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Salesforce, Nov 2024: We're hiring 1,000 new sales execs to sell AI! Well that must have gone well as Salesforce is now hiring 2,000 (!) in sales to sell AI. Per The Information , Benioff has also instructed his sales team to go all-in and put AI and Agentforce into every deal possible. Not really.
” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Would you hire a “VP of Internet” in 2010? Think about it.
Alex Rosenblatt was the first marketing hire and Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog, all the way through IPO and beyond. The 10th marketing hire is the most critical inflection point for team scaling – This is where informal processes break down and requires a complete rethinking of how the team operates. The problem?
During the Boom Times of late ’20-early ’22, we all often confused Taking Risks in hiring … with Just Plain Ignoring Flags. The best VPs of Sales I’ve hired were Directors of Sales before. That’s far better in my experience than hiring a random top tier university grad. Watch them fly.
So what does that mean for inside sales? A 50/50 Sales Team. At least for SMB and more routine mid-market sales. By 2026, these same AI systems will have evolved to manage entire sections of the sales process autonomously. An A+ AI will soon join every sales call, for real. You’ll Need to Manage Both.
Insights from Jasper Carmichael-Jack, CEO of Artisan at 2025 SaaStr AI Summit About Artisan: AI-powered sales platform building the end-to-end solution —from marketing personalization to AE automation across the entire revenue cycle. Sales is messier. CRM data accuracy sits at 47% across most sales orgs.
5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. Create Compelling Economic Incentives For sales talent, compensation is critical.
✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 16, 2025 The Top 3 Reasons AI Sales Tools “Don’t Work” (Spoiler: They Actually Do, If You Use The Tools Properly) I get this question at least 3x a week: “Jason, we tried AI sales tools and they just don’t work. I’ve been in B2B and Saa sales for 15+ years.
The Pivot : They interviewed 200 companies and 400 founders in just 6 weeks, asking one simple question: “If you’re open to hiring internationally, what are your biggest challenges?” Scaled Sales Without Revenue Operations (And Paid Dearly) The Explosion : From 2 AEs to 50 AEs in one year. ” Training was broken.
Ok we’ve talked a bit more on SaaStr over the years on how to hire a Great VP of Sales , but hiring a Great VP of Marketing is just as important. Maybe in some ways more so, in that you can generally hire a great VP of Marketing earlier. Do you make the hire now? Informed leads. Not just in sales.
At this week’s Workshop Wednesday, Lucas Price, former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip and founder and CEO at Yardstick, shares his insights on how to hire and build a high-performing sales team. During that time, he wasted a lot of money on failed saleshires and decided to learn everything about hiring sellers.
The 4 Things Most Founders Get Wrong About Marketing: “We’re a product company, not a marketing company” – The hard truth is that 9 out of 10 B2B companies spend more on sales and marketing than R&D. Better to hire for your specific needs and stage. These “five-five” CMOs barely exist.
They’ve achieved this due to the systems they’ve set up and the profiles they’ve hired for. Zoominfo was one of the first tools for looking up your buyer’s contact information. To summarize this section, AI is already great at: Account scoring and determining who to target. So let’s dive in. Generating content.
It may seem counterintuitive to seek out a sales leadership hire during this time of slowed hiring, but it’s the number one topic that many founders talk about and many SDRs, AEs, and salesmanagers ask about. . Founders may ask, “how do I find the right sales leadership hire?” Timing matters.
Product marketing can be difficult, and managing product launches and rollouts can be complex. Your sales rise to a very high level You may realize that your sales are reaching high levels, but at the same time, you may encounter a situation where there needs to be more structure or control in your sales process.
Making strategic hires before the strategy is fully locked. This also has implications on the people you hire. You don’t want to hire the “old guard” who only knows how to run the “old guard” playbooks. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation.
Here’s the data: Sales Efficiency: Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback Demonstrating the ability to efficiently acquire customers is the fifth aspect of a successful quarter. In theory, any growth rate is possible with an unlimited budget to hire AEs. I consider >120% best in class for companies selling to SMBs (like Bill.com).
In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.
Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Unlike product-led or sales-led growth, Notion is focused on community-led growth. Be able to learn on the fly. Listen to your customers.
Ask them what those top 3 are before you hire them. So with that, let’s add to our classic Top 10 Interview Questions for a VP of Sales and also our Top 9 Interview Questions for a VP of Customer Success with … Our Top 10 Interview Questions for a VP of Marketing! How have you worked with the sales team in the past?
If you want to hire your first sales rep and close more deals, you need to understand how the sales process works, what tools your team needs to be successful and learn to speak sales. Sales definitions you should know. CRM objects — Represent the sales relationship you have with a specific person or company.
How do you build a sales organization from scratch? What about moving from founder-led sales to building a sales team and scaling your revenue growth? Once your product is refined and ready to go to market, inform your users they will now need to pay to continue using your services. Build a predictable sales process.
Some of the information below will apply. Know who will be undertaking the actual work, and who will be acting in a supervisory or account role. While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. Is there a project manager?
On a sales front, how do you evolve past founder-led sales, or together with it, so that you can scale your organization? Founder-led sales can be an immense strength and rapidly become a limiting factor. PST, Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico, shares how to scale beyond founder-led sales on your path to Series B.
They focused on building a payment platform that empowers international talent and independent contractors to get paid on time in a compliant way while also ensuring that companies can hire international talent and make payments efficiently. Use your data to inform. Identifying a direction is just the starting point. Trust the process.
From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.
I’m shocked we don’t already have this for sales calls. By the end of the year, every single sales call should have a digital representative that can fill in when the human doesn’t know an answer. This will utterly change how we do sales.
“The hardest part of closing any deal is finding it,” says Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake. Over his 35+ year career, Nilsson has managed 100+ Sales Development Representatives (SDR) across four continents, six countries, and ten cities. Jumpstart pipeline generation with your first five revenue hires.
Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.
I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Together we combed through AngelList and found companies that we saw potential in, however, most were not hiring. While at Gorgias, I expected to leave with as much knowledge to earn me an honorary bachelor’s in sales.
One thing all of us that have been doing SaaS for a while have learned is that, back in the day, we didn’t do a good enough job of specialization, especially in sales. And we didn’t do a good enough job of training new hires. I do this myself for a handful of VPs of Sales and Marketing at companies I work with.
SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Many companies strategically use the event to meet potential hires, conduct interviews, and build their talent pipeline.
Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. This is where product-led sales comes in.
They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. The lesson — Don’t hire someone just because they have a great pedigree. And it was true.
It’s less jack-of-all-trade hires, so the knowledge and questions they’ll ask will look a lot different. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after.
This week we have a special 2 guest episode, with the best hiring guru’s in the game, Chuck Brotman & David Teichner. Chuck is the co-founder of Blueprint Expansion , a GTM roles recruiting firm that has helped over 50 VC-backed companies make amazing Sales, Marketing, & Customer Success hires.
I walk them through this when I hire them. There are many stories of legendary exec hires. I hired the person with a great resume but who didn’t get our business, culture, or community. Lesson: Many times, I thought, “I need to hire for the role I’ll need 4 years from now.” The execs that we hired too quickly moved on.
There’s a slide I see again and again from start-ups: 2 of the early sales reps are at 100% of quota, sometimes 150%-200%. So why so often, do only 2 of the first 8-10 sales reps perform? The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. Simplify your sales process.
How are they thinking about hiring? Do they really understand how marketing works, and/or sales works? That does not mean it is not directionally correct, and at a minimum, informed by a lot of careful thought. To learn what in the founders’ heads: How long do they want the cash to last? Does the model even make sense?
When the company started 20 years ago, it didn’t hire salespeople. So what should earlier-stage companies do: immediately build out a big sales team or focus on product-led growth? It wasn’t until 12 years in that they hired their first commission rep. Now they have sales reps, but still consider themselves PLG.
How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Sign up for free.
Hiring a global team to achieve the vision What do you do when your company’s location limits your access to talent? You spread your hiring net and draw in as much talent as possible. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team.
Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. The way the co-founders looked at the stages in the early days of no funding and a community-focus were: Step 1 – No sales or customers, only building freely available open-source software. Step 2 – ??
Scaling a sales organization isn’t easy. Knowing which metrics matter and how to analyze them to increase your revenue and hit organizational sales goals is essential. . What makes a sales organization grow? What’s the best way to grow a sales organization? Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.
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