SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Now, I just invest in SasS companies. SaaStr is Turning 10!

Sales Hiring 275

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 275

OpenView Labs

MARCH 17, 2021

We invested more capital than in any prior year in the firm’s history, and we returned more capital than we’ve raised across all OpenView funds combined. Tom focuses on infrastructure, security and application software and has been a part of our investments in Axonius , Buildkite , and Intezer.

Sales Recruiting 62

Sales Recruiting Venture Capital Construction Investment 62

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Matt Rizzetta , founder of North 6th Agency, which is a communications and PR firm based in New York City. Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. How to get better at sales [21:37].

Scale 105

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 105

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2019

.” We had been talking, up until that point, we’d been talking somewhat informally about potentially creating a proper ventures fund at Workday. And the very first thing that I did, like any neurotic person is I Googled corporate venture capital. And I found some exciting things happening in a lot of investments.

Development Team Review 131

Development Team Review Scale Technical Review Software Review 131

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

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. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 266

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 266

Kellblog

JULY 18, 2019

In venture capital (VC) land, you should view investors as long-term partners in value creation. Their investments give them contractual rights (e.g., inside rounds) and strong reputations such that other VCs are willing and eager to invest behind them in future rounds [5]. You might well be doing so. Strong investors.

Underperforming Technical Team 78

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Software Technical Cofounder 78

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

Felix Van de Maele, Co-Founder and CEO of Collibra, will be joined by Teddie Wardi, Managing Director of Insight Partners, to unpack how he built a unicorn company from idea to conception to record growth. Teddie Wardi | Managing Director @ Insight Partners. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 183

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

Michael Cardamone is the CEO/Managing Partner at Forum Ventures (formerly Accleprise) which is a B2B SaaS focused seed fund & pre-seed accelerator with locations in SF, NYC & Toronto. Raising money and venture capital is not for most businesses. You basically want to run it like a sales process. Show Notes.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Venture Capital Investment Technical Review 52

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

ProfitWell

JANUARY 23, 2020

Using CB Insights' tech insights platform, the team there, analyzed signals—like patent and investment activity, executive chatter in earnings transcripts, and media mentions—to identify the top 14 tech trends to watch in 2020. And you claim that sales should be hired last when dealing with a product-led growth initiative. Why is that?

Sales Recruiting 43

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Venture Capital Pricing 43

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. Today I'd like to tell you a bit more about what we at Point Nine Capital are looking for in SaaS startups (other sectors are something for another blog post). along the way.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? Bob Moore: And I was t nerdy engineer in college, so getting the opportunity to have to pitch, it’s really a sales job at the end of the day. You’re selling capital and I think it was a really transformative experience for me.

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 133

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

You’re in the valley, you raise venture capital. I want to come be your VP of sales and, you’re going to meet me for the first time. Spencer : For me, the key things for a VP of sales is, “OK, tell me about your best reps. Spencer : This is something we screwed up a lot of different times.

VP of Engineering 281

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 281

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. Aileen Lee | Founder @ Cowboy Ventures. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years. Aileen Lee: Yeah.

Investment 167

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 167

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And so once I had the idea I convinced my father to invest and become a customer. He was investing in internet companies. We burned through $23 million in venture capital and only had 1 million in revenue to show for it. And I remember with BigMachines my first partner was Chris Shuts. He and I went to MIT together.

Sales Recruiting 182

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 182

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I started a software company in college to make it easy to update websites called Content Management Software Now, and I had this idea for Pardot, I wanted to make it easy for marketers to run campaigns online and measure their results. We raised $0 of venture capital. From a product point of view, our timing was impeccable.

Sales Recruiting 170

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 170

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. He is leading DGF Investimentos’ specialized early-stage investment group – DGF Inova. Starting as VP of Sales, in less than two years he became CEO. Talk: SaaS.City Bootcamp: Sales Leadership.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

Kellblog

OCTOBER 13, 2019

However, as soon as a founder/CEO raises venture capital (VC) they have decided to take investing partners along on the journey. Yes, there is a board of directors but the board/CEO relationship is not the same as the manager/employee relationship with which corporate execs are so familiar. Nothing can take that away.

