SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. You’ll need more than 5–10 engineers to go big. She can be your CTO forever.

Scale 269

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 269

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 9, 2020.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 255

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Sales.

CTO Hire 278

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 278

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. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Including: CEO Snowflake CEO HubSpot CEO DropBox CEO Descript CEO Clio CEO Flock Safety CEO Own CRO ServiceTitan CMO Databricks CMO Infinite Reality CTO Rubrik CCO Canva CCO Bill CCO GitHub VP AI Wiz CEO Calendly and 100s more!! Investor Connections and Funding Opportunities — And $5m AI VC Pitch Stage!!

Sales Recruiting 180

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 180

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag.

CTO Hire 204

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 204

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. Folks come out differently here, but while Amplitude charges per volume, in part, it doesn’t make a material amount from overages. Rather, it uses overage events to trigger a call from sales to buy more. #4. The engineering team is also surprisingly lean. #7.

Scale 300

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 300

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 278

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 286

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have.

Part-Time VPE 278

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 278

SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2022

SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone. Attract, Hire & Build a Diverse Sales Team | Handshake VP, Employer Partnerships Jessica Peluso. Top Videos This Week: 1.

Scale 237

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire CTO 237

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. The best VPs of Sales hit the ground running.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 305

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

Merchant Services 187

Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 187

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep?

Sales Hiring 89

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 89

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. X sales force, X meta.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. Bottom-up sales. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform.

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. They wanted to sell the Amplitude product, I forget, to sales or somebody else, and that was their mistake. Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And the learning is sell two things to buyers.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

If your plan is to create a bloated piece of enterprise software with an ugly interface and make it up by hiring a large field sales force from the get-go you might succeed as well, but in that case please don't ask me for advice. :) Let's start with the founder team. If you don't have product and engineering knowledge that's tough.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

analyzing how often Directors and Executives are involved in the sales process. Scott pulled the research from Chorus, which reported that over five weeks (~May-June 2020), 88% more directors have been joining calls and 72% more executives are joining sales calls on the sell side. Playing the right roles.

Underperforming Technical Team 130

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 130

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In my opinion, the founder team of a SaaS startup needs to excel in three areas: engineering/technology, product/UX and domain/market expertise. This can be a huge advantage, especially for a bootstrapped startup that can't afford to hire many people. I have a stronger opinion on the make-up of the team.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Being an engineer can give you the upper hand as a CEO because you understand the product. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO.

Sales Hiring 136

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. Things like media companies, finance companies, retail companies, sales functions, marketing functions, and customer support. And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 216

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 216

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. We’re on iTunes.

Scale 117

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 117

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. Much of the success here depends on how competent and motivated the CTO and their team is.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Excited to be back emceeing. That was the start of the Month of Scale.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. Eyal Manor: So I’ve been building SaaS services for over 10 years now in an engineering capacity, and just before we start can we get a sense from the audience, I know it’s kind of hard to see but who here is kind of in a technical hat? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

Cloud 171

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 171

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Shipping is our heartbeat ” has been the motto of the Intercom R&D org from the very beginning and engineers ship code to our customer-facing production app dozens of times a day. Shipping quickly and securely. Continuous risk management.

Data 118

Data CTO Hire Technical Review Scale 118

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sales enablement is easy. Oh, and do all of this with less time. More sales meetings, more money. More sales meetings, more money. We’re on iTunes.

Marketplace as a Service 110

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 110

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

I think it’s more around a consciousness of what you know, or what you may not know, and then hiring around it to become successful. ” I’m kind of like, “Even if you make one or two sales in the next couple of months, with your VP sales, it’s going to take you three months to go and hire.”

New CTO 165

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 165

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

Listen to Hang Black’s podcasts to learn about the future of sales enablement or how to lead with empathy. RevOps leaders are talking about trends in the market, and how the move towards RevOps will change everything from marketing to sales development to post sales. Fixing visibility issues in your sales org.

Scale 119

Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 119