SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

Brendon Cassidy, my VP of Sales wrote a version of this piece a while back. I though an updated version of this would be good for founders thinking about hiring a VP of Sales … VPs of Sales themselves … and VPs-to-be to read — Jason, ed. … 10 Rules to Being a VP of Sales in a Startup.

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 301

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 5, 2020

On the brighter side, it is a resource for startups looking to hire as they grow. If we tally the reductions by category, travel, retail, fitness, real estate, transportation, and recruiting constitute the top 6 categories. Aside from recruiting, these are all consumer discretionary spend categories.

Sales Recruiting 357

Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount Sales Hiring 357

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. Then I say … you probably made a mis-hire. They often melt. Be present.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 291

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

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. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. You need to hire 2 to really see what works, and what doesn’t. More here.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 313

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 Should you hire a COO for your startup? How you should you go about recruiting the right person? How does the role work with the CEO?

Scale 299

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Sales.

CTO Hire 284

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 284

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. But this is software.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Plus, some of the best software in the world was being created by geographically distributed teams working in an async manner. Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. Today, not so much. Step 2 – ??

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 10, 2021

Whether you need to hire dozens of sales reps in the next few months or you’re a scrappy startup and need your first three sales hires, building a business will nearly always involve hiring for sales. According to Insightsquared, recruiting should take up to 20% of time for a C-level executive.

Sales Hiring 142

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Enablement 142

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. Recruiting is easier, but the things that don’t change are customers don’t care.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. No one needs another piece of business software. It can’t strategically improve sales software, financial software, quoting software, recruiting software, QA processes, call center software, etc.

Sales Recruiting 312

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 312

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. The CEO wants to hire someone with demand generation experience. What’s your advice when hiring a CMO? When you think about how to hire a really good CMO, you’re actually thinking about how to hire somebody that’s gonna do that.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Hiring a global team to achieve the vision What do you do when your company’s location limits your access to talent? You spread your hiring net and draw in as much talent as possible. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Emboldened by this seeming endorsement, I dashed off what turned into a lengthy email on interviewing and recruiting, a topic about which I am passionate not because I think I am good it, but because I think I am not. Thoughts on The Recruiting Process. For a CFO, do you require a accounting or finance background?

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Finance 110

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

The question facing founders recruiting marketers is: which is the most important to prioritize? But the reason many marketing hires fail is the business doesn’t hire the right expertise at the right time. They use software and tools to find potential buyers. Which should you hire first? Why is this?

Scale 255

Scale Startup Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 255

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple software for the construction industry. For us, it’s about fixing this problem, serving the customer well, so a very service driven mindset, which I gave a talk on a few days ago here, has been a big part of Gusto and affected our hiring from the early days. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve seen four stages in early stage software companies.

Compensation 195

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 195

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Not quite yet.

Sales Hiring 281

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 281

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

Tom Tunguz

MAY 28, 2019

Hashicorp and Mattermost staff their GTM functions in headquarters, but manage a distributed engineering team. This structure is common across companies monetizing open source software. They are are among the best engineers to recruit to the team and the first to join. And still others offices form from acquisitions.

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Startup Sales Hiring Engineering 278

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

We’re in the business of robots, software robots, an industry … There was a great presentation earlier, you all probably heard with the category awareness, category urgency, and I’d add one more, company urgency. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. Bobby, tell us a little bit about UiPath. Bobby: Yes.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 274

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

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. In his opinion, the hiring process is a preview of their sales technique.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

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 105

Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 105

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? When you hire an agency, you are not just hiring one person. You are hiring a whole team and their network, which can sometimes be ten or more people. You won’t have to build out a management structure for that department either.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

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. This role can be recruited through headhunters or your network. Team Size Strategic finance works best when the team is lean.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

Wait, are we at just an average B2B software company? The first thing is, and this is a little crazy, but recruitment is incredibly overrated. How many people out here spend more than a third of your time recruiting? Tough Management Lesson #1. A lot of CEOs spend over half their time recruiting people.

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 196

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 8, 2018

In a time where buyer behavior has rendered cold calling nearly obsolete, successful sales prospecting begins with using tools like live chat and social media to build relationships. He’d go on to become the VP of Sales at Sprinklr, guiding the company through its own high growth period, before striking out on his own.

Social Media 186

Social Media Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 186

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

The same is true in software. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. As well as being a critical philosophy behind how we build software, it also represents how I feel about the software industry and technology in general.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2023

This is the reason 70%+ of SaaS companies that IPO are just new version of old, successful things: About 70% of SaaS Unicorns Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software | SaaStr But … but … Small markets can grow into large markets if you change the market or there is otherwise disruption in the market. One of the best sales people.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Marketing Sales Hiring Market Segmentation 246

Incredo

APRIL 8, 2020

2 Company: InternX , University Recruiting Platform InternX created a constantly updating list of hiring companies who are still looking for new employees during the coronavirus. They also decided to shift their focus to providing virtual fairs.

Sales Recruiting 269

Sales Recruiting Travel SaaS Sales Hiring 269

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Sure, we’ll give you a million dollars a year, but you basically have to build custom software. That’s a great example. This always works.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2017

This might seem like a very logical argument for differentiating on sales processes, but it’s a fallacy. First, it presumes that the most valuable skill set in sales is building rapport. Great salespeople understand how to manage a sales process and the five key people in a sales process. Trust is critical.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourced Development 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261