Sales Hiring 75

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Sales Recruiting Startup 75

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sales enablement is easy. REGIE uses artificial intelligence to create entire outbound inbound, and even follow-up sales campaigns faster. We’re on iTunes.

Marketplace as a Service 94

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Data 94

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

As ChurnZero recently secured a Series B investment bringing our total funding that has been raised to date to $35 million, we thought we’d take a look back and see the role that Customer Success plays at each respective stage of funding for SaaS companies. And we thought, who better to ask than those that chose to invest in us along the way.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success Payments Underperforming Technical Team 98

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

However, as soon as a founder/CEO raises venture capital (VC) they have decided to take investing partners along on the journey. Yes, there is a board of directors but the board/CEO relationship is not the same as the manager/employee relationship with which corporate execs are so familiar. Nothing can take that away.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2019

We’re over 600 employees, and we’re currently privately backed, and you could see the list of a lot of our venture capital backers who have some common Silicon Valley names. They are like Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures. First off, the land, this is your typical initial sale.

Sales Recruiting 172

Sales Recruiting Construction Scale SaaS 172

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

* Nick has previously said, “Burying customer success under sales does not work.” What should the optimal sales to customer success relationship look like? What does Nick mean when he says, “Product is to customer success what marketing is to sales.” Why does this have such a high rate of failure? We actually almost went public.

Sales Hiring 122

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Sales Recruiting 122

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones. There was no strike price or vesting schedule associated with these units—they were simply granted to employees based on performance or as a recruiting tool. You read that right—two!

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

394: Where is Venture Capital today? Interesting for a couple reasons, but Sunil’s been investing in cloud internet since before almost anybody. You’ve spent almost your entire career in venture, back when an $800 million exit might be exciting, before any of this stuff was hot. And how do you hack it?

Sales Recruiting 175

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 175

Point Nine Land

MAY 10, 2022

To achieve its ambitious growth targets, Acme is going to spend aggressively on sales and marketing while continuing to invest in R&D. 1) Until they have experienced sales, marketing, and finance leaders, most companies project to grow exponentially. But let’s dig in a bit deeper. month-over-month.

Scale 98

Scale Sales Recruiting Forecasting Finance 98

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

* How does David think about scaling sales teams? How does one know when is the right time to hire your first sales reps? What have been his lessons on optimizing payback period for sales reps? How should founders think about sales rep compensation? How does David think about payback period on a per rep basis?

Scale 197

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 197

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 4, 2019

To kick off your growth stage and to continue powering through it, you will need to begin raising serious funds that will allow your company to grow its team, invest in product development and iteration, and scale. Venture capitalists and angel investors are not the only routes to growing your business. Mature stage.

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 153

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 153

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

I run marketing and communications for Battery Ventures. It’s a global technology focused investment firm. Then I went over to the sales department. The demo is the sale and we close everybody in month. The first thing you bring in your playbook on sales. My name is Becky Buckman. Becky Buckman : Exactly.

Scale 172

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 172

Outseta

MAY 8, 2020

Invest millions of dollars into growth while running your business at a loss. I can assure you that most people in the tech industry spend countless hours thinking about how to make this happen, investing only a fractional percentage of time thinking about their impact. The lack of self awareness is real.

Part-Time VPE 102

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 102

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

And we were about a $50 million sales run rate, but I’d never done a media interview. For the first 10 years when we didn’t do one media interview and we got to 50 million in sales. You could recruit, you could do fundraising rounds, you could do all this stuff and then you would have arrived. Think about that.

Acquisition 133

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 133

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

I am a partner at Accel, the Global Venture Capital Fund, and I’m very happy to be here with one of these mythical creatures that people were talking about earlier. We took the series A, interesting enough, the first executive hired by, thanks to the sales coaching, actually was marketing. The technology is perfected.

Sales Hiring 268

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 268

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2020

And today, of course, we have a recruiting team. We have a great recruiting team and they partner with the hiring managers. But even to this day, hiring managers are responsible for building their teams. And again, we have a much bigger organization today and the recruiters partner with them to build great people in.

Sales Hiring 187

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Recruiting 187

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

I’m a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners, which is a venture capital firm, which was very lucky to be a part of SendGrid’s journey. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. How did you take away from the business and actually spend time recruiting?

Scale 137

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 137