Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. Jokes aside, this is listed as number 1 because we’ve yet to see a successful B2B SaaS company where one of the founders wasn’t the first person doing sales.

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Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

The GTMfund team has been spread across the globe lately, big things happening! The rest of the team is playing catch-up from SaaStr followed by our annual GTMfund retreat in Napa. Solution: Build functional teams that drive innovation. You need to hire people who are very much think like you, as a founder.

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Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Almost every week, Iceberg RevOps’ founder Taft Love gets messages from executives and CEOs at growth-stage companies asking for help with their first revenue operations hire. These leaders are looking for the right person to own the implementation and management of their company’s go-to-market tech stack. Teams need to scale, fast.

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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.

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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.

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SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

They hired their first VP of Sales with a wonderful pedigree and experience at some of the hottest startups. After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. A bad one can torpedo you.

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SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? And for good reason. One thing is the timing.

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Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2019

A little over a year ago, I got the opportunity to start a new team within our sales organization – a team of Relationship Managers dedicated to growing our current customers at scale. The opportunity emerged out of a shift in how we practice sales. We had split into two distinct but complementary functions.

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Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design. They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Only money. First, some context.

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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?

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Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 19, 2022

As the president of Sales Xceleration, a firm specializing in assessing and implementing sales strategy , sales processes, and sales execution to drive growth, I’ve seen how job hopping can affect otherwise stable sales teams. But also the cost it has on their careers — and your sales team.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

How do you build out a Sales Development (SDR) function at your SaaS company? First, they had six AEs before they started hiring any SDRs. First, they had six AEs before they started hiring any SDRs. When Sam joined, there were two AEs, and he hired four additional AEs. The answer didn’t show up in the data.

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SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2021

I’ve seen sales reps great at $20k deals join a start-up with tons of leads but at a $2k price point and fail. Pick a sales process you are comfortable with. Account management? Can you do truly competitive sales? But larger sales organizations put sales operations processes in place that keep you more organized.

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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.

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SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. Considering aspects of sales and GTM strategies. A good range for this hire might be between 2-8 sales reps.

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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.

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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.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

343: Kyle Parrish is the Head of Sales @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Kyle made his way into the world of SaaS and sales and came to be Head of Sales at one of the fastest-growing companies in Figma. What worked?

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SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

His best deals by cash are: Sales Loft : $2.5 He didn’t predict that Sales Loft, Pipe Drive, and Harry’s would be his top three cash returners. He also learned that some founders just can’t lose, like Kyle from Sales Loft. billion cash, $100 million ARR. Pipe Drive: $1.5 billion cash.

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Totango

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Hiring team members with the right customer success manager skills is critical for the effectiveness of your CS team and strategy. Here we’ve identified the 13 most essential qualities to consider when hiring a CS manager. What Is a Customer Success Manager (CSM)?

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Maybe: – Go grab that office lease at half off – Hire Bay Area VPs now while they'll work anywhere. My top suggestions: Hire those “Bay Area VPs” now while they’ll (still) work with startups HQ’d anywhere. Go hire those VPs now that aren’t in your city. Make the hires.

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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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SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

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. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

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SaaSHolic

JULY 31, 2023

” Bookkeeping, planning, and modeling are skills and activities that someone in the founding team should perform at a good-enough level. Accounting and payroll should definitely be outsourced. It just so happens that these CEOs typically prioritize pressing operational needs (a sales rep, a developer, etc.),

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Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. She “stumbled” into it, as she told us, first as one of the earliest sales hires of Eventbrite, where she stayed for four years, and then into Slack in early 2015 as the first sales rep in the Bay Area.

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Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2019

Growing a sales team isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of A players in a room and getting them to start selling your product. If you want to build a revenue engine that will fuel long-term growth, you need to build and scale your sales org with intention. 12 steps to build a world-class sales team.

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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.

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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.

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Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 5, 2019

When hiring sales reps, what qualities do you look for? Having spent time as a BDR himself, Scott correctly identified that grit and curiosity are key identifiers for success in business development: “Intellectual curiosity & ridiculous grit. This is the traditional mindset when looking for new team members.

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Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 22, 2019

If you are new to sales management, it can be hard to know what concrete steps you can take to improve your skills, be recognized, and eventually, rise to a senior leadership role. These lessons come from LB Harvey, our SVP of Sales and Support. 4 steps to stand out as a sales leader.

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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.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. Now, over the next decade, they need to think about other things their customers do in hiring that aren’t done well and could be scaled.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2023

This year has been tougher for almost everyone — hiring freezes, budget cuts, layoffs, and macroeconomic headwinds. Datadog CMO Alex Rosemblat took the stage at SaaStr Annual 2023 to share how marketing teams can get more deals done with less budget. But it’s essential to see what’s going into the sales engine to begin with.

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Hear from Duo Security’s VP of Inside Sales America on how to build a $2.3B sales team. Jennifer Lawrence | VP, Inside Sales @ Duo Security. Today I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about me, a little bit about Duo, and then the secrets to building a killer inside sales org. Good afternoon.

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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.

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