Hiring

🔫 As you startup continues to scale, you will likely need help managing all of the different revenue generating operations in your company. But before you jump the gun and hire a Chief Revenue Officer, you should always ask yourself the questions, why do I need one now? There are alternatives to consider, such as creating an internal working group with the sole purpose of addressing revenue challenges by departments. Pulling internal talent from the Sales and Finance team and designating them as revenue operations can be a good first step to address the need, and give you a better sense of where you really need help.

🏋️ A good analogy for the difference between an account manager and a customer success manager (CSM) is the difference between a bartender and a personal trainer – the first are reactive while the second are proactive. See, the lifecycle of a CSM typically starts as a proactive, scrappy generalist who manages the support process, but that can quickly evolve into a “do everything” role, in which they handle all tasks from onboarding to technical support. One way to avoid this overload for your CSMs is to adopt the mentality that all employees are responsible for customer success and project progression. Adding new KPIs to your arsenal such as time to value (TTV) and setting a shorter time as a company-wide goal will build alignment. Then, you can look at the trends at TTV and your ticket volume to inform how and when to scale the team.

🍿 It took popup startup WisePops 5 arduous years to get to $1m ARR, which they impressively did as a side hustle and without an in-house development team. That encouraged founder Benjamin Cahen to make the leap of building their own dev team, ultimately propelling them to $2m ARR in just half the time. Of course it’s never as simple as just adding new faces to the team to grow revenue, as hiring for small bootstrapped startups is tough. They added 6 employees during that period and let 4 go – costly when you consider the effort it takes to hire. Hunting for experts who weren’t even on the market and inviting them to team sessions pre-hire was how they landed their best talent, as it gave candidates a real sense of the team and workplace dynamics.