SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

With “SaaS” about $200 Billion of that. Most of you are, in fact: According to our latest unscientific but directionally correct survey of over 2,000 SaaS execs, 64% of you are growing your sales team in 2024. I bet you get an interview. And so many of you in fact are, well … hiring.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 251

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

There are two types of SaaS companies in the world: those that are category creators and the challengers of incumbent technology. At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. A designated partner means lower rejection rates at the very first interview.

Scale 211

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 211

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. Sales: Hiring any reps you wouldn’t buy from yourself. Later, once you have a strong VP of Sales, it’s fine though. Your sales reps need to eat. Yes, Box is SaaS.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

The backup of 2020 was great, 2021 comes in and somehow we have 600 unicorns and everyone can burn 500 million a year or have huge sales teams. A few examples from recruiting and interviewing lately that Jason warns fellow founders against: #1 Beware of the Managers vs the Do-ers. HashiCorp went public but it all stopped after that.”

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Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 274

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2019

SaaS as we know it probably started in 1999. WebEx was founded in 1995), but Salesforce kicked off the current era, and is the biggest player in SaaS. SaaS: Maybe Plan for 30+ Years as a Founder. Inside Sales teams didn’t use to have products like Mixmax or Salesloft or Chorus or Gong. SaaS is 20 years old.

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Interviewing Scale SaaS Construction 190

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

So we’ve spent a ton of time over the years on SaaS talking about hiring a great VP of Sales. Not only because it really matters, but because hiring the wrong VP of Sales can set you back a year — or longer. So many VPs of Sales disagree with me here — at least at first when I make the point.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 217

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. Set and reinforce them early — as early as interviews. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 190

SaaStr

AUGUST 29, 2023

So there’s a situation I see happening with many (not most, but many) SaaS companies as they build out the first management team: They hire a VP of Sales that doesn’t think much of the VP of Marketing. Does this always fail, when sales and marketing don’t really talk, and aren’t a team? Not exactly.

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Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Interviewing 200

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. Should you sprinkle it in to compete?

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Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 230

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. Jason has written about the cheat codes for hiring VPs of Sales since 2012 and realized it was worth a deeper dive.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 145

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are some of the “ultimate sins” in marketing and sales and success in SaaS in the early stages? My list of some bad ones: Sales: Hiring any reps you wouldn’t buy from. Later, once you have a strong VP of Sales, it’s fine though. Your sales reps need to eat. A bit more here.

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Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 222

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

At SaaStr Miami, former Founder’s Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 242

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2022

Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio , a SaaS business that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses. No face time with customers, no interviews throughout the product roadmap – just a couple of weeks of user testing before launch. She dove into the world of customer interviews, and just like that, she was hooked.

Interviewing 138

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Software Review 138

Kellblog

AUGUST 24, 2021

I recently gave a presentation at SaaSBoomi , an India-based SaaS founder community, which was structured as an interview by Freshworks social media evangelist Jayadevan P K (aka, JPK). In the interview I answer the following questions: How do you look at ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and its relation to the valuation of a company?

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Interviewing Metrics Social Media SaaS 129

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2023

A VP of Sales role. This is especially rough in a VP of Sales candidate, but it goes for any leader. It’s time to do them again: First, have the best VP in that role you know interview the VP candidate you want to hire. Have the best CRO you know interview your potential VP of Sales. They just worked there.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Interviewing Startup 219

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2023

Good enough to do well, make good money, and add real value in SaaS. And it particularly appealed to SaaS execs because everyone knows Gong. But the sale is much more complicated, and different, and to a very, very different buyer. But … here it is: Don’t Actually Take That SaaS Job Unless You Truly Know the Product First.

Marketing 219

Marketing Sales Interviewing Enterprise 219

User Pilot

APRIL 30, 2024

Product-led growth is all the rage in the SaaS industry. Wes Bush , Founder and CEO of ProductLed and bestselling author of Product-Led Growth: How To Build a Product That Sells Itself, dives into this topic in an interview with Userpilot. Whereas the sales-led model is all about telling people. Can you show me the value?

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Interviewing Scale Strategy AI 83

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Should Be The Priorities of SaaS Founders During The Early Stages? There is too much to do in SaaS — sales, customer success, product, engineering, demand gen, etc. They don’t do enough interviews, meet enough potential customers, do enough work, etc. You need an MSP, not an MVP in SaaS.

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SaaS Market Research Interviewing Content Marketing 233

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

Finding the perfect VP of Sales position can be daunting, especially in the middle of a global pandemic. Candidates need to find opportunities that not only fit their sales experience and stretch goals, but also companies that are coming out of the pandemic with momentum. Who is looking to hire a VP of Sales in January / Q1?

