Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 15, 2021

There’s a simple secret to hiring quickly and building a strong team. Invest in great managers early. Post-PMF, the organization must evolve: it has to grow headcount and then manage that headcount well. How many hiring managers are in each of the two hierarchies from above? On the right, three.

Sales Recruiting

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, has done numerous surveys now that confirm that a startling 70% of first hires don’t make it. In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to hire a Great VP of Sales. And we’ll keep talking about it — so long as 70% of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it 1 year. Reason #1 is jumping to Stretch VP of Sales one stage too early. Not hiring people better than you. Do not do this.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

This requires effort from your entire organization, and Handshake VP, Employer Partnerships Jessica Peluso outlines some changes that you can make to your brand, and your application, interview, and offer process that will help find the talent you are trying to attract and hire. Below is the transcript of Jessica’s session. Hi everyone.

Sales Hiring

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 5, 2020

On the brighter side, it is a resource for startups looking to hire as they grow. But starting that week, startups began reducing headcount by about 700 per day. If we tally the reductions by category, travel, retail, fitness, real estate, transportation, and recruiting constitute the top 6 categories.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Hacker

JUNE 10, 2025

With over two decades of experience leading marketing ops, sales ops, and go-to-market infrastructure, Andy is a true pioneer of modern RevOps. How venture networks and backchanneling drive most executive hiring decisions. Discussed in this Episode: Why 80–98% of VP and C-level roles are never posted—and how to access them.

Sales Recruiting

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2024

Kyle Norton CRO of Owner is kicking off a new podcast for Pavillion with revenue leaders, and we were lucky enough to be guest #001 here: It’s a great convo on many SaaStr themes — but from the perspective of a VP Sales / CRO. Never play the blame game As a revenue leader, it’s crucial we take accountability for sales performance.

Technical Review

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. If that’s true, then you should absolutely hire more salespeople.

Sales Hiring

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 18, 2018

This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring. Every lead hired today, whether marketing , sales, engineering or product, will have a very different job nine months from now, much less two years from now. Imagine you work at a startup that is growing headcount 125% year over year.

Sales Recruiting

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.

Sales Hiring

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.

Sales Hiring

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

APRIL 5, 2021

In 2020 I was building my sales team at Livestorm , and at the time we were going through a big hiring boom. For the first time in my life, I was in charge of vetting and hiring new team members at scale. This was a big challenge for me because I am very passionate about hiring without bias. First impressions still count.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Companies were growing their sales organizations and bringing in more revenue. The biggest obstacle to hiring was that there simply weren’t too many great candidates on the job market. Companies everywhere have frozen their hiring and laid off workers — with sales reps often among the first to go.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

Like most things in life, hiring sales talent is a matter of timing. Especially since the best candidates with strong sales skills are usually snatched up within 10 days. That’s why it’s critical to overcome indecision and move quickly when recruiting sales talent. Is it unrealistic sales quotas?

Sales Hiring

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. Then, the sales team went to work. In his opinion, the hiring process is a preview of their sales technique.

Sales Hiring

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. But no sales team can afford to grow without intention. While building a sales team, we’ve focused a lot on our sales culture. Here’s how we went about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture-additive.

Scale

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

Given that the primary metric we measure growth in is revenue, it follows that sales feels growth more acutely than almost any other function. As the Senior Vice President of Sales for Pipedrive , she’s currently responsible for building nimble sales teams who drive sustainable revenue.

Scale

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Sales leaders have a bad habit of dumping people into a new job without properly preparing them to succeed. When I landed my first “big girl job” 20 years ago as an Inside Sales Manager , I was underqualified, overambitious, and soon underwater. What’s So Important About Sales Onboarding? So tune in….

Sales Hiring

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

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 6, 2020

Hiring has changed, big time. Old school recruiting is out, social recruiting is in. Many of my hires in the past have been through the network and hired out of opportunity, not necessarily need. Even more impressive, I could have probably happily hired about 30 of them. I haven’t had a resume in years.

Sales Hiring

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

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. Your first SaaS customer success hire. Since then, you’ve spent over 12 years in post-sales leadership.

Customer Success

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

It’s an important question, as your target growth rate determines your hiring plan, budget, and fundraising strategy. As I wrote here , trying to forecast what happens to your CACs if you 10x your sales and marketing spend is very difficult. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 12, 2018

As VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, Elad Gil was a key player as company headcount skyrocketed from 90 to 1,500 employees. This wasn’t Elad’s first experience with hyper growth – Google grew headcount 10x during his time as a product manager there – nor the last. What to consider when hiring a COO.

Sales Hiring

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was offered a job as Buildium’s first full-time marketing hire, pulling in a cool $38,400 annually. In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones. We could branch out into commercial property management. The business was structured as an LLC.

SaaS Payments

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

At the time, I was a sales engineer, and my job was to close deals and move on to the next prospect. However, I found there were two flaws in our customer management process. After getting slapped on the wrist a few times for my after-sales support, I knew things had to change. We had presales, and we had post-sales.

Customer Success

OpenView Labs

JUNE 3, 2021

Engineering manages IT. Hiring managers take on HR responsibilities. Specifically, I’m talking about product management and product marketing. Product management focuses on putting product “on the shelf,” and product marketing focuses on getting product “off the shelf”. CEOs “hit the streets” and sell.

Product Marketing

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

First, digital CS will become a way of life due to flat or reduced headcount. Customer sentiment, intention, and level of trust can be surfaced and incorporated into more predictive customer health scores while providing valuable insights and feedback to CSMs and account managers. Post-sales functions will get a rebrand.

Trends

SaaSX

JULY 26, 2020

Here are 5 roles you may not have thought of and how they can help drive immediate revenue & sales efficiency impact. Role: Also known as Sales Engineer, but I prefer to call it Product Specalist. This is a dedicated role that helps distribute product knowledge across a fast-scaling sales and customer success team.

Sales Recruiting

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

It’s an important question, as your target growth rate determines your hiring plan, budget, and fundraising strategy. As I wrote here , trying to forecast what happens to your CACs if you 10x your sales and marketing spend is very difficult. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 18, 2020

Like let’s take a more conservative approach in the earlier months of the year in terms of adding headcount. Can we recruit hiring new team members from January to April, or from January to June this year, just to make sure that as we enter in the next year, we’re able to start off with some wins and not get upside down.

Customer Success

ChurnZero

JANUARY 25, 2024

Skillset 1: Sales acumen In 2024, driving revenue is a primary responsibility of CS. This means that sales acumen is no longer just a bonus for CS professionals—it’s a new baseline for many companies. Customer success manager roles The CSM role is becoming more strategic, with increased responsibility for driving revenue.

Customer Success

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

Inner Workings of Product Management at Product Led Growth Companies. At product led growth (PLG) companies like Atlassian and Intercom, product management may look very different from a ‘traditional’ SaaS company. These companies have fewer sales reps (or none at all), meaning more resources get invested into product and engineering.

Management