Headcount, Sales, Sales Recruiting and Underperforming Technical Team

The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Hiring a VP of Sales with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. Jason has written about the cheat codes for hiring VPs of Sales since 2012 and realized it was worth a deeper dive. Read the Ultimate Guide to Hiring a Great VP of Sales ebook or What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One blog post.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing

5 lessons learned starting a new team within our sales organization

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. We had split into two distinct but complementary functions.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale

Sales Hacker?s Max Altschuler on selling more with less

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.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors

Webinars

Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

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SaaStr Podcast #403 with Loom VP of Sales Sam Taylor

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

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales

Hiring New Salespeople (While Keeping Up With Business as Usual)

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

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team

Intercom’s Sanj Bhayro on creating the right foundation to help businesses scale

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

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting

20 Secrets to Sales Onboarding Success (Worth Up To $2M Annually)

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

Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services

BrowserStack’s Mark Rudden on hypergrowth in a global pandemic

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. In fact, in some form or another, he’s been working in sales for most of his career. The journey to sales is a bit of a random one.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team

There’s more than one path to $100 million

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale

Gong’s Linda Lin on customer success strategies for moving upmarket

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. So how do you create a strong, enterprise-ready team? Leveraging customer insights across your business.

Scale

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring

There’s more than one path to $100 million

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale

The Ultimate Guide to SaaS Product Management

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

It’s easy to forget that SaaS product management is a relatively new, and still emerging, function. For proof, might I suggest the classic post Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager , which presents a very different vision for the role of product manager than most of us have today). Role of Product Manager.

Management

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting

Mark Tice Returns: It’s Time For SaaS Companies To Do A Channel Check.

Kellblog

JUNE 4, 2023

In that (quite popular) post, I shared Mark’s top ten list of mistakes that enterprise software startups make in sales and go-to-market. Compound this general lack of attention with reductions in headcount and tough economic times, and partners can devolve from an afterthought to a never-thought.

Sales Recruiting

Sales Recruiting Compensation SaaS Sales Hiring

After Selling For $580M, Here’s What I Learned About SaaS During My Time At Buildium

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. 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. We mostly succeeded. I’m proud of all that.

SaaS Payments

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services

Elad Gil on catapulting into hyper growth

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. The second is employees.

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors

SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Lucidchart and Wrike — February 28, 2020

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. How does Karl think about working with recruiters? Loving our podcast content? How does this requirement change as the company scales?

Sales Hiring

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach

When Does Open Source Make Sense for a Business?

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

Many companies are strategic consumers of open-source software as a means to reduce the burden on their software engineering team to build everything from the ground up. Related podcast episode: How MongoDB Scaled Their Open-Source Product with a Bottom-Up and Top-Down Sales Motion.

Business

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service

SaaS Brief

The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Hiring a VP of Sales with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

5 lessons learned starting a new team within our sales organization

Webinars

Trending Sources

Sales Hacker?s Max Altschuler on selling more with less

Webinars

SaaStr Podcast #403 with Loom VP of Sales Sam Taylor

Hiring New Salespeople (While Keeping Up With Business as Usual)

Intercom’s Sanj Bhayro on creating the right foundation to help businesses scale

20 Secrets to Sales Onboarding Success (Worth Up To $2M Annually)

BrowserStack’s Mark Rudden on hypergrowth in a global pandemic

There’s more than one path to $100 million

Gong’s Linda Lin on customer success strategies for moving upmarket

There’s more than one path to $100 million

The Ultimate Guide to SaaS Product Management

Mark Tice Returns: It’s Time For SaaS Companies To Do A Channel Check.

After Selling For $580M, Here’s What I Learned About SaaS During My Time At Buildium

Elad Gil on catapulting into hyper growth

SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Lucidchart and Wrike — February 28, 2020

When Does Open Source Make Sense for a Business?

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