SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Hire a leader who will not only agree with you but someone you can disagree with in a respectful and productive way. Each employee hired at Wiz is individually a personal brand.

Sales Recruiting 226

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 226

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople. She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business.

Scale 236

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 236

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2024

When to Hire Your First CPO You have to evaluate when you need your first Head of Product. If you bring in a really senior person too early, they may want to take the reigns before you have enough product market fit, and they may try to take on the CEO role. Do you have strong product market fit?

Scale 243

Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence 243

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. So, if he wanted to hire customer support, it could be a biomechanical engineer. Instead of hiring for skill, he focused more on core traits like empathy, patience, and being detail-oriented.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale SMB AI 244

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

I walk them through this when I hire them. There are many stories of legendary exec hires. I hired the person with a great resume but who didn’t get our business, culture, or community. Lesson: Many times, I thought, “I need to hire for the role I’ll need 4 years from now.” Of course, sometimes that is indeed true.

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 272

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

The CEO wants to hire someone with demand generation experience. The head of product would prefer someone with product marketing experience. What’s your advice when hiring a CMO? When you think about how to hire a really good CMO, you’re actually thinking about how to hire somebody that’s gonna do that.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Acquisition 248

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2021

You can’t hire some magic salesperson to “get you more sales”, at least not at first. Once you have 10, 15, 20 customers … you can hire someone to help. Freemium is a funnel management strategy and done right, later it can accelerate viral acquisition. First-to-market matters, but so do many other things.

Sales Hiring 335

Sales Hiring Investment Acquisition Product Marketing 335

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no sales people. ‘No No sales’ became nearly as synonymous with Atlassian as ‘no software’ was with Salesforce. Atlassian now has a sales team. Public PLG Businesses Are Doubling Down on Sales.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

Founder of Marketo, Phil Hernandez, and Marketo’s former EVP of Sales, Bill Binch, have had decades of experience tackling precisely these issues. Consider not only how many reps you have and how many you’ll hire, but also incorporate attrition and productivity metrics that give you insight into the health of your organization.

Sales Hiring 208

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 208

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

In this article, we’ve outlined the major roles that move the needle in terms of product growth alongside their KPIs and current salary ranges. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 91

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Initially, most companies start by focusing their marketing on where they have the most product market fit. At this stage, your marketing team should be laser-focused on finding out what resonates with your ICP: what are their needs are, how to serve this market, how to differentiate yourself vs competition.

Scale 202

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 202

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2023

But there’s a single metric that can reflect market demand, product market fit, how well a GTM engine is executing, and the quality of the product- and that is the CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback period. This spend is your lead gen, marketing, SDRs, and sales team salary and commission.

Scale 257

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 257

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. For every company that’s executing the freemium model successfully, there are hundreds more that struggle and the tension it can create between sales, marketing, and product teams.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

So the new sales leader is trying to figure out, can we go further up market? You just haven’t done it, so it’s usually a marketing issue and not an ICP or vertical issue. There can be exceptions, but you’d have to be the world’s best sales and marketing team to have exhausted your TAM, right?

Scale 221

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 221

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

From B2C consumer-focused tech to the next B2B enterprise cloud giants, B2B, and B2C technology companies are springing up left and right and sprinting toward multi-billion dollar valuations (whether on the private or public markets) faster than ever. What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)?

VP of Engineering 95

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 95

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

Marketing expertise falls into three segments: product marketing, demand generation, and brand marketing. Each of these kinds of marketers have critical skills for a startup. But the reason many marketing hires fail is the business doesn’t hire the right expertise at the right time.

Scale 214

Scale Startup Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 214

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. We think we should hold off doing channels until we’ve debugged the sales model.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

Editor’s Note: This article is part three of a four-part series that covers the most crucial product marketing activities for an early-stage startup. Ok, we tested the product out with a few potential customers. Let’s start hiring a whole sales team!”. Welcome to Part Three, focused on scaling sales.

Scale 52

Scale Product Marketing Sales Hiring Scaling 52

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. The framework consists of three elements: product-market fit, go-to-market fit, and growth and moat.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

Whether it’s creating better tools to write code and test code, better tools for customers to engage with reps, better tools for sales teams to engage with their prospects, all those things are happening inside of Bill. The opportunity is to leverage that trust factor to drive customer acquisition, and it has worked for us.

