SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a leading platform for software development and version control that has made waves since 2018 with its AI Copilot. At this year’s SaaStr AI Summit, GitHub CRO Elizabeth Pemmerl shared how to bring AI products to market at scale successfully. The next horizon is scaling.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

During a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday , Mangomint’s VP of Sales Marchelle Mooney shared 10 ways sales is different in vertical SaaS. Marchelle’s personal journey took her from early adopter of Mangomint, to 6 years later, VP of Sales over a 25+ person SMB sales team. Find the one that has felt the pain.”

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SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. The 5 Key Elements of Codeium’s GTM Scaling Playbook 1. What is Codeium and Windsurf?

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

With Databricks now one of the largest pre-IPO technology companies, with $10 billion of expected non-dilutive financing and a valuation of $62 billion, Ron’s insights are gold for any revenue leader looking to scale. His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product.

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SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Should I Let My VP of Sales Go? I’m Not Sure I’ve Made The Right Hire 60 Days In? All Your VPs Really Need to Do is Tilt the Curve A great VP of Sales should show meaningful progress within one sales cycle. Taking Work Off Your Plate : Have they taken ownership of sales?

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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?

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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.

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SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. As Colin describes it, “I went to the CEO and asked to generate more revenue and hire more people, which is counter-intuitive to the standard approach where revenue leaders may sandbag to over deliver and crush numbers.”

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

If you are sales-driven, youll usually stall out at $1.5m-$2m in ARR or so if you dont start growing the team to the next level, The First 50. Theres just physics here to get to $10m in ARR in a sales-led model, even a partially sales-led model: After $1.5m Youll need another sales rep at least per every $500k in new ARR.

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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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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Ah the VP of Sales. The toughest hire. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. So you expect the right things, and hire your rockstar at the right time to do the right things. The second post is a script for you to use (and modify as you see fit) – 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales Candidate.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

AI has ripped through categories like the post-sales space and customer support centers. Salesforce is doing it, Zendesk and Intercom are all doing it at scale. You see this first point viscerally if you’re involved in post-sales or support. Sales is beginning to promise this. 2: The product has to be better for it.

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SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2025

It’s live on SaaStr.com itself and you can also access it here and talk to AI Jason about any of 1000s and 1000s of B2B, sales, SaaS, VC, etc. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days.

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SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2022

Yes, sometimes it’s OK to hire a VP of Sales that everyone loves. At least 9 times out of 10, if everyone on the team loves a VP of Sales, it’s the wrong hire. And this especially matters because I often see CEOs picking between 2 final VP of Sales candidates. VCs love VP of Sales that sell up well.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2024

It’s not the crazy hiring market of 2021. He just can’t find enough great folks to hire. It earned them special attention from others on the hiring panel + company leaders… — Brie Wolfson (@zebriez) November 26, 2024 Everyone great is hiring. But almost everyone growing even at “pretty good” rates is hiring.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? In the early days, it’s simply that you have a few more leads than you can currently handle. Plus — following up on the 50 qualified leads from the month before. To a point. appeared first on SaaStr.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Successful SaaS Leaders Without Sales Teams? Many that are self-serve and SMB-focused can start off without a sales team … for a while. But almost none stay without a sales team … forever. Yes, Atlassian since well past its IPO had almost no direct sales team. Maybe on Day 0.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

I felt part of your core job as CEO was to assemble a management team, not complain about how you couldn’t get it all done. Or didn’t want to do sales. I still believe a CEO should “do it all” in terms of building a decent management team first before hiring a COO. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0

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SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

Hire an Ex Post-Facto Co-Founder: This is someone who isnt technically a co-founder but acts like one. It could be a VP of Product, Sales, or Engineeringsomeone who takes ownership of a big chunk of the business and cares almost as much as you do. Prioritize Great Early Hires. If youre technical, hire someone who can sell.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2021

………………… Hiring a VP of Sales in a startup is an incredibly hard thing. Even if you hire the right person there is no guarantee your startup is going to make it. Understands and has experience running a sales org at your sales velocity (i.e. And just stop. And rethink this.

