Kellblog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

The other day a founder asked me about interviewing because a candidate had described me as “a great interviewer,” and she wanted to know why. I find interviewing and recruiting difficult, have made plenty of mistakes over the years, and the consequences of those mistakes are invariably painful. What size deals?

Sales Recruiting 109

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Finance 109

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2023

In this ultimate list of product manager interview questions, we have tried to simplify the process of hiring great product managers. Despite not being classed as a C-level position, product managers are often leading multidisciplinary initiatives that start with your developers and end with the sales team so confident leadership is a must.

Interviewing 98

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Management Sales Hiring 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Sales tools seem under more pressure right now than infrastructure, for example. If no one is buying sales and marketing tools, why are ZoomInfo and HubSpot growing at record rates, for example? The post Gartner: Business Software Spend Still Forecast to Rise 11.3% No doubt, something is clearly happening. Be honest.

Forecasting 254

Forecasting Artificial Intelligence Software Business 254

Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

When I first wrote this article, we were in a very different place, with unemployment at an all-time low and sales hiring a top priority. Whether your company has paused hiring, topgrading, still hiring, or will be in the future, having the right people for your business and stage will ALWAYS be a priority. The cherry on top?

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 94

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 22, 2020

If you think sales is a simple job, I have a few hundred professional connections who would like a word with you. By mastering your sales interview questions. As a longtime recruiting leader, I’ve worked with countless hiring managers looking to fill sales roles , and I’ve had a firsthand look at their interview process.

Sales Hiring 76

Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 76

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Set and reinforce them early — as early as interviews. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 212

User Pilot

APRIL 8, 2024

How is it different from the top-down business model? The latter is less user-centric and relies on the sales team targeting the key decision-makers and nurturing them with sales pitches, presentations, and demos , to secure an enterprise deal for the whole organization. Bottom-up SaaS approaches: Product-Led Growth.

Strategy 100

Strategy Business SaaS Customer Lifetime Value 100

OpenView Labs

JULY 20, 2020

Interviewing is hard , and interviewing candidates for sales roles can be doubly so. Sales requires a mix of left- and right-brained qualities, and accurately evaluating a candidate’s skills is a challenge for hiring managers. Why is effective interviewing so important? Better interviewing = better sales teams.

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Interviewing Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 73

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Success in sales requires the right skills and a competitive, driven, and personable nature. However, scoring a great sales role takes more than just being confident in your own skills and nature. Just as sales is its own animal in the professional ecosystem, the sales interview is its own unique beast.

Sales Recruiting 76

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Sales 76

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews. From those nine interviews, I received four offers. Going into the interviews, I knew what I wanted out of a job– that part was simple.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 271

FastSpring

APRIL 4, 2024

As an experienced sales and GTM leader, John Eitel has more than witnessed how product-led growth (PLG) has affected the tech and SaaS space in the last few years — he and his teams have been up close and personal with how PLG increased in popularity as a sales strategy. “I What success looks like for using both together.

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Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 122

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. To stick with founder-led sales longer than most folks do, i.e. past $1.5m-$2m ARR or so.

Sales Hiring 297

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 297

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 184

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 184

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

One of the most consistent errors made in sales projections and planning is mismatching the ramp time to the sales cycle. If my startup has a 9 months sales cycle and the VP of Sales projects a six month ramp time, my startup is committing this error. For example, lead quality, sales training, funnel conversion rates.

Scale 253

Scale Forecasting Sales Interviewing 253

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2023

The best VPs of Sales I’ve hired were Directors of Sales before. Even if you are quietly biased here, let it go when they show up incredibly on top of how your business works, and where it should go. And whatever you see as a flag during the interview process, is almost always 10x bigger once they join full-time.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Startup 278

ChurnZero

JUNE 30, 2021

A CSM needs to be responsible for cultivating exceptional experiences and sustained value for your customers by acting as their trusted advisor and advocate from the point of sale through the renewal and throughout the rest of the customers’ lifecycle. 20 Interview Questions to Ask Your Customer Success Manager Candidates.

Interviewing 72

Interviewing Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale 72

Nimble - Sales

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

The main goal of any interview is […]. The post Find the Best Candidate with These Sales Interview Questions appeared first on Nimble Blog. If you want to find the right person amidst a number of experienced applicants for the position you have, you have to know exactly what to look for.

Interviewing 66

Interviewing Sales Business 66

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Overcoming challenges by optimizing for success In the early stages of setting up your SaaS business, it’s always a good idea to invest time thinking about the direction you want to take. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 237

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

A successful, growing business depends as much on its metrics as it does on its people. Founder of Marketo, Phil Hernandez, and Marketo’s former EVP of Sales, Bill Binch, have had decades of experience tackling precisely these issues. Even if monthly quotas don’t seem to fit your business model, Bill would suggest it anyway.

