SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The New Normal: 700 Employees at $200,000,000 in ARR ServiceTitan: The First Great SaaS IPO of 2024 (Potentially) at $500,000,000+ ARR Why The Greatest Sales Teams Just Kill It On Dec 31. When Everyone Else Has Gone Home.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

The biggest structural difference is you have to hire all the VPs by employee 50–100. You won’t be able to scale this far without a full management team — VPs of Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Customer Success at least. Especially, I see founders step out of sales entirely once they hire a merely “OK” VP of Sales.

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SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

So just a little while back, Lenny Rachintsky had me on his hyper-popular podcast to talk about scaling sales, from the perspective of a founder who hasn’t really done sales. They really are a great checklist when you are starting to scale sales in SaaS: #1. And sales go down, not up. #2. It’s a tough job.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

In this CMO panel from SaaStr, Rick Schultz, CMO at Databricks, Janine Pelosi, Former CMO at Zoom, and Ryan Carlson, Former CMO at Okta, joined Carilu Dietrich, Advisor at Hypergrowth B2B Startups to talk about the seven biggest mistakes CMOs make. Here are the 7 big mistakes they made, so you can avoid them. What do we value?”

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

and Lenny asked us to join his podcast to talk about building a sales team — from the perspective of a product-first founder or exec. It was a pretty strong conversation and we took a lot of our learnings over the years and focused on how to learn to do sales right if you come from a product-first background: It’s good.

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SaaStr

JULY 17, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Your Product Has to Be Easier to Buy Than to Use. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. The 1 Simple Test to Know if You’ve Hired a Real VP of Product or Customer Success … Or Not. Top Videos This Week: 1.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Knowing — and Sharing — Your Zero Cash Date (Updated) Salesforce: Your Job’s at Risk If You Sell Less Than $400k a Year The Top 3 Things CROs Are Quietly Talking About These Days 2023 Was The Year of Hiding Inside the Base.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: When The Team Revolts 80% of IPOs Since 2020 Are “Broken” What Are Public SaaS Companies Taken Private At? Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

But we’re lapping tougher times for many, and for many others, it’s just plain time to hire again. So many Cloud and SaaS leaders kept hiring flat for the past 12-18 months, and yet still grew. That works for a while, but you end up with not enough headcount if you do freeze hiring but still want to grow.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

Ah, hiring those first 1 or 2 sales reps. So often, they are mis-hires. But when you get that Sales Magician — they really can be a game changer. If that’s you, hiring your first few sales reps, here are our Top 10 SaaStr Posts on Hiring Your First Few Sales Reps: #1.

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SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. We’ve all made many of these mistakes ourselves, myself included ?? But if you see yourself making any of the mistakes below, it’s fairly easy to make a course correction.

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SaaStr

JULY 24, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Gartner: Software Spend Will Still Grow by $100 Billion in 2023. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sale s. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sale s. A SaaStr Classic. It’s You.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In SaaS, we talk a lot about hyper-growth, uber-successful companies, but many founders, including hyper-growth founders, make mistakes over and over. Being open about mistakes helps others see that you can win at business while still being human-first. A Head of Sales who was a sales rep nine years ago.

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SaaStr

MAY 22, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: One Simple Trick to Make Your SDRs Perform Better. The #1 Mistake I See Founders Make When They Hire Their First VP of Sales. Cloud Stocks May Be Down. But the Cloud Remains on Fire. That Matters More.

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SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

“I never make the same mistake twice. While I struggled to produce 10 things I got right in a decade, the list of mistakes flowed much easier. hits, in no particular order: Mistake: Not holding my leaders to the highest standard One of our company values is the Golden Rule—treat people the way you’d want to be treated.

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SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 5 Interesting Learnings from Sprout Social at $240,000,000 in ARR. Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much in the Earliest Days: Absolute Churn and Sales Cycles. Late Stage VC is Kind of Frozen, Down at Least 40%.

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SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

First, you hire your sales team. Finally, growth occurs when sales, product, and marketing can come together. In reality, avoidable mistakes stop companies from achieving their true growth potential. . She draws from personal experience scaling a global product company to $1B and shares common mistakes.

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SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? Top Videos This Week: 1.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring Scale CTO 200

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are the best 5 points to improve poor sales performance? Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out. Decide who to hire, when, and how. Be more involved as the CEO with sales.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2020

And yet, they/we all tend to make the same mistakes. Mistake #1: Hiring Too Inexperienced and Junior Managers and “VPs” Stretch VPs can do amazing things if you get it right. Mistake #1: Hiring Too Inexperienced and Junior Managers and “VPs” Stretch VPs can do amazing things if you get it right.

