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. A New SaaS Playbook. In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR.

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 196

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

The other day I saw a VP of Sales flame out and resign with no notice from a SaaS company doing $10m ARR growing quickly. So I thought it might be helpful to brush off the topic of alignment between Sales and Marketing by updating a classic post on the topic. What 3 factors/skills must every VP of sales possess?

Sales Recruiting 306

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 306

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2021

That’s a reason the Redpoint SaaS metrics template includes Glassdoor score. The better the management hires for a business, the greater candidates' interest to work for a company. Often, employee satisfaction follows (also a metric in the template). However, some executive teams observe very little turnover.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Branding 160

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2023

SaaStr 632: CRO Confidential: How To Adapt Your Sales Strategy To The Current Sales Environment with Sam Blond and Hannah Willson, SVP of Sales at Modern Health  2. SaaStr 630: Sales-led vs. Product-led? Top Podcasts This Week: 1. Today’s Startups Need Both with Jason Eubanks, CRO at Harness  5.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Venture Capital Sales 130

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

We’ve recently been posting polls on SaaStr’s LinkedIn account to get a feel for what SaaS companies are doing in the current environment. In the video below, he discusses the results and where he thinks SaaS companies are on track or need improvement. #1. This is particularly important for a VP of Sales.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 208

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

But if you can’t tell me the future (in your market) at least 3 years out … then it’s hard for me to believe in SaaS you’ll ever build a unicorn. So I always have to pass here, no matter how good the metrics look today. “Quarterly MRR”, 100% Gross Margins, and Other Crazy Metrics.

Sales Recruiting 339

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 339

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Gartner: SaaS Spend In the Enterprise Will Grow 17% to $195 Billion in 2023. 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.

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Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 218

SaaS Metrics

JUNE 18, 2023

Picture a business model whereby a company doesn’t need a dedicated sales department to sell its wares or services. Instead, an ever-growing workforce of independent agents, working on commission, make the sales. Each independent distributor recruits more distributors for the business, essentially creating an expanding sales network.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Engagement SaaS Marketing 52

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

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. Sign up for free.

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Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 157

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Q: What are the top 20 pieces of advice for building a successful SaaS startup? Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. It just takes that long in SaaS and B2B, nine times out of ten.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 306

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2022

Investments I've made that didn't work out: – Momentum investment – CEO a bit of bulls**t artist – CEO good at sales but weak product team / CTO. Investments I've made that had so-so outcomes: – CEO not better than me – CEO couldn't control burn rate – Not really SaaS.

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Investment Sales Recruiting CTO Startup 261

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 10 worst pieces of SaaS advice, excuses, and mistakes founders make, and what to do instead If you want advice, you probably won’t get it from VCs, but ask anyway. #2 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.”

Part-Time VPE 172

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 172

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. Let me make a list, of at least 10 Risks Different SaaS VCs Do and Do Not Like To Take. Others … really don’t care.

Scale 341

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 341

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. And just improving things quickly, in the first 30 days, has a big impact in SaaS.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Scaling 270

Kellblog

MAY 10, 2021

In this post, I’ll present what I view as the minimum sales management framework for an enterprise SaaS startup — i.e., the basics you should have covered as you seek to build and scale your sales organization [1]. Pipeline management rules, with an optional stage matrix. Quarterly metrics.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Enterprise 110

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.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Retention Sales 99

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. Recruiting is easier, but the things that don’t change are customers don’t care.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 243

Sales Hacker

MAY 6, 2021

What’s the difference between a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? The VP of Sales. Great VPs of sales have gravitas and tact, command the room and hold their end of the table regardless of who is on the other side. Singular focus on sales. As the title would hint at, the VP of Sales should focus on sales.

VP of Engineering 93

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 93

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 ). All good stuff.

