SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2023

Especially if you haven’t done a lot of sales yourself. Boy sales is hard. Yes, once you have a brand, and inbound leads, the engine gets more established. But then you raise the quotas, and sales is still hard. So outbound gets harder, too, later often. And second, value the best sales execs.

Startup 245

Startup Engineering Branding Sales 245

SaaStr

OCTOBER 1, 2022

Want to get outbound going, for the first time? What almost never works, somewhat surprisingly, is hiring a Director of Outbound as your first outbound hire. I see many startups want to add outbound, but not really have a lot of experience. They don’t know outbound, they haven’t done it, they don’t get it.

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Startup 234

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Traditional Sales Teams Vs. Modern Sales Teams Traditionally, most people learned to sell by taking a product, showing the sales team with a demo of how to use it, and then sending them off to sell it. This can lead to making changes to the product, longer sales cycles, and not focusing on the right customer for your product.

Point of Sale 236

Point of Sale Forecasting Technical Review SMB 236

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

Scale 181

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 181

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

How CAC targets drive GTM strategies: If Your CAC Target Is Low You’ll likely focus on small-to-medium businesses and use tools like inbound sales and low-touch or no-touch self-service. The sales cycle at this stage may be very short. The sales cycle will be slightly longer at this stage. But over time, things change.

Scale 220

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 220

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Q: Should sales reps be compensated differently based on how much prospecting they do? For example, if all of their leads come inbound (without effort on their part) should they receive a lesser % per deal vs a rep that prospects for their own leads? And the sales cycles are much faster from inbound leads.

Sales Hiring 169

Sales Hiring Compensation Sales Strategy 169

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

Starting with inbound leads, Chief Marketing Officer at SalesLoft, Lauren Vaccarello, shares secrets for optimizing your process, nailing handoffs, and increasing efficiency all the way through implementation. Let’s begin with the understatement of the century — sales is really hard! The same is true for sales.

Revenue 212

Revenue Technical Review Forecasting AI 212

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2021

I’ve written a lot about this, but for most start-ups, you can boil it down to two criteria any first VP of Sales just has to meet: Has she built at least a small team before? Sales of $3,000 a year products are very different from $300,000 or even $30,000 a year products. Don’t expect your VPS to be great at all the aspects of sales.

Sales Recruiting 272

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Development Team Review 272

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

Inbound marketing funnel reports focus on the effectiveness of marketing efforts in attracting the interest of potential customers and turning them into leads. Outbound marketing funnel reports help organizations evaluate the impact of and refine their outbound processes, for example, cold emailing. Wondering about the name?

Sales Funnel 99

Sales Funnel SaaS User Experience Trends 99

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.

Scale 251

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 251

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. The demand gen playbook is just so different at different ACVs: From $0-1k ACV, marketing is a B2C-style playbook — with no sales at all. Not just in sales. Not really.

Sales Hiring 268

Sales Hiring Growth Hacking B2C SMB 268

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 241

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 241

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 217

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 217

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A VP of Sales that has never done outbound, if they don’t take it on fairly early — they never really will. But the top VPs of Sales know you have to get it going soon. Something sounded off. His opportunity commit.

Sales Recruiting 311

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 311

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2020

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr over the years about all different types of VPs of Sales. small, medium, and large) and through multiple processes (in-bound, out-bound, upsell, channel, partner) … you can’t expect your VP of Sales to be perfect at everything. From Stretch VPs to stage-appropriate VPs. And winning fast.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Customer Success 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2022

“The hardest part of closing any deal is finding it,” says Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake. Over his 35+ year career, Nilsson has managed 100+ Sales Development Representatives (SDR) across four continents, six countries, and ten cities. Every minute spent prospecting is a minute not spent closing revenue.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Development Technical Review Management 199

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Head of Sales – What Corners Can I Cut? A bad VP of Sales is a total disaster. Or can you compromise? And if, so, where and when?

Sales Hiring 271

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 271

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2020

Aaron Ross discusses inbound and outbound sales and how to integrate Sales and Marketing Teams to re-ignite growth. Learn why it is difficult to have accurate and trustworthy outbound dashboards and how to clean up and educate your clients. Companies don’t have enough sales roles. Good job guys.

Scale 188

Scale Outsourcing Services Revenue Outsourced Development 188

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2023

It would be so great if we could all outsource sales, sales development, sales operations, and more. Use them exclusively for inbound qualification” — Kevin Kost, Director CS, GrammaTech “Yes and no….very It’s like trying to hire a sales team before the CEO proves the sales model themselves.

Outsourcing Services 230

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Development Team Review Sales Hiring 230

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales? A VP of Sales might seem the logical place to have your first SDR team report. It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. Sales leaders who have only done inbound and responded to leads aren’t those people.

