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There’s recruiting and there’s people building. Almost equally to their ability to recruit great people. I bootstrapped ZoomInfo to 25 million in revenue. I bootstrapped ZoomInfo to 25 million in revenue. “The best hack,” Jason adds, “is not recruiting one management team. .'”
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Hire a Great VP of Sales? It’s a classic SaaStr topic and a great deep dive is here: Hiring a Great VP of Sales: The New, Latest Edition with Jason Lemkin (Video + Pod) Hiring a great VP of Sales is one of the most critical decisions you’ll make as a founder. Focus on recruiting ability.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about SaaS companies: the majority of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it past 12 months. The 30-Day Evaluation Framework Test #1: Did They Bring in 1-2 Great Sales Reps in the First Month? Great VPs of Sales understand that recruiting is their primary responsibility.
5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. Create Compelling Economic Incentives For sales talent, compensation is critical.
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Know If My New VP of Sales is Working Out? This is one of the most discussed topics on SaaStr, and a deep dive here: The 30-Day Test: How to Know if Your VP of Sales Will Succeed In a nutshell, you’ll know if your VP of Sales is working out by looking at two things: results and team-building ability.
Spend 20%+ of Your Time Recruiting : If you’re a founder, this is non-negotiable. Recruiting isn’t fun, but it’s the most important thing you can do once you have something working. Midday: Customer calls or recruiting. If you’re not spending at least 20% of your time on this, you’re wasting time on less important things.
Dear SaaStr: What Are A Few Top Tips to Hiring The Right First VP of Sales? Hiring a great VP of Sales is one of the most critical decisions youll make as a founder. Get it right, and theyll scale your revenue and team. Heres how to approach it: Timing is Everything Dont hire a VP of Sales too early.
A strong sales leader is vital to any company hoping to scale. With this in mind, hiring for the Head of Sales role is one of the most important things a business can do. Unfortunately, too many companies focus on the wrong things when hiring their sales leaders, which can lead to hires that aren’t the best fit for the business.
How do recruiters – key pieces to building a sales team – source talent for their clients and themselves? Jamie Scarborough from The Sales Talent Agency walks us through the ins and outs of salesrecruiting.
Dear SaaStr: I Fired My VP of Sales. Here’s what you should do next: Step in as Interim VP of Sales (If Needed) If you don’t have someone ready to step up, you’ll need to take the reins yourself temporarily. You know the product, the customers, and the sales process better than anyone else. How will they recruit top talent?
In interviewing great CMOs , the product marketing leader is the first marketer most startups should recruit, and often the first key mishire. Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. This makes sense.
Nothing matters but recruiting and using your personal network. Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team.
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to make that critical hire: the VP Sales. Because you’ll lose not just some incremental revenue, but potentially far more. All the second-order revenue you could have had (6x the initial lost revenue). You’ll end up with a crummy sales team under a mis-hire.
One of the classic original SaaStr posts was on the Top 10+ Questions to Ask a VP of Sales Candidate. It’s a different world today, AI-fueled, often distributed and hybrid, and with inflation both in titles (CRO or VP Sales) and compensation expectations. Use this updated script for hiring that first VP of Sales.
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Crush a VP of Sales Interview? To nail a VP Sales interview, you need to demonstrate that youre not just a smooth talker with a great LinkedIn profileyou need to show youre the real deal. Too many VPs of Sales and CROs show up to interviews knowing almost nothing about the product.
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to hire a Great VP of Sales. And we’ll keep talking about it — so long as 70% of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it 1 year. I wanted to take a moment to explore the flip-side … a guide to why first-time VPs of Sales that finally get their shot — fail.
In our most recent episode of CRO Confidential , hosted by Sam Blond , Graham Moreno , VP of Worldwide Sales at Codium, shared invaluable insights on what drove this growth, the challenges they faced, and how other SaaS companies can replicate this success. Key Growth Drivers 1.
200+ dedicated workshops and braindates with the best in SaaS, Cloud and AI, from intimate small sessions to 20-50 person workshops from the best Our CRO + CEO Poker Night where we bring 200 top revenue leaders together with CEOs and founders of B2B / AI companies attending Our 4th annual CMO Summit for top CMOs and the CEOs that want to meet them!
Pre-Seed / Seed Stage (Pre-Revenue or <$1M ARR) At this stage, you’re compensating for high risk with high equity. For example, a VP of Sales driving ARR growth might get closer to 1%, while a VP of HR might be closer to 0.3%. Senior Managers / Directors : 0.1%-0.3%. Executives : 0.3%-1% Junior Employees : 0.01%-0.05%.
In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, continues a mini-series on founder-led sales with Colin Zima, founder and CEO of Omni. The post SaaStr CRO Confidential: Omni Founder Colin Zima on the Power of Leveraging Your Network for Sales and Recruiting (Pod 658 + Video) appeared first on SaaStr.
