SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Marketing is also an art and science. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders?

Part-Time VPE 307

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 307

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. They have low attrition.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 363

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. So, as you’re considering hiring your VP of Sales or Engineering, find a great executive recruiter to work with and eat the bill.

Sales Recruiting 292

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 292

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 286

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 286

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

She was telling me about her VP of Marketing who, in the Bay Area, she was paying $95,000. Because that’s rather low for a true VP out here in the Bay Area (see typical VP Marketing comp packages here ). I see this all the time in marketing hires that come out of non-demand gen roles. I was a bit skeptical. Get you leads.

Sales Recruiting 348

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 348

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

SImple tips to Do Better in Q4 With What You Already Have: – Drive Down Churn – Drive Up NPS – Be More Grateful – Zoom with 10 Customers a Week – Promote Your Star(s) – Less Spam, more ABM – Weekly Webinar – Improve Lead Routing – Improve Lead Scoring – Talk to Every Prospect.

Sales Recruiting 350

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 350

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Marketing is also an art and science.

Scale 269

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 269

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Emboldened by this seeming endorsement, I dashed off what turned into a lengthy email on interviewing and recruiting, a topic about which I am passionate not because I think I am good it, but because I think I am not. Thoughts on The Recruiting Process. Remember it’s a mutual sales process. Consider a try-and-buy.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Finance 110

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. What a great VP of marketing really does (tons on that here ). How to manage customer success. About this and that.

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

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 275

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 275

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at marketing. 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. Hire a great marketer early. Drive NPS up, and churn down.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. It’s important to track the number of leads in the conversion rates to sales generated by sales.

Metrics 250

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 250

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2022

Going from sales-led to PLG is doable, but it is not easy. Sales-led organizations struggle to adapt to a PLG mindset.”. Let’s use sales-led organizations as a comparison point. If a company has started out with a heavy sales focus, its onboarding process within the actual product may not be intuitive enough for customers.

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Business Pricing Churn 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work. The best mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies grow their accounts 120%-160% as a cohort, inclusive of churn. It’s much cheaper to renew a customer than to acquire one.

Sales Recruiting 270

Sales Recruiting Scale Branding Scaling 270

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. Competition can split markets, and capital can be an offensive weapon in hyper-competitive markets. Not in April.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 321

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 240

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 240

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. On the marketing side, people got ‘lazy’ under the guise of, “Let’s increase our paid online ad spend and turn that dial up and spend more.”

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 294

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? How do you diagnose and solve churn? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 268

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 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

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

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. Marketing and candidate experience will be table stakes. Hiring sales leaders will get harder. So giving them a reason to choose you will be essential next year.

Sales Recruiting 78

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 78

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. When Greenhouse started, it was at a time when the market was growing up, and there weren’t any playbooks. They did it. On websites.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 274

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 286

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

Resulting in an unprofitable professional services business (and wrecking the market for partner services). And, depending on the initial contract duration, high customer churn [1]. churn of 25%, and services margins of negative 66% when I started working with them [2]. High adoption failure. They’re worth it.).

Consulting 144

Consulting Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 144

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Because it depends highly on the product, on the market, what the founders want to do with the company, and on the different types of markets here. 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.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

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. Let’s be 50/50 co-founders and let’s start a company in the sales space.”

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 196

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 28, 2024

You've got big marketing dreams but a not-so-big budget? After 12 years of marketing for bootstrapped brands, I've learned that you don't need to spend a fortune on fancy digital marketing tools to see results. A lot of these marketing software offer free or low-cost versions. Let me guess.

Social Media 105

Social Media AI Search Marketing Business 105

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

The SaaS Trust Crisis is making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before. And you can see marketing is the number one user of software, probably no surprise, many of you are marketers. We mainly serve software marketers, and a lot of software marketers are cutting back.

Software Review 246

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 246

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

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 89

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 89

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 114

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 114

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. So for a bigger SaaS player, sales and marketing costs are the driver of profitability. If CTLV is high, churn can't be that big. along the way. And again, higher conversion means lower CAC.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 5, 2024

He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance. Previously, he founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM that was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014. 17:58) The importance of accountability in sales management. (22:32)

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting AI Search AI Sales 98

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 12, 2020

If you aren’t willing to embrace AI digital assistants as a marketer, you’re going to have a tough time competing with everyone else. Just like Alexa brings you the best jams on-demand and Siri helps you find the nearest Starbucks, AI digital assistants can help you become a better marketer. And late adopters?

Artificial Intelligence 145

Artificial Intelligence AI Search AI Social Media 145

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 143

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 143