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. We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales.

Sales Hiring 254

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 254

Tom Tunguz

MAY 31, 2021

In terms of time cost to the startup, a failed executive hire is roughly similar, 9 months. 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. That’s at the individual contributor level.

Sales Hiring 163

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Branding 163

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? Today’s Startups Need Both with Jason Eubanks, CRO at Harness  5. Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

Sales Recruiting 130

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Venture Capital Sales 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

The Simple Reason Startups That Just Raised $100s of Millions Are Doing Layoffs. 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.

Sales Recruiting 222

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 222

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

So I always have to pass here, no matter how good the metrics look today. “Quarterly MRR”, 100% Gross Margins, and Other Crazy Metrics. But if your metrics make truly zero sense, to me, that’s a flag. Gaming the metrics doesn’t help here. You’re in sales. Recruit the VPs?

Sales Recruiting 336

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 336

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 segment worked together on key metrics across the revenue board. For this, they made their BDRs laser-focused on behavior-based signals, ICP, and recurring processes to help them become account executives. .

Scale 177

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 177

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. Some sales-y, some very technical. CEO good at sales, but CTO not that great. — Jason 2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 6, 2022.

Investment 265

Investment Sales Recruiting CTO Startup 265

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 111

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Enterprise 111

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. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 300

Baremetrics

JUNE 30, 2021

You've got a brilliant SaaS startup idea. A startup financial model is the plan. In fact, we've already built the SaaS financial model you'll actually use — but let's take a look at why this is especially important for SaaS startups. 1 What Is a Startup Financial Model? What Is a Startup Financial Model?

Startup 98

Startup Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Deferred Revenue 98

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 19, 2021

Sales recruiting is broken. The sad truth is that VP of Sales are turning over within 19 months —and that timeline is shrinking. . Not only that, the market has heated way back up and the VP of Sales is one of the most sought after roles. Image from First Round’s State of Startups Report. Therein lies the dilemma.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

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 then some track record of execution either as the new startup or in the past. Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 247

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 247

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. . It’s human.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

A recruiter in the audience submitted a question often discussed in startup boardrooms. If you’re hiring a sales leader, you don’t pass up an awesome sales leader that has a killer track record of closing deals just because in their previous company they sold success software, and then with your company, they’re going to sell MarTech.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Acquisition 248

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 120

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 120

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2021

“The 5 things that kill startups after their seed rounds with Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator” A SaaStr classic from the last SaaStr Annual. #4. “The 5 Metrics You Should Track to Maximize Your Company’s Valuation with Tomasz Tunguz” A great session from the recent SaaStr Build with Tomasz. #9.

Sales Recruiting 142

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Scaling 142

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2021

– did their #1 key metric improve? Or if you hired someone that talked the talk, but isn’t the right fit for your startup? 50% of the job of a real VP is recruiting. Criterion #2: Did their #1 key metric improve? But you can expect in the first 60 days for one key metric to improve.

Part-Time VPE 188

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Metrics 188

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

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 120

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 120

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

To some extent, if you have the hottest startup in the world, the full package, you can play some games with investors. 99% of startups aren’t that. For 99% of startups, when you want money, tell VCs you want money. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” But you have to see progress in one sales cycle.

Part-Time VPE 181

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 181

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

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters. Product Marketing Manager: This person is tasked with developing product marketing campaigns , crafting compelling marketing messages, and coming up with ideas to retain customers. Average salary: $46,035/yr.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 94

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 3, 2017

Every startup’s sales commission plan is different. But it’s key to understand the theory and the benchmark data that governs the creation of sales commission plans to create a good one for your business. Sales compensation is communicated in OTE, On Target Earnings. At the upper end, they spent 11.5%

Sales Recruiting 120

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Data Sales 120

Sales Hacker

MARCH 17, 2021

While every entrepreneur dreams of scaling their startup into a multi-million dollar company, many do not understand all that goes into that dream. Strict sales volume does go a long way in achieving long-term revenue growth, but processes and cross-department alignment are what allow sales volumes to scale in the first place.

Scale 93

Scale Revenue Startup Sales Recruiting 93

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

One of the hardest but least spoken about transitions in a startup’s life is crossing people management chasm. At the outset of the startup, there might be three people, then eight, then fifteen. As they grow, startups often create ad hoc managers I call team leads. Team leads manage 3 to 5 people.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Startup Sales Hiring Scale 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. Yet in Mark’s experience working with and mentoring startups, he’s found that many entrepreneurs go with intuition over information.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

In fact, Peter Thiel wrote about brand as a core asset of the best startups in his recent book, Zero to One. This long term view shapes the culture of a startup’s workplace and reinforce values that will attract talented people whose mission aligns with the business. They capture part of the concept, but not the essence of it.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Startup Branding Acquisition 111

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

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Steve has previously said, “Sales and marketing must be one team.” Where does Steve find common points of tension between sales and marketing? Speaking of developer-first, how can startups compete in a war for talent against FB and Google? Stephen Burton: Yeah, I think in a startup, if you boil it down, it’s about selling.

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

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. Before Quip, Sam spent an incredible 3 years at Dropbox where he was the first enterprise sales rep in the entire company. Should you hire 2 at a time?

Scale 173

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 173

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 21, 2017

What is Sales Operations? Sales operations refers to the unit, role, activities and processes within a sales organization that support, enable, and drive front line sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently. But perhaps more than anything else, sales operations brings a system to selling. Technology.

Scale 87

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 87

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. So in that shift from product-market fit to product-market-SALES fit, how much should you optimize your go-to-market for product… and even the other way around?

Product Marketing 82

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 82

Kellblog

MAY 29, 2021

Someone who, when times are tense, can work as an intermediary between the differing parties, often but certainly not always, the investors on one side and founders/management on the other. Former sales leaders often perform well in this situation [6]. Someone who pushes for standard metrics and templates.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Consulting Government 130

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

Opening video: Hey, all these startups, they have a lot of trouble getting corporate credit cards. Anu: So, without further ado, Henrique, I know that when you first applied to YC, you actually applied with a VR startup idea, but the video showed all about credit card. Expense management was something people care about.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 156

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 5, 2023

And so, in New York, we ended up just going to a lot of meetups, talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, talking to a lot of people that were thinking about building startups generally. The 2012 New York startup community was very small, and it was very tight. And so we did that a lot. We said, “Hey, we’ll publish an API.

Sales Hiring 92

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Banking Outsourced Development 92

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2012

Tech startups write a ton of code. They are the skeleton of the startup. In AdSense operations, the average account manager supported more than 10,000 customers (!) Like Google, startups build many of these tools in house. In either case, these essential supporting cast members enable startups to grow much faster.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Travel 100

The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

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). One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. Trial-to-paying-account conversion rate.

Sales Recruiting 155

Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155