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SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2025

But how did they scale so quickly? Here are the five channels that worked for Rupa: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Social Proof and Trust Building Educational Partnerships and Rupa University Conferences and Event Sponsorships Outbound Sales and Data Quality Lets dive into each. Its about creating high-quality content at scale.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, has done numerous surveys now that confirm that a startling 70% of first hires don’t make it. In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2025

Top Posts: #1: 2025 And The Rise of the Mech AE (Account Executive) #2: 2025 Should Be Better Than 2024 For Almost All Leading Public SaaS Companies #3: 38% of Bootstrapped Start-Ups Have Solo Founders. But Only 17% of VC-Backed Ones Do. And 10%-12% of Ones That IPO. #4: appeared first on SaaStr.

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Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

This chart holds the secret to successful hiring of go-to-market teams. A stack rank of attributes within HubSpot account executive candidates that correlate to quota attainment. The pushier the account executive, the worse the result. I think it’s still one of the best books on how to repeatably scale sales teams.

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SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2025

Many of the early break out leaders in AI for B2B and otherwise have been “small but mighty teams” Honestly we’d all love it if that scaled. And thus — hiring more. They they are doubling down and hiring even more to keep these gains going. And can it sell and scale sales?

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2022

Sales-driven SaaS startups end up with about half their headcount in sales and marketing. Sales doesn't. One thing that sneaks up on you in SaaS is just how many sales, marketing and revenue professionals you are going to need: First it sneaks up on you in the early days because the initial tiny team become so efficient.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2025

We’ll hear from the CRO of $3B Clio (legal SaaS), the CEO and CRO of Flock Safety (police and safety SaaS), and dozens of others on how to scale their vertical SaaS industries and platforms. It takes getting out in the field, and creating a ton of true value — before the sale. #2. See you there! How Kyle does it here: #3.

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SaaStr

MAY 10, 2024

At this week’s Workshop Wednesday, Lucas Price, former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip and founder and CEO at Yardstick, shares his insights on how to hire and build a high-performing sales team. During that time, he wasted a lot of money on failed sales hires and decided to learn everything about hiring sellers.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

It’s a bit of a bummer than oftentimes, once you finally hire a few great VPs at $1m, $2m, $3m ARR … and they do a great job … that they then don’t scale. A few signs I see again and again of VPs that can’t scale beyond $5m-$10m ARR: Lack of organization. But it doesn’t scale. They get it.

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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.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

On a sales front, how do you evolve past founder-led sales, or together with it, so that you can scale your organization? Founder-led sales can be an immense strength and rapidly become a limiting factor. PST, Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico, shares how to scale beyond founder-led sales on your path to Series B.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

There’s always someone a few years ahead of you on the scaling journey who can share their lessons learned. Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. You can get this wrong.

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SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy shares his journey to more than $100M and the lessons he learned along the way for building a PLG motion and an Enterprise sales motion. They didn’t initially envision being a large Enterprise sales organization. Let’s first start with how Cloudinary came to be.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

Ah, hiring those first 1 or 2 sales reps. So often, they are mis-hires. But when you get that Sales Magician — they really can be a game changer. If that’s you, hiring your first few sales reps, here are our Top 10 SaaStr Posts on Hiring Your First Few Sales Reps: #1.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. Every incremental hire with a small team matters, so it’s worth being clear on what you want.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 1, 2022

What almost never works, somewhat surprisingly, is hiring a Director of Outbound as your first outbound hire. And especially, a new VP of Sales comes in without real outbound experience. And finds they don’t have enough leads to hit the number on inbound alone. Why does this seemingly logical hire fail?

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

But we’re lapping tougher times for many, and for many others, it’s just plain time to hire again. So many Cloud and SaaS leaders kept hiring flat for the past 12-18 months, and yet still grew. That works for a while, but you end up with not enough headcount if you do freeze hiring but still want to grow.

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