Don’t Ever Make Anyone “Head of Sales / Marketing / Engineering / Whatever” in SaaS
A few months ago, I gave a great SaaS Founder CEO a Gift. A real gift. This founder CEO was at about $1m in ARR, doing well, but with only a smidge of angel funding and limited resources. And I gave him an insanely great VP of Sales candidate. An amazing fit for his company, […]
Everything is Sort of the Same at a Given ACV (Annual Contract Value)
As you try to hire up for your SaaS company, you’re going to faced with a lot of choices and trade-offs. No hire is the perfect package. Do you take a risk on someone a little more junior than you’d like? Someone from a company a little larger than you’d like? Someone from a very […]
If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to make that critical hire: the VP Sales. I’ve done it right, and I’ve done it wrong. When it’s good … it’s just so good. It all clicks. But when you make a mis-hire, it’s about the worst mis-hire you can make. Because you’ll lose not just […]
Purple Squirrels
It is fashionable to talk about talent shortage in the silicon valley. People whine about how hard it is to find and hire the “right” candidates. What no one wants to talk about is how the hiring process is completely broken. I need to fill headcount: This is a line that you hear a lot […]
Should Your VP Sales Start Off as a Player-Coach?
The moment comes when it’s time to hire your first VP Sales. We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales, What a VP Sales Really Does, and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. So then that time comes. Probably, unless you have a ton […]
By The Time You Give Them a Raise, They’re Already Out The Door
There’s an endless amount written on the ‘net about hiring Rockstars. Finding them, not settling, and all that. That you need to spend 20%+ of time recruiting (I said that myself here). That the #1 most important thing you can do is put together a great team. Which is absolutely true. But the #2 most […]
Why Hiring From Your Direct Competitors Usually Doesn’t Work Out
The time will come when you are first tempted to hire someone from your competitor. They must know so many things we don’t. Have so many skills. It’s pretty tempting. People will tell you about the risks in litigation, trade secrets, etc. I don’t think any of those are necessarily a big deal or a […]
What a Great VP Sales Actually Does. Where The Magic Is. And When to Hire One.
In SaaS, #1 most common mishire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. In fact, there a VC saying that I used to really hate. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” […]
Post-Traction, You Need to Spend 20% of Your Time Recruiting
Love him or hate him, Nick Saban is the most successful college football coach of the current generation. Winner of 3 out of 4 of the last national championships. And how often is he recruiting? Every. Single. Day. In fact, every single day he and his team go into their Recruiting War Room, and analyze […]
Do You Scale? It’s Harder in SaaS.
Generally speaking, I think scaling product in SaaS is about 10x easier than consumer internet. Not easy mind you, but 10x easier. Why? Even Salesforce.com only has a tiny fraction of the concurrent sessions of Twitter, let alone Facebook. Your SaaS apps? It will likely barely tax a couple of instances at AWS. I […]
Resumes Are Worthless
Ok, so a question came up recently about hiring people for software development roles. In answering that, the group discussing this started talking about resumes. Resumes, which I’m told mine looks good and reads well, hold a certain value to someone entering the field of software development. There are also major problems with having a […]
Why BranchOut is a Better Recruiting Solution than LinkedIn (Hint: It’s Social)
“68 percent of people who understand HTML prefer nonfiction, compared with 48 percent of people in general.” Based on a survey of 44 people who know HTML and 116 people in general. – from Correlated.org Correlated.org is a new site that helps discover unexpected correlations between seemingly unrelated things. It’s fascinating how they develop the […]
Social Recruiting – 3 Questions Answered
One of the pressing questions surrounding social media these days is it’s applicability to recruiting and other people management processes within an organization. Specifically, there is an ethics debate around how much of the Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter data are employers allowed to discover, request and use in the hiring process. Today I see organizations […]
How to handle being fired
The recession still blazes on, and people are still losing their jobs right and left. A friend of mine was recently fired and as we sat drinking coffee in our other office, the question was “how do I handle this?” Handling being fired is not easy, it is not meant to be easy; it is […]
Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude Over Aptitude)
Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters. Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation. Your ability to keep […]