Q: What makes a great sales leader? The best salesmanagers / directors / VPs: Recruit great team members. Sales requires a linear number of hires to grow bookings. So you have to be a great recruiter to scale. In fact, the best sales leaders always upgrade the team within 60 days of taking a new role.
When building a list, try to define your potential customer as granularly as possible – size, location, industry, ideal buyer, sales process, technology stack, etc. This will allow you to be much more targeted with your messaging when reaching out and will help you optimize your sales funnel. Pricing is always evolving.
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.
In the “old” days, there was a rough rule that as soon as you are bringing on more than 1–2 reps a quarter, you needed to hire a director of sales ops. That at that point, at a minimum, there would be too much administrative work for your VP of Sales to handle it herself. You want the sales ops help scaled up and helping before then.
The most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales, which will drive you nuts at first, is … Not Right Now. Every business is mostly running OK already with its tech stack, and it’s unlikely your little app, alone, is going to change the revenue/profits course of any customer. I Don’t Have Budget. It’s Great, But Not This Quarter.
Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue. Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop. Want to see more content like this?
At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. Pugh’s strategy is simple, albeit not always easy: Recruitment — how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization. Let’s look at five tips to consider for successful recruiting.
Kyle Norton CRO of Owner is kicking off a new podcast for Pavillion with revenue leaders, and we were lucky enough to be guest #001 here: It’s a great convo on many SaaStr themes — but from the perspective of a VP Sales / CRO. From Kyle’s summary: Here are eight takeaways from our conversation.
billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3 The numbers tell the story: Q1 2025 : 39% revenue growth year-over-year, with U.S. commercial revenue surging 71% Stock performance : Up over 400% in the past 12 months, 63% YTD in 2025 Commercial momentum : 136 U.S.
Q: What are the most common challenges of a VP of marketing transitioning into a Chief Revenue officer CRO role? But here’s what happens: They don’t know how to recruit an A+ sales team. Maybe they recruited a few BDRs to work with them in marketing, but that’s not the same. I’ve almost never seen this work. Not entirely.
What was the first warning sign your VP of Sales wasn't going to work out? A lot of veteran SaaS revenue leaders protested, but most of them, upon reflecting on it, came to agree the point was right. A new VP of Sales doesn’t always double sales in 30 days — although it can happen in SMB sales.
So you wanna build a channel sales program: Don’t Copy HubSpot! All these companies are great companies with great channel sales programs. . Any channel sales program goes through an evolution. There are many reasons to start a channel sales program. Everything is harder with a channel sales program.
I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting asked about the top mistakes hiring your first sales team so many times over the years, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List. Yes, you may be terrible at sales. It’s sales, after all. Here’s my Top 10 list: #1.
Most of us can’t afford to hire a VPM 12 months before we have our first customer, and we can’t survive through 10 sales reps without one. It’s not quite as terrible as waiting too long for a VP of Sales. A great VP of Marketing can help make the sales reps better qualitatively, even before you have a VP of Sales.
As Christina puts it: “If you can give people credit — which really means revenue — for showing off all the good security work they’ve done, they will do more good security work.” “We were operating at basically cash flow break-even,” Christina recalls. And we hadn’t.” billion—up from $1.6
Flock Safety’s Founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, and its VP of Growth, Alex Latraverse, know a bit about sales. Enough to go from 0 to 100 sales reps in about 18 months — and they’re looking to be well beyond 100 by the end of this month. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.
In SaaS, #1 most common misfire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. Because in SaaS start-ups, it seems like the majority of first VP Sales fail.
Founder-led sales generally stops scaling around $1m-$2m ARR. A sign to hire a real sales leader. Over the years at SaaStr we’ve talked a lot about hiring a great VP of Sales, when it works, when it does, and how it moves the needle. To stick with founder-led sales longer than most folks do, i.e. past $1.5m-$2m ARR or so.
In the latest episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context – Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR as Senior Director of SDR.
It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. Colin joined Wiz in February 2021 when the company was near zero revenue. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.
What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales. 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. . #1: 1: You Can’t Stay Founder-Led Sales Forever. This one is newer.
Dedicated Slack Channel For Every Metric From the early days at Secureframe, they have had a dedicated Slack channel for every metric: every net new sale, every expansion, every churn, and every expense. Let’s use net dollar or net revenue retention as an example. By keeping very similar revenue goals in mind.
While competitors invested in huge sales teams, Atlassian actually restricted direct customer interaction. The “Reverse Channel” Effect Counterintuitive channel finding: Unlike traditional partner programs that start with recruitment, Atlassian let partners self-select by becoming power users first.
Dear SaaStr: I’m Being Recruited by a Startup That Just Raised $5m. So how you can do your own diligence as the first senior sales exec going in? It’s likely too early to judge based on revenue and a Google Search. How Do I Vet Them? First, there’s probably something there if they raised $5m. At least, usually.
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