Sales Hiring 352

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Engineering 352

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 166

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 166

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 5, 2023

We also give you a bunch of tips on how to implement it in your SaaS. TL;DR Customer Value Management (CVM) is a business process that focuses on analyzing customer needs , building outstanding products that satisfy them, and enabling users to realize their value. What is customer value management? Let’s dive in, shall we?

Management 105

Management Scale Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 105

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

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

Recently, we welcomed Hollie Wegman to SaaS Office Hours to talk about marketing to developers. A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. Do the metrics suddenly change? It was our first virtual event, and we had hundreds of people attend. The full transcript is here.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Acquisition 248

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Accordingly, the recruiting of beta customers and roadmap selling happen earlier, providing for customer quotes as part of the launch. Subscribe now More for your eyeballs: TechCrunch released an article detailing the most important metrics for SaaS funding in 2024. Make sure your message lands. Keep it simple. “Do

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Generative AI AI AWS 100

ChurnZero

JANUARY 10, 2022

SaaS customer onboarding makes or breaks your customer retention. For this reason, unlocking the optimal SaaS customer onboarding experience is invaluable. Read our guide here for the 8 SaaS onboarding best practices to step up your onboarding experience. Work Cross-Functionally During SaaS Customer Onboarding.

Onboarding 98

Onboarding Sales Recruiting SaaS Technical Review 98

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 119

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 119

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. But that’s not Disruption — in SaaS at least. Sometimes in SaaS, there are natural monopolies. But more often, SaaS categories with significant complexity in workflows and features end up in natural oligopolies.

Scale 239

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 239

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

The headline metrics: 15,000+ attendees. We’re super excited to have partnered with Women in Revenue to bring a mini event-within-an-event for women leaders in SaaS and Cloud. We’ll have a packed half-day of sessions just with women leaders in Cloud and SaaS on Wednesday, March 11. Recruiting Fair.

New CTO 256

New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 256

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2017

How much revenue do you want to book for your SaaS startup next quarter? It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. So does recruiting time.

Sales Hiring 118

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 118

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Your marketing and sales budgets, and the personnel assigned to those teams, will also rise. A longer lead time for recruitment means higher quality recruits. Evaluate your hiring process Part of a strong hiring plan for the year ahead is to evaluate the hiring and recruitment plans of the previous year.

Sales Hiring 97

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Finance Forecasting 97

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 13, 2019

The goal in SaaS sales is not to convince your customer to buy your product there and then—it’s to win that customer over to your product for a lifetime. We’ll tell you how to use your understanding of a prospect to turn them into a delighted customer, what metrics to lean on, and how to build the perfect SaaS sales team.

Scale 61

Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS Sales 61

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 11, 2021

How he founded Sales playbook. I founded SalesPlaybook after getting frustrated by the lack or absence of sales support for startup founders. A lot of these companies have never done outbound sales and they don’t have a repeatable process in place and they haven’t really nailed down their ideal customer profile.

Sales Recruiting 52

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 52

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 6, 2015

Starting on October 21, I’ll be hosting a bi-weekly event from the Redpoint San Francisco offices called SaaS Office Hours. During these two hours, we will discuss the tactical issues and questions facing seed and Series A SaaS companies in a small group. How do I create the right kind of recruiting process?

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Sales Recruiting SaaS Business Model Development 100

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. That experience led to his bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. Or, even if they’re leaning towards the latter, they’re often not using the right metrics. A data-driven framework for scaling.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

OPEXEngine

APRIL 8, 2021

Fundamental shifts in customer buying, big changes in workforce expectations, and rapid movement in the competitor landscape are what SaaS companies expect to have the most impact on business in 2021. These are some of the results of our most recent SaaS CFO Pulse Survey Q1, 2021, conducted in March.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting SaaS Business 59

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As part of our last three annual finance and operating benchmarks surveys, we’ve asked nearly 2,000 startup founders and leaders of B2B SaaS businesses this simple question: “What’s keeping you up at night?”. It’s one of my favorite questions, even though it’s really not a financial or operating metric at all. .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82