SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

People loved Zoom and didn’t churn. Then everyone in the world was on Zoom selling flowers and yoga and things meant to be sold in person, so churn peaked at 3.6%, which isn’t terrible for SMB, but was higher than none. Monday will probably add 25% headcount this year. It doesn’t happen that way. Salesforce is back to hiring.

Sales Hiring 225

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 225

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2022

Management teams expect to reduce operating expense by 20% predominantly through headcount reductions or hiring freezes - everyone from sardine startups to public megalodons. Software automates manual work, provides leverage, and the total cost is often less than a headcount. Software does more with less.

Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hiring Headcount Software Finance 141

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2022

Headcount up 7%, while revenue is up 37%. But that only increases total headcount 7% which revenues went up 37%. Haven’t seen a material increase in employee churn even during the “Great Resignation” The effects here aren’t even. That transition doesn’t happen overnight for legacy customers.

Scale 284

Scale Marketplace as a Service Headcount Cloud 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Without headcount planning for the support team, the company’s response time and customer satisfaction scores dipped. Forecasting can help define revenue numbers, the support you need to provide, headcounts, and opportunities to tap into new businesses. Client churn is scary but inevitable. Use your data to inform.

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 218

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

By freezing headcount for a year. Mathematically, if you keep the headcount flat and continue growing 50% like Monday or 30% at $2B like Hubspot, you get wildly more efficient. Conversely, we’re better at instrumentation and can do cohort analysis of our customers and why they churn. Hubspot and Salesforce did the same thing.

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 218

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

And human churn. You start making up for it in volume — with headcount. Here, you often have to start hiring B players because you just need so many people. And team members start to leave routinely. 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.

Headcount 215

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 215

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2021

They wait for two reasons: first, it’s another headcount, which costs money, which can seem expensive when you have say just $5k-$10k a month in MRR and 6 months of runway left before you’re out of cash. And — this is the counterintuitive part — you must do this even though it will NOT impact churn at first.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Customer Success Headcount Churn 267

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. Second, measure Client Success on “net churn”, or total revenue from the customers under management by Client Success. A typical target is 110-120% net annual revenue growth rate from your base, including both churn and upsells. Measure both.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 245

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

Some define it by headcount, typically around 200-2000 employees, and others by revenue, generally $10M to $1B annual recurring revenue. In rapidly growing companies, the headcount can go from 500-3000 in a matter of months. For some, it may be user adoption or reducing churn. They’ll think it’s them. And, in reality, it’s not.

Scale 178

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 178

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 1, 2020

The rule says that all employees of affiliated companies must be considered headcount. Some are seeing significant churn. Historically, startups haven’t been able to access SBA programs because of this affiliation rule. For startups, this means every employee of every startup for every investor.

Headcount 276

Headcount Payment Services Government Innovation 276

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

At contract expiration these customers either renew (sign another contract with same annual value), expand (sign another contract with higher annual value), contract (sign another contract with lower annual value), or churn (stop being a customer and spend goes to zero). Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

ChurnZero

JUNE 9, 2023

Good sales teams typically get the budget, headcount and tools they desire because the function is tied to revenue. As a result, CS teams often have to work harder to make the case for headcount, technology and even product requests on behalf of customers. How it helps alignment: CS can provide answers as to why customers are churning.

Finance 98

Finance Metrics Customer Success Headcount 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. Second, measure Client Success on “net churn”, or total revenue from the customers under management by Client Success. A typical target is 110-120% net annual revenue growth rate from your base, including both churn and upsells. Measure both.

Sales Hiring 189

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 189

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. Customer Success reviews the net dollar and logo retention, plus churns and expansions. The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. You’ll notice there is no engineering section.

Metrics 209

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 209

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Now, in 2024, we’re in the age of efficiencies, and we’re rethinking whether we should put more people on it or tolerate more churn and issues because we want to be cash flow positive. Of course, this can go too far sometimes if you push the customer and sales team, and customers don’t get value, they’ll churn.

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 234

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Overall, the industry’s top five measurements of success are NRR, gross revenue retention (GRR), churn rate, logo retention rate and expansion revenue—while “softer” metrics like NPS appear only further down the list. Related: Which Customer Success best practices should you keep or let go in 2023? However, 76.5% of companies.

Leadership 98

Leadership Trends Customer Success Investment 98

The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Therefore the key drivers of my imaginary startup are organic growth rate, marketing budget and customer acquisition costs, conversion rate, ARPU and churn rate. If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly.

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 16, 2022

Support teams are facing a critical juncture: business costs and customer expectations continue to grow while resources like headcount and budget are decreasing. In turn, you’ll increase efficiency without increasing your headcount. So, how can it transform your offering into an experience that drives loyalty?

Headcount 118

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value 118

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Headcount maybe goes from 2 or 4 to 10. They’re fully saturated unless customers churn. This is generally where churn starts to pick up because competitors are selling against you. When one person churns, it counts for more. Customer Success You do this to create capacity. The CSM role looks different than other roles.

