Sales Hacker

JUNE 20, 2025

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. PLG, enterprise SaaS, marketplaces). 80% of exec-level jobs never hit job boards. It’s a crazy market.

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SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? And for good reason. One thing is the timing.

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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?

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SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Not that they are just "great at sales" — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) January 12, 2023. So a while back we did a deep dive on why 95% of the VPs of Sales candidates just won’t thrive at your start-up. I think it’s important to repeat that analysis, but for your first few sales reps.

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SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

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 bad one can torpedo you.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. Good afternoon.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. On the other hand, their Enterprise segment is bigger and doing great. But today, it’s not that easy anymore.

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Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design. They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

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.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? 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.

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SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question? That’s a great example.

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SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

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. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. Let me start by telling you about my first role as a manager. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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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. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

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OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

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SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! The other thing is I’ve studied enterprise software for literally 30 years. “Look, here’s enterprise software. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT . Super cool. This is great.

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Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

At Procore, he led all customer-facing functions—Sales, Marketing, CS, RevOps, and BD. But behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team – and building that team is one of the hardest and important parts of the journey. It’s the one person that can hire or fire you. It drives employee engagement.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Learnings on GTM.

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

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SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

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Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively?

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Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

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Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times. Mark’s a seasoned startup executive, he’s go-to-market oriented, and he has some large-company chops that he developed earlier in his career.

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Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Hiring for sales with John Barrows.

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Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Should your sales engineers also implement the software? For us in the early stages, we went down the path of hiring a solutions person (in this case the person was myself!)

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Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 120

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They built one platform that does it all, but also made it simple so that these small businesses they wanted to serve, could actually use it to grow revenue without needing a developer that they didn’t have. But in consumer that just doesn’t work. At the time, Shopify was still a new player. What product would you recommend?

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Kellblog

JUNE 29, 2025

If consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers can differentiate rice or yogurt, then we can darn well differentiate enterprise software. Every feature has benefits (the good things that happen when you have it) and consequences (the bad things that happen when you don’t). Hire a strong product marketer. Great marketers market both.

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Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

In this episode, Bob and I chat about his new book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. What is it about sales that makes academia hesitant to teach it? Bob wondered where all the sales professors were and discovered that perhaps as a profession it required more art than science.

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SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Those are all a bit enterprise biased. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. They moved to a more traditional SaaS inside sales model, and they started shipping out these hardware devices, and only 30% to 40% of the customers would end up paying for them. So that is the theme of today.

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Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2020

The cost of hiring the wrong SDR is high. The longer and more complex the sales cycle is (like in enterprise sales), the longer and more complex the onboarding and training process will be. So, how do you ensure you’re hiring the right SDRs for your team? Determine the Skills You Need. Convincing.

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OpenView Labs

MARCH 24, 2021

Without fail, every week I speak to 5–10 startup founders who are dealing with one of these two painful situations: They’re going through the process of parting ways with the wrong VP of Sales or the wrong enterprise salespeople. For either one, the bottom line is that the cost of a bad hire is significant.

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Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage. Are they looking for a developer with a specific skill set?

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Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

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Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Hiring team members with the right customer success manager skills is critical for the effectiveness of your CS team and strategy. Here we’ve identified the 13 most essential qualities to consider when hiring a CS manager. What Is a Customer Success Manager (CSM)?

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Sales Hacker

APRIL 21, 2020

Can you ever be sure you’re hiring the right salesperson? When I first wrote this article, we were in a very different place, with unemployment at an all-time low and sales hiring a top priority. That secret weapon is a hiring scorecard. Fortunately, my client used their hiring scorecard to sidestep a costly mis-hire.

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SaaStr

JULY 22, 2019

That’s not a bad start. We work with mostly modern teams. It was interesting, listening to Tiago from Talkdesk, and some of his experience with moving from a commercial business to an enterprise business rings pretty true for me and for New Relic’s experience. Join us at SaaStr Europa 2020. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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