SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Former Head of Revenue at BILL and HubSpot Americas leader Michelle Benfer recently joined us on a SaaStr Workshop Wednesday share her insights on one of the most critical roles in any SaaS organization: the frontline sales manager. “At HubSpot, I had over 100 frontline sales managers reporting to me.

Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 262

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2024

You can talk about the roadmap or sales strategy until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t have the team to do it at scale, there’s no point in talking a ‘big game.’ ” The best sales leaders are the ones that are even better recruiters than the CEO. It’s recruiting five or six.”

Sales Recruiting 308

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 308

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Should I Fire a Sales Rep That Lied To Several Customers? I think most sales execs lie, at least a little bit. But I’ve come to accept that you have to put gates and process around most sales execs, or most will lie, at least a little, to close the deal. I don’t like it. Unfortunately. appeared first on SaaStr.

Sales 308

Sales Software 308

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2024

Want to know how to be better than 95% of the world in SaaS sales? The 2 simple edges in sales: #1. Be a True Product Expert 95% of the sales reps I talk to don’t even really understand the products they are selling. The founders though left the sales rep in the lobby at the customer. Honestly it’s easy.

Sales 304

Sales Cloud Enterprise SaaS 304

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2024

I’m not talking about any close friends in sales here. But — there are a ton of folks I know that used to be great in sales. The other day someone who used to be an A+ sales leader emailed me about a position I’d introduced to him as a super hot start-up. And Why You Really Need a VP of Sales, and Not a CRO.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Sales Interviewing Startup 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2024

They lost their entire sales team, except one exec. And a bit more on the deal itself here: The Power of Private Equity and a $1 Billion+ “Double Acquisiton” The post 5 Top Learnings from Legal SaaS Logikcull’s Almost $300,000,000 Sale to Private Equity appeared first on SaaStr. In 2021, they moved to a PE mindset.

Sales Hiring 296

Sales Hiring Banking Sales SaaS 296

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Many Opportunities Should a Sales Rep Handle? And less than 10% just makes sales … start to get even harder. The post Dear SaaStr: How Many Opportunities Should a Sales Rep Handle? You sort of need to back into it based on your opportunity-to-closed deal ratio. appeared first on SaaStr.

Sales 246

Sales Business 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

Workato’s SVP of Embedded Sales and Director of Solutions Marketing joined us at SaaStr Annual to talk about how to nurture customers — a great topic in general, but especially for embedded sales and APIs that can take a while to scale. The Second Most Important SaaS Hire? Customer Success. But the results?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How Do The Best Sales Leaders Retain Their High Performers? A few ways Ive observed that the best sales leaders retain the best: They promote the best. Great sales leaders ask their top performers what they want to achieve this year. You cant promote everyone, but you can almost always promote your best.

Sales 256

Sales Engagement Marketing 256

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Do SaaS Companies Typically Pay Their Sales Reps a Bonus on Renewals? Simple answer: almost no SaaS companies pay sales reps on standard renewals. A deep dive on this and more with MongoDBs SVP of Sales Ops here: The post Dear SaaStr: Do SaaS Companies Typically Pay Their Sales Reps a Bonus on Renewals?

Scale 272

Scale Sales SaaS Cloud 272

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2025

It begs the question: is the sales and revenue acceleration space back? It shows budget remains in the sales acceleration space where and when its earned. Gong in the early days of this wave was often hurt by consolidation, but today it seems to be benefitting as it itself has become a much broader platform and multi-product.

Engagement 218

Engagement Sales AI B2B 218

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2025

One thing is clear is the team that send this isnt the A or B sales team. It took just a few minutes The post Its 2025 And Even Salesforces Sales Team is Kind of Phoning It In (At Least Some Of It) appeared first on SaaStr. Its being sent by the C team. Which makes sense, since Salesforce is mainly hunting big enterprise deals.

Scale 287

Scale Sales AI Enterprise 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2024

SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) November 11, 2024 Salesforce says it’s seeing such high demand for AgentForce … which replaces humans for agents … that it’s hiring an additional 1,000 folks in sales and product to sell it. If it’s the latter, maybe AI will just create even more enterprise sales jobs.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Sales AI Enterprise 287

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2025

When I look at the VP of Sales / CRO that didnt work out the past 12-18 months across the SaaStr Fund portfolio and my ecosystem, one thing stands out. And its an old SaaStr theme: #1: You have to hire folks in sales where their last job was harder. There may exceptions at rocketships. You often fly. Youll never be an expert.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales compliance Interviewing 185

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Should I Let My VP of Sales Go? All Your VPs Really Need to Do is Tilt the Curve A great VP of Sales should show meaningful progress within one sales cycle. All Your VPs Really Need to Do is Tilt the Curve A great VP of Sales should show meaningful progress within one sales cycle.

