SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

Codium is one of the fastest-growing startups in the AI coding assistant space, having scaled its go-to-market team from 3 to 75 in just under a year. Before hiring their first sales reps, the founders personally closed millions in revenue. Their strategy?

Sales Hiring 170

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting AI 170

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics The first thing Secureframe thinks about is metrics. If you don’t know your key company or North Star metrics, talk to your investors or other experts to figure out what they should be. So they can take action on the metrics in real time if they’re going in a direction they don’t like.

Sales Recruiting 294

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 294

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. Metrics That Matter. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Here’s how I did it.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

Sales Recruiting 316

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 316

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 307

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

While competitors invested in huge sales teams, Atlassian actually restricted direct customer interaction. Instead of treating feature requests as a liability, they used them as market research for third-party developers. This created a natural product-market fit validation system for their marketplace.

Sales Recruiting 193

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale 193

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

The result was a 5x increase over initial projections – growing from an $8M revenue target to $40M actual results – driven by a belief that market demand justified the investment. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.

Scale 170

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 170

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2022

Conversations about the state of the SaaS market in 2022 are everywhere, and it can seem overwhelming for entrepreneurs and business leaders to make sense of everything. In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR. The 2022 Economic Climate, Barriers to Growth, and Recruitment.

Sales Recruiting 257

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 257

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 22, 2015

On December 2, SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint will welcome Maia Josebachvilli , VP of Strategy and People at Greenhouse, a fast growing recruiting software company. Maia is especially well known for her thought leadership in developing best in class recruiting metrics. She was also selected for Inc’s 30 under 30.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Metrics SaaS Sales Funnel 100

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 276

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 276

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2024

Kyle Norton CRO of Owner is kicking off a new podcast for Pavillion with revenue leaders, and we were lucky enough to be guest #001 here: It’s a great convo on many SaaStr themes — but from the perspective of a VP Sales / CRO. Prepare your presentations with this in mind, balancing metrics with high-level strategic insights.

Technical Review 292

Technical Review Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Revenue 292

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. What a great VP of marketing really does (tons on that here ). How to manage customer success. About this and that.

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 357

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

When You Fall Out of Product-Market Fit. SaaStr 603: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents the Ultimate Guide to Sales Compensation, Quotas and Recruiting with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin. Live: SaaStr Workshop Wednesday with Battery Ventures on SaaS Metrics. Top Podcasts This Week: 1. Top Videos This Week: 1.

Sales Recruiting 286

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 286

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at marketing. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. Hire a great marketer early. Make NPS a top company metric.

Sales Hiring 310

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 310

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. If you don’t have the time to watch the whole session, here are the main metrics you should be mindful of. MRR, obviously. We talked about churn.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

OpenView Labs

APRIL 29, 2021

OpenView, Work-Bench , Primary Venture Partners , and Lerer Hippeau just hosted the fourth and final session of SaaS Growth Camp—a series for the firms’ portfolio companies tailored to the complex ideas behind SaaS growth and go-to-market strategies. Recruiting top talent is the common denominator across all scaling startups.

Sales Recruiting 98

Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds.

Sales Hiring 256

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 256

SaaStr

AUGUST 11, 2021

A ways back at SaaStr, we did a post “If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days” At first, so many VPs of Sales I know hated the post. A great VP can’t always double sales in a month or two. Shares the key metrics they plan to improve. They can’t recruit.

Sales Recruiting 304

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Scaling 304

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. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 260

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

This revenue strategy consists of three core questions: What is the market opportunity—the problem that needs to be solved? When you can answer these questions confidently, it is time to go to market. The market can be as big as we want, but our resources are not unlimited. Sales Cycle. Post Sales.

Scale 269

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 269

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. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. On the sales side, people hired way too much.

Sales Hiring 297

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 297

Kellblog

MARCH 17, 2020

Rephrasing Lewis Carroll, “if you don’t know what you’re recruiting for, any candidate looks great.” ” I liken executive recruiters to Realtors. If you don’t give a Realtor specific guidance on what you want to see, they’ll show you whatever’s on the market. Nice to Have.

Sales Recruiting 87

Sales Recruiting Sales Enablement Startup Communication 87

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

I really appreciate you coming to talk about how to attract, hire, and build a more diverse sales team in your organization. So I’ve been building top-producing sales teams for a really, really long time. So over the years, I’ve watched many sales leaders go out and say, “Brian’s my top producer.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 259

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

You can also totally change your sales team. In a way, this is the same point as #1, almost — except you can recruit even more of the team here. The sales team can call back every single prospect, not just the good ones. Marketing can better qualify leads — and qualify out churn-and-burn prospects.

Sales Recruiting 350

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Churn Onboarding 350

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

Recently, we welcomed Hollie Wegman to SaaS Office Hours to talk about marketing to developers. During our chat, Hollie shared some valuable wisdom from her experience as a marketing leader at Segment, Envoy, Mulesoft, and Salesforce. A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Signal can come from many places (sales team notes, customer support tickets, etc) IT Incident Management: Similar to the security alert example. However, there is still a TON of manual work / “tribal knowledge” that is relied upon / passed down from employee to employee to manage. Top 5 Median: 22.2x

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

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 235

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 235

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment.

Benchmarks 160

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 160

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. Some VCs will pay up even for very little growth and revenue so long as the management team is strong. They believe a strong team can literally will revenue into existence as long as there is the most basic product-market fit.

Scale 343

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 343

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. Because I suspected that small but interesting early traction was just bottom-feeding in the market. Not a true disruption in the market. Harder to Recruit. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. The go-to-market playbook. The go-to-market segment worked together on key metrics across the revenue board. You need people with fresh thinking, especially sales athletes and leaders who know your market.

Scale 237

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 237

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Mid-Market?

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 199

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2020

Hear his top tough management lessons and mistakes he learned along the way to founding what is now a $3.8 Live Ramp, a middleware company that connects marketing applications was acquired by Acxiom in 2014 for $310 million. The first thing is, and this is a little crazy, but recruitment is incredibly overrated. Billion company.

Sales Recruiting 167

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Management Marketing 167

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

JULY 1, 2021

When we do all hands meetings, we go through every KPI, every metric, ARR, margin, with every Gustee. 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. We’ve done that since day one.

VP of Engineering 290

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

I’m here with Bobby Patrick, the Chief Marketing Officer of UiPath. I can give you marketing examples about how robots are sitting on my laptop and then in the cloud doing work for us that we hate doing, the work that is done in a contact center or in an airline or work that’s done in your finance business.

Sales Hiring 271

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 271

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Let’s be honest: you probably didn’t get into content marketing because you love working with numbers.    But I’ve worked in media and content marketing for over a decade now — long enough to know that keeping a close eye on the numbers is essential if you want your content marketing efforts to pay off. 

Content Marketing 136

Content Marketing Metrics Social Media Marketing 136