Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Those line charts showing fast-rising user acquisition or explosive ARR have been synonymous with the industry over the past decade. And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. It was the start of the wave of the cloud.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Weave started off as a dental ERP and comms platform (including VoIP / phone), and then expanded beyond that as it scaled. It’s a tough outcome for a team that is working hard to scale well into the nine figures of ARR. But I thought I’d take a deeper look at one example, Weave. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

SaaS Payments 231

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 231

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Almost half of that growth is from acquisitions, though, so the “organic” deceleration is from 35% to 15%. #2. Headcount Down 25% Since September 2022, But Revenue Still Up. Twilio is the same great company it was in 2022 and 2021, but it’s also been the segment where buyers have cut back perhaps the most.

Headcount 167

Headcount Cloud Communication Acquisition 167

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

With precise headcount and budget needs. Even in the best of cases, with the best onboarding and the shortest of sales cycles, it takes 30 days to scale a rep. Whatever it takes, if those reps you need to hit the Q1 and Q2 plan aren’t there and scaled on January 1 or earlier … you will never make the plan.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Acquisition 263

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 9, 2012

If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it? Because of the way the SaaS business model works, if you feed the customer acquisition process, you hurt profits and burn cash.

Acquisition 124

Acquisition Scale SaaS Headcount 124

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

And once a customer has paid back the initial acquisitions costs to acquire it, all future streams of revenue can loosely be described as a cash flow annuity. Headcount planning, budgeting, fundraising, etc can often be largely based on a top line plan. Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2019

With precise headcount and budget needs. Even in the best of cases, it takes 60 days to scale a rep. Whatever it takes, if those reps you need to hit the Q1 and Q2 plan aren’t there and scaled on January 1 or earlier … you will never make the plan. How many reps. How many SDRs. This is key. Usually much more.

Sales Hiring 179

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Revenue 179

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. The complexities of scaling a support team. Natasha: It really is.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2019

But how do organizations make customer success work at scale? Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. The challenge was retention. Focusing on retention kills two birds with one stone.

Scale 69

Scale Customer Success Scaling Sales Hiring 69

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 13, 2022

There are large-scale potential implications: Reduction in a sales capacity to land new customers. Companies with an equivalent commercial operation- sales headcount, marketing spend, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Another long sale cycle to upsell existing customers who already showed conservative buying behaviour.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Scale Headcount Software Review 52

OpenView Labs

MAY 24, 2021

You can think of the ratio of R&D:S&M as indicating how much of a company’s future prospects depend on their ability to build great product experiences relative to scaling up their sales and marketing activities. PLG is more of an acquisition channel than a company-wide strategy. Atlassian has an R&D:S&M ratio of 2.9:1.

Scale 98

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Benchmarks 98

ChurnZero

JULY 14, 2021

That means your organization should be weary of overly focusing on customer acquisition at the cost of customer retention. Increase Customer Retention – This one is a no-brainer but the longer you are able to increase your customer lifespan, the more revenue you will receive over time.

Customer Lifetime Value 98

Customer Lifetime Value Scale Headcount Churn 98

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2024

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter – read by over 50,000 revenue professionals weekly to scale their companies and careers. She previously served as the company’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, having joined in January 2021 through the acquisition of Exponea.

VP of Engineering 72

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS AI Search 72

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. This is Scale , Intercom’s podcast series on driving business growth through customer relationships. Kieron O’Neill: Mark, you’re very welcome along to Scale by Intercom today. From selling bikes to software.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

Throughout all of my experience at early-stage growth companies, there’s been an overarching theme: From inception, it’s the people you attract, hire, train, promote, and “communify” who enable and accelerate your time to market and your customer acquisition and satisfaction.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded. Let’s say you have a CAC payback time of 12 months, i.e. your fully-loaded customer acquisition costs equal 12 months of gross profit. The second issue is the timing of some of the major expenses.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Sales now accounts for about 7% of the company’s headcount–a similar share of their workforce as marketing or product management. I’d even argue that the company is still under-resourced in sales; sales accounts for only 7% of Atlassian’s headcount compared to 25% of headcount at the average PLG business. This is a good thing.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

OpenView Labs

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Regardless of the round, fundraising breaks down to three distinct components: non-negotiable value drivers, spending money to make money, and signals of sufficient scale. Cost of Customer Acquisition / monthly gross profit) strictly goes up with every round raised. Signals of sufficient scale. The non-negotiables.

Headcount 55

Headcount Benchmarks Banking Retention 55

Sales Hacker

JUNE 16, 2022

Even if you don’t control the headcount and even if layoffs come later, help them find a new role. In the face of an economic softening, a lot of companies scale back on expenses while they wait to see what unfolds. What companies are actually trying to achieve is to scale their revenue. Make them feel safe. Jamal Reimer.

