SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

Do you have to double your headcount to make it from $10M to $20M or even $2M to $5M? For headcount specifically, make sure that the constraint to growing faster is that you don’t have enough salespeople to work the demand that exists for your business. When those outcomes are achieved, the hire gets their headcount.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 300

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

You start making up for it in volume — with headcount. Your life becomes all about recruiting, even more than it was. It’s harder to find that Magical VP that can make a huge difference. At $100m+ in ARR, the hardest part is you have to add a Unicorn each year.

SaaS 350

SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 350

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2023

The figurehead of the sales team must have strong leadership capabilities to hire and retain a high-performing and diverse team effectively. Redeploy funds from headcount to sales technology. The managers of the future leverage technology, ingest data to inform actions, and effectuate positive changes in their teams.

Innovation 246

Innovation Sales Hiring B2B Strategy 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

Having a predictable pipeline enables more effective decision-making, from headcount planning to strategic investments in technology and beyond. As the week progresses, different levels of sales leadership will review forecasts and inputs and provide feedback to the account teams. Don’t just drive a weekly cadence.

Forecasting 284

Forecasting SMB Technical Review Sales 284

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

These are just some of the findings in this year’s Customer Success Leadership Study, ChurnZero’s third annual report on the top trends and opportunities in Customer Success, presented in partnership with ESG and sponsored by Higher Logic Vanilla and involve.ai. Download your full copy of the 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study here.

Leadership 98

Leadership Trends Customer Success Investment 98

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Download your copy of the thought leadership paper now. Over the past year, many support teams have struggled with budget cuts, reduced headcount, and less bandwidth – while the volume and complexity of customer queries has only risen. So how can you manage a larger volume of queries without needing to add headcount?

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2021

Your sales headcount. If 20% of your revenue is Smaller customers, 50% Medium, and 30% Large (a not uncommon scenario), align your energy and efforts proportionately. Align your marketing budgets. Your product / dev budgets. Don’t chase “whales” and big deals IF that’s not your core. It’s just going to distract everyone now.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Headcount Pricing Market Segmentation 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

They grew headcount fairly aggressively from ‘21 to ‘22, and then Q4 of last year dipped and held flat before starting to regrow. Monday will probably add 25% headcount this year. With Monday, which happened with so many leaders, they hit headwinds, and NRR went from epic to pretty good. Salesforce is back to hiring.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

You start making up for it in volume — with headcount. Your life becomes all about recruiting, even more than it was. It’s harder to find that Magical VP that can make a huge difference. At $100m+ in ARR, the hardest part is you have to add a Unicorn each year.

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Reduced headcount, longer working hours, and a spike in queries have led to burnout. They go big on human support to meet demand, and they end up having to backtrack and cut headcount as costs skyrocket. Are there any other options companies can look at instead of reducing headcount? Support teams seem to be suffering here.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Trends Technical Review Headcount 211

ChurnZero

MARCH 23, 2023

That’s according to our annual Customer Success Leadership Study published in late 2022. Customer Success benchmark: headcount How many people should be on a Customer Success team? When asked about non-headcount budgets; 8.3% The post Customer Success benchmarks: headcount and budgets appeared first on ChurnZero.

Headcount 52

Headcount Benchmarks Customer Success Scale 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 23, 2023

That’s according to our annual Customer Success Leadership Study published in late 2022. Customer Success benchmark: headcount How many people should be on a Customer Success team? When asked about non-headcount budgets; 8.3% The post Customer Success benchmarks: headcount and budgets appeared first on ChurnZero.

Headcount 52

Headcount Benchmarks Customer Success Scale 52

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

For example, our leadership team might decide to focus our company strategy on targeting the segments with the best revenue retention. Leadership: Create a shared language for product, engineering, and go-to-market to describe customers. Informing our approach to the market. Assessing progress on our strategy.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

Honest feedback can be hard to take, but it’s essential to develop the type of culture that encourages people to constructively criticize processes, leadership styles, or approaches. We’ve touched on this a lot in this podcast, but the cultural component’s really important, especially from the leadership team.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

It might be a little surprising to learn that the leadership style at Stack Overflow is decidedly not binary. Step 2: Adopt a flexible, non-dual approach to leadership. Prashanth takes a different approach for himself and the leadership style at Stack Overflow. Step 3: See what happens when you forge your own path.

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 20, 2021

“These are the kinds of things that help our support org to function more smoothly and impactfully so we can support our customers at scale, without needing to increase budget or headcount”. Starting to build out a support operations function doesn’t necessarily mean adding headcount straight away. Baby steps, for sure.”.

Scale 156

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 17, 2024

Establishing effective yet efficient ratios requires aligning your CSM headcount with the mechanics of your customer lifecycle design including the definition of the CSM role in your company and the specific activities that achieve successful product adoption with your customers. Here are three key practices to keep the ratios optimal: 1.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Systems Review Headcount Scale 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Build the baseline by checking leadership assumptions. But as you expand and start productizing everything in your journey, it’s easy to get under the assumption that more headcount equals better performance. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

Scale 246

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 246

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Sanj started working at Salesforce back in 2005, when the company had around 1,000 employees and a few hundred million in revenue, and he was a part of its growth for 14 years, holding several leadership positions in multiple markets in EMEA. They promote a flat culture or a flat leadership and organizational design.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2021

You need a baked financial model, that includes sales and marketing costs, scaling over time, headcount, and comparison to comps, and when you’ll need the next round(s). This is more important in SaaS than consumer internet, by that I mean, it’s more important you have the details right-ish here. Both bottoms up and tops down.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Headcount 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

What kind of headcount do you have? Some have a clear path to market leadership, and others don’t. As organizations grow their marketing team, they either hire too many generalists or too many specialists and put them in silos where they don’t come together or work together. What is the unifying framework?

