Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

As sales leaders, most of us assume that many aspects of our sales machine will become inefficient during hypergrowth. As we think of ways to improve sales performance, a number of growth pains may come in the way: High acquisition costs. Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. It’s a byproduct.

Scale 55

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 55

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Overcoming challenges by optimizing for success In the early stages of setting up your SaaS business, it’s always a good idea to invest time thinking about the direction you want to take. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up.

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 234

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

By freezing headcount for a year. Mathematically, if you keep the headcount flat and continue growing 50% like Monday or 30% at $2B like Hubspot, you get wildly more efficient. So, this person tweaks the numbers in Q4 to show sales increasing, costs staying consistent, and burn going down. How did they do that?

Sales Hiring 233

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 233

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

And often, if you are capital efficient, your marketing cost will be close to $0 at this point (you are barely spending anything to acquire most customers), and your sales costs are pretty predictable. Generally speaking, one Director of Sales can manage about 8 closers, account execs, max. Why would this be? Maybe 10 SDRs.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 236

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2021

Oftentimes, it’s determined many marketing, finance and sometimes sales professionals are redundant. A third review around Year 2 or s o: when the acquirer decides how much to invest going forwar d. This can result in shrinking the team down if it’s underperformed, or investing more if it’s performed well.

Acquisition 176

Acquisition Technical Review Headcount Finance 176

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

Atlassian plans to double its headcount over the coming few years. Spends less than 20% of its revenues on sales and marketing. Atlassian turns around and invests some of that savings in engineering and product. And half of Atlassian’s employees now live 2 or more hours from the office.

Scale 230

Scale Headcount Cloud Business Model 230

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Nearly every sales organization will admit they could be better at planning. According to a study by Cascade Insights , more than 75% of sales leaders agree their planning efforts are problematic — and 90% of sales ops leaders confessed on LinkedIn they need to do sales planning faster and more frequently.

Scale 99

Scale Headcount Sales Forecasting 99

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

We can take higher risks in a less regulated industry than a peer in an investment bank or healthcare business. Over the last 18 months, on earnings call, Jennifer noted that: Sales cycles are longer because more approvals are required. As startup and tech leaders, we need empathy for where they’re coming from.

Generative AI 239

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 239

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Yes, these really can be seen as customer acquisition costs, and they are: “We consider the net costs of onboarding and hardware, in addition to our sales and marketing activities, to be core elements of our customer acquisition approach.” A reminder growth investing isn’t a space you automatically make money at.

SaaS Payments 244

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

We just wrote up how some of the biggest changes of SaaS are now coming, specifically in Customer Success and Sales. This chart says never stop investing in customer success for real. Sales grew a little less. People did invest a lot in CSM, and in 2021 and 2022, the CSM population grew roughly 20%. The world has changed.

Sales Hiring 250

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 250

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 4, 2018

The promise of live chat for sales teams is being able to connect faster with high-quality leads. But for someone in Sales Operations, the first thing we think is: how well does live chat convert? Invest in sales conversations, not touches. Many sales teams aim for 12-18 touches over two to three weeks.

Sales Funnel 220

Sales Funnel Sales Headcount B2B 220

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them.

Sales Hiring 188

Sales Hiring Metrics Revenue Sales 188

Sales Hacker

JULY 31, 2023

It’s easy to find thought leaders on LinkedIn giving tips on using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But when one of my reps was struggling to book meetings in Q1 this year, I couldn’t find a comprehensive guide to LinkedIn Sales Navigator — so I decided to write it. If Sales Navigator is connected to your CRM: Choose ‘My CRM Accounts.’

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 52

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 20, 2021

Here are three ways to know if it’s time to invest in customer support operations (if you’re looking to scale, it probably is), and a few simple things your organization can do to get started. Starting to build out a support operations function doesn’t necessarily mean adding headcount straight away. Sound good? Baby steps, for sure.”.

Scale 156

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

Sales is the Growth Engine. Sales is the engine driving SaaS company value. Top and bottom line performance are totally dependent on the sales organization and its performance. And sales expense is typically the largest expense item on a growth SaaS company’s income statement. Typical SaaS Sales Metrics.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

Sales Hacker

MAY 15, 2023

It’s hard to know when you’re ready to hire a sales team — and the consequences can make or break your startup. And that may include owning and executing the sales process , from initial outreach and lead generation to closing deals — not hiring a sales team right away. How do you know you’re ready to hire a sales team?

Sales Hiring 87

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services Payment Services 87

Sales Hacker

JUNE 16, 2022

It’s been a tough couple of years, Sales Hackers. What do the changing market conditions mean for RevOps and sales? What do the changing market conditions mean for RevOps and sales? VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io. Q: What should sales orgs expect to see in the coming weeks? And it’s about to get tougher.

