SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

The SMB sales team was incentivized purely on logo acquisition rather than revenue. Improving Rev Ops for Data-Driven Decision Making One of Lindsey’s first priorities was diving deep into the company’s existing data to identify trends and leverage these findings for growth.

Revenue 300

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 300

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

SaaStr 527: Acquiring 10,000 SMB Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre. The 4 V’s of Sales: Volume, Value, and Velocity with Waze Head of SMB Sales Fernando Belfort and Head of Sales Enablement Kendra Wrightson. The Silent, Lurking Churn: Activation Rates Less Than 90%. Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

SMB 290

SMB Scale Marketing Sales 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

During SaaStr Annual , Eric Huff, VP of Sales Strategy and Programs, and Theresa Stevens, Regional VP of the SMB sales team, shared an “under the hood” look at how Salesforce does its internal forecasting using Salesforce. The third element is data and tools. Key Takeaways From Salesforce Forecasting Establish a data-driven culture.

Forecasting 291

Forecasting SMB Sales Technical Review 291

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot, has many insights on how to serve SMB customers at scale. The Challenge of Digital Expansion for SMB. When the shift began in 2020, everyone wrote off SMBs as unprepared for the necessary changes that lie ahead. The past few years have kicked off an unprecedented wave of digital expansion.

Scale 265

Scale SMB Scaling Innovation 265

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

AI Speakers: CEO Snowflake + CEO Observe: Where B2B Applications Are Going CEO Box Aaron Levie: AI, Agents and The Next Era of SaaS COO Google Cloud Francis deSouza: Hyperscalers: The Future and More CTO Rubrik: Co-Founder & CTO, Arvind Nithrakashyap CTO Neo4j: Philip Rathle (Valuation $2B+): How Revolut Left Salesforce and More: Rolling Your (..)

VP of Engineering 204

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 204

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2021

During SaaStr Annual 2021, Amanda Malko, CMO at G2, shared a fascinating look at the data that reveals shifting patterns in the way consumers purchase software. . According to the data, the top obstacles are: Inability to get credible customer content. Lack of knowledge of vendor offerings. Customer references are difficult to find.

Software Review 291

Software Review SMB Enterprise Software 291

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What is the average percentage of annual vs. monthly plan sold for a BtoB SaaS startup targeting the SMB market? A few data points: 50% of Zoom’s customers paid monthly until recently. 90% of Smartsheet’s SMB customers pay annually. 20%+- will pay annually to save money.

Data 288

Data SMB Payment Features Churn 288

SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2020

You can also take a look at Romain’s session from 2019 Annual, which was one of the Top 10 most highly rated, on how they used data to get to the first 1,000 customers: Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data (Video + Transcript). The post “What Are You Seeing?

SMB 242

SMB Innovation Cloud Data 242

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

Focus on: Building robust security and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001) Automating customer onboarding/offboarding Creating enterprise-grade support processes Developing procurement relationship expertise Having clear data handling procedures 5. Start Planning for Enterprise Earlier Than You Think The biggest mistake SaaS companies make?

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 29, 2022

SMB SaaS has a lot going for it: – Millions of them – Short sales cycles – Easier compete. But, it's often hard to get to $100m ARR selling just to SMBs. sell just to SMBs pic.twitter.com/Po1I2aMaBK. So many VCs and others have gotten more and more excited about SMB SaaS. Millions and millions more.

SaaS Payments 347

SaaS Payments Scale SMB PayPal 347

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

How to Make Onboarding Work for SMBs While in some cases, selling to SMBs is easier than Enterprise in many ways, one way in which it’s fundamentally harder is onboarding. They don’t have a dedicated person to set up the new software or an IT team. And the more products they buy, the higher the NRR.

SaaS Payments 261

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 261

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2023

Startups selling to enterprises have increased 36%, twice those of Mid-Market & SMB focused companies. Mid-market & SMB distributions skew left with up to 10% of businesses reporting a decrease in sales cycle during the period. The data analysis uses the results from the 2023 GTM Survey.

