![]() ![]() But vendor competition is part of SaaS 95% of the time. They came from companies with strong brands, where the real competition was budget - not another vendor. Most of our prior sales team had struggled with competition. But Pipeline as a metric to aspire to, died on Day 1. We discussed actual deals, that could close. Brendon ended endless charts and discussions of pipeline. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t close it. We just talked about growing MRR, each and every month. He ended pipeline as a metric - and any real credit for it.Instead, he focused on doubling and tripling the productivity of the best of what he had, and immediately bringing in talent that could sell at 2-3x the rate of our prior median. There was too much to do to try to do it himself as some sort of super rep. He didn’t even attempt to do it alone.Just by re-routing leads to closers from middlers (and getting rid of the middlers) … that alone had a huge impact. If you think about it, that was a huge waste, giving the subpar reps any precious leads. And he just plain stopped giving any leads to the reps that weren’t delivering. That probably tripled the productivity of those leads in process. In particular, he saw that our most junior SMB sales rep had incredible talent, and immediately promoted him. Brendon quickly sized up the pre-existing sales team we had when we started, and focused a ton of energy on the two with the best promise and results, respectively. He got the most out of the team he inherited, and quickly moved out the ones that weren’t working.Even without much of a deep knowledge of the domain. And so they closed any leads with a sales cycle of < 90 days at up to 3x the rate of most of the pre-Brendon reps. But they knew basic SaaS sales processes at our price points. So domain expertise had nothing to do with their success. Clearly, they didn’t know the product that well yet. Brendon immediately brought in 3 new reps, almost on Day 1, that knew how to close at our stage and our price point. He immediately - immediately - upgraded the team with proven closers.How did he do it? Well, there may be some trade secrets involved as well, but here’s what I observed: What happened was in 90 days, he doubled the revenue we got out of each lead that we had. ![]() The lead velocity stayed the same, lead gen was the same, virality was the same, etc. In the end, it all boiled down to one metric we’ve discussed briefly before: He Doubled Revenue Per Lead. Ok, so how the heck could Brendon double sales in 90 days? ![]() The pricing stayed exactly the same, as did the target customer and target deal size.The competition didn’t get any weaker.Whatever flaws and gaps it had on his first day, it still had on Day 90. There wasn’t time for them to make an impact in 90 days. He didn’t bring in any new prospects or customers that closed in 90 days.Well first let’s examine the things he didn’t do in Those First 90 Days and that couldn’t change, by definition: How the frack did he do this? What can we learn from it? In fact, he managed to double our sales in 90 days. He spent a little bit of time looking through our numbers and data. I said I knew that was a big ask, but that the math said it had to be done. But I also told him that to be direct, I’d built a financial model, and unless we could basically double our sales in 180 days, we’d never get big enough, eventually run out of money, and fail. ![]() I told him I had 100% confidence in him, that he would do an amazing job. I sat with Brendon, before he accepted the offer, and told him how I saw the job playing out. Leads had kept growing, but revenue growth had stagnated. One was how my First Real VP of Sales Doubled Our Net New Revenue in 90 days.īrendon Cassidy joined as our VP Sales at a tough time, as we’ve discussed before, as we were coming out of our Year of Hell. What was new was some of the anecdotes that came out of my talk. The content of the presentation will be familiar to most SaaStr readers, though I’ve embedded it above as well. One of the very first SaaStr presentations ever was How to Hire a Great VP Sales (And Not Screw It Up). Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ December 16, 2021 Never easy, but a great VPS just has to put up points their first quarterĮven if the sales cycle is longer, the great ones pull in deals already in flight, in the pipe ![]()
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