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 175

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 175

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. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 259

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. In this interview, David Sacks talks about how 70-80% of investor time is spent looking at AI.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 245

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 363

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 363

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.

Sales Hiring 291

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 291

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Make the revenue recur, I’m interested. Who is over 20?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. Want to see more content like this?

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 261

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep. Move the bottom 10% out and give the best leads to your top performer, and watch sales go up 20%. The best VPs of Sales design comp plans so the team never wants to leave. You should be striving for zero voluntary attrition on your sales team.

Sales Recruiting 217

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 217

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. At Salesforce, at Box, the bottom end of the sales team churns out each year. First, do sales reps really compete with each other?

Scale 281

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 281

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2021

” now we have a strong team, enough revenues to start taking things more seriously, and a global (if accidental) footprint. Still, an overall deep-dive on lessons learned the second and third time around: Not Easier : Recruiting – Not Easier. Sales — Not Easier. I know how sales works much, much better.

Sales Recruiting 325

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 325

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2023

Algolia went from zero to seven figures in revenue in 12 months, and the launch of their search as a service product, and grew pricing from $19 a month to $100,000, which sounds amazing. Daniel, you grew to 3 million in ARR before you hired a VP of Sales. You had all the reps and SDRs reporting to you, managed it all yourself.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 239

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

.” Nearly a decade and 500 episodes of the podcast later, we invited back our original SaaStr podcast host, Harry Stebbings of 20VC for a catch-up chat with Jason to discuss the world of venture today and how to scale a successful SaaS sales team from the bottom up. You never get to spend less time in sales as a SaaS CEO.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 189

Totango

DECEMBER 13, 2022

As subscription models and recurring revenue become the norm for both SMBs and enterprise solutions, customer success is becoming an essential part of businesses across the globe. Keep the work at hand as a focus and trust that the vibe of your team will be clear during the interview process. What do we want?

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Customer Success 91

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 156

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

They also talked about the difficulties — and potential advantages — of selling into small businesses, taking alternative approaches to interviewing candidates, and the importance of keeping culture a vital part of a company as it scales. One of the criticisms of SMB software is that each customer can only provide so much revenue.

Payments 107

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 107

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 244

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

343: Kyle Parrish is the Head of Sales @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish. Before Figma, Kyle spent close to 3 years as an Account Executive at ADP. Why is it so hard moving from 0-1 in sales? How does Kyle advise founders when it comes to making your first sales hire?

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Advisors 195

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. The Founder isn’t willing to be the first salesperson Many of the best founders we work with don’t have a sales background and are either product or engineering focused.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? Stage 1: Management by Objectives.

Compensation 153

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 153

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

I’ve never created LinkedIn content with the “goal” of lead generation or immediate-term sales. Another cool example I really like is Tito Bohrt — he stands out with the pseudo, “ Sales Mad Scientist ” — which demonstrates confidence and a unique identity online.

Sales Recruiting 126

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 126

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2023

The first goal of sales at a startup isn’t to bring in revenue — it’s to get customer feedback. I’ve used our sales process to iterate our way to product market-fit and wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way. Use sales conversations as a tool to get product feedback. So how do you get there?

Sales Recruiting 88

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 88

Mucker Capital

APRIL 2, 2024

In this Mucker Growth session, Mike Genstil with ValueCore delves into the concept of value selling and its application in enterprise sales. As a founder, ideally you want your sellers, marketers, and product leaders aligned in transforming product features into value-based messages to accelerate sales cycles and secure corporate deals.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Enterprise Cybersecurity 52

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2019

Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Giraffe is a mobile job matching platform that helps medium skilled workers get access to opportunities and helps businesses to recruit staff faster, and easier, and more affordably than any other way. How’s it guys?

Scale 162

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 162

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

The company scaled from a hundred people to 800, last I know, but it changes every day. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. Growth for us is about massive scaling and hiring. Bobby Patrick: Right. Luciana: It has been quite a journey.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 259

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Nabbing enterprise clients could mean fewer deals to reach revenue goals. Before you rush in for the sale, you need to assess everything. Tailor your solution and sales material to meet their specific need in the same language they use when they talk about their problems and desired solutions. What’s going on in the market?

Enterprise 139

Enterprise Technical Review Sales Recruiting Scale 139

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

He provides an in-depth guide to driving revenue growth at your company and what to expect at each stage. Regardless of what stage you are in, he provides a framework to systematically approach this stage and what you should focus on to get to scale faster. We are screwing up the scale. Thirty, 50% revenue growth.

Scale 212

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 212

Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

In some companies, customer success managers may play an active role in the sales process, helping sales representatives elicit customer goals and persuade buyers of product benefits. At other companies, CS managers may be assigned to follow up on sales during the customer onboarding phase. Persuasion Skills.

Sales Hiring 90

Sales Hiring Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review 90

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Company raises money and is now ready to “scale the sales team.” Their current seller has done a great job, so the natural inclination is to assume that we want to replicate that person and sales will continue to grow, right? Fast forward 1 year later: “Oh no, my entire sales team looks the exact same…”. Sound familiar?

Sales Hiring 74

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 74

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

As a recruiter, I hear from many founders and sales leaders regularly about how many salespeople they need and how quickly they need them. And I’ve seen many startups who fail to make this distinction create a cycle of diminishing returns that impacts the trajectory of their growth for the long haul… especially in enterprise sales.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Dropbox just hit one billion dollars in annual revenue. It became a part of our interview questions. Then trying to maintain that as we scale is always the challenge. What questions do you ask in the interview? Josh : I made probably the first 50, 60 offers in the company personally, and that does not scale.

VP of Engineering 264

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 264

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

Ever since he was hired as the Director of EMEA Sales at BrowserStack , a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, he had to completely rethink how to successfully onboard hundreds of salespeople just as everyone was going remote.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

In this episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Hakim Myers , Business Recruiter at Nextdoor , where he recruits for people, finance, and legal functions for startups. Join us for a revealing conversation on sales and talent from the perspective of a recruiter in an executive search firm. powered by Sounder.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Retention Scale Sales Hiring 81

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I started a software company in college to make it easy to update websites called Content Management Software Now, and I had this idea for Pardot, I wanted to make it easy for marketers to run campaigns online and measure their results. We had 13 million of recurring revenue, 100% year over year growth. I sat down with Kyle at lunch.

Sales Recruiting 164

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 164

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

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

TL;DR Hotjar is a product experience insights platform with heatmaps, surveys, and interviewing capabilities. Each product — Observe, Ask, and Engage — has a Basic plan that is free forever but limits the number of website sessions, feedback responses, or customer interviews in a certain period. What is Hotjar pricing?

Pricing 97

Pricing Investment Software Review Scale 97