SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

PST — Former VP of Customer Success and current founder and Managing Partner at Success Venture Partners, John Gleeson, shares his lessons learned scaling customer success from $1M to $300M in ARR. The framework above is a lean canvas to help you understand your customers’ needs post-sale. Headcount maybe goes from 2 or 4 to 10.

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Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 161

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2021

And they will take at least a tiny amount to scale. I know your first 3 reps are scaled and are crushing it, all hitting 100%. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders are cost centers here. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders are cost centers here. This is hard to achieve.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Headcount Sales 297

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

And they will take at least a tiny amount to scale. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders and sales engineers are cost centers here. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals, and 1 head of sales development for each 10 SDRs. 75 yield = 30 sales professionals.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 285

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? You can back into how many sales reps you’ll need in SaaS. And they will take at least some time to scale. That may actually be high, especially if you are scaling quickly and make a few hiring errors. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 223

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 23, 2020

To scale, a company must find customers in ever larger numbers. The ideal scenario is one where purely external signals confer a prospect’s propensity to buy. A prospect experiences hypergrowth is perfect example. Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion.

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Scale Headcount Sales Startup 237

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

But to Go Big, almost everyone in SaaS at least eventually adds a sales team. But to scale it quickly added a very effective sales team : Yes, Atlassian for a long time had almost no “direct” sales team, well after the IPO. With, and through, a sales team. You don’t need 100% sales-driven revenue to Go Big.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 334

SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2023

So while the media is full of stories of unicorns doing layoffs and massive cutbacks, the story is a bit different with leading public SaaS companies. Yes many public SaaS companies have done some sort of layoffs the past 12 months, they were often more really reorgs, though, without any net decrease in headcount. Billion in ARR!

Scale 210

Scale Headcount Point of Sale SaaS 210

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

You might feel confused about where to begin, how to scale up, which mistakes you should avoid, and things you should consider before expanding. Now, let’s look at ten learnings that Dorian gathered while scaling Grammarly from a Consumer to an Enterprise brand with B2B offerings. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

Scale 219

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 219

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

That works for a while, but you end up with not enough headcount if you do freeze hiring but still want to grow. Samsara is growing a stunning 40% as it crosses $1B in ARR — and says it needs more and more sales capacity. You can’t scale a high-growth SLG-led model without more and more sales reps.

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Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Cloud 293

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. Do you have to double your headcount to make it from $10M to $20M or even $2M to $5M?

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 264

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Three overarching learnings from incredible sales leaders who have lived through the ups and downs of growing sales teams at some of the fastest growing SaaS companies is exactly what we’ll dive into today – so you can get the learnings and insight without being in the driver’s seat. This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Flex.

Sales Hiring 105

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 105

Tom Tunguz

MAY 16, 2023

I analyzed the headcount patterns within these companies to shed light on three questions : How are these top companies changing their headcount through the downturn? What percent of headcount is in product & engineering? What percent of headcount is in sales & marketing?

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Headcount Startup Scale Engineering 258

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. The VPM giving their all to create leads, opportunities, and more. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 297

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 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160

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.

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Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 55

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. You’re not scaling as quickly as you’d like. Sound good? What is customer support operations? Baby steps, for sure.”.

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Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 24, 2018

How do you scale a support organization without breaking the budget or killing the quality of the customer experience? It’s an age old question for anyone leading a customer support organization, the sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its customer base expands. Automation.

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Scale Customer Support Scaling Strategy 178

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. Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company.

Sales Recruiting 177

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 177

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2023

A nice sweet spot for a mix of inside and outside sales. #3. High NRR leads to revenue growing faster than your new customer count. #7. A reminder scaling SaaS takes real capital. #9. Slowing headcount growth — like lots of others. And that’s up from 118% at IPO. #2. And a few other interesting learnings: #6.

