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There’s recruiting and there’s people building. Almost equally to their ability to recruit great people. ” Without a big budget to get the best people, Henry believes part of the ZoomInfo difference has been recruiting good people that he then fostered and developed into great people.
One of the classic original SaaStr posts was on the Top 10+ Questions to Ask a VP of Sales Candidate. It’s a different world today, AI-fueled, often distributed and hybrid, and with inflation both in titles (CRO or VP Sales) and compensation expectations. Use this updated script for hiring that first VP of Sales.
The Best Speakers In The World With hundreds of sessions from proven SaaS leaders who have scaled companies to significant revenue milestones, SaaStr Annual offers practical, actionable insights you won’t find elsewhere. Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.
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.
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.
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 customersuccess. Doing 30+ interviews a month minimum.
The Billion-Dollar AI Unicorn Factory The scale of AI startup funding isn’t just impressive — it’s existential for SaaS: The AI Billion-Dollar Club: OpenAI : $8.4 billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3 billion in funding xAI : $6.4
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 customersuccess. To recruit 100 people. Eventually the team hews the right product.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Throughout her time there, she scaled the SaaS company from $1M ARR to pre- IPO, along the way, creating the category of customersuccess software, and paving the way for Gainsight’s $1.1B She’s written extensively on the topic and co-authored a book The CustomerSuccess Economy. If so, at what stage?
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.
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.
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.
I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues. Not becoming a better recruiter. I recruited a great VP of Sales, a strong VP of Marketing, a great VP of Product (now COO at Gong), and a great VP of CustomerSuccess. Selling the company.
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. We’ve talked about this a lot on SaaStr, but hiring a true VP of Sales before you have 2 reps hitting quota (and thus a repeatable, if not yet fully repeating process) is too early. Earlier is better.
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 managecustomersuccess. About recruiting and helping you scale. All good stuff.
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!
If you must choose a long term headquarters for your startup, call an executive recruiter who focuses in that city. VP Engineering, VP Product, VP Sales, VP CustomerSuccess, VP Marketing, or VP Operations. After establishing product market fit, the startups grow their management team to scale.
She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. Lattice had a product-led growth flow on the website while the sales team was still trying to sell the PLG companies The good news is Lattice had a lot of activity and initiatives at play.
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/CustomerSuccess. Routine Sales. Recruiting >=20% of Your Time.
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.
To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. To not have to manage any customers yourself in customersuccess, and instead be a strategist. You can’t scale after that without one. In many cases this is a good thing.
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.
SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and CustomerSuccess Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow 2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: SalesRecruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman 3. Really, Really, Low.
A great VP of CustomerSuccess in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. It’s hard enough just to maintain KPIs and metrics as you scale. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps. More here: Should You Fire an OK-but-Not-Great VP of Sales?
With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge.
If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, CustomerSuccess, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the CustomerSuccess lead hire, but worse. A bad VP of Sales is a total disaster.
Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date and scale their companies and careers. Personalized Event Recommendations : Demonstrate a deeper understanding of customer needs by recommending relevant events that align with their growth goals.
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.
Few people have more experience with this move than Linda Lin , Director of CustomerSuccess 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 customersuccess.
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 scalingsales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.
Founders were able to recruit on-site. So we took our learnings from our first successful outdoor event and brought back SaaStr Europa in 2022. 2017 The Third SaaStr Annual: Scale Together. total attendees, e.g., a CEO + a VP of Sales and a VP of CustomerSuccess, or two Co-Founders, or CEO + CTO, etc.
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.
Efforts to scalecustomersuccess team activity often fall short because of failure to avoid common mistakes. Your human resources practices, your project management procedures and your technology strategy all need to come together in order for you to scale up without overextending yourself.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?
The company scaled from a hundred people to 800, last I know, but it changes every day. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. Bobby Patrick: Right. Luciana: It has been quite a journey.
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