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. Q: What is the Future of Lead Generation, and How Do You Stand Out? People don’t do that today.

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Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2020

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.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Ah the VP of Sales. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. The second post is a script for you to use (and modify as you see fit) – 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales Candidate. Just so you know, there are 48 Different Types of VP Sales. The toughest hire. Such a high failure rate.

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Q: What makes a great sales leader? The best sales managers / 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. But the best sales leaders know where they are #1. Decrease sales cycles.

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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. A data-driven framework for scaling. Mark’s latest ebook, The Science of Scaling , outlines a precise framework for success.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Sign up for free.

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SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

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.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

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.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

When approaching a GTM exercise, one thing needs to be very clear: the company’s revenue strategy. This revenue strategy consists of three core questions: What is the market opportunity—the problem that needs to be solved? Sales Cycle. Post Sales. Hire talent strategically and be two steps ahead with sales capacity.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

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.

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Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. By the time he left to join Google Cloud as EMEA VP of Operations and Customer Growth, Salesforce had around 17 billion dollars in revenue and almost 50,000 employees.

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SaaStr

JULY 22, 2019

SaaStr Scale, our one day, San Francisco based event. The Playbook To… Hear from different revenue leaders on the playbooks to revenue growth, scaling, building better teams and more. The Playbook to Building a Thriving Sales Culture with PatientPop SVP of Sales Justin Welsh.

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SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

A ways back, I asked Brendon Cassidy, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, Adobe Sign / EchoSign, and Talkdesk to put together his playbook for double sales. … How We Increased Sales Nearly 100% In One Quarter at HackerRank – Brendon Cassidy. They had significant recurring revenue and a lot of customers. Common sense.

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SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2023

So one recent survey we did really brought out a healthy debate: does your VP of Sales really need to be a product expert? Many of the comments said it was more important a VP of Sales understand process and leadership more than the product itself. If they are just saying the wrong things to customers and prospects. Be present.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2020

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. Make fewer of them and you’ll scale faster with less stress. Yes, you may be terrible at sales.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Storyblok started with a leadership-first hiring plan and a recruitment strategy that involved the following: A test to know how candidates handle different tasks and their expertise level. Additionally, they had to figure out how they would sustain the revenue stream to retain the staff. Prioritize customer and employee satisfaction.

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SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

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). The Number One Thing You Can Do to Accelerate Your Business Post-Initial Traction is Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Make the revenue recur, I’m interested. Who is over 20?

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

The list of problems is endless (this is one of the hardest parts of the job), but let me try to order a few of the biggest challenges roughly based on stage: Pre-Revenue: Finding a Truly Great Co-Founder That is Just as Committed as You. Then their collective revenues often only add up to Cappuccino money. It never ends.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

.” Nearly a decade and 500 episodes of the podcast later, we invited back our original SaaStr podcast host, Harry Stebbings of 20VC for a catch-up chat with Jason to discuss the world of venture today and how to scale a successful SaaS sales team from the bottom up. You never get to spend less time in sales as a SaaS CEO.

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SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

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. Here are some things to remember when you think about scaling your next big SaaS company.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

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. The distraction of building a real sales team isn’t worth it yet.

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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. On the sales side, people hired way too much. More salespeople do not equal more sales. Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2020

There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. Reps have to fight for the best leads, prove the highest close rates, exceed the mean of the bell curve, to not just thrive, but survive.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization? The go-to-market segment worked together on key metrics across the revenue board.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Does it get easier or harder to scale SaaS as your company grows? Generally, it gets easier to grow at a “good”/modest rate at you scale, but harder to grow at an outsize rate. And that brand generates leads organically, and fairly low-cost leads. Account expansion starts to work. This helps a lot.

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SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

Today, the majority of revenue professionals likely work multiple side hustles. When March 2020 hit, you laughed when you heard stories of engineers working 4-6 hour jobs, but it became rampant on the revenue side of the industry. As a manager, you have to do things differently. They had no hiring expertise and little money.

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Sales Hacker

APRIL 23, 2024

Before Common Room, Linda led product marketing for serverless computing at Amazon Web Services, where she saw firsthand the impact connected data and person-level insights had on accelerating product adoption, earning new customers, and expanding account revenue. 11:07 – Differences between intent data and signal-based selling.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2021

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. Just by making sure more of those precious leads actually close. Because leads are so precious.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

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?

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure.

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SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster. That was the most over the top entrance that the sales leader for a company that moves boxes around the world has ever gotten. I’m Chief Revenue Officer at Flexport. We’ve scaled it pretty far pretty quickly. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2019

SaaStr Scale is THIS THURSDAY in San Francisco! The Playbook to Building a Thriving Sales Culture with Fmr. The Playbook to Building a Thriving Sales Culture with Fmr. PatientPop SVP of Sales Justin Welsh. The Playbook To Re-Igniting Growth with Predictable Revenue Co-Founder and CEO Aaron Ross.

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SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

The toughest part in the end is always recruiting. Recruiting. Over time, that’s recruiting more and more senior folks, so the target changes. As your company scales, you’ll start to hit 15%+ attrition in your employee base just naturally each year. You’ll have to be recruiting new ones all the time.

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SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Typically on SaaStr.com, we try to focus our content on mistakes to avoid, lessons learned and how to scale faster, but for the CEO Summit, Jason addressed the audience with what’s most top of mind for him at the start of 2024. “I really think we are in a new world as managers and as leaders,” Jason said to kick things off.

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SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

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