SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

This happens with some regularity in SaaS, I’ve learned (and to be clear: I’m not talking about any company I’ve invested in, am an advisor to, board member of, etc – Because when it’s still a very small team, with no true management team … co-founders can kind of hack it to $1m-$2m in ARR together.

Sales Recruiting 236

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 236

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. Flock Safety is a hardware-enabled SaaS company dedicated to stopping crime.

Sales Recruiting 175

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 175

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2022

In SaaS, I think one of the biggest traps you can get yourself into as a founder is doing Low ROI things for one minute longer than you have to. But quickly, in SaaS, it becomes worse. And Things I Successfully (More or Less) Offloaded By/At $1m ARR: Client/Customer Success. Routine Sales. That was me.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 280

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

We’ve recently been posting polls on SaaStr’s LinkedIn account to get a feel for what SaaS companies are doing in the current environment. In the video below, he discusses the results and where he thinks SaaS companies are on track or need improvement. #1. This is particularly important for a VP of Sales.

Sales Recruiting 217

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 217

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

So backstage at SaaStr Annual this year, and in a number of other conversations since, I’ve had a chance to get a few quiet moments with maybe two dozen top CROs and VPs of Sales. Yes, macro issues come up, and how they have to sell to more stakeholders now, and sales cycles are longer. But the best long ago adapted.

Sales Recruiting 219

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales 219

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 She’s written extensively on the topic and co-authored a book The Customer Success Economy. If so, at what stage?

Scale 293

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Customer Success 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2023

5 Interesting Learnings from ServiceNow at $8 Billion in ARR Pitchbook & IVP: Top Tier SaaS Companies Usually Raise at 15x ARR. SaaStr 630: Sales-led vs. Product-led? SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital 198

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Our goal is (and remains) to help everyone get from $0 to $100m+ ARR with less stress and more success. We were the first major SaaS event back in the SF Bay Area. SaaStr is turning 10!

Scale 282

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 282

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 231

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 231

Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Hiring team members with the right customer success manager skills is critical for the effectiveness of your CS team and strategy. Here we’ve identified the 13 most essential qualities to consider when hiring a CS manager. What Is a Customer Success Manager (CSM)? Relationship management.

Sales Hiring 90

Sales Hiring Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review 90

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

But building a sales compensation plan that both aligns your sales team’s compensation with your customers’ objectives and recruits top salespeople can be incredibly difficult in usage-based pricing. Determine where your sales team makes your customers more successful In usage-based pricing, value = usage.

Compensation 92

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Systems Review 92

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

Over the last decade or so, I’ve compiled a metrics sheet to summarise a SaaS business. Redpoint SaaS Metrics Template. The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. I’m sharing it so that others may benefit and improve it.

Metrics 210

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 210

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 95

ChurnZero

JANUARY 25, 2024

How will customer success jobs, and the skills they require, evolve in 2024? With technology advancing and customer expectations rising, customer success has become an essential force driving business growth and customer loyalty within the SaaS industry.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 52

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. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long.

Part-Time VPE 235

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 235

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Q: What are the top 20 pieces of advice for building a successful SaaS startup? Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

For SaaS, this often can be growing in the 30-60% YoY range. Could he or she recruit a better team? Often, just one great new VP of Marketing or Sales or Customer Success or Product will tilt the curve enough that you’d back to Better Growth. SaaS start-ups take time. Raise (more) capital?

Sales Recruiting 227

Sales Recruiting Customer Success SaaS Management 227

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. That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. I Need a VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 358

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 358

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2020

One of the biggest changes since we started SaaStr is the massive number of SaaS veterans out there. The decade-long run of next-generation SaaS start-ups, and the explosion since 2015 of SaaS unicorns and decacorns has led to a lot of experienced execs on the market. Because SaaS is hard. This is great.

Sales Hiring 225

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS 225

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

Level Up Your Customer Success Organization. In the subscription economy, there’s no debate about whether or not to invest in Customer Success (CS); 70% of rapidly growing businesses say that Customer Success is extremely important ( Hubspot , 2017). The fourth challenge is complexity.

VP of Engineering 98

VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 268

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 268

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of Customer Success at the revenue intelligence platform Gong. Moving upmarket means larger customers and higher revenue, but it’s not without its challenges. For Linda, it all comes down to your approach to customer success. ” 3.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 10 worst pieces of SaaS advice, excuses, and mistakes founders make, and what to do instead If you want advice, you probably won’t get it from VCs, but ask anyway. #2 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.”

Part-Time VPE 185

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 185

SaaSX

JULY 12, 2020

Determining if sales or customer success should own customer expansion and renewals is the age-old SaaS question. If you are a SaaS founder, sales, or CX leader you have probably spent a lot of time thinking about this topic. Who you recruit will impact the success of the model.

Sales Recruiting 90

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 90

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. From a GTM execution standpoint, they weren’t focused.

Scale 231

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 231

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

Recently, I met with a great SaaS founder doing about $1.5m A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A head of customer success that doesn’t own churn, or net revenue retention in the first 90 days. I can go on. I was a bit skeptical. Something sounded off.

Sales Recruiting 324

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 324

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

But it’s a good question and I thought it might make sense to set out an Ideal VP Hiring Plan for Most SaaS Companies. More on that here and a great video discussion below: You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR. I’ve worked closely with 26+ SaaS start-ups and founded a few.

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. Singular focus on sales. As the title would hint at, the VP of Sales should focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 93

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 93

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. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. All good stuff.

Sales Hiring 355

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 355

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

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. We’re just not far enough along in SaaS 3.0 to breed enough veterans here for all the next-generation SaaS companies.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 273

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2020

I’ve worked with several startups that fell into the following pattern: Selling a SaaS application at a healthy price (e.g., Customers are left high-and-dry with failed or partial implementations that, if left unfinished, will likely lead to churn. If you sell: A recruiting app, running your first recruiting campaign.

Consulting 144

Consulting Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup 144

ChurnZero

JANUARY 10, 2022

SaaS customer onboarding makes or breaks your customer retention. It has a long-lasting impact on your customer and deep ties to their likelihood to churn. For this reason, unlocking the optimal SaaS customer onboarding experience is invaluable. Work Cross-Functionally During SaaS Customer Onboarding.

Onboarding 98

Onboarding Sales Recruiting SaaS Technical Review 98

CustomerSuccessBox

MAY 9, 2022

A Customer Success dashboard keeps track of your company’s health in connection to your product and its users. Customers are the lifeblood of any company, therefore having a clear picture of its revenue activities is critical for expansion. 360 Customer Success Dashboard.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Outsourced Development Customer Lifetime Value 52

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

We also give you a bunch of tips on how to implement it in your SaaS. TL;DR Customer Value Management (CVM) is a business process that focuses on analyzing customer needs , building outstanding products that satisfy them, and enabling users to realize their value. What is customer value management?

Management 92

Management Scale Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 92

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

We’re super excited to have partnered with Women in Revenue to bring a mini event-within-an-event for women leaders in SaaS and Cloud. We’ll have a packed half-day of sessions just with women leaders in Cloud and SaaS on Wednesday, March 11. Recruiting Fair. Masterclasses! So you can go to both, and back-and-forth.

New CTO 261

New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 261

User Pilot

DECEMBER 6, 2023

Using the product to solve real-world problems also helps them to better empathize with their customers and understand their needs and pain points. Start implementing a dogfooding program by recruiting users from across the organization, especially those not involved in the product development. What is product dogfooding?

Software Development 89

Software Development Sales Recruiting Development Software Review 89