How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
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How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
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Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#2This looks really interesting ... but I'm not going to download some random PDF when you could just have easily put the information directly on the site.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#3I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#4> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of which a candidate is likely to ask you:
• How long is the sales cycle (from first conversation to closed contract) on average?
• What is the typical deal size (in terms of ARR)?
• How is your product priced?
• What are the steps of the sales process?
• How do you define success in this role?
• How are you getting new leads and generating conversations?
As a technical founder, these are exactly the questions I need to ask someone with sales experience!
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#5This looks really interesting ... but I'm not going to download some random PDF when you could just have easily put the information directly on the site.
exactly, but for some reason if you refresh the page the PDF is embedded.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#6I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Where in SaaS you might pay the first month or two as commission, in licensed software you generally pay 10-20% of the gross margin for the first year of the agreement. The mechanics of the sales process are very similar, the people involved are very similar. The difference is the approach to commission, typically, and the quota.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#7> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of which a candidate is likely to ask you: • How long is the sales cycle (from first conversation to closed contract) on average? • What is the typical deal size (in terms of ARR)? • How is your product priced? • What are the steps of the sales process? • How do you define success in this role? • How are you getting new leads and generating conv…
The challenge is that these are key fit questions. Hiring someone with experience doing high velocity one-call-close sales at $250/month is very different than hiring someone doing high touch field sales for deals that are $10k/month. You might as well be asking a DevOps person to write R for data analytics -- tooled totally differently. Those are the questions sales people have to understand, to understand if they are a fit, if their experience is relevant, etc. If they are experienced they can help define it, but it mostly all starts with pricing, how many calls you can afford to have before you are losing money on CAC and whether they have to do a lot of outbound grinding or not.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#8I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Are there actually startups selling “traditional” software? An actual serious question. The follow up would be: “why?” It seems like recurring subscriptions would have a much better LTV than selling one-time software. If updates and/or support is part of the product, then you’re essentially still selling SaaS even if it doesn’t seem pedantically correct.
Let’s say you are selling a $5000 piece of software and you update every 2 years. If you are counting on selling updates as part of your projected LTV, you are pretty much a subscription business, subject to the same churn considerations as a “normal” SaaS might be.
My point is that unless you are selling a one-time product with no paid updates or paid ongoing support, then SaaS strategies should work for you. Unless you happen to be selling something esoteric such as avionics or infrastructure software, it would seem most SaaS sales strategies would tend to be applicable.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#9I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Are there actually startups selling “traditional” software? An actual serious question. The follow up would be: “why?” It seems like recurring subscriptions would have a much better LTV than selling one-time software. If updates and/or support is part of the product, then you’re essentially still selling SaaS even if it doesn’t seem pedantically correct. Let’s say you are selling a $5000 piece of software and you upd…
To play devil's advocate - if you are not selling SaaS, then your infrastructure/uptime becomes much less crucial to the health of your business. A lot of the impetus for Devops seems to go out the window for a non-SaaS product.
Re: How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
#10a16z has an article I read and liked recently: https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-sales-why-what/
Content tagged with sales: https://a16z.com/tag/sales/