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Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Enterprise 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Ok we’ve talked a bit more on SaaStr over the years on how to hire a Great VP of Sales , but hiring a Great VP of Marketing is just as important. Maybe in some ways more so, in that you can generally hire a great VP of Marketing earlier. Do you make the hire now? Not just in sales. What do I mean?

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Sales execs can screw up so many things and still close a lot if they just get 1 thing right If they just are a true subject matter expert in the product they sell Yet so many aren't — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  ?? jasonlk) January 26, 2024 I remember my first embarrassing sales meeting. But not to do all the work for sales.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Catch up on part one here , where he deep dives into what he really thinks about AI, Sales and lead Gen for SaaS in 2024. Q: When Should A Slow Growth Company Hire a Head of Sales? They have one salesperson but want to skip having two scaled reps and immediately hire the VP of Sales. This is the VP of Sales’ job.

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Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Generative AI 246

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 5 Interesting Learnings from Zendesk at $1.6 The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Mistakes the CEO/Founder of ZoomInfo Made on His Journey to IPO (and Beyond) – The 2022 Edition. Billion in ARR.

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Sales Hiring Management Acquisition Engineering 193

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

You Have to Train Sales Reps 3–10. This is the same mistake so many of us make again, and again. You have to start formal sales training by rep #3. Hire Early. Hire your first customer success manager as early as you can afford to once you have some larger customers. And you can start very small. Or they fail.

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Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Compensation Outsourced Development 233

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: SaaS Multiples Are At a 3+ Year Low. A 4 Point Test To Know If You Are Ready to Hire BigCo Folks. Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Where It Goes From Here.

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Scale Sales Hiring Payment Features Marketing 215

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

Top Blog Posts This Week: 20 Interesting PLG Learnings from The Leaders in SaaS. Top 7 Regrets in Hiring VPs. Dear SaaStr: What are The Top 5 Mistakes Every Salesperson Must Absolutely Avoid? Firing Them Is Not One of Them. You’ll Know if That New VP is Going to Fail at the First Board Meeting.

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Scale Sales Hiring AI Innovation 206

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

Incredibly, ZoomInfo has scaled to IPO with an entirely sales-driven motion. ZoomInfo’s CEO, Henry Schuck, joined us to share five mistakes made on this B2B database’s journey from zero to IPO. Mistake 1: Not being honest about your talent. Not being honest about your talent is the first mistake founders make. They will

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SaaStr

MAY 29, 2022

So we’ve talked so much over the years on SaaStr on how to hire a great VP of Sales, the difference they’ll make, and how the level-up comes quickly. And in the end, this is the mistake so many CEOs make. And VPs of Sales do, too. A ton of great VPs of Sales have sold sales tools and similar products.

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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 #1: Bookings are not revenue.

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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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SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2023

The blog Healthy Competition put together their favorite Top 10 SaaStr Tips for Founders & CEOs from all our content. If you are going to bash the competition in sales, you better at least get good at it. It’s ok to hire a couple sellers & VPs from competitors, but not much more. We all make this mistake.

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SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Dave Kellogg, Executive-In-Residence at Balderton Capital, breaks down the most common mistakes companies make when going from startup to scale-up. Mistake #1: Premature GTM acceleration. This is by far the top scale-up mistake that companies make. a company will hire rapidly to achieve scale. Mistake #3: Losing focus.

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SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: What All First-Time CEOs Should Know About Fundraising. Top 5 Mistakes Building & Scaling Global Product Teams | HubSpot GM & VP, Products Poorvi Shrivastav. 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at $4.3B Top Videos This Week: 1.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2020

The corollary is that the window to hire a Stretch VP is shorter than ever. If you hit $1m ARR growing 6-8% a month, you can probably hire a Stretch VP of Sales any time the following 12 months. If you hit $1m ARR growing 15-20% a month, you probably only have a 3-6 month window to hire a Stretch VP of Sales.

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SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2021

But the #1 reason a VP is hired in a start-up is to be an owner. Made a few wrong hires? Instead, simply identify challenges and mistakes as early as possible, and just come up with an action plan. This is #4 on our list, but probably the most common mistake. Don’t hide from bad news, or mistakes.

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