SaaStr

JULY 9, 2025

Sales in the Age of AI: Top 10 Learnings from the CROs of Databricks, Windsurf, Perplexity and Owner We’re recently done A+ SaaStr deep dives with the CROs / VPs of Sales from Perplexity, Owner, Databricks, and Windsurf. It’s no longer enough to have great sales skills—candidates must demonstrate active AI fluency.

Scale

Sales Hacker

JUNE 24, 2025

From viral LinkedIn content and founder-led dinners to the now-infamous “donut drop” strategy, this episode is packed with practical, first-principles GTM plays you won’t find in a sales playbook. Both Centari and Atrix AI scaled founder-led sales by hiring a Chief of Staff to operationalize and extend GTM efforts.

AI

Sales Hacker

JUNE 20, 2025

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. Refresh your LinkedIn to tell a singular story Most recruiters spend less than 20 seconds on a profile. And you send the wrong signal to recruiters. 80% of exec-level jobs never hit job boards. You split your energy.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Toughest Skill to Learn to Scale in B2B? You need to learn to become a parallel recruiter. To constantly, painfully, boring-ly be recruiting the next level of management and managers all the time. Then Ill get to customer success. Doing 30+ interviews a month minimum.

Scale

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 28, 2025

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Kraig Swensrud is the Founder & CEO of Qualified where he provides crucial experience and entrepreneurial energy to create the future of enterprise sales tech. You got sales reps. Everybody was learning on the fly. Couldn’t.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

MAY 27, 2025

They work with startups and scaling businesses to help take HR off your plate, so you can stay focused on building product, growing revenue, and hiring great people the go-to-market engine. What AI really does is it unlocks vast capabilities that are going to lead to doing things much, much faster and much more quickly.

Technical Review

Sales Hacker

JULY 18, 2025

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. Revenue impact: Monitor leads/deals tied to LLM-sourced visits. Prompt-to-lead funnel: How many AI prompts → clicks → conversions. best AI email tools for sales teams”). LuminX – announced a $5.5M

AI Search

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 31, 2024

Featuring hot takes from leaders at HubSpot, Brex, GitHub, and more, this compilation challenges the status quo and might just change how you think about volume vs. value, outbound sales, and hiring in 2025. 11:46) Neal Patel on why you shouldn’t hire a sales leader for their playbook. (15:44) It comes from episode 99.

Sales Hiring

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. 29:00 How to scale with customer empathy and GTM precision.

Engineering

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. 29:00 How to scale with customer empathy and GTM precision.

Engineering

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2020

A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se. A VP of Sales who is smart, polished, and worked at the right place, in a management-level position. That can talk about quota attainment and sales operations and scaling and number. you might ask.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? 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 will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap.

Scale

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You’re probably going to hire 1-2 VPs that themselves are smart, driven and successful — but that can’t themselves hire great people under them.

Part-Time VPE

Sales Hacker

JUNE 10, 2025

With over two decades of experience leading marketing ops, sales ops, and go-to-market infrastructure, Andy is a true pioneer of modern RevOps. The Value of Niching Down ” → Encourages candidates to specialize and be specific to stand out and receive better, faster support from networks and recruiters. What GTM functions (e.g.

Sales Recruiting

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

MARCH 24, 2020

Nothing matters but recruiting and using your personal network. Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team.

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. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers. However, continuing this way isn’t the path to huge scale. Customer meetings, product releases, investor pitches. A new VP of customer success. To recruit 100 people. Eventually the team hews the right product.

Scale

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. How did it come to be?

Scale

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. Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

Sales Hiring

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

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

SaaStr

JULY 22, 2019

SaaStr Scale, our one day, San Francisco based event. The Playbook To… Hear from different revenue leaders on the playbooks to revenue growth, scaling, building better teams and more. The Playbook to Building a Thriving Sales Culture with PatientPop SVP of Sales Justin Welsh. The post SaaStr Scale is coming to SF!

Scale

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. If they are just saying the wrong things to customers and prospects.

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? 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. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft.

Part-Time VPE

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

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

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

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. Work with Great Executive Recruiters ”The first time I saw an invoice for an executive search, I think I had a heart attack,” Shrav joked.

Sales Recruiting

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

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%. And set you up for a ton more success, earlier. 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. Ideally, have your VP of Sales on board in time to hire reps 3-300.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2020

The lead commit goes up each quarter and every year. To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. as you race past $10m+ in ARR.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2022

You need engineering, product in all start-ups — but in SaaS, even in the very early days, you also need sales, client success, true support, demand gen marketing, etc. And Things I Successfully (More or Less) Offloaded By/At $1m ARR: Client/Customer Success. Routine Sales. Recruiting >=20% of Your Time.

Sales Hiring

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