SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. From $1m to $10m ARR or so, as you build your first management team: You shouldn’t be the VP of Sales Anymore As You Scale. You still need to spend 15-20% of your time in sales. Add a layer. the prospects).

Part-Time VPE 272

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 272

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

They usually come in and handle compliance and oversight for an existing finance team that perhaps lacks the seasoned experience to handle models, venture capital and debt, prepare for an audit, etc. We have a Fractional CFO for our tiny team at SaaStr, he reviews the finances and corporate actions of the team that does … the actual work.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale Finance 286

SaaStr

MAY 7, 2024

Why Is Every Role a Prompt Engineering Role Runway is a next-generation finance platform. Sales Qualification You’re entered into a flow when you sign up and enter an email on Runway’s website to join their waiting list. Then, they draft a customized email for that person and put the draft inside the draft folder of a sales rep.

AI 185

AI Engineering Sales Hiring ChatGPT 185

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2024

Finance 101: Why Should You Care? It's important for early stage startups to focus on finance from the very beginning. Often that means trying to do things in the least expensive way possible and that means doing finance accounting on their own. They are not wholly focused on the financials.

Payment Services 52

Payment Services Systems Review Development Team Review Technical Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2024

Then, either: They’ll want to keep everyone for a while; or They won’t see the value in keeping much of sales, marketing, finance, etc. for anything longer than a transition period, and either won’t agree to hire all of them, or will transition them out post-acquisition.

Startup 209

Startup Sales Hiring Finance Acquisition 209

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 286

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 286

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2022

The role of a VP is to own everything required to hit the goals for a functional area – Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Finance, or Customer Success. If not, you aren’t hiring a real VP. You’ll end up needing to hire someone else, probably much sooner than you planned. This includes: Recruiting the team.

Sales Recruiting 251

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Finance Engineering 251

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

Companies are waiting too long to hire a CFO or VP of Finance. Companies Are Waiting Too Long To Hire A CFO or VP of Finance A lot of founders hire a VP of Ops instead. So, this person tweaks the numbers in Q4 to show sales increasing, costs staying consistent, and burn going down.

Sales Hiring 217

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 217

Point Nine Land

MARCH 7, 2019

Lemkin recently posted a tweetstorm about his observation that most startups are bad at finance. As you’d expect from Jason, he didn’t try to sugarcoat things: A top trend I have noticed past 3 years: Startups are MUCH, MUCH worse at finance. No proper finance or account until even after raising millions, even to $5m+ ARR.

Sales Hiring 72

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Payment Services Finance 72

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

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.

CTO Hire 235

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 235

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Sales is much harder than in 2021. Therefore, sales and marketing practices made no sense in 2020. How Does That Impact Sales and Marketing? In 2021, many sales folks were marginally efficient. If you have a good sales and marketing team, they will respond. It’s a cancer on the sales team.

Metrics 199

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 199

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

“Typically that was the marketing hat in my case, but sometimes it was the sales hat or thinking about finance or other areas of the business. During their recent hyper-growth phase, Rick Schultz CMO at Databricks hired a lot of marketers. Leading him to some of his biggest mistakes when hiring: Not investing enough time.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 236

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 1, 2021

It would be an understatement to say that we’re a fan of Flightpath Finance. We’re excited to announce that Baremetrics has acquired Flightpath Finance. Flightpath finance is our new (now not-so-secret) weapon. Have you ever held off on a key hire because you weren’t sure you had the cashflow to support them?

Finance 96

Finance Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Forecasting 96

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

On the other hand, the legal team may feel that the sales team is taking risks that put the company in jeopardy. Even though Legal and Sales can have different interests, creating a positive working relationship is possible. At G2, they have found that a close relationship between sales and legal has moved processes along more quickly.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Communication 156

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 181

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 181

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 18, 2022

A few minutes into the meeting with the sales team, the group startles: the data doesn’t match their expectations. The company moved to customer_revenue last quarter when we hired a new VP of Finance and they updated the definition. and proceed with your analysis. Something’s wrong. What data are you using?!

Revenue 319

Revenue Sales Hiring Finance Metrics 319

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As part of our last three annual finance and operating benchmarks surveys, we’ve asked nearly 2,000 startup founders and leaders of B2B SaaS businesses this simple question: “What’s keeping you up at night?”. Startup founders are seeing hiring become their day jobs . Software companies are hiring significantly more than ever before.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Tom Tunguz

MAY 2, 2013

To many entrepreneurs, hiring the first salesperson is a mystery. The great part about sales teams and sales departments is that they quantitative - sales teams thrive on numbers. At the most fundamental level, sales productivity has to exceed costs. The output of that salesperson - sales productivity.

Sales Hiring 111

Sales Hiring Compensation Forecasting Pricing 111

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

All of the sales and marketing dollars invested to obtain persuade the buyer to put digital ink to pdf have been recouped immediately. Contract As don’t require burning equity dollars to hire more AEs; the company reinvests customer revenue dollars to scale. But the contracts are substantially different to the company.

Sales Hiring 332

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Payment Solutions 332

OPEXEngine

APRIL 12, 2022

For a CFO, do you require an accounting or finance background? Remember it’s a mutual sales process. Unless you’re blessed to be at the hottest company in town, always remember that recruiting is a mutual sales process. And, yes, we succeeded with the hire!) Have a product marketing manager give a presentation.

