SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level.

Scale 199

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 199

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does it get easier or harder to scale SaaS as your company grows? Generally, it gets easier to grow at a “good”/modest rate at you scale, but harder to grow at an outsize rate. Efficiency goes down in other places (sales efficiency usually, marketing efficiency often). Account expansion starts to work.

Scale 201

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling Branding 201

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2020

#1: Todd McKinnon, CEO Okta: “Building a Higher Performance Organizaion” A really great, open session on what Okta got right to win: Todd is humble and candid about how they won (going enterprise, early) and where it ended up being OK they were a bit late, or took time to win (mobile, dev). How to recruit in a less hot space.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SMB 174

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. The company helps enterprises internationally with contextual and actionable insights to secure their cloud infrastructure. In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge.

Sales Recruiting 220

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 220

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Nabbing enterprise clients could mean fewer deals to reach revenue goals. Just one enterprise client could lead to more thanks to the power of word-of-mouth and familiarity — “If this enterprise company likes their solution, then I’ll probably like it too.” Before you rush in for the sale, you need to assess everything.

Enterprise 139

Enterprise Technical Review Sales Recruiting Scale 139

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 259

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 231

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 231

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. I thought it was a great checklist for all of us to take a look at.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 273

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. I don’t know anything about sales.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 261

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

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 scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

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. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 261

Totango

MARCH 15, 2022

Efforts to scale customer success 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.

Sales Recruiting 95

Sales Recruiting Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 95

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

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.

Part-Time VPE 235

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 235

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 245

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 245

Mucker Capital

APRIL 2, 2024

In this Mucker Growth session, Mike Genstil with ValueCore delves into the concept of value selling and its application in enterprise sales. Quantifying pain and value, even early in the sales process, is shown to be beneficial, leading to higher win rates and deal sizes. Deals can slip due to a variety of reasons.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Enterprise Cybersecurity 52

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster. That was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. We’ve scaled it pretty far pretty quickly. So we did about 442 million in sales last year. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 199

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 199

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

.” Nearly a decade and 500 episodes of the podcast later, we invited back our original SaaStr podcast host, Harry Stebbings of 20VC for a catch-up chat with Jason to discuss the world of venture today and how to scale a successful SaaS sales team from the bottom up. You never get to spend less time in sales as a SaaS CEO.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 189

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

So the other day I looked back at about 25 SaaS seed investments I’d made that had scaled well past $10m-$20m and reflected on the top themes. They are all avoidable : #1: Stepping Out of Sales Ok really this is mistake #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. Instead, how they spend time in sales changes. Here they are. More here. #2:

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 267

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2021

If I had, I would have better understood the likely end point vis-a-vis freemium vs. enterprise. Not Hiring 2-3 Sales Reps to Start. More on that here: When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two. Our first ‘enterprise’ customer seemed like an outlier. We should have taken $2m more.

Sales Recruiting 265

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 265

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2023

Daniel, you grew to 3 million in ARR before you hired a VP of Sales. You had all the reps and SDRs reporting to you, managed it all yourself. How’d you manage all that? Daniel : We followed a lean start up approach to building our sales process. An engineering team and the sales team was me with a laptop.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 239

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 268

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 268

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

One of the biggest challenges in scaling a SaaS company has always been VP and SVP level talent. It’s an even bigger deal in the enterprise, where the playbook to closing large deals is more critical to have down. But for now, if you are beginning to scale, aggressively recruit that Bay Area VP you always wanted to hire.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 307

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 184

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 184

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

I really appreciate you coming to talk about how to attract, hire, and build a more diverse sales team in your organization. So I’ve been building top-producing sales teams for a really, really long time. So over the years, I’ve watched many sales leaders go out and say, “Brian’s my top producer.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 224

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 281

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 281

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2021

Still, an overall deep-dive on lessons learned the second and third time around: Not Easier : Recruiting – Not Easier. You might think after (goodness) the best part of 20 years of working in tech, 18 as an executive or CEO, and 13 as a founder … I’d be pretty good at recruiting at this point. I’m not.

Sales Recruiting 325

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 325

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. And also — to understand where you can’t let it all go. Add a layer.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 273

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

Recruitment: Getting the right talent onboard is a critical step. Sales: You must understand how to grow your sales machine, and it isn’t easy. Sales: You must understand how to grow your sales machine, and it isn’t easy. In fact, you need both to optimally grow your sales efforts. Surprises Along the Way.

Sales Recruiting 200

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Delivery Travel 200

Kellblog

MAY 10, 2021

In this post, I’ll present what I view as the minimum sales management framework for an enterprise SaaS startup — i.e., the basics you should have covered as you seek to build and scale your sales organization [1]. Pipeline management rules, with an optional stage matrix. Management rules (e.g.,

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Enterprise 110

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. On the other hand, their Enterprise segment is bigger and doing great. You could do vanilla 101 SaaS practices and succeed. They did it.

Sales Hiring 214

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 214

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

Sales Hiring 209

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 209

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

343: Kyle Parrish is the Head of Sales @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish. Before Figma, Kyle spent close to 3 years as an Account Executive at ADP. Why is it so hard moving from 0-1 in sales? How does Kyle advise founders when it comes to making your first sales hire?

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Advisors 195

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. in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. But trust me.

Sales Hiring 358

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 358

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2020

For example, Google put a lot of work into Google Hire, its recruiting SaaS product. If you buy Salesforce, you get several benefits: Scale. Salesforce is really 4+ clouds that are all at scale (sales, marketing, commerce and platform). Accelerated Enterprise Credibility. But then shut it down. Salesforce.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

In this Ask Me Anything Part 1, Lemkin answers the questions: Many VCs talk about funding, yet you’re so focused on sales. Question #1: Why Are You So Focused On Sales When Other VCs Are Focused On Funding? That VP of Sales came out of Salesforce. Lemkin’s Hail Mary was hiring Brendon Cassidy when that first VP of Sales quit.

Outsourcing Services 211

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 211

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. And now it’s all about like, can you really scale and execute? Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 249

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 249

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 156