SaaStr 175: Lemkin's Lesson on How To Approach Long Sales Cycles, When Is The Right Time For A Founder To Take A Step Back From Selling & How To Deal With Being Cloned with Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS event with over 20,000 of the world’s best SaaS founders and investors attending every year. Jason also invests from SaaStr’s debut $70m fund and has made prior investments in the likes of Algolia, TalkDesk, MixMax, Rainforest QA and many more incredible companies.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How does Jason think founders should approach long sales cycles in the early days? Why does Jason believe that ultimately long sales cycles do not matter? What can the truly great VPs do to impact those long sales cycles?
• How does Jason think founders can tackle lead optimisation with their team? How can founders determine which leads to send to which AEs? What will the effect of this tailored lead distribution be?
• When is the right time for the founder to begin to take a step back from sales? Why does Jason believe that the founder must always be involved in the sales process? How does this look at scale when selling to thousands of customers? How does this mean the founder works with the growing scaling team over time?
• Why does Jason believe that SaaS companies have to raise so much money today? What is the core decision that founders must make when determining how much they need to raise? How should founders approach the topic of cloning? What are the 3 core advantages they have over their clones? What must they be mindful of when being cloned by incumbents?  

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr