SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Not that they are just "great at sales" — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) January 12, 2023. So a while back we did a deep dive on why 95% of the VPs of Sales candidates just won’t thrive at your start-up. I think it’s important to repeat that analysis, but for your first few sales reps.

Sales Hiring 326

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 326

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 325

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 325

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. They did this right at Brex.

Sales Recruiting 289

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 289

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Together we combed through AngelList and found companies that we saw potential in, however, most were not hiring. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 284

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

For us, it’s about fixing this problem, serving the customer well, so a very service driven mindset, which I gave a talk on a few days ago here, has been a big part of Gusto and affected our hiring from the early days. The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Jason Lemkin: I’ll answer it, but are you thinking more on sales or technology or broadly speaking in the question? That’s a great example.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 339

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 339

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

The 10-Point Checklist for Selling Your Company Understand Buyer Motivations – Have conversations with potential acquirers before announcing you’re for sale to understand what they truly value. Manage Team Expectations – Balance transparency with the need to keep the team focused on building the business.

Technical Review 190

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 190

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. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

At Procore, he led all customer-facing functions—Sales, Marketing, CS, RevOps, and BD. But behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team – and building that team is one of the hardest and important parts of the journey. It’s the one person that can hire or fire you. It drives employee engagement.

AI 80

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 80

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team?

Scale 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales. When not writing his sales handbook, he’s been overseeing the change from Close.io to Close.com. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. In this talk, CircleCI VP of Revenue Jane Kim will talk about the 5 mistakes all new sales leaders make. Let me start by telling you about my first role as a manager. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 175

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 175

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 261

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. X sales force, X meta.

SMB 106

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 106

Sales Hacker

APRIL 25, 2019

My cost-conscious lens (plus our proven outbound sales program) has served my company, Leadium, well. I am passionate about helping small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) accelerate their growth with outbound sales. The SMB Decision: In-House vs. Outsourced Sales Development. The Four Costs of In-House Sales Development.

Outsourcing Services 95

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Sales Outsourcing Outsourced Development 95

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2019

Because later you’ll see just having gotten on one more jet, made one more key hire, and then a few years down the road, you might be $1m, $2m, $5m further along in ARR. Not Paying Up for Top Hires, and #2. Under-Hiring. Yes, a true VP, or even a stretch VP, will cost a lot more than a manager or individual contributor.

Sales Hiring 211

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 211

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Whats important to note is that each model targets a distinct customer persona and, therefore, has a unique approach to the customer journeyfrom brand awareness to sales and, ultimately, conversion.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Classic agencies don’t value the software enough to engender pricing power, develop fast sales cycles, or change the operations of their business to maximize the value of the ML innovation. Consequently, product market fit is weak. Second, how to price the product relative to the competition?

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

In this episode, Bob and I chat about his new book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. What is it about sales that makes academia hesitant to teach it? Bob wondered where all the sales professors were and discovered that perhaps as a profession it required more art than science.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person. I’ve never even played a sales person on TV. All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

Like most things in life, hiring sales talent is a matter of timing. Especially since the best candidates with strong sales skills are usually snatched up within 10 days. That’s why it’s critical to overcome indecision and move quickly when recruiting sales talent. Is it unrealistic sales quotas?

Sales Hiring 92

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 92

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage. Pricing 2.3. Revenue & customers Product 2.1.

Social Media 122

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring 122

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. This has created large amounts of data for running teams. . This has created large amounts of data for running teams. .

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 215

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 215

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

359: The Secrets to Vertical Growth, What it Really Takes to Build a $1B SaaS Company with Matt Garratt, SVP, Managing Partner @ Salesforce Ventures, Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer @ nCino and David Schmaier, CEO & Founder @ Vlocity. Trisha Price. They need fewer sales as a percentage of overall employees.

Payment Solutions 189

Payment Solutions Pricing Payments Payment Services 189

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. They moved to a more traditional SaaS inside sales model, and they started shipping out these hardware devices, and only 30% to 40% of the customers would end up paying for them. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product.

Scale 272

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 272

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times. Mark’s a seasoned startup executive, he’s go-to-market oriented, and he has some large-company chops that he developed earlier in his career.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

Stax

APRIL 15, 2025

There are some important variations to MRR that would be good for your sales team to be aware of, including new MRR, expansion MRR, and churn MRR. Talk to sales What is Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)? Let’s get started. TL;DR MRR is the average revenue that a company expects to receive each month.

Payments 88

Payments SaaS Payments Revenue Payment Services 88

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. The company’s best-selling book, Predictable Revenue , details the hugely successful outbound process and sales created specifically for Salesforce. Starting as VP of Sales, in less than two years he became CEO.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hacker

MARCH 30, 2023

If you’re new to sales (or don’t have an economics degree), decoding the sales compensation plan on offer can make your head spin. There are 3 key questions you must ask your hiring manager or recruiter when offered a sales role to maximize your earnings and career potential. They are: What is the pay mix?

Compensation 94

Compensation Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 94

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

Henrique: So, we applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. It was, kind of, like a developer friend who had a startup, so they saw their transactions on the terminal. Henrique: So, we wanted … Actually our GC hire was our third hire in the company.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 212

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MAY 22, 2017

I lead sales enablement for HubSpot out of Dublin, Ireland and my role encompasses sales content, sales training, deal support and sales productivity. That’s where sales enablement comes in. But how can sales enablement be packaged?

Marketplace as a Service 114

Marketplace as a Service Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 114

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Quick recap: Keep your pricing simple. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. Eric Yuan : However, transitioning from engineer to engineer manager probably, is straightforward. Eric Yuan : And, another thing is to be a CEO is not only the product side, you also manage the whole of the business.

Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141