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 294

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 294

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.

Sales Hiring 281

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 281

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

In the world of SaaS, conventional wisdom has long dictated that focus is paramount. The narrow approach has been picked over fifteen years ago, you could start a SaaS company in any vertical and likely succeed by being first. His rationale: Training capacity : Sales teams can only absorb so much product knowledge.

Startup 157

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 157

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

In 2023, we saw a surge of SaaS brands adding anything AI-powered or AI-driven into their website headlines. A quick use of Wayback Machine for the top 100 SaaS brands will show you just how pervasive it was. Bad: We use AI to streamline sales workflows. But avoid buzzwords, make it visual and concrete.

AI Search 88

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 88

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?

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

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 290

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

What Does AI-Enhanced Sales Look Like In Two Years Everyone’s thinking about it. What does the future of AI-enhanced sales look like from Amit’s perspective? Over the last 20 years, SaaS companies have become hyper-specialized with very specific roles. Will a sales executive be able to manage the entire life cycle with AI?

Scale 306

Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 306

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 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 284

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. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

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 339

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 339

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 210

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 210

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

Within the next 12 months, Adam Seligman, VP of Generative Builders at AWS, believes there will be an inversion of SaaS. That many of the standard assumptions and ways of doing SaaS will change a lot. He believes we’re rapidly approaching that new world where anyone can build a great SaaS product. What does that mean?

Generative AI 293

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 293

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. Why It Matters : Business users waste hours navigating complex SaaS UIs.

AI Search 175

AI Search AI Startup Scale 175

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 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

Sales Hiring 336

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 336

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. Especially a VP of Sales, working on a big number, and with presumably, a big upside and OTE? About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 322

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

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Both are two of the most impressive and inspiring public SaaS CEOs — but their products and companies couldn’t be more different. One was to get a sense of what the bar was to pull off a successful SaaS IPO these days (answer = oh man, very high). Do you have two sales teams? This is a good one.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

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 191

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 191

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 327

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 327

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

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

What does customer satisfaction look like for SaaS businesses? Unlike traditional businesses, most SaaS businesses operate the subscription pricing model. As a result, satisfying customers is key to any success in SaaS. Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

That said, industry experts agree that your SaaS companys goal churn should be below 2%. As a SaaS business leader, reducing software user churn is an important part of maintaining your customer base and increasing revenue. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes.

Scale 300

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 300

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. was created by a team with 25+ years of experience in location-based tech, spanning various services and real-time asset tracking systems. Founders : Max Armbruster.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

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. She said, “Your team really needs to get to know you. Overwhelmed.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 183

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. Despite that value, however, there’s a drawback – a lack of formal sales training and sales process can seriously undermine those initial efforts. Identify a market specific methodology.

Startup 178

Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178

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

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? to be the sales engineer during the sales process and then stayed on with customer post sale to manage the implementation process.

Underperforming Technical Team 123

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 123

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 259

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 259

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

At Maxio , we help B2B SaaS companies unlock their next stage of growth. Our financial operations platform is designed to meet the unique financial challenges of B2B SaaS, including billing, subscription management, revenue and expense recognition, and SaaS analytics. Vendr is forever changing how companies buy and renew SaaS.

Scale 272

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 272

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. But that’s not Disruption — in SaaS at least. Sometimes in SaaS, there are natural monopolies. But more often, SaaS categories with significant complexity in workflows and features end up in natural oligopolies.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

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 293

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 293

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

So the first question is what made SaaS so successful. If you kind of that question, thinking about the stakeholders and the decisions and companies of using SaaS products, there’s kind of three types. Customers love SaaS products and tools because it simply works. The second constituent there is the developer.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

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 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

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. So what’s my list of SaaS regrets? The best ones are always accretive in SaaS. What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In? #4. It Compounds.

Sales Hiring 230

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 230

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. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams. We can look back at how Datadog scaled.

Scale 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317