the value until he had to recruit at scale. It always helps with recruiting, done right. Bootstrapped to $100m ARR.

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Social Media Sales Recruiting Scale Finance 300

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2020

One of the biggest changes since we started SaaStr is the massive number of SaaS veterans out there. The decade-long run of next-generation SaaS start-ups, and the explosion since 2015 of SaaS unicorns and decacorns has led to a lot of experienced execs on the market. Because SaaS is hard. This is great.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS 302

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

So there’s a sort of org chart you’ll probably end up with at least twice as you start scaling in SaaS: The “Headless” Sales Org. It’s a bunch of sales reps without anyone to manage them other than … you. With 3, 4, 6, 10 sales reps all reporting to you. Without a VP of Sales, recruiting stalls.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 246

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

JULY 20, 2024

The best SaaS companies Lightspeed has seen in their portfolio are maniacal about defining these key metrics and tracking them with specific targets in mind on a consistent basis. Work with Great Executive Recruiters ”The first time I saw an invoice for an executive search, I think I had a heart attack,” Shrav joked.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 299

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

With all that behind you … let me challenge you to 10 SaaS New Year’s Resolutions. Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. It’s really all about deal size in most SaaS companies, not raw per seat or per unit pricing.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 325

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

One of the biggest challenges in scaling a SaaS company has always been VP and SVP level talent. The companies that create the SVPs you’ll need, especially in Sales and Marketing, are still mostly based in the SF Bay Area. Especially, past $10m ARR and beyond. Even today. With SMBs, you can hack it a bit more.

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 349

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. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The role of finance in SaaS is changing. The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. You must build a lean, impactful team to help your business scale.

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Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Guy Yalif is a seasoned B2B SaaS executive with over 20 years of go-to-market experience. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) Plus, an analysis of the top 75 trending sales AI tools.

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Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 101