SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2022

It’s the never-ending stereotype –– marketing and sales are eternal “frenemies.” However, this push-and-pull doesn’t have to be part of your organization as long as you hire and empower the right leadership. Tip Three: Better Recruiting. What I care much more about is growth rate –– that’s [sales and marketing leaders’] DNA.

Leadership 187

Leadership Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 187

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

Sales Recruiting 323

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 323

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2023

Some engineers by training, others in sales or product originally. But a few uniting characteristics of the very best: Relentless Recruiters. You have to be constantly recruiting the best. The best founders usually spend at least 20% of their time recruiting. You can’t do it all yourself, at least not as you scale.

Sales Recruiting 213

Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling Engineering 213

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

They used the competitive advantage of recruiting out of the Midwest, where they knew the markets and the people better. As a manager, you have to do things differently. But if you know what success looks like in sales, support, engineering, etc., Half of sales and marketing resources might not exist in 24 months.

Sales Recruiting 234

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 234

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 254

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 254

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

From $1m in ARR, and Then Forever After: Recruiting Great VPs. You need to learn to become great at recruiting. As you finally begin to scale, you’ll have enough revenue to hire some great folks, but not enough to build very redundant teams. More here: From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase.

Sales Recruiting 253

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 253

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster. That was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. We’ve scaled it pretty far pretty quickly. So we did about 442 million in sales last year. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 198

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 198

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Pretty incredible at scale. For example, a great Stretch VP of Sales might get you to from $50k to $500k a month in new bookings. Leads and pipeline that flattens. Especially, if the marketing spend keeps growing but the leads don’t. Many first-time VPs just can’t recruit great managers under them.

Sales Recruiting 232

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Metrics 232

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota attainment. The best startups invest in their sales teams and work hard so most of the reps hit and exceed quota. It does mean a well-oiled machine that hires strong reps of all backgrounds, and gets them the help and training so they can scale up and succeed.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Compensation 317

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 212

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 212

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2022

You need engineering, product in all start-ups — but in SaaS, even in the very early days, you also need sales, client success, true support, demand gen marketing, etc. Routine Sales. You gotta hire 2 great sales reps as soon as you can. This didn’t work well until I had a Great VP of Sales. That was me.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Scaling 280

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. You can do this.

Part-Time VPE 264

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

We’ve written a lot on SaaStr on how to increase the odds your first management team is a success. How to hire a great VP of Sales (tons on that here ). What a great VP of sales really does. How to manage customer success. About recruiting and helping you scale. When to hire her (more here ).

Sales Hiring 354

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 354

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

This happens with some regularity in SaaS, I’ve learned (and to be clear: I’m not talking about any company I’ve invested in, am an advisor to, board member of, etc – Because when it’s still a very small team, with no true management team … co-founders can kind of hack it to $1m-$2m in ARR together.

Sales Recruiting 231

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 231

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

They talked about product adoption, sales alignment, freemium models and lessons they have learned throughout their successful SaaS careers. As two CEO who love the art of sales and scaling, this one really was special. And now it’s all about like, can you really scale and execute? Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 247

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 101

Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 101

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. the prospects). But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely. How to scale a global tech ops team?

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 273

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 161

Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling SaaS Payments 161

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) They say “You can’t be what you can’t see,” and the sales floor is no exception.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

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 have to take care of the product roadmap while PMMs take care of the go-to-market strategy.

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

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 136

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Social Media 136

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

InsightSquared

MARCH 6, 2018

Sales operations has been around for quite some time, but lately the function has been gaining momentum. Instead of behind-the-scenes sales support, sales ops now acts as a strategic partner for sales VPs and leadership. Start building out your sales operations department by hiring someone to own your CRM.

Sales Recruiting 119

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 119

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 173

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 173

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%. More on that here and a great video discussion below: You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR. Ideally, have your VP of Sales on board in time to hire reps 3-300. But you’ll need a manager to scale beyond 2.

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

Rick started Guru in 2013, after successfully founding Boomi (a cloud integration and data management company) and selling it to Dell. He joined me for a conversation on tackling issues that come up as you scale your customer experience. When scaling your customer experience, remember AI can’t simulate human empathy.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling AI Search Underperforming Technical Team 156

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. Starting a new sales team is not unlike doing improv.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Scale 171

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the Customer Success lead hire, but worse. To me the first question is — do you have leads?

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 272

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

JANUARY 25, 2021

Not Hiring 2-3 Sales Reps to Start. More on that here: When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two. Scaling Too Slowly — and Too Quickly. I should have invested a little more in sales reps, more quickly, one we had some initial traction (see above). We should have taken $2m more.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

If a VP of Sales can’t improve things in one sales cycle or less — she never will. In one sales cycle, or less. If a great VP of Marketing can double your inbound leads — of course you can afford her salary. Don’t hire some junior marketing person that can’t really get you more leads.

Part-Time VPE 297

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting 297

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2020

The lead commit goes up each quarter and every year. To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. as you race past $10m+ in ARR.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS 223

InsightSquared

MAY 15, 2019

It’s one of my favorite questions to ask a fellow professional in sales operations. Insurance sales rep. Account Manager. Sales Operations is Still Developing. Sales operations as a profession is growing, yet it is a comparatively new function in businesses. Sales Ops is Many Disciplines in One.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 110

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

379: From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them. Announcer: In today’s SaaStr Insider, SaaStr CEO and founder, Jason Lemkin, shared the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales team.

Sales Hiring 174

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 174