One Tough (But Rewarding) Job: Being the First Sales Rep at a SaaS Startup
Ah, the first sales rep. Being the first salesperson into a start-up in a rewarding — but very tough job: Your Founder Boss likely will never have managed a salesperson before. She likely won’t know what you are supposed to do 40+ hours a week. Your Founder Boss may have strong views on what you […]
Outbound Always Works
These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Emails get blocked, spam filtered. No one even has voice mail anymore. 50 calls a day feels awfully dated. Everyone gets […]
Fred Stevens-Smith & Farlan Dowell (Rainforest QA): Morphing into a Rocketship: Learning to Love Sales (Video+ Transcript)
(Only 30 days to SaaStr Annual 2017. Do you have your tix yet?) We talk a lot about sales here at SaaStr (obviously), but that doesn’t mean that everyone is in love with sales funnels, hitting quotas, and nurturing MQLs into SQLs. A lot of SaaS companies struggle with building sales teams that bring in […]
The One Secret Tip To Hiring a Great Sales Rep (In The Early Days)
I’ve written this before, embedded in other posts. I’ve talked about it in many presentations. But it’s time to call out One Simple Hack to getting sales going in your SaaS start-up, in the early-ish days. One of the best there is in SaaS. I’ll tell you the trick. It’s going to sound simple, but […]
How Many Sales Reps Do I Need To Hit The Plan Next Year? Hint: ~2x What You Think
Until founders have real help on the ops side, I usually see everyone get wrong the calculation of how many reps they need. And it’s almost always more than first-time founders think. You can back into it: First, figure out how much revenue you need to close in the next twelve months. Because that’s more […]
Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp) – A Billion in Exits: 5 Things I’m Doing 5 Times Better This Time (Video + Transcript)
In anticipation of the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2017, we’ll be releasing the full series of transcripts and videos from all the awesome 2016 sessions. We were very excited to have BJ Lackland, CEO of Lighter Capital, take the stage and moderate this talk by Auren Hoffman, former CEO and co-founder of LiveRamp. As a serial founder […]
When the Player-Coach is Just That. And No More.
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about not screwing up that VP of Sales hire. Done right, it will accelerate your company to the next level. Done wrong — you can lose the better part of a year, and half of your last round of capital. And we’ve talked a lot about the trade-offs in […]
When To Open Your First Int’l Office? Maybe When You Have $1.5m in ARR There.
We’ve had a lot of discussions on SaaStr and at SaaStr events on founders from outside the U.S. and the Bay Area coming here. We haven’t done enough on the opposite. When to go there. When to open your first international offices. We will do a couple of posts here from guest authors soon. But let […]
5-6 Years Is About As Fast As You Can Mint a True VP of Sales
We’ve talked a lot about hiring a VP of Sales at SaaStr, and if you hire a stretch VP of Sales (as most of you will) … how much you can stretch. A related question is — just how quickly can you gain the requisite experience to be a true first time VP of Sales? […]
If You Want to Hit The ’16 Plan, You’d Better Be Making the Hires Now
Recurring revenue certainly has pros and cons. The biggest pro is it recurs 🙂 The real magic from a Wall Street perspective isn’t that Salesforce is “SaaS” and most of say Oracle isn’t … it’s that Salesforce’s revenue, with net negative churn, completely recurs every year. See, also, Adobe’s multiple as its still essentially desktop […]
