SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 244

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

Dear SaaStr: I’m Starting as a New VP of Sales. A new VP of Sales can add value immediately by focusing on a few critical areas that drive results and demonstrate leadership from day one: Assess and Support Top Performers : A great VP of Sales will immediately identify the top-performing reps and double down on them.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Leadership 165

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. This makes sense.

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Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2023

In particular, hiring for your sales team is critical in an uncertain economic outlook. Additionally, sales professionals looking for a new role should choose their next company wisely. Great Companies Attract Great Talent Blond and Braverman have enjoyed successful careers as sales leaders in high-performing companies.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Compensation 244

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 296

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 296

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

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.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Social Media Sales 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2020

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to make that critical hire: the VP Sales. You’ll end up with a crummy sales team under a mis-hire. We’ve posted a script to use when interviewing a VP Sales. And lessons learned on what a VP Sales really does. Job #1 is Recruiting. It all clicks.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Engineering 360

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s the #1 Mistake New Sales Leaders Make? Let me just summarize my #1 observation here: the top mistake first-time sales managers make is recruiting. It is incredibly hard to figure out how to replicate the magic of the first 1 or 2 sales reps that work closely with the CEO.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Management 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2020

A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se. A VP of Sales who is smart, polished, and worked at the right place, in a management-level position. That can talk about quota attainment and sales operations and scaling and number. you might ask.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 363

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

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.

Sales Recruiting 325

Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 325

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

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.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 359

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. In fact, the best sales leaders always upgrade the team within 60 days of taking a new role.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 299

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

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.

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Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2022

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to hire a Great VP of Sales, and how you have to close the first 10 or so customers yourself, and how when you do go to hire your first sales rep — make sure you hire two. Use Recruiters and other paid channels. Here are 5 suggestions: 1. I doubt any will be good enough.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Pricing 290

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.

Sales Hiring 296

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 296

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Meet and Find Your Next VP / CXO!

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Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

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. I was a local sales manager or regional manager.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

Director+ of Sales at Slack / Zoom / DropBox / Pick Your Brand Name SaaS Company. Because it’s not ARR growth or even an IPO alone that determines if a VP of Sales him or herself is great. And there were probably 100+ RVPs of Sales at that point. Because often, the managers were given a team, or a lot of it.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Interviewing 317

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

What was the first warning sign your VP of Sales wasn't going to work out? A new VP of Sales doesn’t always double sales in 30 days — although it can happen in SMB sales. The old playbook does help, but every great VP of Sales knows they quickly have to evolve it to any new role.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2020

The most common objection you’ll get in SaaS sales, which will drive you nuts at first, is … Not Right Now. It can’t strategically improve sales software, financial software, quoting software, recruiting software, QA processes, call center software, etc. I Don’t Have Budget. It’s Great, But Not This Quarter. Deliver it for her.

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Sales Recruiting Sales SaaS Software 345

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2021

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.

Sales Recruiting 305

Sales Recruiting Sales Technical Support Onboarding 305

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Should I Go Into SaaS Sales? If you aren’t sure you want to go into sales — don’t do it. Maybe in 2021, when many SaaS leaders were growing at simply unprecedented rates, could succeed in sales if you weren’t sure you wanted to sell. link] You will build amazing people, management and recruiting skills.

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Sales Recruiting Sales SaaS Management 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

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. And figure out if they really are great: For your prospective VP of Sales, did her top 2 hires at least crush it and blow out their quotas ? Recruiting.

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Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 352

The Daily Egg

MAY 13, 2021

Getting your sales job advertisement in front of eyeballs can be an uphill task but doable with targeted keywords. Most managers and recruiters will admit to having a hard time crafting appealing job postings. The post Sales Job Descriptions and Titles – The Complete Guide appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Advertising Management 283

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 16, 2024

On the other hand, if I were selling sales and marketing tools, I’d be all over social media, especially LinkedIn. In the middle is recruiting. He didn’t see the value until he had to recruit at scale. It always helps with recruiting, done right. Selling to CFOs and finance. appeared first on SaaStr.

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Social Media Sales Recruiting Scale Finance 306

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Motivate a Sales Team Working Commission Only? If you’ve ever worked with a contingent recruiter, you’ll see this. The post Dear SaaStr: How Do I Motivate a Sales Team Working Commission Only? It is really, really tough. Pay the reps at least a small base salary, with a large commission.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SaaS 285

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

2021 will be the year SaaS sales evolves the most since the Appexchange ecosystem started to take off ~15 years ago, which spawned the entire notion of a true sales app stack. The permanent move to distributed sales teams. Almost every SaaS VP of Sales and CRO I’ve talked to in the past few months isn’t going back.

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Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 354

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: What is the path to become a great VP of Sales? Each story is different, but there is one clear penultimate step: recruiting and managing a small team yourself. What 95 times out of 100 is a recipe for failure is jumping straight from successful individual rep to VP of sales. Not just managing one.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Startup 243

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. The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 260

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2021

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. Recruiting 4, 5, 20, 50 great AEs is not the same at all. Even if they’ve owned a revenue commit — they’ve never owned a true sales number. Not entirely.

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Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Growth Marketing 321

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

So we’ve spent a ton of time over the years on SaaS talking about hiring a great VP of Sales. Not only because it really matters, but because hiring the wrong VP of Sales can set you back a year — or longer. So many VPs of Sales disagree with me here — at least at first when I make the point. Sales is hard.

Sales Hiring 308

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 308

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones. Ask who they are.

Sales Recruiting 334

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 334

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. Yes, you may be terrible at sales. It’s sales, after all. Here’s my Top 10 list: #1.

Sales Hiring 334

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 334

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 5, 2020

If we tally the reductions by category, travel, retail, fitness, real estate, transportation, and recruiting constitute the top 6 categories. Aside from recruiting, these are all consumer discretionary spend categories. ClassPass, one of the fitness startups to reduce headcount, reported a 95% drop in sales in 10 days.

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Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount Sales Hiring 357

SaaStr

MARCH 14, 2022

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. Sales is hard.

Sales Recruiting 306

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review Scale 306

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

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.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

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. To stick with founder-led sales longer than most folks do, i.e. past $1.5m-$2m ARR or so.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 328