SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. I don’t know anything about sales. More power to you.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 290

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. Can you do truly competitive sales? Not everyone is ready for highly technical or highly verticalized sales in the early days of a start-up’s life. This is #1.

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 345

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Some classics here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days. Your VP of Sales Shouldn’t Be Perfect. They hire weak, too junior folks.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 253

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

Sales has an unavoidable reality: sometimes, your team won’t hit their numbers. If your team isn’t reaching their goals, what are you doing as a leader to help them get up and over the line? This coaching helps them drive their team and their company to greater productivity and higher sales. What is sales coaching?

Underperforming Technical Team 175

Underperforming Technical Team Data Sales Communication 175

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. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

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.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 267

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

What Does AI-Enhanced Sales Look Like In Two Years Everyone’s thinking about it. What does the future of AI-enhanced sales look like from Amit’s perspective? Will a sales executive be able to manage the entire life cycle with AI? Can we get away with fewer sales professionals permanently? First, no drudgery.

Scale 307

Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. While at Gorgias, I expected to leave with as much knowledge to earn me an honorary bachelor’s in sales.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 290

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

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. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 304

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

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. Especially a VP of Sales, working on a big number, and with presumably, a big upside and OTE? About 3,000 of you think it’s just fine for even a VP of Sales to have a side hustle.

Underperforming Technical Team 324

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 324

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. And second, the scorecard provides a way for a team to understand their strengths and weaknesses. sales enablement: how strong are the materials sales teams use to pitch?

Underperforming Technical Team 282

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 282

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

The session that I’m talking about is basically about the board dynamic and about how to survive this valley of death and bring not just yourself and your team but your extended team, including your board, across that until you cross the $1 million mark, and then the $10 million mark and keep going beyond. There we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

He also observed that after product-market fit had been achieved, companies would only ever have to worry about marketing and sales. As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. Listen to sales. We just have to actively listen.

Underperforming Technical Team 289

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 289

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. Shifting from an operator and loving operations and data to a sales and revenue leadership role felt like a big jump.

Scale 302

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 302

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

If you already have a few bigger deals under your belt, but most are smaller … a few higher-level suggestions: Hire a Very Good VP of Sales that has sold at your “high end” price point. More here: The 48 Types of VP Sales. The best way to make pos-initial sale land-and-expand happen organically is engaged, happy customers.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 312

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

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.

Sales Recruiting 170

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 170

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Most support teams have seen an influx of support queries since COVID-19 hit – and those issues are more complex than ever. According to recent research, however, many teams aren’t sufficiently equipped to meet these new challenges. Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

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). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. 1/ Want the best startup VP Sales candidates in the world? Only money.

Sales Hiring 334

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 334

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.

Sales Hiring 323

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 323

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

Is outbound sales dead? When sales slow how do you keep the team motivated and push through? How important are channel partnerships for sales and revenue? ” Question #2: Is outbound sales dead? Because your product, if it’s early, is feature-poor, bug-ridden, slow and does nothing.

Scale 166

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 166

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. The last thing you want the team doing is chasing a shiny penny, when what really matters is hitting the plan for the quarter.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

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.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

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. She said, “Your team really needs to get to know you. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 173

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 173

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. because they needed to rebuild the sales team.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Datadog CMO Alex Rosemblat took the stage at SaaStr Annual 2023 to share how marketing teams can get more deals done with less budget. At the same time, they got more than 20% more marketing-qualified leads for their sales team. But it’s essential to see what’s going into the sales engine to begin with. The good news?

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Sales 307

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

How sales worked, how pricing worked, how billboards work, and more. Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows software developers to embed communications into the apps that they’re building. He said, “I feel so bad. Jeff : I felt really bad, because you plan way ahead. It’s pretty cool.

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 306

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 316

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 316

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. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? Helping the engineering teams run smoothly and being super productive thanks to mentoring.

Scale 320

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 320

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.

Sales Enablement 189

Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Sales Telecommunications 189

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 232

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 232

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

Announcer: Up today, the secrets of market timing, how to develop the right idea at the right time with Allen Gannett, author of The Creative Curve. Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water. These are bad ideas. This is where the cloud meets. Allen Gannett: Okay.

Underperforming Technical Team 245

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 245

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