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3 minute read / Jun 25, 2020 /

Top 10 Learnings from the Redpoint 2020 GTM Survey

Yesterday, we shared the Top 10 Learnings from the 2020 Redpoint GTM Survey at SaaS Office Hours. The presentation is embedded below. It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities.

I want to thank Nick Giometti who parsed and processed the data and taught me (an R user) a lot about python and pandas along the way. Thanks to his work, we have some terrific insights to share. I also want to thank everyone contributed data. The full transcript is here.

We received more than 500 responses to the survey, and as you will see the demographics, the respondents represent a broad swath of company sizes focused on different buyers. The deck in embedded above and is also linked here

We’ve endeavored to include as much data as possible to help companies benchmark themselves relative to others. One note that we made in the office hours is that there does seem to be a positive skew to the respondent set. In other words, we hypothesize companies with favorable metrics responded in greater numbers. We use XDR to mean both SDR and BDR.

The top 10 learnings from the survey are below.

  1. 1:1 AE/XDR ratios are the most common in both inside and outside sales teams.
  2. XDR teams are measured typically either on meeting count or pipeline value. 60% of teams employ meeting count, but goal selection doesn’t impact performance. Just pick a metric.
  3. If XDR teams hit their numbers, so do AEs. When XDR teams attain 95%+ of their target number, 50% of AE teams achieve 95%+.
  4. Sales teams with spans of control under 7 attain 80-95% of quota twice as frequently. Sales teams with spans of control greater than 7 whiff their quota (attainment of 50% or less) with twice as much frequency.
  5. Most sales teams ramp AEs (both inside and outside) on six month time periods. But, it’s important to consider sales cycle when setting ramp time.
  6. Marketing teams spend 5-10% of ARR on programs (non-headcount expenses), and this is pretty consistent across ARR.
  7. 33% of respondents reported payback periods, burdened for gross margin, between 10-13 months. This was surprisingly low.
  8. Net dollar retention is the most common customer success goal, used by about 37% of respondents. Logo retention is second at about 33%. NPS is the least common at 7%.
  9. 40% of companies reported an NPS of > 50. This distribution was a surprise, and it reinforces the idea that customer success should not use NPS, since it doesn’t seem to be that discerning of a metric.
  10. Engineering:Account Executive headcount ratios scale from about 3:1 down to 1:1 as a company scales revenue.

If you have any questions about the survey, please let me know on Twitter. We will do our best to respond to the questions. Thank you again, Nick, and everyone else who helped us along the way with the survey.


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