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 284

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 284

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 252

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 252

OpenView Labs

APRIL 29, 2021

Recruiting top talent is the common denominator across all scaling startups. Nine out of 10 founders and CEOs I connect with are involved in recruiting on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Many of them are learning on the fly and trying to juggle being CEO and Chief People Officer/Lead Recruiter/Brand Evangelist all at once.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 81

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 224

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 160

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 160

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 210

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 210

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Overlapping responsibilities and conflicting priorities are just a couple of the many friction points between product managers and product marketing managers – leading to inefficient workflows and potential product failures. PMs should offer usage analytics , behavioral trends, and findings from customer interviews.

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first. Names stick.

Scale 152

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 152

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 16, 2019

So if scaling your sales organization is a priority in 2020, here are the things you need to be aware of to make sure you do so successfully. In my experience both as a salesperson and as a recruiter, it’s primarily been four things: They want the work they’re doing to matter to them. Hiring sales leaders will get harder.

Sales Recruiting 53

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Trends 53

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

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

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2021

Still, an overall deep-dive on lessons learned the second and third time around: Not Easier : Recruiting – Not Easier. You might think after (goodness) the best part of 20 years of working in tech, 18 as an executive or CEO, and 13 as a founder … I’d be pretty good at recruiting at this point. I’m not.

Sales Recruiting 318

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 318

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. Here’s what Claire talks about: How to avoid trapdoor decisions when scaling. Lessons for scaling high-growth organizations.

Scale 116

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Sales Hiring 116

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 91

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 91

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

On this episode of the podcast, I interview Arthur Nobel and we discuss scaling SaaS companies. What we discovered is companies sometimes struggle with scaling so we dived into the reasons for that. Levers of scaling a SaaS company. He is passionate about enabling entrepreneurs to realize their vision.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting SaaS 52

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 172

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 172

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2021

The question now is, how big should CS organizations be, and what’s the best way to staff and scale its success? To uncover how today’s CS leaders are successfully building and scaling their CS organizations, Valuize’s Founder and CEO, Ross Fulton, spoke to TSIA’s Vice President, Customer Success Research, Stephen Fulkerson.

VP of Engineering 98

VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

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 141

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 141

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

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

This trend leverages social media platforms to build connections and establish meaningful relationships with potential business prospects — and when it comes to social selling, LinkedIn is the MVP. It’s the first impression you’ll make on prospective employers, clients, partners, or investors — so make it count.

Sales Recruiting 135

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 135

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

DECEMBER 8, 2020

According to First Round’s 2019 State of Startups report , sales leadership is the most difficult hire to make. And with sales being a top priority for founders…. …along with it getting harder to recruit top-quality talent… Image: State of Startups. That’s the opposite of scaling efficiently.

Sales Hiring 81

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 81

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Just one enterprise client could lead to more thanks to the power of word-of-mouth and familiarity — “If this enterprise company likes their solution, then I’ll probably like it too.” Before you rush in for the sale, you need to assess everything. Remember, not every conversation is a sale. What’s going on in the market?

Enterprise 139

Enterprise Technical Review Sales Recruiting Scale 139

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. What “customer success” looks like evolves as your company and customers scale upmarket.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

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 84

Sales Recruiting Retention Scale Sales Hiring 84

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 91

Sales Hiring Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review 91

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. It scales with your customers. Here’s an edited excerpt from their conversation.

Payments 112

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 112

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 19, 2021

Sales recruiting is broken. The sad truth is that VP of Sales are turning over within 19 months —and that timeline is shrinking. . Not only that, the market has heated way back up and the VP of Sales is one of the most sought after roles. This isn’t linear and there are many shades of grey when it comes to sales. .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Product Marketing Manager: This person is tasked with developing product marketing campaigns , crafting compelling marketing messages, and coming up with ideas to retain customers.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

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. How can you capture, qualify and convert the right leads for your business while working within your means? Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2017

You even get to read the same questions from your sales job interview script over and over and over. ” The purpose of this article is to talk about the characteristics to look for when interviewing for sales talent. How many times in your career have you gone into multiple sales job interviews with the same company?

Interviewing 59

Interviewing Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 59

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

Overall, customer value management can make your product more competitive. Sales reps can use the knowledge to shift sales negotiations from price to value. Its aim is to diagnose customer pain points and needs via market and customer research techniques like surveys or interviews. How do you recruit your interviewees?

Management 105

Management Scale Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 105

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

One of the biggest decisions you can make when setting up your sales team is whether to focus primarily on inside or outside sales. They seem to be completely at odds, with one focused on clients with a high acquisition cost and high ACV (annual account value), the other focused on a high sales velocity. Hiring guide.

Sales Hiring 83

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 83

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

But sales is the one thing founders cannot oversee — without it your startup will die. But the one thing you must think about is sales. Without sales, your startup dies. Yet, sales is all too often a dirty word. They go for the sale without caring about what the customer needs in the first place. Coach regularly.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Startup 93

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. So in that shift from product-market fit to product-market-SALES fit, how much should you optimize your go-to-market for product… and even the other way around?

Product Marketing 80

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 80