SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to hire a Great VP of Sales. And we’ll keep talking about it — so long as 70% of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it 1 year. I wanted to take a moment to explore the flip-side … a guide to why first-time VPs of Sales that finally get their shot — fail.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 356

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

This happens with some regularity in SaaS, I’ve learned (and to be clear: I’m not talking about any company I’ve invested in, am an advisor to, board member of, etc – Because when it’s still a very small team, with no true management team … co-founders can kind of hack it to $1m-$2m in ARR together.

Sales Recruiting 251

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 251

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2020

A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se. A VP of Sales who is smart, polished, and worked at the right place, in a management-level position. That can talk about quota attainment and sales operations and scaling and number. you might ask.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 363

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.

Sales Recruiting 185

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 185

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 234

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 234

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2022

You need engineering, product in all start-ups — but in SaaS, even in the very early days, you also need sales, client success, true support, demand gen marketing, etc. And Things I Successfully (More or Less) Offloaded By/At $1m ARR: Client/Customer Success. Routine Sales. Recruiting >=20% of Your Time.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 286

Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Hiring team members with the right customer success manager skills is critical for the effectiveness of your CS team and strategy. Here we’ve identified the 13 most essential qualities to consider when hiring a CS manager. What Is a Customer Success Manager (CSM)? Relationship management.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review 91

Totango

MARCH 15, 2022

Efforts to scale customer success team activity often fall short because of failure to avoid common mistakes. Your human resources practices, your project management procedures and your technology strategy all need to come together in order for you to scale up without overextending yourself.

Sales Recruiting 96

Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 96

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2022

The role of a VP is to own everything required to hit the goals for a functional area – Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Finance, or Customer Success. This includes: Recruiting the team. While the answer may sound obvious, I’m not sure it always is in early-ish stage start-ups. This can be hard.

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Finance Engineering 278

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2023

So one recent survey we did really brought out a healthy debate: does your VP of Sales really need to be a product expert? Many of the comments said it was more important a VP of Sales understand process and leadership more than the product itself. They often melt. I say, you just gotta know the product. Not just with buzzwords.

Scale 249

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 249

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

This is a guest article by Michael Su , senior consultant of Customer Success, The Success League. Customer Success is still a young field and a new concept for many companies. When I ventured out to build my first Customer Success department at a tech software company, my leadership team thought I was nuts.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review Compensation 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

So backstage at SaaStr Annual this year, and in a number of other conversations since, I’ve had a chance to get a few quiet moments with maybe two dozen top CROs and VPs of Sales. Yes, macro issues come up, and how they have to sell to more stakeholders now, and sales cycles are longer. But the best long ago adapted.

Sales Recruiting 236

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales 236

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

But building a sales compensation plan that both aligns your sales team’s compensation with your customers’ objectives and recruits top salespeople can be incredibly difficult in usage-based pricing. Determine where your sales team makes your customers more successful In usage-based pricing, value = usage.

Compensation 91

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Systems Review 91

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2023

SaaStr 630: Sales-led vs. Product-led? SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  5.

Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital 210

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Throughout her time there, she scaled the SaaS company from $1M ARR to pre- IPO, along the way, creating the category of customer success software, and paving the way for Gainsight’s $1.1B She’s written extensively on the topic and co-authored a book The Customer Success Economy. If so, at what stage?

Scale 293

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 293

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

A CRO owns and directs the strategy over a company’s revenue cycle, but there’s not a set standard for operational or management decisions: in addition to sales and sales development, they might be responsible for customer success, lead generation and pipelines, and even marketing and brand development.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 203

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 203

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 21, 2023

Designing a successful post-sale strategy requires choices, says CXology’s Tim Conder. Without making those choices upfront, you’ll find it hard to create a good customer experience and scale it, and you’ll easily fall into the chaotic trap of “doing what it takes”. A: First, it matters how you recruit.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Scale Customer Success Sales 52

ChurnZero

JANUARY 25, 2024

How will customer success jobs, and the skills they require, evolve in 2024? With technology advancing and customer expectations rising, customer success has become an essential force driving business growth and customer loyalty within the SaaS industry.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 52

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Chuck is the co-founder of Blueprint Expansion , a GTM roles recruiting firm that has helped over 50 VC-backed companies make amazing Sales, Marketing, & Customer Success hires. By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase.

Sales Hiring 103

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing SMB 103

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

Level Up Your Customer Success Organization. In the subscription economy, there’s no debate about whether or not to invest in Customer Success (CS); 70% of rapidly growing businesses say that Customer Success is extremely important ( Hubspot , 2017). The fourth challenge is complexity.

VP of Engineering 98

VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

Valuize Consulting

JANUARY 25, 2024

Mastering Digital Customer Success: Insights From Valuize Spark Toronto What does your Digital CS model look like today and what was the journey like to get here? In the rapidly evolving B2B recurring revenue economy, the focus on Digital Customer Success is more pertinent than ever.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Scale Strategy 52

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. Take say 100 leads a month spread across 2 great reps, then bring in a new VP of Sales that hires 4 weak reps. This is hard.

Sales Recruiting 205

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 205

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 244

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 244

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

Dig deeper on a lot of titles during recruiting. A "VP of Revenue" often knows nothing about inside sales or building a sales team. A "CRO" often doesn't want to do sales anymore. A “VP of Revenue” for a VP of Sales job. But marketers never, ever know how to do sales.

Sales Hiring 297

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Growth Hacking Product Marketing 297

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2022

My general learnings: By 20-30 employees, you should have 1-2 good managers in place such that at least 50% of the company can run based only on weekly staff meetings, 1-on-1s, and “grab me when you need me-s” E.g., a great first VP of Sales that can just handle sales. management team by 50 employees or so.

Part-Time VPE 209

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 209

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of Customer Success at the revenue intelligence platform Gong. Moving upmarket means larger customers and higher revenue, but it’s not without its challenges. For Linda, it all comes down to your approach to customer success.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Do at least 20–30 customer interviews before you start writing too much code. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer. A 10x feature that customers will pay for, that the key competition doesn’t have.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

Could he or she recruit a better team? Often, just one great new VP of Marketing or Sales or Customer Success or Product will tilt the curve enough that you’d back to Better Growth. Not < 30%-40% … where it clearly isn’t quite working. Raise (more) capital? With less stress.

Sales Recruiting 243

Sales Recruiting Customer Success SaaS Management 243

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 280

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 280

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. That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. I Need a VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 361

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 361

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. Singular focus on sales. As the title would hint at, the VP of Sales should focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 93

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 93

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 2, 2019

If you must choose a long term headquarters for your startup, call an executive recruiter who focuses in that city. VP Engineering, VP Product, VP Sales, VP Customer Success, VP Marketing, or VP Operations. And who better to call to understand the labor market dynamics than an executive recruiter from that locale?

Sales Recruiting 214

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 214

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2023

The first goal of sales at a startup isn’t to bring in revenue — it’s to get customer feedback. I’ve used our sales process to iterate our way to product market-fit and wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way. Use sales conversations as a tool to get product feedback. So how do you get there?

Sales Recruiting 88

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 88

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.

Sales Recruiting 335

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 335

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

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. Define your ICP as early as you can and segment your sales team accordingly.

Scale 246

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 246

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Fortunately, more organizers than ever before are consciously seeking out female sales experts for panels, presentations, and podcasts. At Sales Hacker, we’re serious about diversity, and for that reason, we’ve compiled a list of 530+ female sales experts to consider for your next event. Sales Development. Sales Growth.

VP of Engineering 121

VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Payment Services 121