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Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 196

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2021

The moment comes when it’s time to hire your first VP Sales. We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales , What a VP Sales Really Does , and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. So at this stage, the VP Sales, while necessary, sure looks expensive.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 219

CustomerSuccessBox

OCTOBER 31, 2021

Many CX professionals across the globe still don’t understand the criticality of Quarterly Business review. This is why we, at CustomerSuccessBox , thought of interviewing CS leaders to understand their perspective of QBR. The second interview in the series is with Mary Poppen. Why is Quarterly Business Review important?

Interviewing 52

Interviewing Consulting Education Customer Success 52

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

Incredibly, ZoomInfo has scaled to IPO with an entirely sales-driven motion. He breaks down how GTM efficiency drives their ability to scale with sales-driven motion and other insights you can apply to scale your SaaS business. Your CFO is a business partner who helps you understand the rhythms of your business.”.

Scale 230

Scale Sales Hiring Interviewing Engineering 230

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. But no sales team can afford to grow without intention. Many leads’ first meaningful interaction with your business will be a conversation with a salesperson – you have to carefully consider what kind of experience you want that to be, and who will be delivering it.

Scale 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160

Sales Hacker

MARCH 8, 2018

Sales interviews are nerve-wracking. You may have to pass on hundreds of excellent sales hires—it’s definitely frustrating. Hopefully, these 5 tips will help you avoid many of the pitfalls I see candidates falling into, and drastically improve how you prepare for a sales interview. Sales interview must-dos

Sales Hiring 69

Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 69

OPEXEngine

APRIL 12, 2022

The other day a founder asked me about interviewing because a candidate had described me as “a great interviewer,” and she wanted to know why. I find interviewing and recruiting difficult, have made plenty of mistakes over the years, and the consequences of those mistakes are invariably painful. To line of business, IT, or both?

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Finance 40

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. One key lesson we’ve learned from the best founders we’ve worked with is that they don’t need to learn the hard way by risking their businesses and employees.

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Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

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. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 267

User Pilot

JANUARY 22, 2024

For your product marketing strategy, however, you’ll need to align your sales and marketing teams, create a value-based pricing strategy , collect and apply customer feedback , and map out the customer journey. Whether that is brand awareness, lead generation, or sales, your chosen framework should align with the objective.

Product Marketing 105

Product Marketing Marketing Social Media Scale 105

Sales Hacker

APRIL 18, 2023

Table of contents Joel’s background: 80% interview rate, 0 sales experience Burn your resume! Here’s why Statistics: Video pitches vs. resumes How to make a video pitch Video pitch + follow-up cadence Real success stories Hone your mindset My story: How I landed an 80% interview rate with 0 sales experience It was early 2020.

Sales Recruiting 78

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales 78

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 11, 2023

Before we get into it, curious to hear your thoughts on last weeks Sales Hacker/GTMnow announcement ?! This week I sat down and interview the VP of Sales at Crunchbase , Ang McManamon. Ang shares her 5 P’s of Sales Leadership: Professionalism Preparation Process Performance Play More on these below. Grit is a must-have.

Scale 63

Scale Leadership Sales Hiring Sales 63

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

If you’re looking to move up the ladder into a sales leadership role, your resume is key to getting your foot in the door. I’m the founder of iCareerSolutions, a 20x award-winning resume-writing company, specializing in executive and C-suite level resumes that get my clients high-level interviews. And I should know. Manage pipeline.

Leadership 77

Leadership Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 77

Dubb

MAY 4, 2023

Learn more The post How Sales & Marketing Automations have taken over Businesses with Robin Alex! The story continues on dubb.com.  Listen to the full podcast here: Listen to this podcast on the platform of your choice here. appeared first on Dubb Blog.

Marketing 52

Marketing Business Sales Software 52

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

I believe in these strategies so much that I’ve focused my business on helping others implement them for their own companies as a public speaking coach. These strategies helped me land my first high-ticket client three weeks after starting my business and hit my first $10,000 month in sales just four months later.

Scale 88

Scale Sales Funnel Development Social Media 88

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. Is a CRO right for you?

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 250

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2022

It takes a deep understanding of both the art and science of sales engagement for a company as large as Adobe to successfully transition from in-person sales to a remote model. Join us as we discuss: Storytelling in sales and bringing your authentic self. Shifting from in-person sales to remote sales. Cheryl Turja.

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Sales Innovation Interviewing Education 70

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

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). Is it going to come from the Sales and Marketing budget, or General Administrative budget? leverage Training & Development.

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VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. Conducting interviews. What’s your biggest weakness?

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80