Hey everyone -

We're quickly approaching our largest, and most ambitious SaaStr Annual yet -- and with less than 60 days to the biggest SaaS event of the year, we don't want you to miss out!

Be there September 6-7-8 in the heart of the Bay Area for 3 days of tactical content, hands-on workshops, mentorship sessions, speed networking, recruiting and epic evening events.

With 12,500+ of the best SaaS leaders, executives, revenue leaders and investors joining us this year, this will certainly be the biggest and best SaaStr Annual yet.

So a little while back we had a deep dive on just how much of a product expert your VP of Sales needs to be, and your sales team in general.

The bottom line is while views weren’t consistent, I can tell you VPs of Sales that don’t know the product close to cold … fail. 

They just plain fail in my experience.

I repeated the survey for CS, and found more what I’ve personally experienced — the CS team needs to know the product cold.  And yet, so many seasoned VPs of CS and Chief Customer Officers actually … don’t agree.

This is an important question to understand.

If you don’t understand it, it’s hard to understand how early-stage venture capital works.

If you are a start-up investor, in a perfect world, you would wait. As long as you could. To get more data, more information, more traction. To see if the team can really do it. If they can close just a few more customers. Just grow a little bit faster. Just ship a few more features, etc. You’d … wait.

And you’d even wait if that meant the price went up a tiny bit. As long as the price doesn’t go up too much, it’s still generally better to wait. And de-risk the investment.

So you only don’t wait if you are sort of forced to act now:

• You are worried the opportunity will pass you by. If someone else is going to do the deal, you may need to invest now. If you really want to do it. There are 1000+ seed VC firms.

• You are worried it will get too expensive. Every fund and firm has a sweet spot. If the deal gets too expensive, it may pass you by just for that reason. Many funds have structural limitations on valuations.

• You are worried you can’t get enough ownership unless you invest now. Professional investors have % ownership targets. Those are easier to achieve if fewer folks are in the deal. The earlier you invest, the easier it is to get your target ownership.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by SAP

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Many people at this year’s SaaStr Europa wondered about the future of customer success, motivation during hard times, and how to grow in this new era of efficiency. 

SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin sat down with the audience for an Ask Me Anything session to answer some of the most pressing questions from the audience. 

His answers didn’t disappoint.

We’re almost there!!  2023 SaaStr Annual is coming up on Sep 6-8 in the SF Bay Area, once again on our 40+ acre campus at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds.

We’ll have 12,000+ of the best in SaaS and Cloud all coming together to share, scale, and learn.  And our sponsors are a key part of it! 

We’ll have over 100 of the leaders in SaaS as sponsors, from Salesforce to Expensify, from Google Cloud to G2, and so much more!

Need leads?  Want pipeline influence? Want to get your brand out in front of 12,000+ of the best of the best in SaaS?

If you want to join us, let us know here ASAP!

We were lucky enough to do a deep dive with the co-founders of Monday.com, Eran Zinman and Roy Mann.

It was great and will be released soon on their podcast and ours.

But ahead of that, I wanted to write up my top learnings while they were top of mind.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Vanta

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A strong sales leader is vital to any company hoping to scale. With this in mind, hiring for the Head of Sales role is one of the most important things a business can do.

Unfortunately, too many companies focus on the wrong things when hiring their sales leaders, which can lead to hires that aren’t the best fit for the business.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid common hiring mistakes. Greenhouse Head of Sales EMEA Renu Jhugaroo and Growth by Design Founder Jill Macri share the crucial steps to hiring sales leaders with confidence.

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