SaaStr

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

One of the biggest challenges in scaling a SaaS company has always been VP and SVP level talent. The companies that create the SVPs you’ll need, especially in Sales and Marketing, are still mostly based in the SF Bay Area. But for now, if you are beginning to scale, aggressively recruit that Bay Area VP you always wanted to hire.

Sales Hiring 348

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 348

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. It does mean a well-oiled machine that hires strong reps of all backgrounds, and gets them the help and training so they can scale up and succeed.

Sales Hiring 362

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 362

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 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

From $1m in ARR, and Then Forever After: Recruiting Great VPs. Later, once you have a brand, you’ll be competing with Hot Startups nipping at your heals for top VPs. You need to learn to become great at recruiting. More here: From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase. It never ends.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 284

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 278

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 278

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Employees are the brand Every employee at your organization is the brand.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 260

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

The toughest part in the end is always recruiting. Recruiting. Over time, that’s recruiting more and more senior folks, so the target changes. As your company scales, you’ll start to hit 15%+ attrition in your employee base just naturally each year. You’ll have to be recruiting new ones all the time.

Sales Recruiting 232

Sales Recruiting Scale Compensation Business Model 232

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 289

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 289

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Hire more sales reps in the areas where they are profitable. Generally, they can scale and go further than you think. It’s time to add a new mentor to help you scale. Not by June.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 325

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does it get easier or harder to scale SaaS as your company grows? Generally, it gets easier to grow at a “good”/modest rate at you scale, but harder to grow at an outsize rate. Once you cross $5m-$10m in ARR, then usually: You have a brand. At least, you have a mini-brand in your niche. This helps a lot.

Scale 267

Scale Sales Recruiting Branding Scaling 267

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

This requires effort from your entire organization, and Handshake VP, Employer Partnerships Jessica Peluso outlines some changes that you can make to your brand, and your application, interview, and offer process that will help find the talent you are trying to attract and hire. Below is the transcript of Jessica’s session.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 261

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. The ones that will benefit from taking a risk on a less-proven team and brand. The sales leader that did well, but their startup still didn’t quite make it. Then, they can scale almost infinitely. Even though they already did that before.

Part-Time VPE 254

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 254

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

The question facing founders recruiting marketers is: which is the most important to prioritize? Marketing expertise falls into three segments: product marketing, demand generation, and brand marketing. Brand marketers are the third type of marketer who develops the market’s awareness of a company. Why is this?

Scale 255

Scale Startup Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 255

OpenView Labs

APRIL 29, 2021

Recruiting top talent is the common denominator across all scaling startups. Nine out of 10 founders and CEOs I connect with are involved in recruiting on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Many of them are learning on the fly and trying to juggle being CEO and Chief People Officer/Lead Recruiter/Brand Evangelist all at once.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 98

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

Building ‘opinionated products’ and the importance of customer intimacy Lessons learned from scaling Twitter’s ad business from zero to $650 million in three years. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) Plus, an analysis of the top 75 trending sales AI tools.

Scale 97

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 97

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. For B2B SaaS companies, building a base of advocates – customers who champion your brand can be a pivotal go-to-market advantage.

Scale 108

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 108

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. And now it’s all about like, can you really scale and execute? Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 292

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 292

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 232

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 232

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 16, 2019

So if scaling your sales organization is a priority in 2020, here are the things you need to be aware of to make sure you do so successfully. In my experience both as a salesperson and as a recruiter, it’s primarily been four things: They want the work they’re doing to matter to them. How to build a magnetic brand.

Sales Recruiting 78

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 78

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

The company scaled from a hundred people to 800, last I know, but it changes every day. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. Bobby Patrick: Right. Luciana: It has been quite a journey.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 274

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure. 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

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first. Names stick.

Scale 160

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 160

How To Buy Saas

MAY 21, 2025

Whether youre a startup , an SMB , or a global enterprise , the right ATS can streamline your recruitment process, save time, and help attract top talent in a competitive market. Recruitee Best Collaborative Recruiting ATS Pricing: Key Features: Ideal Use Case: 4. Whats the difference between an ATS and a recruitment CRM?

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 52

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

We work with brands across the industry, like IBM, Disney, Intuit, Microsoft to help them build better products to understand what their users are doing. Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. Josh : I made probably the first 50, 60 offers in the company personally, and that does not scale.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 296

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 296

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 15, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. That’s why HG Insights created The Next Generation of Sales AI report — to calm the FOMO and help you bring AI to your GTM teams. You’re not alone. Let’s get into it.

Scale 110

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting Technical Review 110

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

And can you talk a little bit about touching on the hiring point, because you did say that you focused a lot on talent, and recruiting. And coming from Brazil without a big network in Silicon Valley, un-launched, without a website, it was actually really hard to recruit the first ten people. I’m going to go, and scale it up.”

Sales Hiring 209

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 209

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 102

Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 102

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Ultrasite is a global website builder, Chinafy is a tool for making websites China-compatible, and Connect is their collaborative content management platform for brands. Talkpush is a conversational recruiting CRM that allows employers and job seekers to connect in new ways across the globe. They have three main products.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 8, 2018

In a time where buyer behavior has rendered cold calling nearly obsolete, successful sales prospecting begins with using tools like live chat and social media to build relationships. He’d go on to become the VP of Sales at Sprinklr, guiding the company through its own high growth period, before striking out on his own.

Social Media 186

Social Media Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 186

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 18, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newslettr by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. Jonathan Moss (EVP at Experity) showcased an Account Plan GPT that streamlines sales and marketing account research for outbound efforts. Link to GPT. Link to GPT.

Sales Recruiting 99

Sales Recruiting Software Review Scale AI 99

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services 234

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 234

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

Rick started Guru in 2013, after successfully founding Boomi (a cloud integration and data management company) and selling it to Dell. He joined me for a conversation on tackling issues that come up as you scale your customer experience. When scaling your customer experience, remember AI can’t simulate human empathy.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 156

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Hacker

APRIL 8, 2024

In the competitive arena of B2B sales, mastering the art of prospecting is key to ensuring a healthy sales pipeline, daily demos booked, and hitting your sales quota. Fortunately for you, we’ve sifted through the clutter and done all the legwork to bring you the top 10 sales prospecting tools. Wiza reviews 4.5/5

Scale 121

Scale Sales Recruiting B2B AI Search 121