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. The SaaS “Rule of 40” has gained popularity due to its simplicity, requiring only two common financial metrics to be added together. What Is The SaaS “Rule of 40”?

SaaS 255

SaaS Technical Review Benchmarks Azure 255

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Doug Pepper, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth, has invested in software and SaaS companies for 22 years, from seed to growth stage. Christine Edmonds, Partner & Head of Analytics at ICONIQ Growth, joins Doug to share insights from the company’s latest growth and efficiency report. This trends downward over time.

Scale 197

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Venture Capital 197

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

First, you hire your sales team. Finally, growth occurs when sales, product, and marketing can come together. Simple processes can help you understand and figure out your critical errors so that you can correct them. You could even try a mock role-play over a call to test their sales skills. “If

Scale 212

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Marketplace as a Service 212

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Going into the interviews, I knew what I wanted out of a job– that part was simple.

Scale 254

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 254

User Pilot

JANUARY 29, 2024

A good SaaS UX design is critical to a successful SaaS product in today’s constantly evolving and competitive market. An efficient and effective design with users’ needs at the center stage encourages product engagement and reduces churn. What is SaaS UX design? Why is UX design important in SaaS?

SaaS 105

SaaS Interviewing User Experience Onboarding 105

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 21, 2023

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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 177

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2023

Every Wednesday we bring you the best speakers in SaaS. The speaker emphasizes that improvement, not perfection, is key, and even small improvements in metrics can have a significant impact. The second myth is the belief that everything needs to be done perfectly, but John argues that improvement, not perfection, is key.

Technical Advisors 201

Technical Advisors Data Technical Review Sales Hiring 201

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2023

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? What are common pitfalls to avoid, and how can teams maximize efficiency and meet quota? So you need to know what are the problems you’re solving, who are you solving for, and then continue to keep refining it so you have a very efficient funnel.”

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring SMB Sales Recruiting Payment Methods 157

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 169

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 169

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Good SaaS executives keep these metrics in mind, regardless of whether they get them from KeyBanc , RevOps Squared , OpenView , Opex Engine , or any other quality source. But that’s all SaaS Metrics 101.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Benchmarks 131

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

We’ve recently been posting polls on SaaStr’s LinkedIn account to get a feel for what SaaS companies are doing in the current environment. In the video below, he discusses the results and where he thinks SaaS companies are on track or need improvement. #1. Your best sales reps can close so much more than your average rep.

Sales Recruiting 205

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 205

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 13, 2018

Great SaaS sales reps can change your entire business. The best ones are efficient, motivated, effective, and creative in how they operate on a day-to-day basis. So what is it about these SaaS sales reps that differentiates them from the rest? Persistence is a key driver of SaaS sales. Only 23.9%

Scale 224

Scale SaaS Sales Sales Funnel 224

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 20, 2023

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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Benchmarks Scale 161

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 12, 2023

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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 161

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 20, 2022

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., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 130

Cloud Software Review Software Benchmarks 130

User Pilot

JANUARY 22, 2024

What factors should you consider when choosing one for your SaaS business to provide the best assistance to your customer ? Product-led companies tend to be low-touch while sales-led companies – are high-touch, at least in the beginning. What are the most common customer success models? Let’s get right into it!

Customer Success 95

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 95

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 1, 2020

Most support reps don’t enjoy answering the same simple questions over and over – instead they get a kick out of the kind of work that requires flexing their deep problem-solving skills. We also work closely with Product and Sales to ensure a cohesive customer experience throughout. Define and co-own bottom-line metrics.

Customer Support 239

Customer Support Scale Education Onboarding 239

Stax

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses need to constantly evolve their offerings to stay fresh and relevant. By partnering with a trusted SaaS billing platform. In this guide, we’re going to cover what companies need to consider when choosing a SaaS billing platform—and how Stax Connect makes this process simple.

Payments 88

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Services Merchant Services 88

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 21, 2021

Challenge: UXPin needed a tool to consolidate their subscription data and track metrics. Right away, its toolkit replaced their in-house solution and made it easy to track metrics and segment customers. This allows their team to focus on product, sales, and growth. Solution: They signed up for Baremetrics. Try Baremetrics free.

Payment Services 98

Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions 98

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 14, 2022

The people in charge of your company – the Executives, Board, and Investors – want to improve a metric called NRR (Net Revenue Retention or NDR, Net Dollar Retention, if you prefer) for one very simple reason: it plays a direct role in the value of the company. Talk about efficient growth! What is NRR?

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Investment Sales Hiring Retention 97

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

In the early days of SaaS, it was difficult to predict how users would interact with new products. Be pragmatic and keep things simple. Many frameworks exist to build messaging and sales enablement. Without showing customers what your product, service, or solution will look like in the future, it is hard to close the sale.

