Dear SaaStr: At What Point Should Founders Pay Themselves a Market Salary?
Dear SaaStr: At What Point Should Founders Pay Themselves a Market Salary? The right answer is: just as soon as the company can afford it. Taking a market salary when cash is very tight is, at best, penny-wise and pound foolish. If you own 20%-30%–50% of a company,...
Dear SaaStr: How Much Equity Do You Give to Extremely Early Employees?
Dear SaaStr: How Much Equity Do You Give to Extremely Early Employees? It’s a tough one because they really do deserve a lot. You really want to give the early folks a ton. At least — the very best ones. But the pie only adds up to 100%. So my rough rule: Do 3x what...
16 Ways to Level Up in 2022 with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin (Pod 566 + Video)
At SaaStr Europa 2022, Jason shared the results of 16 SaaStr LinkedIn polls and discusses where he thinks SaaS companies are on track or need improvement.
There Are Never Enough Stock Options To Go Around
Dear SaaStr: What amount of share options is fair? Boy this is a tough question. Options are rarely worth as much as anyone expects, unless the start-up is worth $10b+. One big problem: the pie only adds up to 100%. That sounds silly, but it isn’t. You literally...
BowtiedCocoon: Top SaaS SMB AEs have $125k OTEs. But The Best Ones Make $261k.
Ok, I have to admit, I don’t know BowtiedCocoon on Twitter but the research from LinkedIn they put together looks really solid and consistent with all my data. And it’s super helpful. Per LinkedIn data, SMB AEs at some of the top SaaS and B2B companies...
Dear SaaStr: How Many Deals Can a Sales Rep Close Per Month?
Dear SaaStr: How Many Deals Can a Sales Rep Close Per Month? A successful but not top 5% sales rep in SaaS typically can close: 20–50 deals a month if $0.5k-$2k ACV, i.e., very transactional 1–2 call close. Usually all inbound. 10–15 deals a month if $5k-$25k ACV...
How to Build a High-Performing and Data-Driven Inside Sales team at Scale with WalkMe’s VP of Sales, Aliisa Rosenthal (Video)
Aliisa Rosenthal, VP of Sales at WalkMe, shares her insights on developing a powerhouse inside sales team at scale to succeed in today’s customer-driven marketplace.
What Incentives … Actually Incent Employees to Stay?
Dear SaaStr: What incentives work well to attract new employees to a company, and what ultimately makes them want to stay? The tough part is that things that incent folks to join … don’t really incent them to stay. Not really, at least not in my experience. Things...
Money
After almost 60,000,000 views on Quora, the top #2, #4, #14, and #17 answers are all about how much money CEOs and founders make. And not just “exit” money but salary. Salary is a means to an end for great founders, nothing more. Money matters of course....
How Much Should the CEO Pay Themselves?
There’s a lot of stuff written on how much to pay yourself as CEO. Christoph Janz has a great spreadsheet of quantitative thoughts here. Having thought a bunch about it, I think I can distill it down to 3 general guidelines: In the very early days, the CEO...
In The Early Days, Don’t Forget To Pay Yourself, Too
When I co-founded my first company, way back in the dark stretch between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, we got a terrible deal, from a dilution and valuation perspective. Yes, we raised $9m to get the company off the ground, but we had to sell just about everything to pull it...
Don’t Forget to Pay People Right – Or at Least as Much as You Can
Your very, very best people are even better than you think they Dig in and you’ll see they are doing even more great things than you realize * Let them run* Help them hire* Let them make the mistake* Wait to top them* Thank them* Pay them — Jason ✨Be Kind✨...
How to Calculate How Many Deals a Sales Rep Has to Close Per Month. And Their Quota.
Q: What’s a healthy number of deals an Account Executive for a B2B SaaS company be working? How many is too many? Deal size is $4k/yr and sales cycle ~25 days. You can back into it. First, what’s the On Target Earnings (OTE = base + bonus) for the rep? Let’s assume...
Your #1 Sales Rep Should Be Driving a Tesla Plaid By Month 12. (And Not Buying a Panerai Watch) — Updated
I want to spend a few posts and some time on sales comp plans for early-ish stage SaaS companies (up to say $20m in ARR). Because most of the sales comp plans you are going to read about and learn about are great — for SaaS companies that are well...
Digital Content Director, SaaStr
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