Inc - The One About the VP of Sales

Hey SaaStr Community,

There's just 05 days now til SaaStr Annual 2023 and the very last tickets are going fast!

It's also the most high-profile content and speakers we've ever had a single SaaStr Annual, including:

CEO Amplitude

CEO Monday

CEO Lattice

CEO JFrog

CEO Freshworks

CEO Workiva

CPO Adobe

CRO Gong

CMO Datadog

CMO Databricks

CRO OpenAI

CMO Harness

VPE Okta

COO Docebo

CMO Lightspeed Commerce

CEO Bitly

CRO Miro

SVP PagerDuty

CCO Asana

And 12,000 more!!

Don't miss 3 epic days of all things SaaS. You'll want to be front row & center to take notes from all these epic SaaS leaders. 

Get one of the final tickets before prices go up at midnight.

So there’s a situation I see happening with many (not most, but many) SaaS companies as they build out the first management team:

They hire a VP of Sales that doesn’t think much of the VP of Marketing.  And doesn’t work with them.

So they bypass marketing, do their own thing, rebuild some of that function themselves, and sort of just have … a ton of distance from marketing.

Does this always fail, when sales and marketing don’t really talk, and aren’t a team?  Not exactly.  Sometimes, the VP of Marketing really just isn’t very good, and a replacement comes in that works better with sales.  And the situation is fixed.  Sometimes.  And sometimes a VP of Sales just brute forces it on their own.

Just as often though, I see it as a sign the VP of Sales isn’t going to make it.

So what do I do?  I do two simple things:

• First when I interview VPs of Sales candidates, if there’s already a marketer in place, I asked the candidate what they think.  If they have no idea at all, and/or don’t want to meet the VP of Marketing before joining — that’s a flag.  A real flag.
• Second, when I interview VPs of Marketing candidates, I always ask how they like to work with the sales team.  If they don’t have a terrific answer — I say pass if you have a sales-led motion.  What you want to hear is how closely they work with sales, and how they enjoy it, some frictions aside.
• Third, when I attend a board meeting or team meeting and see a VP of Sales ignoring the VP of Marketing — it’s always a sign of a problem that has to be fixed.  You can’t ignore this.  The passive aggressiveness, the mocking of marketing, etc.  It’s a sign you don’t have a true GTM team.

Perhaps the simplest, most effective way to get in front of 100,000+ SaaS and Cloud professionals is to sponsor one or more of the SaaStr digital assets.  Our SaaStr Annual and Europa events are amazing ways to get in front of 1,000s of execs IRL, but they also are a fair amount of work to sponosr and only take place twice a year;)

So year-round, the #1 best way to reach Cloud and SaaS leaders are SaaStr digital assets. The three core ways to reach our base.

The #1 Podcast in SaaS!  

The SaaStr Podcast is closing in on 700 (!) episodes and features an incredible mix of CEOs, founders, VCs and more.  The podcast reaches over 100,000+ and a 3+ month run of ads will get you mass exposure.   You have a captive audience by advertising on the pod.  I would take this in a heartbeat.

The SaaStr Daily and Weekly

Our Daily and Weekly newsletters have been running for years and reach 120,000 high-quality SaaS and Cloud execs.  If you have a direct CTA to promote, these assets are great.  The Daily goes out to 80,000+ three times a week, and the Weekly goes to 100,000+ 4 times a month. The Daily is great if you want to maximize exposure over 90 days, the Weekly is great if you want to hit the most folks all at once with the highest open rates.

VCs don’t spend most of their time working on new deals.

They spend most of their time on existing investments.

Imagine you are a VC on 9 boards of directors:

• Board meetings alone can take 20% or more of your time. Each board meeting takes a half day including travel, prep, etc. 9 boards x 8 meetings a year x 0.5 days = 36 business days right there. Many seasoned VCs can be on as many as 20 boards.  At that point, it becomes the majority of your time.
• Monday partner meetings can take 20% of your time right there. Most of Mondays are dedicated to portfolio review, and pitches from other companies that aren’t even yours. It takes a lot of discussion and time to run a partnership with > 2 or 3 partners. A lot of time.
• Fundraising can take a lot of time, although not all the time. But if you aren’t a Top Fund, you can spend a huge amount of your time raising the next fund.
• Dealing with your Dogs can take 10% of your time (and 20%+ of your energy and mental bandwidth) right there. The ones slowly going down the drain, doing drama-filled acqui-hires, that can’t pull off the next round, with quitting founders and failing CEOs — they take so, so, so much time. And so many high drama calls and meetings. And if you have a ton of money into a Dog, it can be a career-ending drama for a GP.
• Working with CEOs, recruiting for your existing investments, speaking, events, etc. can easily take another 20% of your time. Just doing VP interviews alone takes a lot of time if you do a lot of them.