Outsourcing Services 196

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 196

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Most marketplace founders and leaders intuit this over time, so they obsess over growth metrics. In the SaaS-like network model, the supply is in charge of generating the majority of the demand, and the product acts as mainly a fulfillment or monetization vehicle for the supply. We see these elements in the best marketplace businesses.

Payments 116

Payments SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods 116

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Shopify is a huge opportunity for developers looking to expand into the micro-SaaS space. To get the most out of the time and money invested into their apps, Shopify App Developers need to track the core metrics of their industry. What is a business metric? Quick ratio: How efficiently is your business increasing its MRR?

Payment Solutions 98

Payment Solutions Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Metrics 98

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 28, 2017

Over the last year in particular, Revenue Ops is a term that’s gaining some mindshare in the SaaS world. Revenue operations teams combine marketing operations and sales operations into one team. As one SaaS executive described to me, marketing operations teams are the engines of the marketing team.

SaaS 124

SaaS Construction Engineering Acquisition 124

User Pilot

MAY 8, 2023

While product growth may seem as simple as “attract customers to your Software-as-a-Service solution” there are countless SaaS challenges and customer issues that you’ll need to overcome along the way. As the number of software tools and subscriptions increase, so too do the expectations of SaaS customers.

Software Review 98

Software Review Outsourcing Services SaaS Sales Hiring 98

Subscription Flow

JANUARY 26, 2024

When evaluating the growth and valuation of SaaS businesses, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is arguably the most commonly used SaaS metric out of all of them. Keeping all that in mind, in this blog we will be underscoring the importance of SaaS MRR growth. How to increase SaaS MRR growth using SubscriptionFlow?

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payments SaaS Payment Features 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2019

A few seasons back, we wrote a post on hitting how in SaaS, you have to be putting the resources in place by Q3 to hit the plan for the next year. We update this post a bit annually as we head into next year’s planning procress. I’m not sure we’ve gotten that much better at our resource planning in SaaS.

Sales Hiring 181

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Revenue 181

Sales Hacker

JULY 14, 2023

I also like as few levers as possible to keep things simple, but am a fan of having accelerators when over quota to drive over-performance. That said, here is a plan that I have implemented at dozens of successful saas companies: AE = 10% commission SDR = $200/SQO SDR split is 70/30 ish. 60k base, 30k uncapped commission. “We

Compensation 52

Compensation Sales Hiring Technical Review Metrics 52

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Training is key to resolving issues efficiently and maintaining a positive customer experience. Visit our Support page.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Customer Support Merchant Services Payments 78

User Pilot

MAY 18, 2023

UX and CX differ in target audiences, goals, tests, and metrics. Testings: UX testing focuses on evaluating the usability and efficiency of the product, while CX testing aims to assess overall customer satisfaction and identify strengths and weaknesses in customer workflows. This nurtures loyalty and increases customer retention.

User Experience 95

User Experience Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Retention 95

Totango

AUGUST 25, 2022

Six Customer Engagement SaaS Strategies That Work. For software service providers, customer engagement SaaS strategies play a central role in a successful business model. In this article, we’ll offer some tips for a winning customer engagement SaaS strategy. Next, we’ll share six keys to effective SaaS customer engagement.

Engagement 96

Engagement Strategy SaaS Scale 96

Chart Mogul

JULY 6, 2023

Churn, SaaS companies should avoid it like the plague. Say hello to negative churn, churn’s much more friendly sister metric. If you’re looking for positive growth, you … Churn, SaaS companies should avoid it like the plague. Say hello to negative churn, churn’s much more friendly sister metric.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Churn SaaS Customer Lifetime Value 52

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 21, 2018

In sales, we often talk about how to write great email subject lines or best times to cold call. This helps, but in the world of SaaS it’s more important to communicate with your prospects when the timing is right for them to engage. Here are three steps to prepare your sales team for success on an announcement day: 1.

Scale 199

Scale Sales Startup Strategy 199

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them.

Sales Hiring 188

Sales Hiring Metrics Revenue Sales 188

Cobloom

SEPTEMBER 2, 2019

Whether you're trying to work out how efficient your sales and marketing strategies are, or determine how profitable your current customers are, it's vital to keep a pulse on the health of your SaaS business. Thankfully, there's a simple performance metric that does both.

Acquisition 69

Acquisition Metrics Strategy SaaS 69

Neil Patel

MARCH 9, 2021

The biggest brands in the world understand one simple truth: Not all leads are created equal. Before we dive deep into the metrics and methods you’ll use, let’s establish a baseline definition of lead scoring. A business that uses lead scoring learns how to allocate its resources efficiently. Metrics for Scoring Your Leads.

Scale 115

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Metrics B2B 115