Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2020

How do you benchmark a sales organization in a time like this? Using data across 10m telephone calls, Jim highlights how the coronavirus is changing sales team performance. Timeline risk, the likelihood a sale drags to a close, has doubled to about 2% of calls. In early March, 75% of sales conversations discussed net 30.

Benchmarks 331

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Sales Data 331

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2024

That ties to our overall rough sales cycle data here: Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? The findings arent much different from what weve discussed before at SaaStr, but still very helpful to see, given how much data they are pulling from: On average, $100k deals take about 70 days to close.

Scale 287

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 287

Clouded Judgement

JULY 16, 2024

There’s a lot of info to digest, so in the sections below I’ll try and pull out the relevant financial information and benchmark it against current cloud businesses. Over the lifetime of the customer relationship, we also incur sales and marketing costs related to upselling and expanding the number of users accessing our platform.

Benchmarks 295

Benchmarks Data Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 295

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

The report uses data from 5m sales and customer calls to benchmark sales team performance. For example, the typical win rate of a sales qualified lead is 19%. And the typical sales manager reviews only 8% of calls, but the best managers spend much more. There’s lots of great data in the report.

Benchmarks 234

Benchmarks Customer Success Sales Data 234

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2025

It’s live on SaaStr.com itself and you can also access it here and talk to AI Jason about any of 1000s and 1000s of B2B, sales, SaaS, VC, etc. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. Here are some of the top ones: “How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring AI Scale Compensation 259

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2020

How do you benchmark a sales organization in a time like this? Using data across 10m telephone calls, Jim highlights how the coronavirus is changing sales team performance. Timeline risk, the likelihood a sale drags to a close, has doubled to about 2% of calls. In early March, 75% of sales conversations discussed net 30.

Benchmarks 232

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Sales Data 232

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Large Audience: Considered the biggest SaaS conference with a large number of attendees from leading SaaS companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

Software 245

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 245

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 25, 2023

There’s a lot of info to digest, so in the sections below I’ll try and pull out the relevant financial information and benchmark it against current cloud businesses. ” Benchmark Data The data shown below depicts how the Klaviyo data compares to the operating metrics of current public SaaS businesses.

Benchmarks 246

Benchmarks Artificial Intelligence Data Software Review 246

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2023

Sales cycles shifted dramatically in 2023. Slower sales cycles create pipeline shocks & startups are feeling the impacts. The average startup saw a 24% increase in sales cycle from early 2022 to 2023. 60 day sales cycles are now 75 days. But the latency isn’t evenly distributed.

Startup 350

Startup SMB Headcount Sales 350

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2020

Sam Jacobs created the Revenue Collective , a group of more than 1700 sales professionals at some of the fastest-growing companies. With chapters across the US, Revenue Collective has broad reach within the sales community. Typically, sales leaders have reduced quota somewhere between 10-50%. You can download the survey here.

Sales Hiring 334

Sales Hiring Sales Forecasting Travel 334

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Benchmark Data and Performance Metrics SaaStr sessions typically feature transparent sharing of key metrics and benchmarks that are otherwise difficult to access.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Sales Efficiency. -. The first is sales efficiency. The company spent $47m in 2019 on sales and marketing, and $52m in 2020, an increase of $3m or 6%, while growing revenues 49%. The 2020 sales efficiency is 0.54. Assuming current trends hold, sales efficiency in 2021 should nudge up to about 0.57. Revenue, $M.

Metrics 294

Metrics Benchmarks PayPal Enterprise 294

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. The chart above shows the sales and marketing investment of publicly traded software companies at different revenue levels.

Investment 274

Investment Startup Marketing Sales 274

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JULY 1, 2020

A CRM vendor can see the ratio of opportunities per lead and the average length of the sales cycle. A vendor that hosts a solution for car dealers, for example, can see the average sales per month, the value of extras sold with each vehicle, and the average time a vehicle stays on the lot. That information is valuable.

Benchmarks 161

Benchmarks SaaS Cloud Metrics 161

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2019

sales efficiency, meaning one dollar of sales and marketing spend results in $1.80 Expect this business to fetch stellar multiples, most likely similar to Atlassian because the revenue, growth rates, sales efficiency and profitability metrics are comparable. In addition to reduced labor costs, Zoom benefits from a 1.8

Metrics 279

Metrics Benchmarks Scale Acquisition 279

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2024

All of these benchmarks are machine-generated : HumanEval & HumanEvalFIM are not human testers - but open-source projects that evaluate AI code. The generic tests probably won’t work, which translates to slower sales cycles as prospective buyers understand the system’s performance in their own context.

Sales 212

Sales Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Generative AI 212

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

The 4 Things Most Founders Get Wrong About Marketing: “We’re a product company, not a marketing company” – The hard truth is that 9 out of 10 B2B companies spend more on sales and marketing than R&D. Mix in the classic conflict between sales and marketing teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 205

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2020

It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities. We’ve endeavored to include as much data as possible to help companies benchmark themselves relative to others. The presentation is embedded below. Just pick a metric.

Headcount 364

Headcount Scale Benchmarks Retention 364

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2021

So how do you simplify and speed up your sales cycles? He started as the first sales hire at TripActions when the company was small and he helped scale the business to 5,000 customers, 1,200 employees and a $5 billion private valuation. Read on for Michael’s insightful advice for driving faster sales cycles. Sales Enablement.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales 296

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

Next, let’s compare the sales efficiency. Sales efficiency is a measure of the marginal gross profit generated by a dollar invested in sales and marketing. According to the recent Redpoint free trial survey, the 140% net retention puts the business in the top decile of businesses.