Payments 98

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 98

Sales Hacker

MARCH 15, 2022

In the 200th episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Asad Zaman , CEO of Sales Talent Agency (STA), where he rose through the ranks from AE to CEO, earning recognition as Toronto’s Young Professional of the Year (2019). There are over 40K more sales jobs openings than salespeople. How COVID has affected sales salaries.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition Development 94

User Pilot

JANUARY 17, 2024

The most common challenges that hinder SaaS growth are lack of product-market fit , ineffective sales and marketing strategies , customer churn, and long product development cycles. Here are the 15 most effective ways to scale your SaaS business: Create a solid customer acquisition strategy.

Scale 90

Scale Scaling SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 90

SaaSOptics

MAY 19, 2022

What Is Customer Acquisition? Customer Acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers in a business. Not only is it one of the main drivers of revenue growth for early-stage companies, but it’s a primary goal for SaaS businesses across market stages. What is a Customer Acquisition Strategy? Plain and simple.

Acquisition 59

Acquisition Scale Strategy Software Review 59

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

We’ve collected some of the best product management webinars for 2024, so you don’t miss out. TL;DR A product webinar is a virtual seminar showcasing and discussing a product's features and benefits as a marketing and sales tool. What is a product webinar? Book the demo today!

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring Generative AI AI Leadership 95

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR. So number six, thinking you’re getting away with under investing in management, up scaling in HR.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 245

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 3, 2017

It sounds like a simple question, but from the question of what costs to include and the right way to account for organic traffic to the pandora box of multi-touch attribution , there are lots of devils in the details. but "What will your CACs be if you invest $10-20 million in sales & marketing?".

Scale 233

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Acquisition 233

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2019

So data analytics, marketing customer analytics, and technology and acquisition. The second category is very interesting because this, you can translate that as the paid spend, of Facebook and what not, moving towards MarTech acquisition tools. Alice : Definitely pre-product market fit. Guillaume : Keep the mic.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Solutions Marketing 149

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 3, 2019

The customer acquisition cost can help you create, measure, and improve a business model that will put your business on the path to profitability. The design of your product? . Marketing? . What is the Customer Acquisition Cost? CAC stands for customer acquisition cost. Let’s play a little thought experiment.

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Underperforming Technical Team Startup Customer Lifetime Value 91

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times. Thinking that your first VP of Sales will take you from $0 to $100M. Startups should hire the right person for the next 18-24 months; anything beyond that is a bonus. (DK:

Sales Hiring 138

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 138

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

We now have a backdrop where it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build high-quality products. Markets are more crowded than ever, so building multi-product companies is the best way to compete. Lattice’s Timeline For Going Multi-Product — It’s Not Easy Lattice started in OKRs and performance and expanded out to other products.

Scale 241

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 241

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. They relied on a great product, with a passionate userbase that helped kickstart an organic growth engine which sold the product for them. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

The Angel VC

SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers. The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers.

Scale 153

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales 153

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Why startup founders should treat fundraising like a sales funnel. Beware of flashy hires from big corporations. There are always exceptions, but when brought in early on, these kinds of hires tend to flounder. . Get your COO on board and hire for operations roles earlier than you think. Hire for brand even earlier. .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Marketing 82

User Pilot

JULY 23, 2023

You should consider the industry, company size, duration, and budget while structuring your marketing teams. An organizational structure for a B2B marketing team consists of the following: The product marketing team for focusing on new feature launches and in-app marketing. Let’s look at them in detail.

B2B 77

B2B Sales Hiring Marketing Social Media 77

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. I’m Sameer Dholakia, CEO of now Twilio SendGrid as of Friday after our completed acquisition.

Scale 130

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

They started in the point of sale market, and then as the company scaled, they rolled out new value props and modules for payroll, or Toast capital, or ways to manage your employee base. You can also find your second act inorganically via acquisition as Twilio did with SendGrid. This is really founder-led sales.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 160