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There’s recruiting and there’s people building. On the topic of building SaaS companies, Henry kicks off the conversation with: “I think a lot of bootstrapped founders who are less capital infused have to actually be great at developing their people. Almost equally to their ability to recruit great people.
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Get a Job as a First Time VP of Sales? If you’re aiming to land a VP of Sales role, you need to position yourself as someone who can deliver results and scale a team. "The "The biggest mistakes CROs and VPs of Sales make when they take a new role." Show you can recruit.
5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. Their product is generating an impressive 45% of developers’ code on average.
As the past few years have demonstrated, it’s wise to expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to hiring. In particular, hiring for your sales team is critical in an uncertain economic outlook. Additionally, sales professionals looking for a new role should choose their next company wisely.
A strong sales leader is vital to any company hoping to scale. With this in mind, hiring for the Head of Sales role is one of the most important things a business can do. Unfortunately, too many companies focus on the wrong things when hiring their sales leaders, which can lead to hires that aren’t the best fit for the business.
We’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales at SaaStr, and I’ve relinked to some of the most popular posts below. But after 5+ years of SaaStr.com, I think we can almost boil it all down to 2 things to look for when you make the hire — and 2 things not to look for as much. That takes years to learn.
Recently valued at over $1 billion , Codium is proving that AI-driven software development is not just the futureits the present. Before hiring their first sales reps, the founders personally closed millions in revenue. Their strategy? The real impact?
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 salesdevelopment, they might be responsible for customer success, lead generation and pipelines, and even marketing and brand development.
At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. Pugh’s strategy is simple, albeit not always easy: Recruitment — how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization. Let’s look at five tips to consider for successful recruiting.
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Crush a VP of Sales Interview? To nail a VP Sales interview, you need to demonstrate that youre not just a smooth talker with a great LinkedIn profileyou need to show youre the real deal. Too many VPs of Sales and CROs show up to interviews knowing almost nothing about the product.
In interviewing great CMOs , the product marketing leader is the first marketer most startups should recruit, and often the first key mishire. Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. This makes sense.
Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.
Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second saleshire 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?
To hire 3-4 folks to do what you used to do mostly yourself. 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 customer success, and instead be a strategist. Or at least, with just 1 or 2 key hires.
A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. Architects.
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.
Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Combine Strategies To Drive Sales.
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.
A Philadelphia native, Colin started his professional career as a Business Development Representative (BDR) 14 years ago and worked his way up to his current role as CRO. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.
billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3 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 in funding xAI : $6.4 billion stake Waymo : $10.5
I’ve written a lot about this, but for most start-ups, you can boil it down to two criteria any first VP of Sales just has to meet: Has she built at least a small team before? Have they hired at least 2–3 reps that have performed well? If you can hire 2–3 great ones, you can likely scale and hire 20–30. More here: [link].
Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.
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 SalesDevelopment 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.
Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Meet and Find Your Next VP / CXO!
People post in our Slack channel that they’re hiring but it’s not posted. And in a world of layoffs, AI disruption, and hiring freezes, your next opportunity will increasingly come through backchannels, not applications. Refresh your LinkedIn to tell a singular story Most recruiters spend less than 20 seconds on a profile.
They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. A good recruiter is worth it.
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. Then I say … you probably made a mis-hire. They often melt. Be present.
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. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. I Need a VP of Sales. Manage a trade show?
For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.
At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. I couldn’t agree more, and I think startups should make that hire sooner rather than later. Let’s say you want to hire 10 people in the next 12 months.
There are roughly 2 types of start-up management teams. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team.
Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. SaaStr’s own Jason Lemkin shares the top 10 mistakes he sees during the hiring process during Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. The last 18 months have seen the biggest changes in the VP of Sales in his SaaS career.
What’s your approach when hiringsales reps? Companies often hiresales reps who have knowledge of, or even a passion for, the brand’s product or industry — which is great because it gives you a team of “walking brochures” who can spout off all the benefits of your product. The best training for new saleshires.
Imagine a coverage model, from end to end, for the full customer life cycle: from demand generation to sales to post-sales. In addition to marketing, do you also need business development representatives (BDR)? Sales Cycle. This includes everything from inside sales to account executives to strategic asset allocation.
If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Lizzie Mintus Founder and CEO of Here’s Waldo Recruiting and host of The Heres Waldo Podcast about her thoughts on: The most effective recruiting strategies for SMBs.
It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. They build a pipeline, learn the sales motion, and close a few accounts in the first few months.
You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. Head of Sales.
In this post, we’re featuring our RecruitingManager, Elizabeth Faddis! Priority projects are focused on enhancing the company’s recruiting strategy, processes, and programs to deliver on current and future talent needs. You recently started your RecruitingManager role at FastSpring, how are you liking it so far?
They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. Recruiting is easier, but the things that don’t change are customers don’t care.
Recently, we welcomed Hollie Wegman to SaaS Office Hours to talk about marketing to developers. A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. The CEO wants to hire someone with demand generation experience. What’s your advice when hiring a CMO? And so you hire for that.
A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.
Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. They believed talent was global, and the co-founders loved to travel. Today, not so much. Step 2 – ??
In 2019, the founding team at Storyblok set out to create a content marketing solution that worked for everyone—developers and marketers alike. Hiring a global team to achieve the vision What do you do when your company’s location limits your access to talent? You spread your hiring net and draw in as much talent as possible.
As it grows, it changes significantly, especially as you move from hiring people who can do everything to hiring more specialized roles. What is the CEO’s role in hiring during different stages? What is the CEO’s role in hiring during different stages? So that support person, Mafalda, started doing sales, too.
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