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. Not mediocre ones.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 354

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

In interviewing great CMOs , the product marketing leader is the first marketer most startups should recruit, and often the first key mishire. Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press.

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Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Nothing matters but recruiting and using your personal network. 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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 194

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2023

In particular, hiring for your sales team is critical in an uncertain economic outlook. Additionally, sales professionals looking for a new role should choose their next company wisely. Great Companies Attract Great Talent Blond and Braverman have enjoyed successful careers as sales leaders in high-performing companies.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Compensation 244

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

The Best Speakers In The World With hundreds of sessions from proven SaaS leaders who have scaled companies to significant revenue milestones, SaaStr Annual offers practical, actionable insights you won’t find elsewhere. Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.

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Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 190

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 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

So just as supply chain logistics juggernaut Flexport was beginning to scale, founder CEO Ryan Petersen came to SaaStr Annual to share his top lessons — and mistakes. When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 325

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2020

A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se. A VP of Sales who is smart, polished, and worked at the right place, in a management-level position. That can talk about quota attainment and sales operations and scaling and number. you might ask.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Q: What makes a great sales leader? The best sales managers / directors / VPs: Recruit great team members. Sales requires a linear number of hires to grow bookings. So you have to be a great recruiter to scale. But the best sales leaders know where they are #1. Decrease sales cycles.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 299

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2022

Scaling your sales team can be one of the hardest things to do in SaaS. What’s the best way to help your sales team navigate today’s changing markets and changing priorities? And what’s the right time to fill crucial sales leadership roles? 1 Buyers Expect Personalization in Outbound Sales.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 278

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap.

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Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 279

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

In the “old” days, there was a rough rule that as soon as you are bringing on more than 1–2 reps a quarter, you needed to hire a director of sales ops. That at that point, at a minimum, there would be too much administrative work for your VP of Sales to handle it herself. You want the sales ops help scaled up and helping before then.

Sales Hiring 296

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 296

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. And figure out if they really are great: For your prospective VP of Sales, did her top 2 hires at least crush it and blow out their quotas ? Recruiting.

Part-Time VPE 352

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 352

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 16, 2024

On the other hand, if I were selling sales and marketing tools, I’d be all over social media, especially LinkedIn. In the middle is recruiting. He didn’t see the value until he had to recruit at scale. It always helps with recruiting, done right. Selling to CFOs and finance. appeared first on SaaStr.

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Social Media Sales Recruiting Scale Finance 306

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. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2020

I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting asked about the top mistakes hiring your first sales team so many times over the years, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List. Make fewer of them and you’ll scale faster with less stress. Yes, you may be terrible at sales.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 334

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic. The original version here on Lattice Engines’ Sales and Marketing Hub.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 317

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 258

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

2021 will be the year SaaS sales evolves the most since the Appexchange ecosystem started to take off ~15 years ago, which spawned the entire notion of a true sales app stack. The permanent move to distributed sales teams. Almost every SaaS VP of Sales and CRO I’ve talked to in the past few months isn’t going back.

Sales Recruiting 354

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 354

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Ah the VP of Sales. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. 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. Just so you know, there are 48 Different Types of VP Sales. The toughest hire. Such a high failure rate.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 364

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. How did it come to be?

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 297

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 334

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

Q: Dear SaaStr: When Should The CEO Step Away From Sales? It’s just, as you scale, what you do in the sales process as CEO evolves and changes. Anyhow, my VP of Customer Success, VP of Product and I were in one small conference room working with the Sales Operations team. But you don’t get to stop doing sales.

Sales Recruiting 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 296

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 316

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 328

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Combine Strategies To Drive Sales.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

However, continuing this way isn’t the path to huge scale. To recruit 100 people. To answer these questions, the team must look beyond this today’s one-on-ones and this month’s engineering milestones this quarter’s sales pipeline. Eventually the team hews the right product. The startup raises capital.

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Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Startup 256

SaaStr

MARCH 14, 2022

We’ve talked a ton about How to Hire a Great VP of Sales on SaaStr, but I wanted to highlight a few VP of Sales “personas” that I rarely, if ever, see work out. Because again and again, many of your will hire this VP of Sales. Here are the types of VP of Sales that just never work out. Sales is hard.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Scale 306

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.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2021

Most of us can’t afford to hire a VPM 12 months before we have our first customer, and we can’t survive through 10 sales reps without one. It’s not quite as terrible as waiting too long for a VP of Sales. A great VP of Marketing can help make the sales reps better qualitatively, even before you have a VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 352

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 352

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2021

I’ve written a lot about this, but for most start-ups, you can boil it down to two criteria any first VP of Sales just has to meet: Has she built at least a small team before? If you can hire 2–3 great ones, you can likely scale and hire 20–30. No VP of Sales is equally great at both inbound and outbound sales.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Development Team Review 290

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. Work with Great Executive Recruiters ”The first time I saw an invoice for an executive search, I think I had a heart attack,” Shrav joked.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 304

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

It formed the basis for a career at HubSpot predicated on consistent quantitative analysis to scale the go-to-market, which he detailed in the Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. I think it’s still one of the best books on how to repeatably scale sales teams. What would the chart above look like for your sales team?

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 349

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Pretty incredible at scale. For example, a great Stretch VP of Sales might get you to from $50k to $500k a month in new bookings. To recruit the team and resources it takes not just to meet the plan this quarter, but the next one and the following quarters as well. What changed? A new revenue team. I see this again and again.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Metrics 315

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft.

Part-Time VPE 309

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 309

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales. 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. . #1: 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. This one is newer.

Sales Hiring 309

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review 309

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

What does it take to scale a team from 2 to more than 1,100 people in just a few short years? When Remote had 120 people two weeks into 2021, they planned to scale to 600 that year. At the same time, you want to give trust and power to people who recruit, and you do that by ensuring they understand what the culture is.

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