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. Including not too many leads.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

and Lenny asked us to join his podcast to talk about building a sales team — from the perspective of a product-first founder or exec. It was a pretty strong conversation and we took a lot of our learnings over the years and focused on how to learn to do sales right if you come from a product-first background: It’s good.

Sales Hiring 257

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Headcount 257

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

To $300k-$400k+ per employee at scale. 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. I thought we’d be behind them by now, that the cuts were sort of a one-off.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 274

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

Wondering how to scale customer success in SaaS and drive product growth ? If you’re a leading SaaS company, you know that growth is directly tied to helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. This article discusses ten tips that can help you to effectively scale customer success teams in SaaS.

Scale 104

Scale Customer Success Scaling SaaS 104

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. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business.

Scale 250

Scale Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scaling 250

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment. Revenue per employee has doubled since 2021, leading to budget cuts and the necessity for leaders to achieve more with fewer resources.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 194

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

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

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. Including not too many leads.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Scaling Your Personalization. This is the downside of the modern Sales Assembly Line — both buyer and seller feeling like a cog in the wheel. Instead we need to focus on using our own voices and words to send each prospect a unique message. AI can help scale this, but we need to be careful not to rely too heavily on it.

Scale 107

Scale Scaling AI Search AI 107

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2023

You can expect upwards of 75-300 leads if you meet the guidelines of our Speaker and Sponsorships teams. All day we’ll get 25 of the Best Apps and Best Vendors in SaaS together live with the SaaStr community to show hundreds of CXOs and thousands of SaaS execs why to use your app. More details on it here!

Scale 252

Scale Interviewing Trends Innovation 252

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. 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 sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews.

Scale 265

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 265

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 342

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 342

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2022

Yes, sometimes it’s OK to hire a VP of Sales that everyone loves. At least 9 times out of 10, if everyone on the team loves a VP of Sales, it’s the wrong hire. And this especially matters because I often see CEOs picking between 2 final VP of Sales candidates. Even if they were, how many hired a VP of Sales at your ACV before?

Sales Hiring 332

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 332

ChurnZero

JULY 22, 2022

As Donna Weber , the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding, knows, onboarding is about more than completing product training and filling out checklists. 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

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 325

Sales Hiring Scale Payment Solutions Payments 325

Valuize Consulting

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Achieving Customer Success At Scale. As your customer base grows, the need to lead operations transformation, scale your CS team, manage intricate customer relationships and reach your customers across multiple touchpoints, is compounded. Q: What was your first job? How did you get started in Customer Success?

Scale 52

Scale Technical Review Technology Interviewing 52

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 234

Scale Sales Hiring Interviewing Engineering 234

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

It doesn’t matter how good an individual contributor, how good of a hacker, how good of a small team lead you are/were. That’s not enough to scale. This often means 20+ interviews a week! But if you can’t recruit those leaders under you, really great ones … you can’t scale. Recruiting is hard. We All Need To).

Scale 265

Scale Interviewing Engineering Content Marketing 265

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 And I won’t give away too much of the lead here.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 150

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 191

Interviewing Scale SaaS Construction 191

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 241

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 241

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 295

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 295

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

After that, the public markets began a precipitous decline — leading to an almost 2 year pause in SaaS IPO. 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.

Scale 237

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Interviewing 237

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

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. Leads have been nurtured in that territory for a while.

Scale 255

Scale Forecasting Sales Interviewing 255

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

As Managing Director of Salesforce Ventures, Nowi Kallen , shared at last week’s Workshop Wednesday, there are five main challenges of moving upmarket and tips to follow if you want to succeed at Enterprise sales in today’s macro environment. For many, moving upmarket makes sense to scale. We’ve already mentioned the why.

Scale 199

Scale Enterprise readiness compliance Enterprise 199

CustomerSuccessBox

JUNE 21, 2022

Yet, it’s often easy said than actually done, especially, when you’re looking for Customer Onboarding at Scale. To help you, we have compiled a list of the top 8 strategies that will enable you to carry out customer onboarding at scale. 8 Best Strategies for Customer Onboarding at Scale. Partnership Kick-off meeting.

Scale 52

Scale Onboarding Scaling Strategy 52

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

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 264

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 264

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2019

Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Now, unfortunately there are a lot of constraints in Africa, major constraints when you’re talking about setting up and scaling a startup. Well, you have to build a direct sales force. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 161

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. Someone that knows, lives and breathes leads, funnels and funnel management, drip marketing, and all the rest. And most importantly … someone who knows how to deliver leads.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Marketing 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 247

Cloud Scale AWS AI 247

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 148

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 148

Dubb

MAY 29, 2023

However, he eventually found himself at a crossroads, feeling trapped by the business's reliance on his presence and yearning to be present for his kids’ The post Scaling Your Business with Proven Systems with David Jenyns appeared first on Dubb Blog.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Business Social Media 52

Totango

JANUARY 12, 2022

While some of these skills are apparent upon first meeting a person, interviewers will typically structure their Customer Success Manager interview questions around determining whether or not a candidate has these skills innately and/or has the ability and drive to learn them. 5 Key Customer Success Manager Interview Questions. .

Interviewing 96

Interviewing Customer Success Management Scale 96

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