Q: How do you structure a sales team when you’ve got zero experience doing sales? Well, first go get some experience with sales. 🙂 At least, close the first 10 customers yourself. If you don’t, you’ll never have any idea how to do it. And the odds your first rep...
If you really want to diligence a VC, Talk to the CEO of a portfolio company not listed on their twitter — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 16, 2020 Q: What is the proper way to do due diligence on a VC firm? Here are the things, IMHO and IME, that are...
Q: As an entrepreneur starting out, is it better to overprice your product or underprice it? I remember years ago I was at an event with the CEO of a SaaS leader. And I asked him how he came up with their freemium pricing model. A data science team? A/B Testing?...
Q: How do you structure a sales team when you’ve got zero experience doing sales? Well, first go get some experience with sales. 🙂 At least, close the first 10 customers yourself. If you don’t, you’ll never have any idea how to do it. And the odds your first rep...
Q: How is low/mid-ticket sales different from enterprise sales? They are very, very different. If I had to boil down how to filter potential sales professionals based on just 1 controlling criterion, it would be deal size. Enterprise sales: Reps often hunt many of...
It’s been a fun experience being on Quora for … a decade 🙂 We’ve crossed 60,000,000 views of our answers there, so let’s take a look at the Top 50 most viewed SaaStr Answers on Quora in 2020: Why do many startup owners sell their firm and move...
Can an entrepreneur back out of a signed term sheet without damaging his/her reputation? I’m going to say Yes, probably. There is a lot of drama around broken term sheets. Mostly around VCs backing out, not founders. But here’s the thing — term sheet are term sheets....
Ben Braverman explains how Flexport entered a competitive market with a unique model and continues to grow. Hiring senior leaders can set companies up to fail and see how sticking with a current, successful model can be the key to hypergrowth. Rely on your success,...
Creating champions requires detailed focus on the journey. Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People explains how asking hard questions, embracing feedback and making personal connections with your customers can move the sales journey from prospect to champion. Want to see more...
Ep. 282: Michael Pryor, Co-Founder & CEO @ Trello, now Head of Trello Product with Atlassian following their recent acquisition. Kolton Andrus is the Founder & CEO @ Gremlin, the failure as a service startup finds...
We were recently asked: Q: Are there any examples of a unicorn startup that was bootstrapped? Of course the answer is yes. But I didn’t have a sense of how many, and how the data might look. So I fired up the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100, which isn’t all private...
What is the hardest rejection you’ve ever had in sales? The hardest rejection I’ve had in sales was around renewals. Especially ones I thought we really had earned. But still lost. In particular, in the early days of EchoSign / Adobe Sign, we had a particular...
Ep. 266: Janine Pelosi is the CMO @ Zoom, the next-generation enterprise phone system. Prior to their very successful IPO, Zoom raised funding from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures and...
What skills do you look for in an entry level sales person? If you are a founder hiring salespeople to manage yourself (i.e., you don’t have a VP of Sales or other sales leader yet) … your #1 criteria should be trust. Specifically, does your gut and time with him/her...
It can be harder than you might think. The further you are along in your career, the easier it is to have the time, networks and personal capital to be an investor. No question. And it can take a decade or more to make any real money from investing. It’s hard to have...