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Sales Hiring Scale Payment Solutions Payments 313

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2019

How do you think Customer Success should work with the Sales and Product teams? How involved they want to be pre- and post sales. The post What would be your top 3 questions for a customer success manager interview ($1M ARR/enterprise SaaS)? These three questions will tease out a lot. What goals they like to sign up for.

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Interviewing Customer Success Enterprise Management 157

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Best Ways to Retain Your Customers in SaaS? Too many early-stage VPs of Sales don’t have a strong “wing person” running customer success. and yet I see fewer and fewer sales execs flying to meet customers. The best VPs of Sales are closers. Far fewer customers churn if you visit them in person.

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Sales Hiring SaaS SMB Churn 234

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 22, 2020

If you think sales is a simple job, I have a few hundred professional connections who would like a word with you. By mastering your sales interview questions. As a longtime recruiting leader, I’ve worked with countless hiring managers looking to fill sales roles , and I’ve had a firsthand look at their interview process.

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Sales Hiring Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 77

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

Founder of Marketo, Phil Hernandez, and Marketo’s former EVP of Sales, Bill Binch, have had decades of experience tackling precisely these issues. Phil, meanwhile, has his own take: Sales and marketing alignment. Have your marketing and head of sales collaborate on their sales arc. SaaS exists in an evolving world.

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Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 189

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2020

It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days. I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. Start their own SaaS company. There are three things I ask folks who want to start their own SaaS company: 1. That just doesn’t happen in paid SaaS apps. >>

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Sales Recruiting SaaS Interviewing Consulting 363

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

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 8, 2021

Great interview questions tell you who a person is, what motivates them, how they think and solve problems, and what they’d be like as a teammate. To help us all conduct better interviews, we asked some of the smartest leaders in SaaS to share their favorite questions. More wisdom from SaaS leaders.

Interviewing 75

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Scale 75

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

Director+ of Sales at Slack / Zoom / DropBox / Pick Your Brand Name SaaS Company. Because it’s not ARR growth or even an IPO alone that determines if a VP of Sales him or herself is great. And there were probably 100+ RVPs of Sales at that point. The post That Super-Successful VP of Sales. But were they great?

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Interviewing 288

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2024

So much has changed the past few years on the people side in SaaS and tech. The other day I interviewed yet another other great AE who had recently become a Director of Sales. It’s time to get back to basics: A new VP of Sales has to carry a bag at first — and close customers themselves at first. Ask in the interviews.

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Sales Hiring Interviewing Startup Customer Success 232

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Once dominated by relationships, sales today (especially SaaS sales) are equally propelled by technology. With the broad adoption of CRM, the rise of the sales tech stack, and the advent of social selling and other digital sales channels, the sales landscape has shifted dramatically. Scaling SaaS Sales.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Technical Review 91

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2022

So we’ve talked so much over the years on SaaStr on how to hire a great VP of Sales, the difference they’ll make, and how the level-up comes quickly. And VPs of Sales do, too. Don’t hire a VP of Sales that isn’t truly comfortable selling to your buyer persona, especially in B2D and fintech. Be careful.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 243

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2023

In this ultimate list of product manager interview questions, we have tried to simplify the process of hiring great product managers. Product management encompasses the entire SaaS lifecycle from ideation to launch and everything that follows. Leadership. How would you manage a team that works across time zones and remotely?

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Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Management Sales Hiring 74

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2022

Roughly — very roughly — you want to be multiproduct in SaaS by the time you have 10,000 customers. So a top theme across SaaStr CEO interviews since 2017 or so, and across our 5 Interesting Learnings series with public SaaS companies, is … when should you go multi-product? For enterprise, this could be $300m-500m in ARR.

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Scale SaaS SMB Scaling 238

FastSpring

APRIL 4, 2024

As an experienced sales and GTM leader, John Eitel has more than witnessed how product-led growth (PLG) has affected the tech and SaaS space in the last few years — he and his teams have been up close and personal with how PLG increased in popularity as a sales strategy. “I What success looks like for using both together.

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Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 144

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews. Stay Laser-Focused.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 251

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

Q: What are some advice for people who want to create a SaaS startup? A bit more here: If You’re Going to Do a SaaS Start-Up … You Have to Give it 24 Months | SaaStr. Do at least 20 potential customer interviews. A bit more here: Planning to Do a SaaS Startup? Don’t Forget the 20 Interview Rule.

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Startup SaaS Interviewing Market Segmentation 254

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. Flock Safety is a hardware-enabled SaaS company dedicated to stopping crime.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 167

User Pilot

JANUARY 29, 2024

A good SaaS UX design is critical to a successful SaaS product in today’s constantly evolving and competitive market. In this article, we will examine what an effective SaaS UX design is, why it’s important, and the best practices to produce a well-crafted design that works. What is SaaS UX design?

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SaaS Interviewing User Experience Onboarding 96