Four Simple Tips to Increase Pricing. Without Angering Your Customers.
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Increase Pricing Again Without Angering Customers? One simple thought: earn it. First, plan to increase pricing in general once a year, each year for new customers. But earn it. And generally for new customers, not existing customers. How...A Checklist: 10 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire a Sales Rep
So you’re hiring your first few sales reps in the early days? Before you have a great VP of Sales? It’s an interesting time. Leads are precious, everyone is a team. So you need a very certain type of sales rep. Let me give you a checklist of a few...My First Big Sales Deal. It Was For $6,000,000.
In my first start-up, I was mostly hunting whales — seven figure and eight figure deals. I had no experience doing any of this. For our First Big Customer, we’d been negotiating a $6m/year contract for quite some time (they always take time). We finally had the “all...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?
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 🇮🇱...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.
A Soft Miss vs. A Hard Miss in Sales (Updated)
I've never seen a great VP of Sales hide from a miss — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) August 26, 2023 We’re coming up on the quarter. We always are, really. Some of you are going to beat the plan! Most of you maybe, even. I hope. But not all....The #1 Hack To Making Sure a VP of Sales or Top AE Will Work Out
We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. That they are the right ones. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at...Dear SaaStr: How Often Will a Sales Engineer Also Wear a Customer Success Hat in an Early Stage of a SaaS Startup?
Dear SaaStr: How often will a sales engineer also wear a customer success hat in an early stage of an SaaS startup? Pretty darn common. The “traditional” role of a sales engineer is to support the sales team through the close of a deal. And as you scale, the role...How to Build Out Your SDR Function in 2024 with Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and Host of SaaStr CRO Confidential
How do you build out a Sales Development (SDR) function at your SaaS company? Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and host of SaaStr’s CRO Confidential shares his advice for building an SDR function in 2024 based on his experience as CRO at Brex.
We’ll cover everything from setup to efficiencies in setting up an SDR function, including:
*The benefits of SDR
*When to hire your first SDR
*Who to hire
*How to measure performance
*Scaling the team
*Trends in outbound
11 Things That Set The Best Sales Teams Apart From The Rest
The best sales teams seem to just do amazing things together. But hat differentiates them? They do tend to work at some of the best startups, so there is that. But it’s more than that. A few factors that contribute to high-performing sales teams: High quota...CRO Confidential: Bringing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth Together For Go-To-Market Success with Giancarlo Lionetti, CRO of Zapier
In this latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG.