SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2023

This year, many companies, including Gong, have been focused on how to optimize and drive value with existing tech stack investments, rather than adding new tools. One app we did add this year was Madkudu , to change the way we prioritize what leads Marketing sends to sales. #3.

Leadership 314

Leadership B2B Branding Revenue 314

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2022

This famous quote from self-help author Robert Collier applies to every sales organization because excellent results come through repeatable activities, not one-off wins. Alice Katwan , SVP at Twilio , discusses how you can build a high-retention sales team while being remote. Invest in your team’s development.

Sales Hiring 220

Sales Hiring Scale Retention Sales 220

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. She wanted to jump into a full cycle capacity as a sales leader, but she said yes. Shifting from an operator and loving operations and data to a sales and revenue leadership role felt like a big jump.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

“Typically that was the marketing hat in my case, but sometimes it was the sales hat or thinking about finance or other areas of the business. So you need context from leadership to what you ultimately need to deliver on in your function to be successful. And without that context, you lose out.” What do we value?”

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 253

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

Q; Dear SaaStr: I Just Received a $1M investment for My 3-year old Industrial SaaS Product to Scale. To hire a true sales & marketing team, you’re going to need about $3m-$4m. You can hire a sales rep or ideally two to help you sell. If you are very careful, 1m will let you invest in your first sales team.

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring Investment Scaling 195

Sales Hacker

MAY 31, 2023

In this insightful episode, Colin Campbell of Sales Hacker engages Lauren Bailey from Sales Bar, Factor Eight, and Girls Club in a thoughtful discussion on the dynamics of the sales industry. They delve into the underrepresentation of women in sales and the initiatives aimed at bridging the gender gap.

Sales 85

Sales Leadership Development Engagement 85

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2023

I remember I first started to see this with one company I invested in where some folks described it as “Gong for XYZ”. But the sale is much more complicated, and different, and to a very, very different buyer. Too many sales and marketing and CS execs just think they will pick it up once they start. The problem?

Marketing 234

Marketing Sales Interviewing Enterprise 234

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 20, 2021

As a result, much of the evaluation, investment, and rollout of virtual training technology in 2020 was rushed, limited in scope, and poorly planned. Businesses must take a step back, evaluate their software investments, and rework their implementations. How to maximize customer training investment. Today, not much has changed.

Investment 94

Investment Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 94

Buffer Resources

APRIL 19, 2023

I loved getting to use my voice and story to help create a more inclusive world and started working on a strategic plan for turning my thought leadership into a business. This meant, instead of hoping for the quick sales moment that paid ads offer, I worked on establishing long-term relationships.

Outsourcing Services 97

Outsourcing Services Investment Social Media Revenue 97

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

But the drive and passion remained, and leadership didn’t give up. After the shift, the sales reps stopped chasing whales and working outbound ops with more than 5K employees. Leadership introduced a high-velocity playbook and refocused the company downstream. Sometimes it can take longer.”

Scale 207

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 207

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 14, 2022

The Social Proof created by customer advocates can work to make new business sales more efficient, reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for net new customers, but also for Expansion among existing customers. Why they’re investing in you. Ultimately it may cost you your job. CSMs and NRR. Why you have the job you have.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Investment Sales Hiring Retention 97

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2022

Mistake #1: Being Risk-Averse to Investments Outside of Your Area of Expertise. Many founders find themselves confident in one area of their business, whether it be the product, customer success, or, in Schuck’s case, sales. Schuck felt that he could more easily see the results in immediate dollars when he invested in sales.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Acquisition Investment Leadership 235

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In leadership, there’s a great expression that “to those who much is given, much is expected.” This is a common mistake founders make — getting a new Head of X when you get to a certain point in business, missing a sales number, the product isn’t what you want, there’s too much churn, etc. Your average sales quota is $1M.

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 244

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. For instance, Founders Fund doesn’t really invest in AI, health tech, or edtech, even if you’re growing 5x. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 261

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2023

So my LinkedIn feed is full of sales execs complaining how unfair startups are: VPs get fired seemingly without cause (it’s never that simple, though. Are expectations for VPs of Sales, CROs, and CMOs too high? I’ve founded several and invested in 25+, including 6 true unicorns. Is this fair? Perhaps not.

Startup 225

Startup Leadership Investment Sales 225

OpenView Labs

MARCH 9, 2020

What they often forget to think about is the critical component of building their company: their personal leadership. Self-leadership. Invest in self-awareness to build your foundation of leadership. Therefore they commit to studying leadership right alongside their focus on new product releases, sales and operations.

Leadership 52

Leadership Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Investment 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team. Partner: investing in different partnership channels.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 202

Sales Hacker

MARCH 19, 2021

For every dozen sales professionals, there are only one or two who advance their career to the next level, growing into a sales leader. So what is the trend among the few who grow their careers from individual sales contributor to leader ? Traits of a successful sales leader. Work ethic. Consistency.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team Leadership 130

Totango

MAY 17, 2023

When it comes to understanding customer needs, marketing, sales, and CS teams are the experts, so it’s on us to work together to define today’s most valuable growth opportunities. More than half raised hands for sales and the CRO, and when asked if they felt the relationship with product teams could be enhanced, even more hands shot up.

