Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales @ Cloudera: Targeting the Big Guys: Account Based Sales Development (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. Account-based sales development is the hot new thing with promises of finding targeted leads and pushing your sales performance to levels to dramatically greater heights. That all sounds fabulous, but since we all […]
The Four Levers of SaaS
There are a lot of SaaS posts out there with some pretty fancy math in them. I’m a math guy, so I like to geek on SaaS metrics myself. But, in the heat of battle running a SaaS company, sometimes you just need to keep it simple. Here’s the picture I keep on my wall to […]
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 […]
Eventually. Everyone Has a Sales Team.
The lure of freemium (like The Force) is strong. No headaches. Customers try and buy all on their own. Like magic. And. No salespeople. Well, that can work. For a while. Maybe even forever, if you don’t want to build something really big. But to Go Big, almost everyone in SaaS at least eventually […]
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 […]
Have Even Half-Decent Connect Rates? Double Down on Outbound Sales Early On
We’re going through a quiet revolution in sales processes now, where a combination of specialization, technology, and a segmentation are making the next generation of SaaS founders far better at figuring out and scaling sales than I or my peers ever were. On of the things the best founders are figuring out earlier than ever is […]
Your Sales Efficiency Will Probably Plummet Toward $10m ARR. Plan For It.
When a great SaaS business starts to come together, and crosses Initial Traction ($1-$1.5m), growing nicely (8-10%+ Month-over-Month Growth) … often times, the founders start to see the first bit of real economic returns on the model. It finally starts to make sense, this SaaS stuff. As you cross $2.5m, $3m in ARR, you can […]
Book Review: From Impossible to Inevitable
This post reviews Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s new book, From Impossible to Inevitable, which is being launched at the SaaStr Conference this week. The book is a sequel of sorts to Ross’s first book, Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and which was loaded with great ideas about how to build out your sales machine. […]
How To Run a Sales Kickoff
Since we’re wrapping up what has been a simply amazing Host Analytics 2016 sales kickoff, I thought I’d share some of the rules I’ve developed, learned, appropriated, discovered, et cetera during my career. Rule 1: for salespeople, your signed compensation plan is your admission ticket to kickoff. This is incredibly important because comp plans define […]
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? […]
