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 198

Sales Recruiting Scale Compensation Business Model 198

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic. The original version here on Lattice Engines’ Sales and Marketing Hub.

Sales Recruiting 303

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 303

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. Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company.

Sales Recruiting 188

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 188

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level.

Scale 221

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 221

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 279

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2020

There are so many good ones, but these should keep you busy watching for the next few days! #1: On how to recruit in the early days, when not everyone gets it. Therese shares: How to know how long a VP can scale. How to recruit in a less hot space. On how and when to be respectful to potential partners, like Salesforce.

Scale 180

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SMB 180

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. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Ah the VP of Sales. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. The second post is a script for you to use (and modify as you see fit) – 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales Candidate. Just so you know, there are 48 Different Types of VP Sales. The toughest hire. Such a high failure rate.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

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 256

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 256

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. Hiring sales leaders will get harder.

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 53

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. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.

Sales Hiring 310

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 310

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster. That was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. We are in a different business. We’ve scaled it pretty far pretty quickly. We are not a software business.

Scale 208

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 208

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

However, continuing this way isn’t the path to huge scale. Suddenly, the business is working. The founders have hired department heads, who manage employees. What will the business need in six months? To recruit 100 people. They must anticipate what the business will need a few quarters out.

Scale 228

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Startup 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization? Does PLG really help scale by a large amount? The go-to-market playbook.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 202

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 COOs have become more common in management teams as ways for founders & CEOs to build the management team to scale a business.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 293

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 we were like less than 10 million ARR and business was doing very well.

Sales Recruiting 256

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 256

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2021

Still, an overall deep-dive on lessons learned the second and third time around: Not Easier : Recruiting – Not Easier. You might think after (goodness) the best part of 20 years of working in tech, 18 as an executive or CEO, and 13 as a founder … I’d be pretty good at recruiting at this point. I’m not.

Sales Recruiting 345

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 345

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 23, 2021

Recently, Redpoint Office Hours welcomed Allison Pickens to clarify the COO role and when startups should consider recruiting one. Whereas a decade ago, a board might have hired a professional CEO to scale the operations of a startup, today, more boards seek COOs. The CoS doesn’t manage anyone. The Four COO Archetypes.

Sales Recruiting 192

Sales Recruiting Startup Scale Sales Hiring 192

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

But you need more than a vague desire to start a business. That builds great business.”. Recruitment: Getting the right talent onboard is a critical step. Sales: You must understand how to grow your sales machine, and it isn’t easy. Sales: You must understand how to grow your sales machine, and it isn’t easy.

Sales Recruiting 221

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Delivery Travel 221

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. After establishing product market fit, the startups grow their management team to scale.

Sales Recruiting 215

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 215

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2019

Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Giraffe is a mobile job matching platform that helps medium skilled workers get access to opportunities and helps businesses to recruit staff faster, and easier, and more affordably than any other way. Yeah, great.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 172

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 98

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

This trend leverages social media platforms to build connections and establish meaningful relationships with potential business prospects — and when it comes to social selling, LinkedIn is the MVP. I’ve never created LinkedIn content with the “goal” of lead generation or immediate-term sales.

Sales Recruiting 125

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 125

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

They see it as a key differentiator to win as you scale. You never have a perfect management team until you are at $10m+ ARR, at the earliest, in 98/100 cases. Still, some VCs want to see at least one solid VP on the team, or at least, one solid manager you can scale under. The Googlers. The Palantirians. They want that.

Scale 340

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 340

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

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

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. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. With less drama.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 363

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 155

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 155

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2020

To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. To not have to manage any customers yourself in customer success, and instead be a strategist. You can’t scale after that without one. The Benefits of Hiring a Stretch VP of Sales (and The Risks).

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS 239

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.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

Like most things in life, hiring sales talent is a matter of timing. Especially since the best candidates with strong sales skills are usually snatched up within 10 days. Add to that the dramatic pace of business, and it can be very difficult to put the right people in place. Business Moves at the Speed of Light.

Sales Hiring 76

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 76

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? Some businesses employ all four, others just use one or two.

Compensation 152

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 152

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2022

It’s the never-ending stereotype –– marketing and sales are eternal “frenemies.” In this session, Tolithia Kornweibel, CRO at Gusto, shares advice on creating sustainable partnerships between marketing and sales. . Tip Three: Better Recruiting. Tip One: Don’t Believe the Hype As You’re Hiring. Tip Two: Always Be Networking.

Leadership 213

Leadership Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 213

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. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

“Give the VP of Sales More Time” This is always terrible advice. If a VP of Sales can’t improve things in one sales cycle or less — she never will. In one sales cycle, or less. ” Of course you do — if you have any sort of repeating business. Hacking just does not scale.

Part-Time VPE 324

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 324

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. Find out how you can build these same tools for your business at outgrow.co/saas. Jason Lemkin: This term founder-led sales is maybe overused these days, but it is true.

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 198

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Accordingly, the recruiting of beta customers and roadmap selling happen earlier, providing for customer quotes as part of the launch. Now organizations can customize demos at scale even easier. It forces messaging, ideal customer persona, and go-to-market planning to advance earlier, providing more timing and feedback to nail it.

Sales Recruiting 99

Sales Recruiting Generative AI AI AWS 99