The First Week of a Great VP of Sales. And The First Month of a Mediocre One.
Great VP of Sales, first week: – brings 2-4 great sales execs in ASAP. often week 1– identifies top existing talent, does what it takes to keep them– begins to move out underperformers– jumps into all critical deals Mediocre VP of Sales, first...
We Run 21 AI Agents and They’ve Closed Millions. But There Still Isn’t a Good AI Account Executive. Yet
We run 21 AI agents in production at SaaStr. They have closed millions in revenue. They book meetings on Saturday nights, resurrect leads nobody had touched in six months, run the invoice and the collections follow-up, and write to Salesforce all day without asking...
Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in B2B
"How do you kill your competition? You have to think about this if you really want to win. At Elevenlabs, we did a grants program, 10,000+. Then we upsold them — later. And it helped crush the competition." with @samdblond https://t.co/ktEXlxMQJV...
Dear SaaStr: When Should a Startup Hire its First Sales Person, and What Should Their Profile Look Like?
Dear SaaStr: When Should a Startup Hire its First Sales Person, and What Should Their Profile Look Like? We’ve talked a lot about this on SaaStr, let me summarize my top learnings from 15+ years Try to close at least 10–20 customers yourself first, before you hire a...
Harvey Puts a Former Practicing Lawyer in Every Deployment. About 180 of Them. Here’s How That Model Works
Everybody in B2B AI is rediscovering forward deployed engineers right now. Palantir ran the model for two decades, OpenAI built a team, and everyone has figured out agents don’t deploy themselves effectively. Not well at least, not yet at least. Harvey runs two...
SaaStr AI App of the Week: Sumble. The Kaggle Founders Rebuilt Sales Intelligence Around Context, Not Contacts
by Jason Lemkin | AI App of Week, Blog Posts The Next Generation App To Learn What’s Really Happening In Your Target Accounts Sumble is a knowledge graph of what’s actually happening inside your target accounts. Not “does this company use...
Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles?
Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? To overgeneralize, but to give you a pretty rough sense: Sales cycles are very much impacted by the intent of the prospect. Intent varies from High Probability / Intent Opportunities (“I Need to...
Is the Era of the Sales-Guy CEO … Over in B2B?
Frank Slootman is the only CEO in history to take three enterprise software companies public. Data Domain, then ServiceNow, then Snowflake. At their peaks those three were worth more than $200 billion combined. He took ServiceNow from roughly $100M in revenue through...
Of Course Your Competitor Is Trying to Sell To, And Steal, Your Customers and Prospects
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Know if My Competitor is Cold Calling My Customers? Just assume your competitor is cold calling all your existing customers.  They should be. Be most worried if they are doing it well. They should be calling your customers. Yes, oftentimes the...
Dear SaaStr: What Are The Benefits and Drawbacks of Having co-CEOs?
Dear SaaStr: What are the benefits and drawbacks of having co-CEOs? Like many things, my thinking on this has evolved over time. I used to think having co-CEOs was almost always plainly a bad idea. And clearly, it’s still quite rare. But now I think maybe it’s...
One Thing Miro + Airtable Show: Getting Cash Flow Positive Isn’t Magical
Bending Spoons just announced a definitive agreement to acquire Miro at a $1.355 billion enterprise value. Five weeks ago it announced Airtable at $1.285 billion, and that one just closed. Two of the better-known B2B brands of the last decade, sold to the same...
Before You Start as a VP — Please, Please, Please. Do a 60-Day Plan. And Make Sure the CEO Agrees With It.
I’ve now worked with or invested in ~30 successful start-ups beyond my own companies and I’ve watched a lot of VP / CXO-level hire train wrecks. Probably the most common is “the wrong VP of Sales / CRO”. We’ve talked about that for 6+...
20VC x SaaStr: Jensen Declares AGI, $170M of Secondary Before the Series C, and Why Index Walked Away From Town
This week with Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll and Jason Lemkin: rule-breaking as a product feature, the legal AI ceiling, agents that route around their own guardrails, and Anthropic walking from a multi-billion dollar deal after diligence. #1. Instinct and...
5 Interesting Learnings from Snowflake at $6 Billion in Revenue: 37% Growth and Accelerating, 126% NRR, and a Gross Margin Guided Down to Pay for AI
Snowflake reported its fiscal Q2 2027 on September 2. And it crushed it: Product revenue was $1.49 billion, up 37% year over year, the third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. The stock closed at $306 before the print and traded around $370 the next morning,...
Founder SaaStr
Related Posts