Scale 92

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 92

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 16, 2022

Support teams are facing a critical juncture: business costs and customer expectations continue to grow while resources like headcount and budget are decreasing. In turn, you’ll increase efficiency without increasing your headcount. Reduce investment costs. Improved reputation drives sales.

Headcount 118

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value 118

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no sales people. ‘No No sales’ became nearly as synonymous with Atlassian as ‘no software’ was with Salesforce. Atlassian now has a sales team. Public PLG Businesses Are Doubling Down on Sales.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

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. Have a bias toward “yes”.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2016

Sales leaders consistently underinvest in sales team training and development. As SaaS startups scale, sales execution becomes the most tangible metric of a business’ success, and the one by which the business’ health is benchmarked. Not to mention how the head of sales is evaluated.

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Headcount 100

The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

The original v1 model was a very simple plan for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model. If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly. You can remove, change or add roles in column H.

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

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, 2022

The admin, influential decision-makers, and consumer sales reps can be the same people in a Consumer or SMB setting. There’s a lot of fear when you’re moving from a digital-led Consumer business to a business with multiple digital channels, sales channels, customer success channels, etc. . Overhaul and invest in your people strategy.

Scale 211

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 211

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

JUNE 26, 2018

Today, everyone working in and around sales and marketing knows that bots are hot, in vogue and quite simply, of the moment. In my role leading sales enablement at HubSpot in EMEA, we deliberately carve out time to think about ways to leverage tools, technology and software that will make sales reps more effective.

Sales Enablement 100

Sales Enablement Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 100

ChurnZero

JUNE 9, 2023

Good sales teams typically get the budget, headcount and tools they desire because the function is tied to revenue. As a result, CS teams often have to work harder to make the case for headcount, technology and even product requests on behalf of customers. How can CS leaders address this challenge?

Finance 98

Finance Metrics Customer Success Headcount 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

One smart way to build a US presence is to hire a GM, ideally someone who could run an important function like sales or marketing besides being responsible for US operations. Often, founders are unsure about the headcount split between India and the US. b) Some folks like to invest in the company they advise.

Scale 218

Scale Sales Hiring Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team 218

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Measuring Usage Since Day One Since the beginning, monday.com built and has used a BI tool called Big Brain — a major investment for that size of company. Now, they have monday Sales CRM, a complete organization within the company. As an engineer, he and his partner said they’ve never had a sales team. Are Sales Teams Too Lean?

Scale 164

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 164

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Companies were growing their sales organizations and bringing in more revenue. Companies everywhere have frozen their hiring and laid off workers — with sales reps often among the first to go. I’ll be honest: as the leader of a sales-focused recruiting company, this has been tough for me and my team.

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 95

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 13, 2022

SaaSco’s sales have slowed in the second half of 2022 selling to mid-sized enterprises. SaaSco’s sales cycle is six to nine months. . If the Saasco executive team acts on that suggested benchmark, they will need to devote a significant part of their sales team’s capacity towards current customers.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Scale Headcount Software Review 52

OpenView Labs

MAY 24, 2021

Tip: Look at the ratio between R&D spend vs. Sales and Marketing spend*. If a company’s product plays an important role in their revenue generation—whether through acquiring, converting, or expanding customers—we should expect that company to spend relatively more on R&D and relatively less on Sales and Marketing.

Scale 98

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Benchmarks 98

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

In this article, you’ll learn how to structure your sales development (SDR) team for maximum efficiency and scalability. Sales leaders, read on! The SEAL program can bolt on to traditional models like pods, round robin or regional inside sales structures and give those structures superpowers. Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs.

Scale 86

Scale Development Headcount Sales 86

Kellblog

MAY 26, 2024

Hire a VP of Sales who makes you uncomfortable. You must build a hyper-competitive sales force who will win deals at nearly any cost. Make a loose discounting policy that provides sales with lots of discretion. They should be so aggressive you get worried. They should be respected more than liked, feared more than loved.

Software Review 109

Software Review Systems Review Sales Hiring Headcount 109

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 20, 2023

The founders of Dealroom and Databox , Yoram Wijngaarde and Peter Caputa (former VP sales, HubSpot), get together with Sara Archer from ChartMogul to discuss what lesson they have learned on the journey from $1M to $10M. Peter shares his experience with managing headcount. We got a reduced ROI on initial investment on headcount.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Headcount SaaS 52

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 5, 2020

One of the challenges we’ve faced as a support team is scaling our high bar for customer satisfaction without scaling our headcount alongside our customer count. More than a balance: it’s a strategic investment. It’s a problem we know well. Striking a balance with conversational support.

Scale 204

Scale Headcount Scaling Customer Support 204

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

In our webinar, “ Convincing your CEO to invest MORE in Customer Success ,” Jeff shares how to win more budget for your CS team by backing up your requests with the right research and data. This is something that I’m doing with fractional headcount allocation. A lot of times, my COO might know about it. CFO is on it.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 98