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 238

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 238

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

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 81

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 81

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 295

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 295

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

From $1m in ARR, and Then Forever After: Recruiting Great VPs. You need to learn to become great at recruiting. As you finally begin to scale, you’ll have enough revenue to hire some great folks, but not enough to build very redundant teams. More here: From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 261

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

They used the competitive advantage of recruiting out of the Midwest, where they knew the markets and the people better. As a manager, you have to do things differently. But if you know what success looks like in sales, support, engineering, etc., Half of sales and marketing resources might not exist in 24 months.

Sales Recruiting 245

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 245

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 186

Sales Recruiting Scale Compensation Business Model 186

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 264

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 264

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 208

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 208

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

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

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 173

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SMB 173

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 189

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 189

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 198

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 198

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

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 99

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 99

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

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 252

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 252

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 225

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Startup 225

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 286

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 286

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 334

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 334

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

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Your sales team is integral to your business’s success: not only do your salespeople bring in the big deals, but they also represent your company and culture to every new and potential prospect. So why is sales team culture still an afterthought for so many organizations? Be collaborative, not cutthroat.

Sales Hiring 143

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 143

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 191

Sales Recruiting Startup Scale Sales Hiring 191

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

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 205

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Delivery Travel 205

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 148

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 148

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 186

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 186

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. While building a sales team, we’ve focused a lot on our sales culture. Here’s how we went about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture-additive.

Scale 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160

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

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 134

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 134

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 214

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 214

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 8, 2020

According to First Round’s 2019 State of Startups report , sales leadership is the most difficult hire to make. And with sales being a top priority for founders…. …along with it getting harder to recruit top-quality talent… Image: State of Startups. That’s the opposite of scaling efficiently.

Sales Hiring 81

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 81

InsightSquared

MAY 15, 2019

It’s one of my favorite questions to ask a fellow professional in sales operations. Insurance sales rep. Account Manager. Sales Operations is Still Developing. Sales operations as a profession is growing, yet it is a comparatively new function in businesses. Sales Ops is Many Disciplines in One.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 110

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 360

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 360

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 162

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 162

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 337

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 337