Scale 274

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 274

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

Despite the exponential growth they’ve gone through, Stripe have been refreshingly conservative about how quickly they grown the company from a headcount perspective. We are a very engineering-centric company, so 50% of headcount is always going to be on engineering. We just were never going to get that headcount.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2014

Customer success teams must justify the investment of building a CS team, often at the expense of headcount in another team. Constrained by headcount budgets and burn requirements, startup leadership teams often must choose between hiring an additional sales person or investing in a customer success person, for example.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Headcount Compensation 100

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2024

Do you see massive disruption in workforces and marketing headcounts shrinking because of AI? “I’m We’re in the early days in terms of how it changes how a business operates and unlocks. That’s really exciting and occasionally scary,” Adam says. I’m not connecting those dots yet,” Adam shares. “I

AI Search 273

AI Search SaaS Advertising Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Approaches vary from top-down (leadership pushes goals all the way to sellers) and bottom-up (sellers and managers determine realistic goals and commitments and roll them up). Sales leadership needs to understand capacity at the aggregate level to better assess revenue projections and headcount decisions.

Scale 120

Scale Headcount Sales Forecasting 120

ChurnZero

JANUARY 17, 2025

Your CFOs focus on efficiency and profitability means that theyll be open to collaborating on efficiency opportunities that dont necessarily involve headcount cutssuch as leveraging AI and automation to increase customer value delivery at scale. 3: Take these initiatives to collaborate better with your CFO.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Benchmarks Headcount Scale 52

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Whether you’re bringing on your tenth or hundredth salesperson, you need to discuss the “must-haves” with your leadership team. Step 1: Create a scalable hiring profile that reflects your company’s values. Start with your non-negotiables. Your non-negotiables are your core values and ways of working.

Scale 160

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 160

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

“The great thing about performance marketing is the ROI is really obvious, so you can justify increased spend and headcount based on the performance, and that’s what we’ve done” The first thing we did was build out a pretty robust performance marketing team. “Great leadership hinges on some sense of predictability.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 2, 2020

Get buy-in from the revenue leadership team to ensure you get the potential of your ROI. 10% of companies that have reduced headcount have reinvested the savings into new sales technologies. The UI for modern SEPs can support early- and late-cycle reps, customer success managers and revenue insights for leadership.

Scale 139

Scale Engagement Sales Sales Enablement 139

ChurnZero

MARCH 22, 2023

As a CS leader, these tools help keep your team lean, standardize your operations, and give your C-suite visibility into decisions about headcount and tooling. Once you arrive at a ratio of customers to CSM, you have what you need to meet with your finance team to discuss budget and headcount in a data-driven way.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Headcount Finance Leadership 97

Kellblog

SEPTEMBER 21, 2024

” “Other than asking me for more headcount. They’re pretty darn good at doing that,” the CEO chuckled, pensively gazing over the whitecaps from the patio of the luxury resort where the executive leadership team (ELT) was huddled. Our leadership team is quite simply out of its depth. “Wait.

New CTO 92

New CTO Sales Leadership Headcount 92

ChurnZero

MAY 17, 2022

WASHINGTON , May 17, 2022 — ChurnZero , a leading Customer Success platform, has earned multiple accolades from business and SaaS industry groups for its product innovation and industry leadership. The company plans on doubling its headcount in 2022. ChurnZero has quickly become one of Washington, D.C.’s

Marketplace as a Service 98

Marketplace as a Service Technical Review Headcount Software Review 98

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

As a Customer Success leader, do you get anxious at the thought of asking your CFO or CEO for additional headcount? Using these models, you too can learn how to go toe-to-toe with your Finance team by presenting trade-offs to get the headcount you need. How to Build a Customer Success Budget for Headcount. Discovery Call.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Benchmarks 98

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 13, 2024

So, in larger teams, the ratio of high-output individuals doesn’t scale at the same pace as headcount, making it seem like fewer “rockstars” are emerging. Four key program areas emerge: Connect them with leadership regularly. In a 100-person company, 10 people will be doing half the work.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Development Team Review AI Search 120

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

When I started, they had a big growth plan as far as headcount, but they were a little bit looser on processes and cadences and things like that framework I was talking about. So again, we got aggressive headcount to see the growth, and we put together a plan where we can actually see maybe even a little bit more growth with the same people.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Customer > Team > Individual During my time at HubSpot, the leadership team shared this mental model to help with decision-making. The Horizons Framework is an effective way to categorise projects, which in turn helps with assigning budget, headcount and timelines. Source: McKinsey 17. This is always wrong.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2012

I’m a avid proponent of the OKR (objective and key result) model where the company leadership sets three measurable, quantitative goals for the year. A financial plan for next year including a headcount plan, a sales plan (if applicable) and a forecast for out of cash date and timing of next fundraise. OKR setting.

Startup 100

Startup Sales Hiring Headcount Compensation 100