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

Webinars are a lot of work, and repurposing that content takes hours, and no one seems to want to own it. Using gen AI, Hubilo Webinar+ with it’s new Snacakble Content Hub can create 40+ assets in minutes, including video snippets and video shorts, blogs, social posts, and even ebooks. 

G2 is a unicorn startup that’s stayed in the game for over a decade. G2 CEO Godard Abel deep dives into his original vision for G2, going multi-product, selling with multiple sales teams, demand gen spend, and why AI is the most important thing right now. 

Keep reading to learn how this $1B+ valuation SaaS company stuck it out through a long, slow slog in the beginning and has become the largest software marketplace today. 

With SaaStr Annual 2023 now just a week away, we’re getting a lot of questions from sponsors wanting to know how to get the best ROI from their sponsorship package. So we reached out to a few of our returning sponsors who absolutely crushed it at the 2015-2022 Annuals to learn what worked for them. Give their advice a shot and watch your pipeline grow!

1. Understand upfront how you’ll measure the success of your sponsorship. Will it be scans at the booth? Number of meetings set with prospects? Dinners or events held outside of the venue? Once you have a shared vision for the metrics that matter most, you can rally the team and build your event plan accordingly. 

2. If you’re taking your team with you, do a daily morning meeting. Have the team go around and each state their biggest highlight from the week before and what they plan to accomplish today. Prepare a 2 minute rallying cry message to get the team on point for the rest of the day. Intentional is always better than winging it. 

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

Win customers by creating compelling offers with flexible pricing, billing, and bundling options with end-to-end automation. Learn more at the SAP booth in the Sponsor Hall, Hanger West! 

So I was on a group Zoom with a number of CROs and VPs of Sales the other day and a consistent theme came up:  everyone was surprised how high OTEs (On Target Earnings) had held up in the current environment.

Why?

Well, one would think OTEs would have to come down as every SaaS leader has gotten much more efficient over the past 12+ months, as growth venture capital has dried up, and in some cases, as times have gotten a bit tougher.

But OTEs really haven’t come down much.  In fact, in some cases, base salaries have gone up as a reaction to market conditions. 

What has come way down is attainment.

You can see this in third party data, in RepVue and other places, but some of the root cause is less well understood. Some of the root cause is in fact … the need to still market “High OTEs” to attract talent.

As we gear up for 2023 SaaStr Annual on Sep 6-8 in SF Bay, I’ve found myself re-watching this great session with David Sacks from 2021 on the SaaS org chart.  Some of it assumes a bit more aggressive spend than is practical in 2023, but the overall lessons on who to hire, when; who to promote, and when; and how and why things get less efficient over time are just terrific.

David and I will be back together at 2023 Annual talking about “SaaStr in 2024”.  See you there!  And dig back in on this classic.

Nathan Latka of Founderpath is hosting a new bootstrapper workshop track at SaaStr Annual 2023 in our Executive Briefing Center.  Anyone with a full pass can sign up through the Braindate app (the sessions are tagged as workshops / Super Braindates).  Nathan is also giving out some tickets to his base as well.

Next Week: 13 Bootstrappers On Stage, 9 Revenue Graphs, 18 SaaS Templates, 2 Book Signings

” We’re putting our money where our mouth is. We believe bootstrappers should be celebrated (and so does SaaStr!) Here’s our stage lineup for SaaStr Annual (come to meet all of them in person):

• TimeDoctor CEO: How I scaled TimeDoctor to $10m Revenue, 100% remote in 46 countries, and fully async
• BackBlaze CEO: How we bootstrapped to $80m Revenue, 500k Customers, and the slide deck we used to IPO in 2021
• NetCore CEO: How I Bootstrapped To $100m Revenue Using Proficorn Secrets
• YouCanBookMe CEO: Hitting $5m ARR Was Not Easy: 3 Things that Failed and 3 Things we Nailed
• Mogli CEO: How Mogli used Profit Units to Incentivize Employees, Retain Talent, & Generate $7M ARR
• Living Security CEO: We Grew To 200+ Enterprise Customers & Not Burning (despite $20m raise)

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