Scale 92

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 92

CustomerSuccessBox

MARCH 9, 2022

In the glorious business of the SaaS space, one underlying truth that determines the growth and scaling of the business is that it takes several months to recover the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and get to the profitable zone at a unit economics level. However, only one of them performs tasks at scale.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value Outsourced Development 52

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

When scaling the business, sales typically averages roughly 30% of revenue, so therefore sales spend is one of the biggest investments a company can make. At the highest level, SaaS companies look at sales expense, headcount, sales productivity and SaaS metrics like: The cost of new customer acquisition (CAC).

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

Sales Hacker

JULY 22, 2021

Good cooperation between these two can skyrocket your growth, while the opposite might turn out to be a dead-end for further scaling. At Packhelp , we created an SLA that helped us scale over 9000% over five years and take out Deloitte’s Fast50 of the CEE region. But it can also mean customer segments divided by their scale.

Scale 110

Scale Sales Marketing Metrics 110

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

As companies scale, they evolve, so how should marketing evolve accordingly to add maximum value? PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. PST, Kady shares the ten things that change in marketing as you scale. The reality is that a lot of things change as we scale. The answer isn’t simple.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 188

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

Traditional Sales Organizations – Growth of headcount in sales was structured around revenue per individual contributor (IC). CASE IN POINT: Acquisition needs: To grow revenue annually, SDRs need to find business for AEs who attain clients , commitment and help them on-board to the point they can use the service.

Sales Recruiting 75

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 75

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

And in this article he explains why, and proposes a different approach to thinking about the optimal CSM headcount to help you build a more effective customer success organization. On a global scale, on average, product marketers with strong leadership support earn almost $13k more a year than those without. Here are a few teasers.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 28, 2021

The rule of 40 states that at scale, a company’s revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should be at least 40. It was one of my critical measurements of how efficiently we were scaling. Ideally, as a company scales, headcount doesn’t scale exactly in tandem. There are a few ways I think about it.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Software Review Software Payments 52

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded. Let’s say you have a CAC payback time of 12 months, i.e. your fully-loaded customer acquisition costs equal 12 months of gross profit. Setting yourself up for T2D3-style growth usually comes with a very high burn rate?—?hundreds

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. Here’s some intel from our conversation.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader. What was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? How did his 4 years at Salesforce change his operating mentality?

Scale 167

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 167

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. Tara Bryant: It’s funny you ask me that.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

However, when researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford explored growth at more than 3,000 startups , their key finding was that premature scaling was the most common cause of failure. This is episode seven of Scale , a brand new podcast series on moving from startup to scale up. Making sure culture scales as you grow.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

How do you enter a highly competitive marketplace, carve a niche for yourself, and then scale the business to $100 million+ ARR? Brokers and accountants were two of the channels that Rippling identified would help them scale quickly, so they invested in them from early on. Scaling your go-to-market efforts.

Outsourcing Services 207

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 207

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2024

Customer acquisition. One thing about moving away from paid acquisition to higher quality revenue is it requires a re-emphasis and reinvestment into free. Do you see massive disruption in workforces and marketing headcounts shrinking because of AI? “I’m That’s the opportunity here. It’s a pain.

AI Search 218

AI Search SaaS Advertising Sales Hiring 218

Neil Patel

JANUARY 8, 2019

Start off small and as long as the numbers work out, scale up as fast as possible. Don’t just focus your efforts on traffic acquisition, focus on conversion optimization. Don’t be afraid of headcount… remember teams build great businesses, not individuals. Mistake #2: Picking too small of a niche.

Marketing 111

Marketing Sales Hiring Technical Review Scale 111

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

So how did they go from product-market fit to actually scaling a sales org around a repeatable sales process? Arriving at a company that had found early success epitomizing Paul Graham’s mantra of “ do things that don’t scale ”, her brief was the opposite – to build a sales organisation that would scale.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

OPEXEngine

JANUARY 5, 2021

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a key SaaS metric that accounts for how much it costs your company to procure each new customer. A high CAC may work for you if you want to promote stability and predictability in your company’s revenue and are not as interested in scaling quickly. However, this metric calls for discerning judgment.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Acquisition Customer Lifetime Value Scale 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

What started as a series of interviews by co-founder Des Traynor soon bloomed into hundreds of episodes where we explore how businesses are driving growth through customer relationships and how to build successful products at scale. Slack has obviously raised a lot of money, so we weren’t hampered by budgets as long as the ROI was there.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215