Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 95

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2024

He made many great leadership points, but one in particular rattles around my head a lot and I think deserves its own post: You usually won’t know if you’ve made a 10x hire … when you make the hire. A good / great employee can become 10x in a new environment was part of Auren’s point. But I didn’t know they were truly 10x hires.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO CTO 295

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.

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Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo? ” And there can be some truth to that, right?

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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

There’s a slide I see again and again from start-ups: 2 of the early sales reps are at 100% of quota, sometimes 150%-200%. So why so often, do only 2 of the first 8-10 sales reps perform? The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training.

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Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 348

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. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. You can’t hire a magician Head of Product.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR.

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Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager. In my first start-up, there was one engineer we had no choice about. Everyone hated him.

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Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 284

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 325

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 209

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

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Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 200

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

We had Lew Cirne, Founder & CEO of New Relic, Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder & CTO of HubSpot and for the first time at Annual, we added office hours with the top VCs in SaaS. total attendees, e.g., a CEO + a VP of Sales and a VP of Customer Success, or two Co-Founders, or CEO + CTO, etc. 2020 SaaStr Annual At Home.

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Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire New CTO 307

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR. So number six, thinking you’re getting away with under investing in management, up scaling in HR.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 247

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. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 177

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript). Gaetan Gachet | SVP of Sales @Algolia. It’s an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to 50 million in the same job. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 146

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. What comes next?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. Which brings me to sales and marketing.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete. And you should do it right then.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. They wanted to sell the Amplitude product, I forget, to sales or somebody else, and that was their mistake. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

If I think about the founders of "my" SaaS startups, these are the three qualities that all of them have – in addition to a huge amount of intelligence, motivation and commitment, which allows them to quickly acquire new skills as the company grows. The second best option is two, and the third best option is one, four or five.

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CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. Welcome Eric.

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Account Managers: They serve as the lead point of contact for all customer account management matters.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

Great to see a lot of repeat attendees and some new ones. A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. I’m Travis Bryant.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 161

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

OpenView Labs

MARCH 17, 2020

When you ask average questions, you get average hires. If a potential senior hire has gotten so far as to talk with the CEO , she’s probably someone the company wants. Mixmax isn’t the only company that tries to talk new employees out of staying. Zappos famously pays new employees to leave after the first month.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They love new ways of working and were happy to bring Slack into their functional teams and say, “Let’s experiment with this new way of working.” And it was very successful. Product can do a huge amount there.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. We saw inside the company this tension between our classroom business and this new B2C digital business, and we knew we had to make a decision.

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B2B B2C Scale New CTO 170

Stax

AUGUST 14, 2024

Experienced payments and sales executive joins Stax leadership team to drive accelerated growth for Stax Connect and embedded payments. Krahl’s appointment cements Stax’s commitment to investing in its team and bringing on new team members with deep industry knowledge and is the latest executive hire at Stax.

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Payments Stax Payment Solutions Payment Services 88

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. Even though HubSpot grew 23% at $2.5B, there was weaker demand and longer sales cycles, and they had to do pilots with CEOs and CIOs. HubSpots NRR has fallen to 100%, so to grow 23%, they must add 23% net new customers. UiPath saw a huge drop of 30%.

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CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 144

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success. At Hired , we help top R&D, engineering, and tech talent find jobs they love. Customers called us.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 45

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Which is why you should sign up for the 2 for 1 Insider Sale and get two people for the price of one. Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business.

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

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.

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Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 111

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Simmone Taitt , CEO of HeartSpace Consulting , and a longtime sales leader and consultant in the New York community. How intuition and heart can be built into a sales organization. How to build diversity into your hiring practices. We’re on iTunes.

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Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 91

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

Listen to Hang Black’s podcasts to learn about the future of sales enablement or how to lead with empathy. RevOps leaders are talking about trends in the market, and how the move towards RevOps will change everything from marketing to sales development to post sales. Fixing visibility issues in your sales org.

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Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 120

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Continuous risk management. Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Understanding the guardrails we need to build means closely tracking meaningful change across Intercom and making sure we’re on top of new initiatives”. Shipping quickly and securely. Evolving security landscape.

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Data CTO Hire Technical Review Scale 118