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 159

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). Know and Share Your Churn and NRR. Hiring churn doesn’t help. Both bottoms up and tops down. Every public SaaS company now shares its NRR.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Headcount 276

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. Churn Plan.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Benchmarks 98

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Folks pulled usage down as much as they could to save money, although logo churn remained low. They kept the headcount kind of flat. Even with MongoDB’s epic growth, 2022 saw a big slowdown in usage growth. And when you have partial utility-based pricing like MongoDB does, you see the impact fast. But last quarter saw a bounce back.

Revenue 188

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 188

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 5, 2020

This INCLUDES headcount-related expenses. If you are utilizing Gusto or a similar payroll tool, your headcount expenses are likely coming into your P&L as one (or maybe two) line item(s). these figures are going to be WRONG because you haven’t properly accounted for your headcount costs in Sales & Marketing.

Finance 118

Finance Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 118

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Fast growers retain and expand new customers, resulting in net negative churn. Low churn shows the product is sticky, hard to replace, and truly generating value for customers. This should include both customers that show leading signs of potential churn (i.e. These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2020

A mediocre CSM might say retain 100% of your mid-market revenue on a net-of-churn basis. No headcount limits. A lot of mature SaaS companies use the metric of ~$2m in ARR per customer success rep. But if you get a great team — you can hire a lot more aggressively than that. I didn’t figure this out until $4m in ARR.

Sales Hiring 291

Sales Hiring Headcount Engineering Banking 291

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2023

Many of them said headcount management and spend were common levers they pulled, given the immediate and significant impact they have on spend. Companies are giving price breaks this year to reduce churn and increase retention, with the caveat that it might go up next year. What are companies doing today to scale efficiently?

Outsourcing Services 159

Outsourcing Services Scaling Venture Capital Forecasting 159

Totango

APRIL 6, 2023

Our latest platform enhancements and solutions help you scale without needing to add headcount, and make CS a company-wide initiative that drives predictable revenue growth. While this customer segment may not be your biggest spenders, there certainly are lots of them and it can be tough to engage with everyone on the list.

Innovation 86

Innovation Scale Revenue Technical Review 86

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

An exception are SaaS startups with a no/low-touch sales model and viral growth (see above) and potentially companies which have a massively negative net MRR churn rate and therefore don't have to acquire as many new customers. Input your monthly net MRR churn rate (i.e. click for a larger version).

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2020

It can also guide your hiring process if increasing headcount is required to guarantee 24/7 coverage for customers. A disconnect between your tickets opened and tickets completed may indicate a need for better training of support reps, increased headcount, or the introduction of automation to help reduce the strain on your team.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Metrics Technical Review Scale 211

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2020

And they have five times the headcount and have raised $25 million. Net Negative Churn is an awesome force. That the operational part would get harder before it got easier … but it would get easier once he doubled or so, when he’d finally have some redundancy and fat on the team and the model. More on that here ).

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount SaaS 279

ChurnZero

JULY 14, 2021

And the good news is this metric is something that Customer Success teams can directly influence during the customer’s journey as they play a critical role in solving customer pain points and delivering value and business outcomes to increase customer loyalty and ultimately reduce churn. How Do You Calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer Lifetime Value 98

Customer Lifetime Value Scale Headcount Churn 98

Kellblog

JUNE 17, 2023

Executive Summary: Sales KPIs (Slide 5) Here we can see key metrics, cut by size, and grouped into five areas: growth & profitability, sales efficiency, retention & churn, GTM strategy, and sales productivity. Annual revenue churn (rate). I’ve never heard it put exactly this way, but this is some churn rate.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Benchmarks Metrics 102

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 27, 2022

As companies and their headcounts grow, so do their tech stacks. Integrations with product analytics tools like Amplitude make it easier to understand and measure the impact of customer interactions in Intercom, helping to increase revenue and reduce churn.

Enterprise 205

Enterprise Headcount Engineering Cloud 205

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

” I think the “Sure thing boss, give me more headcount” is obvious. If you’re a SaaS company, that could be new customer acquisition, it could be an expansion or even reduce contraction, reduce churn. ” It’ll reduce our churn, potentially increase expansion. That’s one category.

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 13, 2022

Most SaaS executives can relate to a friendly debate they’ve had at a board or leadership team meeting about what percentage of revenue should come from “upsells” to existing customers or what is “healthy churn.” Companies with an equivalent commercial operation- sales headcount, marketing spend, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Scale Headcount Software Review 52

Totango

JULY 5, 2022

Customer health scores can help you assess whether your customers are seeing value in your product, determine churn risk and spot opportunities. When this happens, you need to be able to salvage the relationship as quickly as possible, so you can prevent churn before it strikes. Low Net Promoter Score (NPS). Low usage rates.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Scale Headcount Churn 98

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

Churn ARR is the sum of ARR lost due to shrinking customers (aka, downsell) and lost customers. Ending ARR is starting ARR + new ARR – churn ARR. It’s + churn ARR if you assign a negative sign to churn, which I usually do.) YoY growth in churn ARR. Churn rate (ATR-based) = churn ARR/available-to-renew ARR.

Technical Review 116

Technical Review Software Review Forecasting Churn 116