SaaStr 050: Why All Founders Should Do Sales Until $1m ARR, When Is The Right Team To Hire Your VP of Sales & How To Approach The Hiring Process with Matthew Bellows, Founder @ Yesware

Matthew Bellows is the Founder @ Yesware and a specialist in helping sales people close more deals faster. Yesware serves more than 750,000 salespeople at companies like IBM, Groupon, Salesforce, Twilio, Yelp, VMWare, and Zendesk. Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the VP of Sales at Vivox. Before that, he was GM at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga) and Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks).

In Today’s Episode with Matthew We Discuss:

• How Matthew came to be Founder and CEO @ Yesware? What was the a-ha moment for him?
• Whether sales is an art or a science and what makes Matthew feel this way?
• Why all founders should do sales until $1m ARR? What were Matt’s personal learnings from scaling the sales team with Yesware?
• Why a CEO cannot also be a VP of Sales? When is the right time to hire an exec to run the sales team and begin sales specialisation?
• How Matthew approaches the hiring process? What is the best way to receive high quality candidates? What does his interview process look like?
• With the array of data on sales activity how can managers balance management with micro-management? What are the inherent problems?

60 Second SaaStr:

1. If Matthew could do the process again, what would he redo?
2. How does Matthew deal with rejection in business and sales?
3. Strategies to optimise email open rates?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Matthew Bellows