Startup 350

Startup SMB Headcount Sales 350

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

Skills: Self-starter, data-driven, tech-savvy, strong sales skills, critical thinker, problem-solver, fast learner. Gorgias began using tech tools that helped them automate their process, and they could track data about their customers and sales process more efficiently. Who will be looking for this product? Mid-Market? Enterprise?

Sales Hiring 203

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 203

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2023

In any event, that’s good median data. Enterprise reps tend to close more ($1m+), and SMB reps less (maybe $500k), with $750k net new bookings per year the median. While different data sources report different numbers, the companies themselves in the Keybanc Sapphire data report 80% hitting quota attainment.

SMB 336

SMB Sales Hiring Enterprise Metrics 336

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2022

The late-stage VC firm Meritech put together its annual SaaS report here and it slices the data in a few interesting ways. Average NRR at IPO is 119% — but this excludes a bunch of SMB folks who did not disclose their NRR. Folks that are very SMB with mediocre retention often don’t disclose it.

SMB 360

SMB SaaS Retention Scale 360

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2025

SMB customers. For SMB SaaS, aim for 6 quarters of LTV:CAC, not 4 Ren adjusted the traditional benchmark because SMB customers stay longer than typically measured. As we gear up for 2025 SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 in SF Bay , we want to take a look back at a few of our top sessions from last year.

SMB 130

SMB Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 130

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Do public software companies with largely enterprise customer bases benefit from superior growth to their peers with mid-market or SMB focuses? SMB businesses benefited from a post-Covid surge when the US re-opened - a phenomenon that seems to abate with time. Segmenting the population by growth rate yields the same conclusion.

SMB 311

SMB Enterprise Software Strategy 311

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Usage data feeds product-led growth (PLG) lead scores, enabling account executives to outbound to the most promising users. Longer sales cycles : Recent data shows usage-based pricing models experienced 29% longer sales cycles in 2023 compared to 21% for seat-based companies.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2024

Andrew Bialecki, CEO Klaviyo This will be an epic deep dive on just how you get an SMB+ app to almost $1B in ARR — all while having incredibly happy customers. And a deep, honest and data-driven look at what works, and what doesn’t today, in AI. This will be a special one. And an epic one. #2. Across 16,000+ customers.

CTO 313

CTO SMB AI B2B 313

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2025

This data will be critical when scaling your program. More here: 7 Thoughts on Building Your First Partner Program And how Gorgias got to 10,000+ SMB customers with partners here: This could mean co-marketing efforts, training their teams, or even helping them close deals.

Scale 147

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Enterprise 147

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

The data confirmed many rules of thumb but also raised some interesting new questions about the best way to use trials. About 600 companies submitted data. We processed the data with 1000+ lines of R code to parse the insights from the data and test for statistical significance. In the SMB, month to month is more common.

Payment Services 279

Payment Services SaaS Payments SMB Benchmarks 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2021

7:00 AM (50 MINS) – Acquiring SMB 10,000 Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias’ CEO Romain Lapeyre. 9:00 AM (20 MIN) – 10 Learnings Scaling from Consumer to SMB to Enterprise with Grammarly’s Head of Organizations Revenue Dorian Stone. All times are in Pacific Time. 7:00-8:00 AM PT. 8:00-9:00 AM PT.

Scale 279

Scale VP of Engineering Scaling SMB 279

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2020

And even when you do check “dashboards” from SMB-y apps, they often don’t even look like dashboards. The data is automatically generated by the app. They require some data entry (this falls apart in practice). And the best dashboards will force you to build better ways to visualize data for all users.

SMB 363

SMB Enterprise Innovation Communication 363

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2021

Battery Ventures’ data says while VC investment $$$ are on fire — they aren’t going into more startups. The average SMB SaaS company has $295k in revenue per employee, and $450k in the enterprise. This may be changing, but it’s interesting to see the data presented this way: #6. $5B ” #2.

Investment 319

Investment SMB Acquisition Cloud 319

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

First, SMB SaaS almost always has lower NRR, especially in the earlier years, and that hasn’t stopped HubSpot and Toast many others from getting mighty big. But, the best in SMB SaaS do tend to have higher NRR, especially as they scale. But the data is real. This wasn’t obvious to me.

Startup 300

Startup SaaS SMB Banking 300

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

The second time, we started SMB. As a founding team, we didn’t know what to make of our first SMB customers, as they were very small — from $12 to $99 a month. My learning: with very small businesses, you may need 20, possibly even 50, paying customers to have enough data to draw true opinions on what the future holds.

SMB 278

SMB Enterprise Startup Data 278

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 23, 2023

SMB revenues decreased 13% Education declined 9% with a 68% drop in hardware sales Government grew 13.5% Healthcare increased 8% Overall software grew 8% The data sets are largely consistent : high single digit growth in most areas outside of hardware. CDW has a significant government & education business.

Software 297

Software Government Healthcare SMB 297

SaaStr

APRIL 12, 2025

For example: At Adobe Sign / EchoSign, we learned that SMB leads who hadnt used our product at least 3 times were far less likely to convert. Use data, not just your gut. Dont Convert Too Early Converting leads too early is a common mistake. If not, refine your qualification criteria. If not, adjust your process.

Systems Review 128

Systems Review SMB Engagement Sales 128

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

What we learned from ’08-’09 in SaaS: First, SMB churn went through the roof — as SMBs went under much more quickly and often. As soon as the economy went south, SMBs started to simply go bankrupt and/or shut down. Anyone processing a lot of SMB and credit-card deals saw churn probably double.

SaaS Payments 280

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 280

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2021

“Enterprise, SMB and Everything In Between: How to Build a Business that Scales With Your Customers with Zendesk’s CTO.” “Improving Employee Performance in the Enterprise: What the Data Really Shows with Ally.io” Register here. #4.”Bottoms Register here. #2. ” Register here. #3.

Enterprise 291

Enterprise CTO SMB Scaling 291

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2021

Both it and Wix are a bit murky on customer count vs “subscriptions”, but those are the data we have. HubSpot is SMB too, but a bit upmarket of Squarespace and Wix. Wix is at $1B ARR, worth $15B and added 1 million new subscriptions in 2020. More here.

SMB 295

SMB SaaS Subscription Payment Features 295

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. I quickly learned that the people in this company were incredibly motivated, smart, focused, and data driven.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 291

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2019

But I hadn’t come across any data. The charts above display Gainsight’s data. We’ll look at that data in a second. In the SMB the distribution is more uniform. Price points in the SMB can vary widely, as can the success effort. But it varies by segment. in ARR/25 accounts for $140k ACV.

Management 253

Management SMB Enterprise Retention 253

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

“Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data” Gorgias is now the fastest-growing contact center solution, with 5,000+ SMB customers. Take a look back at how they got their first 1,000 SMB customers here. #8.

Scale 265

Scale SMB Scaling Engineering 265

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2019

Today I’ve got a lot of data to share with you and I’m really excited because it’s really interesting. I write a blog at tomtunguz.com that focuses a lot of early stage start-ups and uses a lot of data in order to illuminate different topics. Can we get the slides on the presentation? Ready to go? What does this mean?

Scale 254

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Payment Services 254

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Waze sales executives Fernando Belfort , Head of SMB Sales, and Kendra Wrightson , Head of Sales Enablement, discuss optimizing sales processes for four essential data points: value, variety, volume, and velocity. You’re not the only SMB asking this question as you navigate perpetual pitches, closing clients, and growth. .

Scale 298

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 298

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2023

And so many different strategies, from more enterprise to more SMB, from more tech focused (Asana) to less tech focused (Monday). 135% NRR from larger customers and 120% for $5k+ customers remains top-tier, especially for a vendor with plenty of small SMB customers. You can just learn so much.

SMB 310

SMB Outsourced Development Enterprise Scale 310