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Key hires like a VP of Engineering or VP of Product might get 1%-2% each. Senior engineers or designers might get 0.5%-1%. Another way to think of this stage; the first 10 or so should probably get at least twice the equity of others for joining early, if they are mission-critical hires. Executives : 0.3%-1%
06:33 Why Sales Nav was a $250M business with a “crappy product” — and how Doug turned it around. 09:56 Doug’s “awesome test” for hiring top talent (and the 90-day rule he swears by). 13:26 The speed dating hack that landed Coffee’s first sales leader. 17:36 What Doug learned running Sales Cloud at Salesforce — and why he left.
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product. He asked which to hire first.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. Talk to them.
Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap.
The advice and thinking that leads you to make important mistakes there really is no need to make: “Ask VCs for Advice When You Want Money, Money When You Want Advice” I don’t know who started this, but they must be smarter and more perceptive than me. Especially the money part. In one sales cycle, or less.
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 timerecruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough timerecruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself.
Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.
That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. And a Rockstar VP is really what you need in every position. So I’d hire earlier here rather than wait. To me the first question is — do you have leads?
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. You get the picture.
The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. Veterans of the SaaS journey.
Ok now that some time has gone by I can reflect a bit more thoughtfully here. My top mistakes as a SaaS founder/CEO: Not convincing the very, very, very best VPE I knew to join as our VPE. I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues.
Pick a few that work for you: Get That Key VPHire Done in Q1. Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Drop other stuff to get this hire done. But anyhow — in January, find a way.
On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle.
And that’s really good when you’re scalingpart of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome.
And that’s really good when you’re scalingpart of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome.
But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product development, and representation in important regions and time zones. We got a chance to celebrate our initial public offering on the New York stock exchange back in September, which was a really exciting time for me.
We’ll have some time. It sounds minor or technical, but if you want to due diligence on a human being, I get to do it a few 100 times a year. I used it in kind of my breakfast pre warm-up, the crazy times we’re in. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high.
Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. 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.
As part of that, we wanted to look back at some of our most iconic content and sessions. One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). I don’t know anything about sales. SaaStr is Turning 10!
In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And if your team knows how to spend it, correctly — find a way to get them the capital they need to grow even faster than plan. the prospects). And see where that takes you. Add a layer.
356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Alongside Atrium, Pete is also the Founder of Modern Sales Pros, a community of 15,000 focused on sales operations and salesmanagement. Stop asking questions.
Ep: 413: Join four-time Founder and CEO Auren Hoffman as he breaks down how businesses can become the right model for explosive growth, emulate their strategy, and join the path to Unicorn potential in eight simple, hand-made steps. This episode is an excerpt of Auren’s session at SaaStr Scale. This is also true with people you hire.
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