The Best Sales Execs Are Great at The Interview Process, Too
If a sales exec makes it anything but effortless to schedule a job interview with them, Basically it won't work out — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) February 13, 2024 So I remember years ago I went to hire my first VP — ever. To make it even...Dear SaaStr: What Would Be The Single Most Important Advice You Would Give Other Entrepreneurs?
Dear SaaStr: What Would Be The Single Most Important Advice You Would Give Other Entrepreneurs? Quit today if you don’t want it bad enough. But … never quit if you truly do. … Now, by “quit” I don’t literally mean leave the keys on your...What Venture Capitalists Look For in Leaders: Tips from a Founder-Turned VC with Ridge Ventures
As a founder, you may wonder what VCs are looking for these days. Akriti Dokania, Partner at Ridge Ventures shares traits they look for in founders.
How to Double Your Magic Number and Increase Your Go-to-Market Efficiency with Sapphire Ventures
Rajeev Dham and Karan Singh, Partners at Sapphire Ventures, and Jane Lee, Vice President at Sapphire walk us through how to double your “Magic Number,” a shorthand for your SaaS sales and marketing efficiency. In recent years, the average Magic Number and benchmark for go-to-market efficiency has dropped from .7x to just .3x. How has the happened? And what can founders and revenue leaders do to turn around their budgets for efficient growth?
Dear SaaStr: What Is The Average Time it Takes a VC to Make an Investment Decision?
Dear SaaStr: What Is The Average Time it Takes a VC to Make an Investment Decision? For hot seed and even Series A investments? 20 minutes into the first face-to-face meeting. The average VC basically makes the initial decision to tentatively invest very quickly —...Dear SaaStr: What Kind of Background Checks Do VCs Do on Entrepreneurs They Fund?
Dear SaaStr: What Kind of Background Checks Do VCs Do on Entrepreneurs They Fund? It varies. Everyone does some background checks, or least they did outside of the Boom Times of late 2020 through late 2021. And some do very in-depth ones with lots of “off sheet”...You Don’t Do Nearly Enough to Help With Customer Migration. But It’s Magic If You Do.
When you ask customers to switch from an existing vendor to you … Do you offer to do ALL the work? The migration?The implementation?The integrations?The data mapping? If not, imagine all the friction you could remove if you did — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱...The Advice That Stings is The Advice You Want to Hear
The advice that stings is the advice you need to hear. Many folks are saying everyone from our kids to our SVPs and CEOs can’t take criticism anymore. It does seem to be more true, in my experience. VCs are reluctant to be critical of founders, even as they run out of...SaaStr Fund: Looking to Fund 2 More Great SaaS Companies in 2024
So I’ve been investing since 2013. Some of my top investments at seed stage include Pipedrive, Salesloft, Talkdesk, Algolia, Gorgias, Greenhouse, RevenueCat, Owner, Treasury Prime and more: The goal for SaaStr Fund is to invest in 2-4 of the very top seed / late seed...Mastering Partner Marketing: What NOT to Do and How to Excel with Drata CMO Sydney Sloan
Welcome to the latest installment of our “What’s New” series where SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin sits down with some of the top leaders and founders in SaaS and Cloud to discuss What’s New and what should be top of mind for fellow founders. In the new episode, Jason sits down with Drata CMO Sydney Sloan to talk about what’s new at Drata, the role of CMO at Drata vs. Salesloft, partner marketing, customer marketing, and more.
Yes, It Can Take More Than a Year to Close a Big Customer
Dear SaaStr: Did it ever take you a year to close a sale? Absolutely. This is pretty common in the enterprise. It took me about 18 months to close Google, for example. And that was just for the initial group of users: Need identification and discussions with...High-Velocity Techniques to Maximize Sales with Gusto’s CRO and Head of Go-to-Market
Tolithia (Gusto’s CRO and Head of Go-To-Market Ops, or GTM Ops) and Jamie (Gusto’s Principal, GTM Strategy & Operations) about their high-velocity techniques for maximizing sales. They first discuss their aim of helping other professionals grow their businesses, the importance of proper territory management, especially in high-velocity, high-scale operations, and the difficulties of geographic territories. Following that, they discuss dynamic territory management, the problems of static sales books, and how industry does not necessarily dictate business models. They also touch upon tools and strategies they implemented at Gusto, such as the Next Best Action tool and dynamic books, to decide which leads to work and how. At the end of the discussion, they answer several questions from the audience.
Dear SaaStr: What Should Happen When a Co-founder Wants to Quit?
Dear SaaStr: What Should Happen When a Co-founder Wants to Quit? This is one of the toughest situations to be in. First, figure out if it’s just anxiety. Starting something is hard. Getting to the first $1m in ARR is borderline impossible. If it’s “just” anxiety, and...Customer Success In The Era Of Efficiency: A Deep Dive With HubSpot, ChurnZero and SaaStr
Today we’re focusing on actionable insights you can use to drive down churn with customer success in today’s new era of SaaS efficiency. You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.