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 […]
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 […]
“How We Increased Sales Nearly 100% In One Quarter”
I grabbed this post from Brendon Cassidy, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, and Talkdesk, because I thought it had a great checklist for all of us to take a look at. Brendon wrote this post about his learnings about how he doubled sales once again in one quarter (the story of how he did […]
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 […]
How To (Successfully) Hire Your First 2 Sales Reps
We’ve talking 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. But how do you get those first few reps […]
The Beauty and ROI in The Zero-Voluntary Attrition Sales Team
There’s a common thinking that sales teams should be relatively high churn. That the bottom 15-20% of the sales team almost has to churn each year, because it’s survival of the fittest. Reps have to fight for the best leads, prove the highest close rates, exceed the mean of the bell curve, to not just […]
The Top 10 Mistakes Made in Hiring Your First Sales Team
I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting the question again and again, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List on mistakes made in hiring your first sales team. Because it seems like so many of us just make these mistakes again, […]
How to Ensure Your First 2 Sales Reps Actually Work Out
A long-time reader, first time caller recently wrote in to ask a question that pretty much everyone asks some variant of: If you had to force rank these items in terms of what we should primarily be looking for in these first sales reps, how would you rank them? – has sold SaaS before (as […]
You’ll Know in One Sales Cycle If Your VP Sales Won’t Work Out: Four Case Studies.
Just about a year ago, we did a post that proved, at the time, to be somewhat controversial. That in Just 30 Days, or at least, just one full sales cycle — you’ll know if your VP Sales isn’t going to work out. This isn’t intuitive, and is something I had to learn the hard way. […]
