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

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

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. Subscribe.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales 293

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

Imagine a coverage model, from end to end, for the full customer life cycle: from demand generation to sales to post-sales. Sales Cycle. This includes everything from inside sales to account executives to strategic asset allocation. Post Sales. Hire those who have proven their value.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 273

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

So one caveat if you’re googling what your NRR should be – be sure to look at the data source as most NRR studies or reports are based on public company data, which provides great benchmarks, but it may not always be accessible for smaller and private companies. And so you can see the benefit of higher ASPs (average sale prices).

Customer Success 310

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Benchmarks 310

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

The four stages of growth are: Early stage Early growth Growth Pre-IPO Each of those stages has key GTM milestones, benchmarks, and team-building strategies that allow you to grow effectively. Because founder-led sales worked really well for most of the early stages, but you eventually start running out of juice around $15M ARR.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

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 339

Metrics Sales Hiring Benchmarks SaaS 339

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

This is where traditional SaaS methods like subscription pricing only, driving growth through headcount only, or a pure sales GTM strategy only live. PLG is about investing in product and data instead of sales and marketing. Notion Capital came up with a benchmark for the days when you’re below $20M ARR.

Business Model 300

Business Model SaaS Payments Payments Headcount 300

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

We all become new customer-oriented, so we say we’re focused on the existing base, but once the sales team becomes 30-40% of headcount, it tends to dominate every conversation. All public companies did hiring freezes last year, which is a hidden layoff. They tap back into sales for upsells and cross-sells.

Customer Success 299

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 299

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 3, 2017

Every startup’s sales commission plan is different. But it’s key to understand the theory and the benchmark data that governs the creation of sales commission plans to create a good one for your business. Sales compensation is communicated in OTE, On Target Earnings. These three strategies are quite different.

Sales Recruiting 160

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Data Sales 160

OpenView Labs

MARCH 8, 2021

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

Sales Hiring 80

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting B2B 80

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. Below is my list of the six most important benchmarks and observations from that report. Sales commission as % of ACV 9%.

Benchmarks 109

Benchmarks Startup Sales Hiring Compensation 109

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., In theory, any growth rate is possible with an unlimited budget to hire AEs.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Here’s how to drive early value effectively: In-product value Measure TTV : Set a quantifiable benchmark for how long it should take a new user to reach their first “aha moment.” GTM 120: Avoid the AI Sales Skills Atrophy Trap with Peter Kazanjy Pete Kazanjy is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor.

Scale 111

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 111

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

The admin, influential decision-makers, and consumer sales reps can be the same people in a Consumer or SMB setting. But the truth was, the campaign was performing above the benchmark, but it was a new area for them. But to operate this way, you need to re-envision how you look at hiring people and managing processes and technology.

Scale 246

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 246

Kellblog

MARCH 1, 2025

When people ask about cost/opportunity, they usually have one of two things in mind: An efficiency question — e.g., how efficiently does marketing spend convert into sales opportunities (oppties)? You might argue that’s a good overall marketing efficiency metric and try to benchmark it. There are more benchmark data sets.

Sales Hiring 72

Sales Hiring Benchmarks Metrics Startup 72

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2019

In addition, we believe that this data is representative, because if you look at the different kinds of buyers from the respondents, you see it spans everything from operations and marketing to sales and engineering, even down to legal. The first goal is to share with you benchmarks. Our second topic, benchmarks around retention.

Scale 252

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Payment Services 252

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Charts like this, from OpenView’s 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey , help us answer questions like that all the time. The company is not making much progress towards the benchmark. This situation is very common.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Benchmarks 139

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

SaaS companies, presumably having achieved product market fit, quickly hire large sales and marketing teams. Sales teams require a certain amount of time to learn the product, the sales pitch and build a book of business to eventually achieve quota. Again, I’ve omitted the outliers.

Startup 213

Startup Scale Sales Hiring Benchmarks 213

OPEXEngine

APRIL 3, 2020

HIRING FREEZES AT THE MAJORITY OF COMPANIES. Over half of the respondents said they have a hiring freeze in place or were planning one. of companies said they no hiring freeze or any reduction in hiring planned, again, as of the end of March. SALES QUOTA AND COMP POLL. BENCHMARK TO WIN.

