SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2021

I’ve seen sales reps great at $20k deals join a start-up with tons of leads but at a $2k price point and fail. Pick a sales process you are comfortable with. Account management? Can you do truly competitive sales? But larger sales organizations put sales operations processes in place that keep you more organized.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 345

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

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. Good afternoon.

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Maybe: – Go grab that office lease at half off – Hire Bay Area VPs now while they'll work anywhere. My top suggestions: Hire those “Bay Area VPs” now while they’ll (still) work with startups HQ’d anywhere. Go hire those VPs now that aren’t in your city. Make the hires.

Underperforming Technical Team 334

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 334

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

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Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 328

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Together we combed through AngelList and found companies that we saw potential in, however, most were not hiring. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? And for good reason. One thing is the timing.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Only money. First, some context.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

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. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 195

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Not that they are just "great at sales" — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) January 12, 2023. So a while back we did a deep dive on why 95% of the VPs of Sales candidates just won’t thrive at your start-up. I think it’s important to repeat that analysis, but for your first few sales reps.

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Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

Sales Hacker

APRIL 30, 2020

What’s your approach when hiring sales reps? Companies often hire sales reps who have knowledge of, or even a passion for, the brand’s product or industry — which is great because it gives you a team of “walking brochures” who can spout off all the benefits of your product. The best training for new sales hires.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Underperforming Technical Team 121

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. We had split into two distinct but complementary functions.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. SaaStr’s own Jason Lemkin shares the top 10 mistakes he sees during the hiring process during Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. The last 18 months have seen the biggest changes in the VP of Sales in his SaaS career.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 162

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

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.

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Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. Let me start by telling you about my first role as a manager. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 184

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 184

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. Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question? That’s a great example.

Scale 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

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. The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

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. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

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. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

In this episode, Bob and I chat about his new book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. What is it about sales that makes academia hesitant to teach it? Bob wondered where all the sales professors were and discovered that perhaps as a profession it required more art than science.

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Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design. They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. Considering aspects of sales and GTM strategies. A good range for this hire might be between 2-8 sales reps.

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Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

2019 is shaping up to be another fine year for those working in and around sales enablement. We’re seeing larger numbers of people work in the industry, more companies investing in sales enablement teams and numerous tools being developed to solve sales enablement challenges. But here’s the thing.

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Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Sales Telecommunications 189

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. Now, over the next decade, they need to think about other things their customers do in hiring that aren’t done well and could be scaled.

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Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 286

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 298

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 298

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 321

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively?

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 264

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 20, 2019

There’s been a lot of discussion around the role of SDRs in modern sales, and what’s changed about the role over the past decade. However, one thing that hasn’t changed is the following: almost every SDR’s goal is to be promoted into a closing sales role, usually as fast as possible. There are a few reasons behind this. Here’s why.

Sales Hiring 35

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Headcount 35

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Almost everyone in sales seems to be into real estate, either “multi-family” real-estate or getting their broker’s license. Or other so-called “passive” income streams that really often take many hours to manage. About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Should your sales engineers also implement the software? For us in the early stages, we went down the path of hiring a solutions person (in this case the person was myself!)

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Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 124