SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Former Head of Revenue at BILL and HubSpot Americas leader Michelle Benfer recently joined us on a SaaStr Workshop Wednesday share her insights on one of the most critical roles in any SaaS organization: the frontline sales manager. “At HubSpot, I had over 100 frontline sales managers reporting to me.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 260

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.

Scale 176

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 176

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What are the most common mistakes first-time founders make when building enterprise sales teams? The most common mistakes first-time founders make when building enterprise sales teams are surprisingly consistent. Heres the breakdown: Hiring a VP of Sales Too Early : This is a classic. Its harsh, but necessary.

Outsourcing Services 178

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 178

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2025

Your first few sales reps have to be … different. "That early sales team … they have to be product gurus. And Have They Sold Somewhere Where Sales Is Hard? Look for someone with a track record of hustlemaybe theyve done door-to-door sales or worked in a tough outbound role. A bit of a product savant.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 259

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?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

From Sales-Led to Product-Led: How Apollo.io This analysis examines their journey from a struggling sales-led organization to a successful product-led growth company, resulting in over 880,000 paying customers and substantial revenue growth.

Scale 155

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 155

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Do SaaS Companies Typically Pay Their Sales Reps a Bonus on Renewals? Simple answer: almost no SaaS companies pay sales reps on standard renewals. Of course, though in the early days this is impossible You dont have the scale or the capital or the customer base. If So, How Much is Typica l? Not renewing.

Scale 269

Scale Sales SaaS Cloud 269

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?

Sales Recruiting 227

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 227

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

A little ways back Databricks VP of Sales Heather Akuiyibo joined SaaStr to share unexpected things that work well at Databricks GTM organization as well as some things that havent worked as well. Deep Dive: Unexpected Learnings Time Management as Competitive Advantage Most sales organizations guess how reps should spend their time.

Scale 194

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 194

SaaStr

MARCH 29, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Best Ways to Transition From The Founder-Led Sales Stage? Transitioning from founder-led sales to a commissioned sales team is one of the most criticaland trickysteps in scaling a SaaS business. You Never Get to Leave Sales. This is non-negotiableeven if you hate sales. Be specific.

Scale 187

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Compensation 187

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team. Colin joined Wiz in February 2021 when the company was near zero revenue.

Scale 178

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 178

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2025

One thing is clear is the team that send this isnt the A or B sales team. And a great example of running a very successful outbound program at scale here: And what I’d do better. The email is from Salesforce itself for sure (and an SDR that works there) but it might be a captive agency or contractor working at Salesforce.

Scale 284

Scale Sales AI Enterprise 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Klaviyo dominates marketing in the Shopify ecosystem and in ecommerce, and just keeps on scaling. But it’s clear that it’s still in the investing phase, and increasing spend in sales & marketing. So the latest SaaS leader to cross $1B ARR is Klaviyo. It was the only SaaS IPO on 2023. The only one!

Scale 301

Scale SMB Scaling Enterprise 301

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2025

Convergent evolution from 2 very different start-ups that now have many similarities at scale. Keys to HubSpot’s Success: The “Hub” Strategy : HubSpot mastered the land-and-expand model, starting with Marketing Hub and strategically expanding to Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, Operations Hub, Commerce Hub, and Content Hub.

SMB 272

SMB Scale Education AI 272

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.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling SMB 189

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2024

That ties to our overall rough sales cycle data here: Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? Is usually see 15%-20% as start-ups scale, but 25% is probably the right target as you scale. Is usually see 15%-20% as start-ups scale, but 25% is probably the right target as you scale.

Scale 284

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

These outcomes might include: Driving user growth Maximizing revenue Ensuring user satisfaction Scaling adoption A different outcome would lead to a different pricing choice. Scaling stage: Reduced to single-user plans to maximize accessibility. And if you’re enterprise or sales-led, that volume is not going to be there.”

Payments 284

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 284

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

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. It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 307

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? For a higher-velocity, in-bound driven SaaS product, most sales reps will have trouble processing more than 50 or so truly qualified leads a month. Before $10m ARR or so, more qualified leads = more sales.

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Sales 301

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. Timing is also essential.

Scale 309

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 309

SaaStr

MAY 18, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How Should I Specialize My Sales Team? One thing is clear: most founders and VPs of Sales and CROs look back and wish they’d specialized their sales team earlier. SMBs often require a high-velocity sales motion, while enterprise deals are slower and more relationship-driven.

Scale 155

Scale Sales Healthcare SMB 155

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.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 261

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. The takeaway?

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 312

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. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales. This isn’t new.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 290

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.

Revenue 293

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 293

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How will Ai Change Sales in The Next 12 Months? It’s already fundamentally remade the contact center and post-sales. And it’s just getting there in sales. This will take sales calls from 10% being great to 95% being great because the AI will always be prepared and accurate.

AI 157

AI Scale Sales SMB 157

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.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring AI Scale Compensation 258

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2025

Or a great growth marketer paired with a great sales team will punch above their weight class. In sales, t he more SMB you are, the more you should lean on your bench. “One of the things we did is when we hired a new sales rep, their training wasn’t sales training. Nothing else matters.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review Interviewing 284

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. 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. First, let’s rewind the clock and look at Grafana Labs’ origin story. How did it come to be?

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

A reminder to not stay too reliant on direct sales as you scale. RingCentral has followed, driving SBC down from 23.6% of revenue in 2021 to 15.7% 16,000 Channel Partners A very large percent of RingCentral’s revenue comes from the channel. Billion in ARR appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 284

Scale SMB Compensation Cloud 284