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The success rate for executive hires at high-growth SaaS companies can be surprisingly low – you’re often lucky if 50-60% of your management team works out long-term. ” If you have a SaaS company above 2 million in revenue, both Brian and Jason agree that at that point, all that matters is the management team.
” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Would you hire a “VP of Internet” in 2010? Think about it.
Insights from Jasper Carmichael-Jack, CEO of Artisan at 2025 SaaStr AI Summit About Artisan: AI-powered sales platform building the end-to-end solution —from marketing personalization to AE automation across the entire revenue cycle. Sales is messier. CRM data accuracy sits at 47% across most sales orgs. The other 72%?
✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 16, 2025 The Top 3 Reasons AI Sales Tools “Don’t Work” (Spoiler: They Actually Do, If You Use The Tools Properly) I get this question at least 3x a week: “Jason, we tried AI sales tools and they just don’t work. I’ve been in B2B and Saa sales for 15+ years.
What are the top 10 mistakes founders are still making today when hiring their VP of Sales? SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, has done numerous surveys now that confirm that a startling 70% of first hires don’t make it. In this post, we’ll delve into the common pitfalls founders encounter when hiring a VP of Sales.
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. Technical customers report that tasks that previously took weeks are now completed in hours.
The Pivot : They interviewed 200 companies and 400 founders in just 6 weeks, asking one simple question: “If you’re open to hiring internationally, what are your biggest challenges?” Scaled Sales Without Revenue Operations (And Paid Dearly) The Explosion : From 2 AEs to 50 AEs in one year. ” Training was broken.
The Great Spending Showdown: AI vs SaaS in 2025/2026 — What Every B2B Leader Needs to Know We’re witnessing the most dramatic shift in enterprise tech spending since the cloud migration began 15 years ago. billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3
Big Company M&A Is Incredibly Complex “Acquiring a company is a much bigger deal for a tech company than you think” “The soft costs are much, much more than the cash or stock” Integration can consume “10,000 hours of like expensive people’s time” 2. Never happened. The M&A Reality Check: 1.
The 4 Things Most Founders Get Wrong About Marketing: “We’re a product company, not a marketing company” – The hard truth is that 9 out of 10 B2B companies spend more on sales and marketing than R&D. Better to hire for your specific needs and stage. These “five-five” CMOs barely exist.
As Colin describes it, “I went to the CEO and asked to generate more revenue and hire more people, which is counter-intuitive to the standard approach where revenue leaders may sandbag to over deliver and crush numbers.”
We’ve talked a ton about How to Hire a Great VP of Sales on SaaStr, but I wanted to highlight a few VP of Sales “personas” that I rarely, if ever, see work out. Because again and again, many of your will hire this VP of Sales. Here are the types of VP of Sales that just never work out.
While many partners excel technically, broader operational considerationssuch as resourcing and support considerations , sales strategies , marketing , and portfolio managementremain areas for growth. And Ella is a passionate thought leader for all things payments, technology, and commerce. There is a lot of material out there.
They’ve achieved this due to the systems they’ve set up and the profiles they’ve hired for. The idea for Clay came from the goal of giving the power of programming to more Go-To-Market leaders rather than more technical founders or engineers. So let’s dive in. They’re a creative approach to GTM. They’re trying to grow.
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. Never play the blame game As a revenue leader, it’s crucial we take accountability for sales performance.
Quickly, though, your attention turns to initial traction, your first critical hires, and building out those early business functions. With early revenue, you start thinking about churn and scalability of every aspect of the business, including product, infrastructure, customer support, sales and marketing. Mistake #4: DIY Accounting.
Are specific technologies or platforms involved in your project? Do they have experience with the technologies involved in your project? While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. Is there a project manager?
2021 was a huge year for us, a big rebound after SaaStr Annual 2020 was the first major tech event that Covid shut down in March ‘20. SaaStr Annual 2021 was the first and only major tech event to be back in-person IRL in the Bay Area , and we moved to an outdoor (and 100% vaccinated and tested) format for our 5,000 attendees.
“Give the VP of Sales More Time” This is always terrible advice. If a VP of Sales can’t improve things in one sales cycle or less — she never will. In one sales cycle, or less. Don’t hire some junior marketing person that can’t really get you more leads. More on that here.