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Scale Headcount Sales Hiring SMB 288

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Building revenue operations to support sales Deel had onboarded nearly 100 clients, reports showed good traction, and it was time to leverage this opportunity. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up. Use your data to inform.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 240

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Scaling Your Personalization. This is the downside of the modern Sales Assembly Line — both buyer and seller feeling like a cog in the wheel. Instead we need to focus on using our own voices and words to send each prospect a unique message. AI can help scale this, but we need to be careful not to rely too heavily on it.

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Scale Scaling AI Search AI 108

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. Everyone is basically doing more with not much more headcount (see next point). #4. Growing Headcount, But Much More Slowly That Revenue. Headcount is up 29% year-over-year, but revenue is up 50%. Billion in ARR. They are growing 80%. #3.

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Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 214

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 24, 2021

After all, whether you’re aiming to drive product-led growth or you’re going with a sales-led strategy, once you’ve brought in those new users, you still need to provide an exceptional customer support experience in order to keep them around long-term. Are the tools you’re using capable of scaling with you?

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Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 129

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Same Sales Commissions for Upsells as Net New Deals Always interesting to see what folks do here. #8. Adding Back Sales Capacity Now. Keeping headcount flat got everyone to be more efficient. Keeping headcount flat got everyone to be more efficient. But you can be too efficient in sales. I.e., Hiring More Reps.

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Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Engineering 247

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

At least in the short term, it is turning most of us can do more with about the same headcount in SaaS. #4. Product expansion key to its growth — its new Sales CRM already seeing very rapid adoption. Headcount Growing, But Slowly. Staying basically flat in headcount for 3 quarters while growing a stunning 50% (!)

Headcount 296

Headcount Sales Hiring Scale Cloud 296

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

If you’re a leader, he says, don’t try to scale your job. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Here are five quick takeaways: Most sales and support teams talk about their jobs as a funnel. Short on time?

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

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. At least you don’t have a scale disadvantage. Peter shares his experience with managing headcount.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Headcount SaaS 52

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 86

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services Payment Services 86

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2020

It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities. 1:1 AE/XDR ratios are the most common in both inside and outside sales teams. Sales teams with spans of control under 7 attain 80-95% of quota twice as frequently. Just pick a metric.

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Scale Headcount Benchmarks Retention 364

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2022

Not having a traditional sales team sure helps. Never let it be said that SaaS can’t generate a lot of cash at scale. #3. I’d argue No until you are at scale. But once you are at scale, they can have a massive impact. #4. Transition to Cloud takes time at scale. Headcount up 7%, while revenue is up 37%.

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Scale Marketplace as a Service Headcount Cloud 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

Even if leads are still a bit lumpy, outbound is still stretching itself … you at least learn how to close by this point. 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.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Venture Capital 242

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

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 2, 2019

This time every year, sales and sales operations teams work with their business partners in finance, marketing and other functions to set their annual sales plan for the coming year. One way to approach this complexity is to separate out the three key components of sales planning. Headcount Planning.

Headcount 41

Headcount Sales Hiring Scale Sales 41

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Sales teams have started using software that identifies leads, researches them, identifies commonalities (a shared university affiliation or a passion for a sports team), drafts the email, & sends it. how will sales teams restructure as a result of the mechanization of outbound email? What about an artisanal email?

Artificial Intelligence 146

Artificial Intelligence Scale Headcount Scaling 146

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 98

Scale Headcount Sales Forecasting 98

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

So what should earlier-stage companies do: immediately build out a big sales team or focus on product-led growth? Now they have sales reps, but still consider themselves PLG. Directly through sales teams. Unlike many sales teams, this one only engages with existing customers of a certain size. Here’s why.

Sales Hiring 231

Sales Hiring Enterprise Headcount Scale 231

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

Last year, the company doubled its headcount, tripled revenue and landed on G2’s Top 100 Global Software list. . Keep in mind that Conversation Intelligence is the fastest-growing segment in sales technology, with much traction in the enterprise. No doubt, Chorus provides this at scale. Yet the growth is likely to accelerate.

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Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 355