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. You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders?

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2021

But I think the biggest, #1, mistake successful first-time entrepreneurs in SaaS make time and time again these days is they micromanage too long. I think it’s a byproduct, in part, of the fact that founders are just so much better these days. Engineering. Customer Success and Support.

Part-Time VPE

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. She can be your CTO forever.

Scale

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2023

Ok now that some time has gone by I can reflect a bit more thoughtfully here. My top mistakes as a SaaS founder/CEO: Not convincing the very, very, very best VPE I knew to join as our VPE. I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues. Selling the company.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? That when you make a mis-hire, you'll always look back and say you should have made a change 3-4 month earlier? A lot of classic SaaStr advice has been how to spot the best potential VPs. When to hire them.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

And he made an observation to me that I’d been thinking about for a very long time, but didn’t know how to express. And for the most part, these were incredibly stressful times, when I was very underpaid, overworked, and worked to the bone. Not just being part of something great — but, Being Great.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2022

My general learnings: By 20-30 employees, you should have 1-2 good managers in place such that at least 50% of the company can run based only on weekly staff meetings, 1-on-1s, and “grab me when you need me-s” E.g., a great first VP of Sales that can just handle sales. You spend all your recruiting time just on VPs and above.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. If you want to increase your odds of getting a deal done: Send the world’s best cold email Create the world’s best deck Have customer references ready to go Don’t play games Be clear on how much you want to raise, when, why, and where you’re at. Hiring someone too junior.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

you don't know what to do: 1/ Spend more time w/existing customers. 2/ Hire 1 great VP. Those are good times indeed. But there will be times when almost all of just not only struggle … but are just sort of out of ideas. Spend more time with existing customers. Hire 1 great VP.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2024

Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. The traditional SaaS model doesn’t always scale, and not every company has all the bells and whistles to fund marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

Underperforming Technical Team

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And You’ll find out tomorrow. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.”

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Your VP Marketing sure better have her comp plan tied to the leads or opportunity commits that make the plan work. Your VP Customer Success sure better have her comp plan tied to hitting the upsell, retention, or negative net churn goals. Watch him sweat the lost customers 10x more when money is on the line.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

JULY 8, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Kim Rose , VP of Customer Success at Buildium. Kim is a successful executive who spent 8 years out of the workforce. She’s walking us through how to render long-term success in the workforce and add customer value in your career. How’d she do it?

Customer Success

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

And what we saw along the journey the last couple years was that our customer was changing. They wanted real-time results. And in order to be relevant to businesses that were moving to the cloud we needed to be able to keep pace with what was happening to these customers. They were changing, they were moving to the cloud.

Cloud

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 24, 2020

Why is your Customer Success team underfunded, marginalized, and overlooked? Acquisition gets all the glory while Customer Success gets relegated the part of the unsung hero.”. Getting Customer Success the organizational stature it deserves isn’t as hard as you may think.

Customer Success

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. In a market that requires companies to earn their customers’ business each and every day, it can literally make or break your entire business model. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

As part of that, we wanted to look back at some of our most iconic content and sessions. One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). I’m doing this thing for the first time. SaaStr is Turning 10!

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2021

I wrote a piece some time ago here, a person favorite, about Our Year of Hell. When a bad hire at a key time, and some confusion on strategy, led us to our worst year ever on a Year-over-Year growth rate basis. At least some times. Triple Down on Your Customers and Customer Success. It’s true.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

When is the right time to hire their first sales reps? What are the most common mistakes founders make when hiring their first reps? What can be done to minimize ramp time of new reps? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin.

Part-Time VPE

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 14, 2020

Customer Success teams arise out of the need to provide high-touch guidance to your most valuable customers – without disrupting your Sales and Support teams. In Intercom’s early years, it wasn’t uncommon to find a support rep looped into a deal or asked to assist with onboarding.

Customer Success

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Your VP Marketing sure better have her comp plan tied to the leads or opportunity commits that make the plan work. Your VP Customer Success sure better have her comp plan tied to hitting the upsell, retention, or negative net churn goals. Watch him sweat the lost customers 10x more when money is on the line.

Sales Hiring