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Finance 40

Tom Tunguz

MAY 27, 2014

What are the tradeoffs when considering different sales hiring plans and which is the right one for your startup? There are many different considerations in creating a sales hiring plan. The plot at the top of the post compares the MRR trajectory of these three sales strategies.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Strategy 100

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2021

This usually doesn’t happen in the very early days, when you just have a few employees and almost no real marketing or sales expense. It’s just, to invest in sales and marketing now, and make those extra hires, the burn rate is growing even faster at 12% a month after $100k MRR. This sounds about right. Not really.

Sales Hiring 309

Sales Hiring Scale Payment Features Finance 309

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

a company will hire rapidly to achieve scale. Executives think that hiring new contributors is necessary to hit plan numbers. The problem here is that without confidence and assurance that you can repeat your early success, you may set up your new hires for failure. Hire according to empirical indicators, not the financing plan.

Scale 184

Scale Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Technical Review 184

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2022

So I’ve seen a trend among many startups these days which is to sort of have a VP or Director of Business Ops instead of a VP / Director of Finance. They handle the cash too, but also go deep on the business in a way a “finance person” usually simply can’t. And they are often great hires, often very smart.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Finance Consulting Banking 240

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

VP of Sales (once you have one). Finance sometimes. There are clear Pros and Cons to reporting to a VP of Sales. The Pros are: Usually, a VP of Sales is your best manager. So usually, she can easily also manage Customer Success as well as all her reps. The function inherently teaches management skills.

Customer Success 227

Customer Success Sales Hiring Finance Churn 227

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 5, 2020

While many of these mistakes or potential issue items are likely to be more prevalent in a business with a lean (or essentially non-existent) finance team, we’ve seen large businesses deal with many of these same challenges. Not Utilizing a Proper SaaS Chart of Accounts. Not familiar with cash-basis vs. accrual-basis accounting?

Finance 118

Finance Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 118

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. SaaStr 565: Classic Episode: The Importance of Company Values, a Great Hiring Process, and Ownership Culture with Gusto Co-Founder & CEO Josh Reeves.

CTO Hire 212

CTO Hire CTO Sales Hiring Scale 212

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 27, 2014

The chart above compares the contribution of two hypothetical inside sales people with $400,000 quotas to an early-stage startup’s finances. In this case, contribution is the 18 month revenue of sold customers tallied cumulatively minus the salary costs of $100k annualized of the sales person.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Customer Lifetime Value Company Culture 100

Point Nine Land

MAY 19, 2021

Analysis of the early hires of 15 top B2B software companies in Europe Intro Hi there, it’s Maddy (again!). For example, when should they bring in their first VP Marketing hire, what kind of profiles of people should they be hiring as leaders, and how should they structure seniority levels. As a Partner at Erevena ?—?a

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Leadership B2B Finance 52

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2022

The reality is though, in SaaS, especially if you are primarily sales-driven, that’s often gonna be tough. Pay Sales Bonuses When Cash is Received, Not Upon Signed Contract. Sales reps hate, hate, hate this. Whatever it is, that extra bit is the cheapest financing of your business you’ll ever get.

SaaS Payments 259

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring SaaS Payment Services 259

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2022

Yet, it’s crucial to understand how to set the right goals for your sales teams to ensure optimal growth. But once you have hired salespeople dedicated to revenue, it’s time to set your first targets. . Invest in Sales Ops and/or Finance: This is the time to move the art of sales to a repeatable, more measured science.

Sales Hiring 254

Sales Hiring Revenue Finance Startup 254

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

Here are ways to hire the best salespeople for your role without having to throw everything but the kitchen sink at them. First, here’s why over hiring is so deadly. Why over hiring is bad (an example). Before I was engaged with a former client, they had made a hire that ended up costing them big. A mega sign-on bonus.

Sales Hiring 89

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Interviewing 89

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2022

Finance told us our budget is decreasing by 20%.” Management teams expect to reduce operating expense by 20% predominantly through headcount reductions or hiring freezes - everyone from sardine startups to public megalodons. Account executives selling mission-critical software should breathe easy.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Headcount Software Finance 145

SaaStr

APRIL 27, 2023

Organizations using Bob are able to accelerate hiring, retain the best talent, and elevate employee engagement. QuotaPath is the most adaptable compensation solution to bring Sales, RevOps, and Finance all on the same page. appeared first on SaaStr.

Cloud 199

Cloud Scale Startup Sales Hiring 199

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Chief Operating Officer: Responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations, providing strategic advice, and managing the company’s operations. Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2020

Most every early-stage investment either makes a solid profit for the investors, or nothing at all (odd acqui-hires aside). Stop paying below-market salaries, and only hiring the managers you can get, not best-of-breed. Stop paying sales reps too little. Stop hiring directors instead of VPs to save money.

Sales Hiring 343

Sales Hiring Investment Finance SaaS 343

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 21, 2023

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Pilot Waseem Daher on how he thought about the importance of charging, how secondary signals often matter in an area like accounting, and never stepping away from doing founder-led sales. So the first two hires we made were two early engineers.

Sales Hiring 84

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Pricing 84