The path to Cheif Revenue Officer (CRO) is different for many people. Tracy Young, CEO and co-founder at TigerEye, sits down with three CROs to talk about how they navigated the journey to revenue leader. Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl, Laurabeth Harvey, President of Field Operations at Lattice, and Erica Anderson, Notion’s CRO, all share the key decisions or events that shaped their careers.
At SaaStr Miami, former Founder’s Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions.
Dear SaaStr: Should I Hire a Sales Rep First, Or a Sales Manager First? The ideal flow is: You (founder-CEO) close the first batch of customers, say the first 10 or 20. If you don’t, you’ll never really know how it’s done. Or be able to help anyone else, really. Then,...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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 🇮🇱...
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.
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....
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 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 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
A great sales team can get a prospect to: – Buy now vs. later (a big deal) – Buy from you vs. a competitor more often (huge) – Buy product that sort of meets their needs (good-ish) – Buy product they won’t actually use (not as good) A mediocre...
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.