SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work. The best mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies grow their accounts 120%-160% as a cohort, inclusive of churn. It’s much cheaper to renew a customer than to acquire one. You have redundancy.

Scale 220

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 220

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 278

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. Churn slowly increases. Then, manage a small team.

Sales Recruiting 209

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 209

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep. Move the bottom 10% out and give the best leads to your top performer, and watch sales go up 20%. The best VPs of Sales design comp plans so the team never wants to leave. You should be striving for zero voluntary attrition on your sales team.

Sales Recruiting 237

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 237

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale 249

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 249

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2022

Going from sales-led to PLG is doable, but it is not easy. Sales-led organizations struggle to adapt to a PLG mindset.”. Let’s use sales-led organizations as a comparison point. If a company has started out with a heavy sales focus, its onboarding process within the actual product may not be intuitive enough for customers.

Sales Recruiting 268

Sales Recruiting Business Pricing Churn 268

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

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. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big.

Part-Time VPE 246

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. It can’t strategically improve sales software, financial software, quoting software, recruiting software, QA processes, call center software, etc. And when you hire a real, great VP of Sales. Truly qualified leads and prospects. I Don’t Have Budget.

Sales Recruiting 281

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Software Review 281

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. Drive NPS up, and churn down. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. Turning over a sales team is very hard on the organization. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in gold. They have low attrition.

Sales Hiring 338

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 338

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A head of customer success that doesn’t own churn, or net revenue retention in the first 90 days. I can go on. But the top VPs of Sales know you have to get it going soon. Never will. That hits quota or better. Never will.

Sales Recruiting 337

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 337

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. To get to $5m-$10m ARR and beyond, we’ll need a real VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 362

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 362

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 98

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. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

Mucker Capital

APRIL 2, 2024

In this Mucker Growth session, Mike Genstil with ValueCore delves into the concept of value selling and its application in enterprise sales. As a founder, ideally you want your sellers, marketers, and product leaders aligned in transforming product features into value-based messages to accelerate sales cycles and secure corporate deals.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Enterprise Cybersecurity 52

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

And, depending on the initial contract duration, high customer churn [1]. churn of 25%, and services margins of negative 66% when I started working with them [2]. Customers are left high-and-dry with failed or partial implementations that, if left unfinished, will likely lead to churn. High adoption failure.

Consulting 144

Consulting Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 144

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. When to hire her (more here ).

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 192

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 192

Sales Hacker

JULY 25, 2022

Here’s the thing about driving a car — and about running a sales org: Bumps in the road are inevitable. One of the best ways to ensure every part of your engine is running smoothly is to build sales performance dashboards for everyone on your team. What is a sales performance dashboard? What is a sales performance dashboard?

Sales Recruiting 99

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 99

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. It’s important to track the number of leads in the conversion rates to sales generated by sales.

Metrics 209

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 209

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Your sales team is integral to your business’s success: not only do your salespeople bring in the big deals, but they also represent your company and culture to every new and potential prospect. So why is sales team culture still an afterthought for so many organizations? People all across the company are so proud of our sales team.

Sales Hiring 143

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 143

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Your marketing and sales budgets, and the personnel assigned to those teams, will also rise. A longer lead time for recruitment means higher quality recruits. Build a stronger team by using a hiring plan Get deep insights into MRR, churn, LTV and more to grow your business. It helps maintain consistent growth.

Sales Hiring 97

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Finance Forecasting 97

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Product Marketing Manager: This person is tasked with developing product marketing campaigns , crafting compelling marketing messages, and coming up with ideas to retain customers. Average salary: $46,035/yr.

Sales Hiring 96

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 96

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need. Manage People. This is one of the best things you can do, because 50% of the job of a CEO is recruiting a team, leading a team, empowering a team, convincing a team. Because they don’t know it’s impossible.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 279

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 19, 2022

Sales compensation planning can be a tricky beast to tame — but know that you’re not alone. I asked 12 incredible sales leaders across the SaaS industry to share their biggest challenges with comp planning and how to overcome them. Related: New to sales compensation planning? Top 10 sales compensation challenges.

Compensation 94

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Finance 94

ChurnZero

MARCH 11, 2020

Churn Reasons: You’re Not Digging Deep Enough. This is a guest post by Jay Nathan , Founder & Managing Partner at Customer Imperative. Disappointed, but oddly satisfied, I hung up the phone from a call with a recently-churned customer. Eventually, these issues become deal-breakers which can lead to churn.

Churn 52

Churn Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 52

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

At the time, I was a sales engineer, and my job was to close deals and move on to the next prospect. However, I found there were two flaws in our customer management process. There were also a number of customers who turned us into shelfware or essentially churned. We had presales, and we had post-sales.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review Compensation 98

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 19, 2021

Sales recruiting is broken. The sad truth is that VP of Sales are turning over within 19 months —and that timeline is shrinking. . Not only that, the market has heated way back up and the VP of Sales is one of the most sought after roles. This isn’t linear and there are many shades of grey when it comes to sales. .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Sales Hacker

APRIL 5, 2021

In 2020 I was building my sales team at Livestorm , and at the time we were going through a big hiring boom. Over the course of time, I’ve interviewed and talked to hundreds of sales candidates. This was the case for me years ago when I started applying for sales positions in France, Ireland, and Luxembourg. Culture fit.

Sales Hiring 92

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Company Culture Interviewing 92

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2019

I actually worked in sales for five and a half years and that’s probably why I have tended to gravitate to B2B marketing. Worked as an AE and then a sales manager. Decided to go to business school, did that for a little bit and then came out in management consulting, a company. So, they’re a B2B piece.

Sales Recruiting 185

Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 185

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

You can also use segmentation to help you identify and target at-risk users accordingly to reduce the churn rate. Segmentation has been proven to improve a vast range of product success metrics (not just sales efforts). Personalized churn prevention message. In-app message for recruiting beta testers. Create content (i.e.,

Strategy 93

Strategy Sales Recruiting Onboarding Churn 93

Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

In some companies, customer success managers may play an active role in the sales process, helping sales representatives elicit customer goals and persuade buyers of product benefits. At other companies, CS managers may be assigned to follow up on sales during the customer onboarding phase. Persuasion Skills.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review 91

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment.

Benchmarks 119

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 119

Valuize Consulting

JANUARY 25, 2024

Effective Cross-Functional Collaboration Your Digital CS program should be directed by Customer Success but also requires close partnership with Marketing, Product, Sales, and Revenue Operations. Strategic Resourcing Relying on traditional CSMs for fractional management of your digital program is not sustainable.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Scale Strategy 52

ChurnZero

JANUARY 25, 2024

Skillset 1: Sales acumen In 2024, driving revenue is a primary responsibility of CS. This means that sales acumen is no longer just a bonus for CS professionals—it’s a new baseline for many companies. Customer success manager roles The CSM role is becoming more strategic, with increased responsibility for driving revenue.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 52

InsightSquared

AUGUST 14, 2019

For sales professionals, AI is not only impacting your personal life, but it will soon influence your professional work too if it hasn’t already done so. Many of today’s forward-thinking companies have already begun using AI in their sales strategies. Strengthens Communication With Sales Leads.

AI 91

AI Artificial Intelligence Sales Recruiting Forecasting 91