Metrics 222

Metrics Benchmarks Software Review Engineering 222

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2023

A CMO might come in saying they generated 1200 MQLs last quarter, yet sales feel like they’re starving. For example, if you ask your VP sales for their commit and they say “$4.3M How you really want your VP Sales to answer (and the answer you want to receive) should be the answer/number that you have a 90% confidence level in.

Metrics 340

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 340

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

How do you build a sales organization from scratch? What about moving from founder-led sales to building a sales team and scaling your revenue growth? Hitting $1M ARR is the benchmark to figure out if you have a product-market fit.” – Veronika Riederle, CEO @Demodesk. Build a predictable sales process.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Revenue Sales 246

FastSpring

APRIL 26, 2022

In part one, we cover benchmarks and common churn formulas. Part I: SaaS Churn Benchmarks Part II: 5 Proven Strategies for Reducing SaaS Churn Part III: Churn Definitions and Additional Resources. Part I: SaaS Churn Benchmarks. When we set churn benchmarks for SaaS companies, there’s so much to consider.

Benchmarks 147

Benchmarks Churn Payments SaaS Payments 147

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

We automated contact centers employing >100 human agents and now handle their incoming customer support and sales calls, end-to-end. Their performance benchmarks showing 10x query throughput compared to self-hosted options were eye-opening. All while maintaining 90% customer satisfaction score. The Numbers : Processing 1.2B

AI Search 177

AI Search AI Startup Scale 177

User Pilot

JULY 14, 2024

Sales-led companies have a higher user activation rate than product-led companies. That’s one of the questions about user activation rates that we explore in our Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024. Companies analyzed in the Product Metrics Benchmark Report by industry. Userpilot’s SaaS Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024.

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks Scale Onboarding Metrics 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

The “Rule of 40” is one of the most commonly cited valuation benchmarks in SaaS for both public and private companies. While SaaS is an amazingly transparent community with abundant benchmarking resources, there are much fewer publicly available studies that allow an analysis of the underlying drivers of “Rule of 40.”

SaaS 319

SaaS Technical Review Benchmarks Azure 319

FastSpring

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Q4 sales numbers usually outperform the rest of the year thanks to year-end holidays and their associated shopping cycles — but how much does that trend carry over into software and SaaS sales? And does it improve B2B sales too, or is it more just a B2C advantage? sales trends by month and quarter.

SaaS Payments 158

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Software Review Merchant Services 158

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2019

Recently, we’ve seen a series of product-driven companies building huge customer bases with tremendous account expansion and terrific sales efficiency. Here’s why: For every dollar of sales and marketing investment, DataDog generates $1.68 DataDog is no exception. An amazing feat to be growing fast at scale and profitable.

Metrics 189

Metrics Benchmarks Scale User Experience 189

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 11, 2023

These are three of the lessons that stood out to me espcially managing the transition from product to sales-led growth (PLG -> SLG). Second, the PLG -> SLG (sales-led growth) transition has two parts. But more important, the sales pitch must also change (in addition to the pricing/packaging). First, revenue is fuel.

Benchmarks 309

Benchmarks compliance Engineering Pricing 309

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2024

In this session, Notion’s CRO, Erica Anderson, and GitHub’s VP of Customer Success, Abbas Haider Ali, discuss how customer success teams can take a proactive approach to drive sales. They’ll explore strategies for using customer success not just as a support function but as a powerful engine for revenue growth.

Benchmarks 296

Benchmarks Finance Business Model Forecasting 296

User Pilot

JULY 21, 2024

Product-led ones than sales-led ones? These are the key questions we explore in the article based on our recent Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024 which investigates company performance in 6 different metrics across 7+ industries. Companies analyzed in the SaaS Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024 by industry. Book the demo!

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks Onboarding Healthcare Metrics 105

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2024

And look, average sales cycles are almost meaningless. A related post here: Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? So Vendr has their latest SaaS Buyer Report out here. There’s plenty of good data in there and it’s worth a read. One metric I wanted to highlight. Bigger deals take longer.

SaaS 304

SaaS Benchmarks B2B Metrics 304

User Pilot

JULY 14, 2024

That’s the average core feature activation rate across the companies we studied for our Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024. Companies by industry analyzed in our Product Metrics Benchmark Report 2024. Sales-led companies had higher core feature adoption rates than product-led ones (26.7% respectively). respectively).

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks Artificial Intelligence Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding 105

User Pilot

JUNE 11, 2024

That said, let’s explore the most critical product marketing metrics to track, along with the latest benchmarks in 2024: Check out the 2024 Benchmark Report. Let’s explore the most important metrics (you can check their benchmarks here ): User activation rate : Measures how effectively onboarding converts new users into active users.

Benchmarks 102

Benchmarks Product Marketing Metrics Marketing 102

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Rajeev Dham and Karan Singh, Partners at Sapphire Ventures, and Jane Lee, Vice President at Sapphire walk us through how to double your “Magic Number,” a shorthand for your sales and marketing efficiency. Magic Number is your growth in ARR over a quarter divided by the sales and marketing spend in the prior quarter. Let’s find out.

VP of Engineering 276

VP of Engineering Scale Marketing Benchmarks 276

User Pilot

JULY 21, 2024

According to our benchmark, the average month-1 retention rate in SaaS companies is 46.9%. Let’s explore our product metrics benchmark and learn: The definition of month-1 retention rate and why it matters. Check our product metrics benchmark report. CRM & Sales : 52.5% What is the month-1 retention rate? HR : 41.4%

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks Retention Healthcare Scale 105

User Pilot

JUNE 27, 2024

Learn more about industry benchmarks in our latest SaaS Product Metrics Report. Activation rate benchmarks for various industries in 2024 range from 54.8% User activation rate benchmarks in 2024. Here's what we've found: AI & Machine Learning: 54.8% (average activation rate) CRM & Sales: 42.6%

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks SaaS Social Media Onboarding 105