Sales Hacker

MAY 7, 2025

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Marcy Campbell is the Chief Revenue Officer at AppFolio, where she leads sales and client services with a focus on delivering unified, end-to-end customer experiences. 16:00 End-to-end GTM orchestration across sales, marketing, product, and CS.

Engineering

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. At Salesforce, at Box, the bottom end of the sales team churns out each year. Usually – no.

Scale

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. Turning over a sales team is very hard on the organization. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in gold.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. Invest in People You want to keep the bar high on talent, especially in hypergrowth, and not just in the early stages.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. Drive NPS up, and churn down. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

It’s the most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales … Not Right Now. It can’t strategically improve sales software, financial software, quoting software, recruiting software, QA processes, call center software, etc. And when you hire a real, great VP of Sales. Truly qualified leads and prospects. I Don’t Have Budget.

Sales Recruiting

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. Invest in Your Brand and Customer Marketing. This is the one investment everyone skimps on, but always works. Not in April.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Can you start and stop a PLG motion?

Scale

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

To invest in you when there’s no logical reason to. But they are often just awful managers. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need. Manage People. Manage anyone you can, even if it’s not perfect. Being a CEO is tough. You have to convince people to join you. Especially in SaaS.

Sales Hiring

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment.

Benchmarks

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. For instance, Founders Fund doesn’t really invest in AI, health tech, or edtech, even if you’re growing 5x. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring

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

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. that you’re invested in their success).

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. He ran from the term.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

You can be like, “OK, our culture is we’re going to work super hard, and churn out a lot of features, and sell a lot of product.” I want to come be your VP of sales and, you’re going to meet me for the first time. Spencer : For me, the key things for a VP of sales is, “OK, tell me about your best reps.

VP of Engineering

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I started a software company in college to make it easy to update websites called Content Management Software Now, and I had this idea for Pardot, I wanted to make it easy for marketers to run campaigns online and measure their results. SalesLoft, why was that Pardot, I tried to recruit this guy, Kyle Porter, to come run sales at Pardot.

Sales Recruiting

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

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

One is your churn. SaaS businesses have churn. Churn, think we’re all familiar with what churn is. Churn defines your average lifetime of your customer. We talked about churn. Five percent monthly churn gives you a 20 month average lifetime. MRR, obviously. Average Revenue per Customer.

SaaS Payments

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And we’re also pleased, now to have almost a hundred thousand different SaaS products listed there, and being backed by a hundred million dollars from LinkedIn and some great investors that do allow us to keep investing in this marketplace. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital.

Software Review

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. And I’ve seen many startups who fail to make this distinction create a cycle of diminishing returns that impacts the trajectory of their growth for the long haul… especially in enterprise sales.

Sales Recruiting

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. If CTLV is high, churn can't be that big. along the way.

Sales Recruiting

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? People all across the company are so proud of our sales team.

Sales Hiring

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 2, 2021

By failing to acknowledge the differences early, teams risk misallocating their focus and energy when solving problems, investing too much or too little in each one. “ Investment . Investment. If not, investment will be higher. That said, ranking investment shouldn’t be driven purely by estimating effort.

Innovation

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. This is really founder-led sales. With Twilio, for example, they expanded into email.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2019

How to Design a Sales Comp Plan to Get You to $100M with Work-Bench, Movable Ink, MongoDB and Concert Finance. This panel will speak tactically to various comp design options as a way for management to determine and promote ideal behavior in their front-line teams. Meghan Gill | VP of Sales Ops @ MongoDB. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

Rajesh is going to walk you through the key elements of winning the long game in SaaS – how to win customers, how to create long-term relationships, and how to avoid churn. Churn management is a journey. And this is the moment of reckoning that you get to as a SaaS company is that a sale is not the end.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think if you ask how applicable is SEO, programmable is maybe a different question, but I tell you every single SaaS company I have invested in or worked with that has made a commitment to building at least one high quality piece of content per week has seen significant ROI from SEO over a period of months or a year.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2015

Over the course of the panel, we discussed the ways to recruit, structure, and manage vibrant customer success teams. In 2015, the company prioritize on-boarding to mitigate short-term customer churn by investing more time at the beginning of a relationship. Year Adoption Retention Expansion. 2014 20% 70% 10%.

Compensation

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

The value of your contracted subscriptions taking into account revenue added/lost from components such as new sales, renewals, upsells, churn, etc. Churn Rates. Customer Churn = # of customers lost / total #of customers. Customer Churn = # of customers lost / total #of customers. Big mistake.

Benchmarks

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

With the rise of AI, new sales technology and automation at the forefront of the sales echo chamber these days, we thought we’d take a moment to bring it back to BASICS – that’s why we’ve rounded up this complete glossary of sales terms and definitions to help you remember where it all started.

Scale

InsightSquared

AUGUST 14, 2019

For sales professionals, AI is not only impacting your personal life, but it will soon influence your professional work too if it hasn’t already done so. Many of today’s forward-thinking companies have already begun using AI in their sales strategies. Strengthens Communication With Sales Leads.

Artificial Intelligence

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting

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. Part two of this scorecard series will help you create a sales interview scorecard to land that sales role you’ve been dreaming about. Sales chops. What sales system do we use?

Sales Hiring

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

This is what SaaS applications call “user churn,” and it can affect their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) , as well as their annual recurring revenue (ARR). Churn rate. Churn is the percentage of customers that end their subscriptions within a certain amount of time. Customer lifetime value.

Scale

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2019

And so in Plaid, we build integrations into bank accounts focused on letting you interact with your money in your bank account in whatever way you want to in the web. Quovo had focused on investment accounts and allowing you to programmatically interact with your investment accounts through third-party applications.

Payments