Generative AI 106

Generative AI Marketing Sales AI 106

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Many of you are familiar with this visual, most likely created by an investment firm. Will you have an overlay team that only sells the new product, or will you enable your entire sales force? This question exists whether you have 2, 12, or 50 sales reps. Prepare for post-sales on new products. What are those incentives?

Scale 238

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 238

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Today, I’d like to hop to the 201 level by introducing a simple that metric that can reveal a lot and on which few people focus: the sales/marketing expense ratio, which just equals sales expense divided by marketing expense.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Benchmarks 131

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Invest those extra cycles. ” — Casey Hill, Sr Growth Manager, ActiveCampaign “Be highly over prepared, sign up for demos of their products, talk to sales, look at the org chart, connect with other team members, board members, look at their culture on YouTube, Twitter, research competitors, read analyst reports.

Interviewing 232

Interviewing Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Consulting 232

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, Founders Fund Investor Sam Blond sits down with the SVP of Sales at Modern Health, Hannah Willson, to discuss how companies can adapt to the current sales environment and how to correct course when you don’t have a right-sized sales team. What Sales Team Size Is The Right Size?

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Strategy 130

Sales Hacker

JULY 28, 2021

In providing a neutral ground for marketing, sales, and customer success, RevOps must also analyze contexts to convey insights quicker. To win at this will take great RevOps leadership. How to invest in data that actually drives insights. Revenue Operations is the business version of Switzerland.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Marketing Sales Innovation 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2022

If you’re only investing in sales and marketing, you’re missing a huge revenue opportunity. This allows you to present a frictionless renewal and expansion process to your customers, rather than handing them back to Sales. You can figure it out with your leadership team and a whiteboard. Just do it.

Customer Success 229

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Leadership 229

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Overcoming challenges by optimizing for success In the early stages of setting up your SaaS business, it’s always a good idea to invest time thinking about the direction you want to take. Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 235

OPEXEngine

APRIL 14, 2021

In today’s post, we review the results regarding the “Top Growth Initiatives for 2021,” “Internal Investments,” and “Strategic Finance Goals” that those surveyed are planning to make. . 2021 is expected to be a year in the SaaS market where competition for customers, product category leadership, and employees is hot.

Investment 52

Investment Sales Hiring SaaS Finance 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 20, 2022

Strong sales reps are the lifeblood of your business and how you choose to invest in them matters. For frontline sales managers, attributes like competency, quality of work, ease of execution, and length of contribution indicate reps’ overall job success, but you can’t rely on those inputs to tell you if they are personally satisfied.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 98

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. Create/ track a leaderboard so i f someone is below average in sales, it’s objective. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 204

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2024

The #1 issue I see is not understanding what investments really are accretive — and which aren’t. Venture capital, if you raise it, is there to invest. But … but: A sales rep that can’t hit quota in a few months = cash drain. And so the money goes far, far faster than anticipated.

Sales Hiring 200

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Venture Capital 200

Sales Hacker

JUNE 10, 2021

It’s that sales representatives are one of the toughest positions to hire for. The demand for sales reps is one of the highest of any job. Sales courses are largely absent from college curricula. Most sales managers will tell you that they’re looking above all for the right attitude. Leadership. Positivity.

Sales Hiring 103

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 103

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Sales reps were hosting 4-6 calls daily but most of these calls were early demos or top-of-funnel discovery calls Sales was closing really small deals on one end while talking to really large companies with hundreds of thousands of people on the other. Define your ICP as early as you can and segment your sales team accordingly.

Scale 233

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 233

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 19, 2022

As the president of Sales Xceleration, a firm specializing in assessing and implementing sales strategy , sales processes, and sales execution to drive growth, I’ve seen how job hopping can affect otherwise stable sales teams. Sales organizations experienced 58% higher voluntary turnover in 2021 than in 2020.

Sales Hiring 79

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Compensation 79

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Nearly every sales organization will admit they could be better at planning. According to a study by Cascade Insights , more than 75% of sales leaders agree their planning efforts are problematic — and 90% of sales ops leaders confessed on LinkedIn they need to do sales planning faster and more frequently.

Scale 97

Scale Headcount Sales Forecasting 97

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

A great VP of Sales to keep the engine scaling A great VP of Marketing to keep the leads coming in A great VP of Customer Success to make all those hard won customers happy After $5m-$6m in ARR or so, it’s really hard to scale without a strong VP heading most core functions. Upgrade the management team. You have to be patient.

Scale 268

Scale Sales Hiring Banking Engineering 268

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? The sales reps were friends, and accounts were shared.

AWS 213

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 213