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. There’s always the next startup out there.

Sales Hiring

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

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. Team structures GTM strategy and startup velocity have evolved across each era and what founders need to understand to succeed in this next wave.

Technical Review

Sales Hacker

JULY 18, 2025

best AI email tools for sales teams”). Startup to watch Iris just launched the first AI analyst that delivers fast, accurate answers to real business questions (without the bottlenecks of SQL, dashboards, or data teams). It’s like having a top-tier analyst embedded in every function: marketing, ops, recruiting, strategy.

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. Why customer experience is a competitive differentiator in vertical SaaS.

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. Why customer experience is a competitive differentiator in vertical SaaS.

Engineering

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

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

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

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

MAY 10, 2023

In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, continues a mini-series on founder-led sales with Colin Zima, founder and CEO of Omni. In a year’s time, they’ve built a team with more than 150 years of experience in BI, all because they tapped into their own cheat codes for success.

Sales Recruiting

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 2, 2019

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 Customer Success, VP Marketing, or VP Operations. After establishing product market fit, the startups grow their management team to scale.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

So we’ve spent a ton of time over the years on SaaS talking about hiring a great VP of Sales. Not only because it really matters, but because hiring the wrong VP of Sales can set you back a year — or longer. So many VPs of Sales disagree with me here — at least at first when I make the point. Sales is hard.

Sales Hiring

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. People is the first section because people are a startup’s most important element. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics.

Metrics

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

When a startup takes form, the first weeks and months and years are spent furiously. It is formed and reformed again and again as customers supply feedback. The startup raises capital. Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers. A new VP of customer success.

Scale

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2022

Dear SaaStr: When Should a CEO of a Startup Stop “Doing the Work” and Let Others Do the Work? So you don’t have to directly manage at least several of the key functional areas in the company at all. management team by 50 employees or so. You spend all your recruiting time just on VPs and above.

Part-Time VPE

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. But the reality is, if you’re scaling from $1M to $20M in ARR, you’re going to need to become best friends with your executive recruiters.”

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

A CRO owns and directs the strategy over a company’s revenue cycle, but there’s not a set standard for operational or management decisions: in addition to sales and sales development, they might be responsible for customer success, lead generation and pipelines, and even marketing and brand development.

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

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

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

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2020

I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. I’d like to recruit you to be a VP at one of my companies, but I get it. You’re going to have to be the VP of Sales, Customer Success, Marketing and probably Product in the early days. It’s time. To go out on their own.

Sales Recruiting

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

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge. CRO at Wiz, Colin Jones, shares how this traditional startup evolved, thrived and grew from 0 to $100 million in just two years. Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Why VCs Love Founders That Respond to Email Almost Instantly 90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. A 6 Part Test to Help You Get It Right. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

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?

CTO Hire

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. 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. The very best of the best.

Sales Hiring

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

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2021

Or if you hired someone that talked the talk, but isn’t the right fit for your startup? 50% of the job of a real VP is recruiting. Sales — for a VPS. CSAT or NPS for a VP of Customer Success. Let’s break it down to 4 simple criteria. Then, I want you to be honest about them.

Part-Time VPE

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur. The marketers all want a team today.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. Jason has written about the cheat codes for hiring VPs of Sales since 2012 and realized it was worth a deeper dive. Jason has written about the cheat codes for hiring VPs of Sales since 2012 and realized it was worth a deeper dive.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. She manages a huge global team. Four, people in the sale? Jason Lemkin: None.

Merchant Services

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Any fast growing startup in here and you’rer hiring and HR to handle your employee hiring, you could probably have a robot do 88% faster, better for your employee, and not have to hire fast. Bobby: Yes.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. The way the co-founders looked at the stages in the early days of no funding and a community-focus were: Step 1 – No sales or customers, only building freely available open-source software. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team.

Scale

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. As a startup, it’s tempting to try and do everything.

Scale