Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing. Reaching the 5-20M in ARR, the management team fills out with a layer of VPS.

Scale 363

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2022

With that, I asked my first controller at my first start-up, Anita Kutlesa, who has since gone on to be CFO at several SaaS and software companies, from Pipedrive to Coverity and more, to share her suggestions and learnings: … The Top 10 Important Finance Mistakes First Time Founders Make. Mistake #4: DIY Accounting. But don’t.

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Finance Outsourcing Services Systems Review Technical Review 334

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.

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Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2024

1: Don’t hire a VP (or anyone in the early days) that you aren’t 95% sure is great. Founders between a million and $250M are talking about lowering the bar for hiring because they aren’t sure if the person is great or they’re trying to fill a gap. A great Head of Sales will move the needle. It never works.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Fractional VPE 311

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

The business builds software to help other crypto companies grow. Perhaps you’ll sell infrastructure to help other startups scale or software to manage internal operations. The customer roster brims with the best names, each client increases their spend every year, and the sales team outpaces its quota handsomely.

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Payment Solutions Outsourced Development Software Review Software 263

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.

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Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. Will AI let ICs do more, with fewer managers? AI in Sales and Marketing AI is disrupting sales and marketing, particularly in support and SDR /BDR functions, due to the shortage of skilled workers and the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings.

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Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 306

The Angel VC

APRIL 1, 2017

I couldn’t agree more, and I think startups should make that hire sooner rather than later. If you can hire only one or two handful of people with your seed round, hiring anybody who doesn’t either code or sell is hard to justify. Let’s say you want to hire 10 people in the next 12 months. Here’s why.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Software Review 168

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

If you want to hire your first sales rep and close more deals, you need to understand how the sales process works, what tools your team needs to be successful and learn to speak sales. Sales definitions you should know. CRM objects — Represent the sales relationship you have with a specific person or company.

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Sales Hiring Startup Sales Outsourced Development 321

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Back in the day, premium comp for some software sales execs made simple and easy sense. Traditional software had 90% gross margins, and the classic enterprise sales reps, the best ones, could close a million or more dollars a year. Sales reps should be wary of comp plans that look too good to be true.

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Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 345

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. For every company that’s executing the freemium model successfully, there are hundreds more that struggle and the tension it can create between sales, marketing, and product teams.

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Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2021

Due to that convenience, departments and teams tend to seek out best-of-breed cloud applications, streamlining foundational and specialized functions through automation. Through every sales cycle, there’s a need to share information from sales, accounting, customer success, and other teams. Employee Hiring and Onboarding.

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Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Marketplace as a Service 325

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 299

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Lucid is the leading provider of visual collaboration software with over 70M users worldwide. Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. This is where product-led sales comes in.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2023

“The fastest company will always win,” says Daniel Dines, CEO and Founder of UiPath, one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Ten years ago, no one would have guessed Europe would generate the largest software IPO globally, yet UiPath has done it, and net retention is 144%.

Scale 246

Scale Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Software Review 246

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

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2022

Global customers such as Amazon, Japan Airlines, Sky, and Affirm rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns. There’s no reason you shouldn’t hire the brightest, most talented people. No matter where they live.

Payments 264

Payments Sales Hiring Payment Solutions Airlines 264

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

By choosing the right project management software, projects won’t throw you into that panic-inducing nightmare. I’ve managed countless projects, hundreds of teams, and bounced around to every project management software you can think of. The top 6 options for project management software.

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Software Review Software Management Sales Hiring 144

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. I Don’t Have Budget.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 316

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

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.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2023

They review the changing market, buyer trends, and tips for the road ahead. Software that is difficult or time-consuming to remove is more likely to be purchased and renewed. Oates explains, “Software that supports critical infrastructure will continue to be purchased and renewed, year-over-year.” Why is this?

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VP of Engineering Trends Cybersecurity Sales Hiring 298

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.

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Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

There’s some great content out there on the subject of hiring your first VP of sales at a startup, so in this post I’m going to do some quick thoughts on the subject in an effort to complement the existing corpus. Hire them first. That is, before hiring any salesreps. Hire someone who enjoys the fight.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Software Review 97

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

Recurring software revenue is now recognized as a great way to generate tons of cash for investors,” says Gerety. He had never found a successful software company that wasn’t necessary. This was likely due to how difficult it was to convince ten companies to buy back in the day. But that wasn’t always the case. It took a while.

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Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 278

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. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

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. I should have hired someone in some role like six months ago, a year ago.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

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.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

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. She was my first VP of Sales. Brendan Cassidy, second VP of Sales at EchoSign.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 195

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2022

“The customer that buys in $100K bites may end up being more successful in the long term—because they ramped up their deployment—than the customer that takes on so much upfront due to budgetary or political reasons.”. Maximize and optimize for Account Executive productivity. When it comes to your sales team, productivity is paramount.

Scale 306

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 306

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. X sales force, X meta.

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SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 106

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2021

But Wong offers a word of caution: “If you don’t get your ICP right, you kind of become this custom software development shop for your top customers.” Segment, for example, hired a research firm to combine their observations with in-house data for a holistic view of their ideal customer. Thriving ($100 million +).

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Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Sales 239

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Instead, due to a decade-long exodus from Wall Street, the strategic CFO has burst onto the tech scene. 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.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

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Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Product : Vanta Your deal is almost closed, and all that’s left is the security review. With Vanta Questionnaire Automation, go-to-market teams can complete security reviews up to 5 times faster, helping you close deals in less time than ever. The team is growing too – one role highlighted below and many more being hired for.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

FastSpring

JANUARY 31, 2023

payment processing, gathering and remitting taxes, and subscription management) and what additional software you’ll need to add to your tech stack. Finally, we share several customer reviews and case studies for each solution. Sign up for a free account or request a demo today to see how FastSpring can help you expand globally.

Payment Services 147

Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services Software Review 147

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2024

Stage 2 Capital invests $4M to $6M in first checks into B2B software companies that are around $1M ARR. From sourcing opportunities to hiring talent to coaching founders to implementing sales methodologies, we leverage the Stage 2 Capital LP base in every stage of the investing and portfolio support process.

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Technical Review Scale Management Sales Hiring 306