Focusing on generative AI applications in a select few corporate functions can contribute to a significant portion of the technology's overall impact. Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Having learned from thousands of customers and prospects, Sarah Lash, Envoy’s head of enterprise sales, will talk about what it takes to guide and scale enterprise sales programs during an uncertain future. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17. Combine Strategies To Drive Sales.
I recently put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn on folks’ top tip to take friction out of their sales processes. “Presumptive close in a transactional sale. “At “Help people buy how they want to buy and be as transparent as you can with pricing ” – Ken Edwards, Sales leader, Uberflip.
a company will hire rapidly to achieve scale. Executives think that hiring new contributors is necessary to hit plan numbers. The problem here is that without confidence and assurance that you can repeat your early success, you may set up your new hires for failure. Hire according to empirical indicators, not the financing plan.
“The hardest part of closing any deal is finding it,” says Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake. Over his 35+ year career, Nilsson has managed 100+ Sales Development Representatives (SDR) across four continents, six countries, and ten cities. Jumpstart pipeline generation with your first five revenue hires.
AI’s True Power in Finance : The biggest unlock of AI isn’t just automation, but its ability to reason over complex financial data, freeing finance teams from hundreds of hours reviewing ledger records. “The biggest fallacy in tech is that the only way to scale is through hiring and delegating,” notes Nangia.
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.
Due to that convenience, departments and teams tend to seek out best-of-breed cloud applications, streamlining foundational and specialized functions through automation. However, trouble arises when your company ends up with a SaaS sprawl – the overall amount of adopted applications overwhelms your tech stack. Customer 360.
Between the initial COVID economic shutdown to the tech V-shape recovery to the rise and fall of the public and private valuation landscape with inflation and interest rates to now the advent of a massive technology breakthrough with AI, these are crazy, fast-moving, and exciting times. what would you do with a clean start?
Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. For every company that’s executing the freemium model successfully, there are hundreds more that struggle and the tension it can create between sales, marketing, and product teams.
We’ll explore key aspects such as building customer relationships based on trust and honest feedback, defining company culture amid rapid growth, and hiring strategies that prioritize team chemistry over expertise. UiPath was founded back in 2005, and its origin story is similar to many technical engineers-turned-founders.
Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. Will AI let ICs do more, with fewer managers? AI in Sales and Marketing AI is disrupting sales and marketing, particularly in support and SDR /BDR functions, due to the shortage of skilled workers and the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings.
Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment. Lemkin acknowledges the challenge of meeting people’s high expectations and the existential nature of finding solutions to these hiring and motivation issues.
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.
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.
Hiring a global team to achieve the vision What do you do when your company’s location limits your access to talent? You spread your hiring net and draw in as much talent as possible. Their first step to achieving this was hiring a sales leader to build a sales team.
Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. This is where product-led sales comes in.
Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing.
As buyers grapple with expanding technology, higher prices, and a need for efficiency, SaaS companies need to deliver what their audience is looking for to win in the market. They review the changing market, buyer trends, and tips for the road ahead. This means higher engineering costs for companies and, so, higher software prices.
Companies were growing their sales organizations and bringing in more revenue. The biggest obstacle to hiring was that there simply weren’t too many great candidates on the job market. Companies everywhere have frozen their hiring and laid off workers — with sales reps often among the first to go.
How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process. Sign up for free.
“Typically that was the marketing hat in my case, but sometimes it was the sales hat or thinking about finance or other areas of the business. During their recent hyper-growth phase, Rick Schultz CMO at Databricks hired a lot of marketers. Leading him to some of his biggest mistakes when hiring: Not investing enough time.
A few of the best: “Hire more relationship managers. Pay sales reps on renewals (enough to keep them from overselling year 1). Pay sales reps on renewals (enough to keep them from overselling year 1). Hire 9s & 10s ONLY. “Add Pendo to our tech stack.” We all learn this again and again.
Prakash Raina, Co-Founder of Subskribe, and Leslie Hui, VP of Accounting Operations and Finance Transformation at Okta, break down the secrets to unifying SaaS teams, processes, and systems. Before we get into the dynamics of alignment, let’s briefly review the evolution of SaaS. Hire ahead of the curve. New service offerings.
Airtable is a low code, bottoms-up business which means that its users don’t have to be in IT or have a technical background in order to build useful internal databases within Airtable. Here, we breakdown some of the strategies Howie used to turn Airtable into the project-management powerhouse it is today. On Category Creation.
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