CTO Hire 172

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 172

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Cash was tight and I didn’t know any great VPs of Biz Dev, so between myself and my VPs of Sales, Product and Customer Success, we all jointly managed our key partners. 6/ Adding an outbound team earlier. I’d never managed or built a high-velocity outbound team.

Part-Time VPE 257

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 257

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Because SaaS requires so many functions beyond engineering, especially if it’s sales-driven … outbound, SDRs, inbound, field sales, marketing, customer success, support, more complex product management, etc. What will it look like, if it’s a sales-driven model? That’s a yielded quota).

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 347

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2019

Or a specific outbound strategy. Inbound or Outbound Sales? You can to add outbound to inbound. To add field sales to inside sales. Once you hit Initial Traction in SaaS, say that first $1m-$1.5m in ARR, you’ll finally find something that works. One channel, often. Or Facebook ads.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring B2C Marketing Investment 237

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2021

We’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales at SaaStr, and I’ve relinked to some of the most popular posts below. Sales of $3,000 a year products are very different from $300,000 or even $30,000 a year products. Sales of $3,000 a year products are very different from $300,000 or even $30,000 a year products.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Development Team Review 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. Their growth at this stage depended on four factors: Inbound: implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Outbound: including Account Based Marketing (ABM). They also hired a VP of Partners who knew how to scale B2B software.

Scale 186

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 186

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2023

Daniel, you grew to 3 million in ARR before you hired a VP of Sales. Daniel : We followed a lean start up approach to building our sales process. I focused on learning and getting the process right, so I did all the sales myself. An engineering team and the sales team was me with a laptop. How did they do? All of them!

Sales Hiring 226

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 226

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 27, 2020

Either way, whether this article was forced on you ( outbound ) or you researched and found it yourself ( inbound ), the point is that you’re still here. It means that the difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing boils down to getting your business in front of two different groups of people.

Marketing 139

Marketing Social Media Advertising Sales Funnel 139

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2021

Manages inbound (vs outbound) PR. Events, steak dinners, supporting a field sales team. More on this here: Your VP Sales Has a Sales Quota. A classic VP of Marketing will do 4 things (although of course no one is great at all 4): Brand and Corporate Marketing. Gets the color of the logo right. Manages press.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Marketing Product Marketing Branding 273

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 26, 2022

Some common examples include: Chatbots , which perform tasks such as greeting website visitors, starting new conversations, asking follow-up questions, offering product tips, capturing sales lead data, and routing customers to the correct support channels. The AI component is crucial. Why use conversational AI?

Artificial Intelligence 118

Artificial Intelligence AI Scale Machine Learning 118

Kellblog

OCTOBER 21, 2021

While you can define them in different ways, I think a pretty standard way of defining the pipeline sources is as follows: Marketing , also known as “marketing/inbound.” SDR/outbound: 10%. Sales/outbound: 10%. ” Opportunities generated as a result of people responding to marketing campaigns [3].

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Advertising Forecasting 131

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2022

In every business and industry, customers will have questions or need support before, during, and after a sale. Call centers have historically been a popular way to offer that support by employing customer service representatives to assist both inbound and outbound queries from existing and potential customers over the phone.

Outsourcing Services 118

Outsourcing Services Social Media Customer Support Communication 118

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2022

Our target market is US-based enterprise sales, marketing teams, and companies with software. We flooded this market with the now-classic double funnel model: The “Inbound” Funnel. The “Outbound” Funnel. Even though we empower other companies to use PLG, Reprise had a fairly classic approach to enterprise sales.

Scale 281

Scale B2C Enterprise Acquisition 281

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them.

Sales Hiring 188

Sales Hiring Metrics Revenue Sales 188

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

There’s a common debate out there, it goes something like this: “Our sales development representatives (SDRs) need to look for pain: finding business owners with a problem and the ability to get budget to go fix it.” Whether your SDR is working an inbound or outbound motion. ” Who’s right?

Scale 144

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Marketing 144

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2021

Ep #401: In this session, you will learn how to make the Freemium model work while also incorporating the traditional sales-driven strategy. Announcer: Up today, the secrets to doing freemium and sales-driven sales at the same time with Mixmax CEO, Olof Mathé. What do we mean when we talk about freemium and direct sales?

Sales 242

Sales Pricing Enterprise Outsourced Development 242

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

The report uses data from 5m sales and customer calls to benchmark sales team performance. For example, the typical win rate of a sales qualified lead is 19%. And the typical sales manager reviews only 8% of calls, but the best managers spend much more. There’s lots of great data in the report.

Benchmarks 201

Benchmarks Customer Success Sales Data 201

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Determine if your growth is product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led. Determine if your company is direct vs. indirect sales-led for tech alliances, channels, and Student Information Systems. The go-to-Market team has an Evangelist sales leader with scrappy sales and customer success members. Building a Community.

Scale 310

Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 310