SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2022

Rather than operating on our own in silos, marketers must extend our focus beyond top-of-funnel metrics and partner with sales to create a pipeline velocity. . Scale your alliance and solution partner marketing portfolio to amplify net new acquisition. . Affecting change in the sales ecosystem. Pillars of Revenue Marketing .

Scale 246

Scale Revenue Scaling Marketing 246

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

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

That result alone should encourage rethinking of AE interviewing. It formed the basis for a career at HubSpot predicated on consistent quantitative analysis to scale the go-to-market, which he detailed in the Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. Adam Grant delimited the types of interviews with the greatest predictive power.

Sales Hiring 343

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 343

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.

Scale 91

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Technical Review 91

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

In today’s SaaStr podcast episode, Harry Stebbings sits down with Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer at Whereby to chat about how to market at scale. A globally-renowned digital marketing and sales leader, he sits down with Harry to discuss how to hire marketers at scale and how to use marketing to set your brand above the rest. ?

Scale 157

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 157

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. Never works out.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 239

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?

Sales Hiring 326

Sales Hiring Scale Payment Solutions Payments 326

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2019

The software sure looks a lot different: But not that much in terms of overall approaches to scaling has really changed, so long as you have kept up with technology changes. Inside Sales teams didn’t use to have products like Mixmax or Salesloft or Chorus or Gong. The post Are You Interviewing 50+ Years Young SaaS Veterans?

Interviewing 190

Interviewing Scale SaaS Construction 190

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 176

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 176

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB 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. From those nine interviews, I received four offers.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 264

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 292

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 292

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. Just do it! It will help.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 80%-100% YoY growth) to the next phase — Initial Scale. You’ll have a real sales team, the core of one — but not a large enough one to experiment, or add redundancy, or management layers. Lead qualification reps?

Scale 254

Scale Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scaling 254

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

To solve this, Deel interviewed 200 founders seeking answers to the question, “If you’re open to hiring internationally and remotely, what are your biggest challenges, and what kind of product can we build to solve them? Manage scaling issues by using data to plan ahead and being team and customer-obsessed.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 235

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

One of the most consistent errors made in sales projections and planning is mismatching the ramp time to the sales cycle. If my startup has a 9 months sales cycle and the VP of Sales projects a six month ramp time, my startup is committing this error. For example, lead quality, sales training, funnel conversion rates.

Scale 255

Scale Forecasting Sales Interviewing 255

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 But really excited about this interview. Jump to video.

Scale 130

Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 130

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

Incredibly, ZoomInfo has scaled to IPO with an entirely sales-driven motion. He breaks down how GTM efficiency drives their ability to scale with sales-driven motion and other insights you can apply to scale your SaaS business. Mistake 4: Not getting your product and engineering team on sales calls.

Scale 228

Scale Sales Hiring Interviewing Engineering 228

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Away from the crowds for two days and nights, founders exchange stories about their journeys, the triumphs, failures and the challenges of scaling a SaaS business. Smaller at scale, bringing 20 founders together, it will be an even more intimate experience for attendees. Tailored content for the scale stage. Make friends.

Scale 155

Scale Scaling Entertainment Travel 155

ChurnZero

JULY 22, 2022

But when it feels like each customer has different goals and definitions of success, how do you create an onboarding program that caters to these individual needs and at the same time can scale? I recommend you interview customers. I would interview 5 to 10 customers and ask what ah-ha moment made them glad they bought your product.

Scale 98

Scale Onboarding Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a pre-Scale sales-driven SaaS company. Or sometimes an SAL commit (Sales Accepted Lead). I want to bring this up again because I interview so many VP/head/director of marketing candidates. Or SQL commit.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Marketing 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2021

The moment comes when it’s time to hire your first VP Sales. We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales , What a VP Sales Really Does , and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. So at this stage, the VP Sales, while necessary, sure looks expensive.

Sales Hiring 211

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 211

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

years as SVP, Global Sales at Klaviyo. He helped scale the sales organization from 15 to 300 people, while growing annual recurring revenue from $25m to over $450m. During Sean ‘s most recent operating role he spent 4.5

Sales Hiring 90

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 90

ChurnZero

JUNE 30, 2021

A CSM needs to be responsible for cultivating exceptional experiences and sustained value for your customers by acting as their trusted advisor and advocate from the point of sale through the renewal and throughout the rest of the customers’ lifecycle. 20 Interview Questions to Ask Your Customer Success Manager Candidates.

Interviewing 72

Interviewing Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale 72

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

And what I wish I’d done better as a SaaS CEO: Force yourself to interview 30 candidates for each VP position. You’ll have to, to get through 30 interviews. After each of those 30 interviews — email over a note on your feedback. Thoughts on what would work well in the sales process for a sales rep.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale 363

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.

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VP of Engineering Customer Success Sales Hiring Interviewing 98

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

For sure, if you have a strong existing sales team that needs some mentorship, I can see a Fractional CRO working. If you have a new, stretch sales leader doing it for the first time, and they want someone more seasoned to help 0.5-1.0 days a week, that can be a win-win. I will tell you it rarely is. And worst case, it sets you back.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale Finance 300

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

In this SaaStr Europa 2022 session, Matt Jacobson, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth, interviews Miro’s Founder & CEO, Andrey Khusid, to get insight into how he was able to grow the company so successfully. Currently, Miro is one of the fastest-growing companies at scale, but it didn’t take off immediately at the same velocity in 2011.

Sales Hiring 213

Sales Hiring Scale Company Culture Leadership 213

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

at this scale (!!) At SaaStr we’ve been super fans for a long time and a little ways back we did an amazing interview with CEO Andrew Bialceki here: Our 5 Interesting Learnings here: #1. Klaviyo said theirs even at this scale is a relatively short 14 months. #5. You may not have heard of Klaviyo until recently, if at all.

Scale 231

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Interviewing 231

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2022

41% of you have sales do some customer onboarding, not just CS or other specialists. Should sales just disappear once the contract is signed? #5. On average, you got a 33%+ boost in revenue when you hired your first VP of Sales. Hire a great VP of Sales, and revenue goes up. Fix this, and watch sales go up. #16.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Pricing Scale Interviewing 294

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

They’ve also: Built-in all the security and controls and technology to be able to scale Introduced Duet AI on the Google Cloud side to help with day-to-day coding and assistance The way GenAI has been built into the whole stack, natively from top-to-bottom, and owning and managing a lot of the pieces has been giving Google an edge in the market.

Cloud 243

Cloud Scale AWS AI 243

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 57

Interviewing Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 11, 2023

Before we get into it, curious to hear your thoughts on last weeks Sales Hacker/GTMnow announcement ?! This week I sat down and interview the VP of Sales at Crunchbase , Ang McManamon. Ang shares her 5 P’s of Sales Leadership: Professionalism Preparation Process Performance Play More on these below. Grit is a must-have.

Scale 63

Scale Leadership Sales Hiring Sales 63

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. takes the cake as the worst question ever.

Interviewing 75

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Scale 75

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 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 261

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit The Sales Rep Making $500,000 That Was Angry About His Base Salary Want Happy Customers? SaaStr 634: Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed  5.

CTO 191

CTO Scale Interviewing Retention 191

SaaSX

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

This article should really be titled, “How to interview a product manager (if you aren’t a product person) “ Because customer success, marketing, sales, support, and other operational roles are key stakeholders in a SaaS organization they are often called into the interview process for product managers.

Interviewing 59

Interviewing Management Sales Hiring Scale 59

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.

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Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125