Sales Hiring 167

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Onboarding 167

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2024

Customer-facing sales is a critical area of SaaS that drives growth and revenue retention. Pia Heilmann, VP of Sales EMEA at Klaviyo, shares how to master the art of customer-facing sales in an increasingly competitive market. Sales has changed massively over the last decade. How do you do this at scale? With data. #2:

Scale 315

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Technical Review 315

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense to Have Post-Sales Functions Report into Sales? In theory, why not let sales “keep” the customer longer? Even if having a CRO own post-sales and CS is becoming much more common these days. A “true” VP of Sales often wants nothing more to do with a customer after a deal closes.

Sales Hiring 320

Sales Hiring Sales Customer Success Revenue 320

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2024

When Marc Benioff started Salesforce, he codified the sales playbook. Then Mark Roberge , former Hubspot CRO, wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula with deep insights into quota structures. The biggest challenge to that outlook is an increase in the sales cycle. That elongated sales cycle created pipeline supply shocks.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital Marketing AI SaaS 333

SaaStr

MARCH 16, 2025

But Were Growing The Sales Team +20%. How Codeium Built A Billion-Dollar AI Company and a Winning Sales Machine #2. Top Posts: #1. The Per-Seat Model Isnt Dead. But Also, Surprisingly, It Was Never Domina nt. #2. Salesforce: We Are Hiring 0 Engineers This Year. Because AI. #3. Egnyte Sells to Private Equity for $1.5

Sales Hiring 187

Sales Hiring Scale AI Sales 187

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2024

So in the earlier days especially, you’ll be tempted to lean on the sales team to do more than just … sell. It has some positives, the more you ask sales to do. Renewals, if they are tough, are sometimes better handled by sales who at least isn’t a brand-new name Customers like continuity.

Sales Hiring 324

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Customer Success 324

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale. Penetration pricing leads to land-and-expand sales tactics. Salesforce sells CRM seats based on an aggregate ROI of increased sales productivity for example.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

From Sales-Led to Product-Led: How Apollo.io This analysis examines their journey from a struggling sales-led organization to a successful product-led growth company, resulting in over 880,000 paying customers and substantial revenue growth.

Scale 161

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 161

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2024

Later, when you have RevOps and SalesOps and a proven VP of Sales, they’ll own this. More on that here: The #1 Most Important Thing You Can Do With Your Leads: Implement an SLA The post One Way to Succeed in Sales: Be Super Responsive appeared first on SaaStr. So frustrating. At least hopefully.

Sales 327

Sales Revenue 327

SaaStr

OCTOBER 7, 2024

Most of the best VP of Sales have been fired once. Sometimes, for the best sales leaders, it’s a mismatch on passion. So don’t run from a great VP of Sales that was fired. One mis-jump, one mistake though is part of the territory for a great VP of Sales. You can crush it one place and struggle in another.

Sales 308

Sales 308

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2025

Have we lost interest in investing in the human side of sales? Not in hiring sales execs themselves, but in giving them more tools to be more efficient. AI has hardly rendered the sales professional obsolete. Salesforce itself is hiring 2,000 sales execs this year to sell its AI platform, AgentForce. Not yet, at least.

Sales Hiring 330

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount AI 330

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2024

So G2 put out a survey and report on customer success recently that was an eye-opener: 67% of CS execs report having a sales quota 53% of CS execs now view their job as primarily a sales role Now some of this may be semantics. CS now is primarily an upsell and sales function in many cases. That aren’t primarily on a sales quota.

Customer Success 326

Customer Success Sales Trends Retention 326

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Selling to developers and technical audiences requires a different approach than traditional B2B SaaS sales. In a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday , Komodor CRO Jim Hunnewell who also previously led sales at companies like GitHub, shared his first-hand experience and insights for successfully selling to engineering teams.

Engineering 287

Engineering Development CTO Leadership 287

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2024

Probably the biggest challenge in vertical SaaS I see is scaling the sales team. It’s pretty easy to hire SaaS sales execs to sell … a SaaS sales product. At the same time, it’s very hard to turn a domain expert that doesn’t know sales into a great SaaS salesperson. Plan to be in founder-led sales mode longer.

Sales Hiring 319

Sales Hiring Scale Sales SaaS 319

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

So clearly AI is rapidly changing the way we do sales, but how will it all shake out? Over in the contact center and post-sales space, we can already see 20%+ of customer support execs been routinely replaced by AI. But what about the more personal sales side?

AI 327

AI B2B Engineering Customer Support 327

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customer success, and post-sales team. But at the start of its expansion play, Checkr’s enterprise motion failed, and sales cycles were slow, taking up to a year for $100k & up deals.

Revenue 296

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 296