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. Let’s use net dollar or net revenue retention as an example. By keeping very similar revenue goals in mind.

Sales Recruiting 299

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 299

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

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. You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big. Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders?

Part-Time VPE 306

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

Brendon Cassidy, my VP of Sales wrote a version of this piece a while back. I though an updated version of this would be good for founders thinking about hiring a VP of Sales … VPs of Sales themselves … and VPs-to-be to read — Jason, ed. … 10 Rules to Being a VP of Sales in a Startup.

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 301

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. When to hire her (more here ).

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2021

No lead commit, or revenue commit. A head of sales that doesn’t recruit at least one strong rep in the first 90 days. A head of product that doesn’t take over the roadmap, and redirect the engineering team to do something better, faster and bigger. Something sounded off. His opportunity commit. ” Oh.

Sales Recruiting 349

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SMB Engineering 349

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

The list of problems is endless (this is one of the hardest parts of the job), but let me try to order a few of the biggest challenges roughly based on stage: Pre-Revenue: Finding a Truly Great Co-Founder That is Just as Committed as You. Then their collective revenues often only add up to Cappuccino money. It never ends.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 284

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 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at engineering. Somehow, find enough cash to make it 24 months to first real revenue. Even if on their own, they aren’t enough revenue to really pay for all that much. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 313

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

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 can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.

Scale 274

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

“Give the VP of Sales More Time” This is always terrible advice. If a VP of Sales can’t improve things in one sales cycle or less — she never will. In one sales cycle, or less. An owner will add more net new revenue than her salary. And you are better off without her. More on that here.

Part-Time VPE 348

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 348

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. At Salesforce, at Box, the bottom end of the sales team churns out each year. First, do sales reps really compete with each other?

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 293

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. And another 6-12 to get any material revenues. Because you won’t have enough revenue just 12 months in … if you have any. It’s time. I get it.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting SaaS Interviewing Consulting 363

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. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. To get to $5m-$10m ARR and beyond, we’ll need a real VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 363

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 281

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 281

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. Bookings and Revenue illuminates the company’s performance in closing new business (bookings) and recurring revenue.

Metrics 250

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 250

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

A ways back, I asked Brendon Cassidy, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, Adobe Sign / EchoSign, and Talkdesk to put together his playbook for double sales. … How We Increased Sales Nearly 100% In One Quarter at HackerRank – Brendon Cassidy. They had significant recurring revenue and a lot of customers. Common sense.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 284

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 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 291

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) Youre not alone. Why HG Insights?

Scale 99

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 99

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

She brings in even better reps, and the revenue per rep goes up. Or drives the engineering team to ship more features per quarter. A great VP of Customer Success in just a quarter or so decreases churn and increases account revenue growth. Sales growth slowly declines as she struggles to bring in enough reps.

Sales Recruiting 256

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Churn 256

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

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. So during the intro, I kind of talked about how you run here’s Waldo recruiting.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Whether in customer acquisition, the revenue growth spectrum, or elsewhere, know that you’ll need to find the bottleneck and apply enough pressure and attention to alleviate it and move it elsewhere.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 261

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2019

Matt Schatz is SVP of Sales at WPEngine, responsible for defining and executing the global sales strategy. Matt has nearly two decades of senior leadership experience in sales and customer growth, specifically for technology companies with customers around the world including Bazaarvoice, CityVoice and Rackspace. It is hard.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Scale Engineering Sales Recruiting 212

Sales Hacker

JULY 25, 2022

In order for your car to run efficiently, you need every part of your engine firing on all cylinders. Your revenue organization works in the same way. Everyone on your team must meet their specific goals in order for your engine to operate efficiently. What is a sales performance dashboard?

Sales Recruiting 115

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 115

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

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.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2019

Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Hire more sales reps in the areas where they are profitable. Hire more engineers that can build features that help you close six figure deals. Not in April. Not by June. Get it Done.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 325

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work. The best mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies grow their accounts 120%-160% as a cohort, inclusive of churn. You can lose a top salesperson or engineer, and it’s still tough. This helps a lot.

Sales Recruiting 276

Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling Branding 276

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. 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. He or she doesn’t have to jump start the engine.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 284

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 239

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

But now they are back to picking the types of risk they like to take: Lack of A+ Engineering Team Risk. In SaaS, VCs seem to split two ways on the engineering team. Still, some VCs want to see at least one solid VP on the team, or at least, one solid manager you can scale under. The Googlers. The Palantirians. They want that.

Scale 343

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 343

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? Stage 1: Management by Objectives.

Compensation 195

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 195

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Sign up for free.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

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.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

engineering); or. Able to close first $1m in revenues (sales); or. If the founder/CEO is a magician in one area, and is tenacious and driven, she or he can recruit the rest. If yes, how much, or to what extent? Able to architect and lay out The Next Big Thing (product); or. Why would anyone great join you?

Sales Recruiting 211

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Engineering Product Marketing 211

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

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. GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor.

Scale 110

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 110

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

They are all avoidable : #1: Stepping Out of Sales Ok really this is mistake #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. I see way too many founders, in the transition from founder-led sales to their first (or second) VP of Sales, look to get that time back. Instead, how they spend time in sales changes. And so sales goes down.

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 312

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Back then, remote first was a recruiting advantage. Those were the innocent days with no customers, revenue, or responsibilities. 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.

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291