Sales Hiring 72

Sales Hiring Benchmarks Compensation SaaS 72

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2013

One way of measuring the efficiency of a company’s revenue model is to benchmark revenue per employee. It’s also a composite metric that is negatively impacted by significant waves of hiring, sales team ramp time, product and company maturity in a market and many other factors.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Revenue Scale Sales Hiring 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 15, 2014

In the past, we have benchmarked the revenue per employee of large publicly traded SaaS companies and determined that the average is about $200k of revenue per person. In the chart above, Business Objects, a business intelligence company, sets the benchmark. But, that analysis examined revenue per employee that only one point in time.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Revenue Scale Metrics 100

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As part of our last three annual finance and operating benchmarks surveys, we’ve asked nearly 2,000 startup founders and leaders of B2B SaaS businesses this simple question: “What’s keeping you up at night?”. This data point isn’t like our typical benchmarks. Startup founders are seeing hiring become their day jobs .

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. My favorite joke when I meet a brilliant founder is to ask them if they know there’s an easier path to becoming an Account Executive than founding a company.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 124

Sales Hacker

MARCH 5, 2019

Last year, we started a new Sales Hacker tradition: the Top 50 Awards. Most other sales awards end up going to the most popular influencer. The Sales Hacker Top 50 is different. These awards go to practitioners: people who not only did a fantastic job, but also elevated the sales profession through their actions last year.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Leadership 110

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

Sales is the Growth Engine. Sales is the engine driving SaaS company value. Top and bottom line performance are totally dependent on the sales organization and its performance. And sales expense is typically the largest expense item on a growth SaaS company’s income statement. Typical SaaS Sales Metrics.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2022

With the 2022 Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report , we wanted to look deeper than individual metrics. While a short First Response Time is important, it should take into account what makes sense for the customer, the issue, the resources of the company, and the industry standard. Instead, we wanted to view trends in the industry.

Benchmarks 104

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Scale Strategy 104

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2018

At some companies, customer success managers create resources for thousands of self-serve customers, while at others they work with a select few. Sometimes they’re just account executives with a fancier title, or the two roles have simply been combined into one. Why onboarding is a part of sales.

Sales Hiring 123

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Underperforming Technical Team 123

Sales Hacker

JULY 28, 2021

After spending many quarters creating sales forecasts, you should have the process down and deliver precision accuracy. Unfortunately, sales forecasting is not that straightforward. Fortunately, sales forecasting tools are available that can do a lot of the heavy lifting by using algorithms to create more accurate forecasts.

Forecasting 131

Forecasting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 131

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 10, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. This is a good sign for the business, especially when considering the average account expansion pattern noted above.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Metrics SaaS 100

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2020

It can help you identify peak times for support requests and ticket creation which can guide your hiring and tech stack decisions to ensure you continue to meet customer demands. It can also guide your hiring process if increasing headcount is required to guarantee 24/7 coverage for customers. Customer satisfaction.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Metrics Technical Review Scale 211

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. The company operates in the Application Performance Management category, which New Relic calls Software Analytics.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Underperforming Technical Team Metrics Sales Hiring 100

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

In 2021 the ‘ Rule of 40’ died, according to our latest 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks report that launched last week. . To state the obvious: hiring has never been harder. Recommended resource: Read More Tips for Hiring Top Talent in Today’s Overheated Market . Today growth appears to be all that matters.

Payment Services 80

Payment Services Benchmarks SaaS Payments Merchant Services 80

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 20, 2016

Those figures can’t create empathy, develop the right culture, or hire the right people. We identify unusual companies, those with best in class sales efficiency or revenue growth. Management teams employ metrics to identify when a particular part of a company is performing in an unexpected way. Often, data is a filter. .

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Data Sales Hiring 100

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

APRIL 10, 2017

Sales enablement is a rapidly emerging, but immature function. Many companies are investing in the creation of sales enablement teams, but as they’re so new, there’s a distinct lack of thought leadership, standardised measurement and best practices available. Defining sales enablement How we define sales enablement matters.

Sales Enablement 112

Sales Enablement Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 112