OPEXEngine

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

Dramatic increases in SaaS enterprise valuations and competitiveness over the past decade have been driven by business model innovations more often than new rocket science technologies. Could we increase sales productivity rather than hire more sales reps in order to make our growth target next year?

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Sales Hiring Headcount Customer Lifetime Value 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product.

Sales Recruiting 75

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 75

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

SaaS companies tend to have more Finance headcount than traditional, non-Cloud companies. Median Finance headcount in private, growth SaaS companies averaging $25M is 7 Finance executives. When he came out, the first thing he asked me was, how do you define a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

Finance 40

Finance CTO Hire Headcount SaaS 40

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 17, 2019

My experience reinforces the fact that SaaS business model variants and approaches to measuring performance via metrics are still very much undefined. For example, you can access Sales headcount data for Account Executives, Sales Development Reps/Business Development Reps and Renewal Reps along with compensation data.

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Metrics Headcount SaaS 40

The Angel VC

MARCH 22, 2012

It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction.

Startup 189

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Solutions 189

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 9, 2012

Should you pony up the money to feed a full-blown sales and marketing effort? Because of the way the SaaS business model works, if you feed the customer acquisition process, you hurt profits and burn cash. Cut sales and marketing headcount and scale back spending on customer acquisition programs.

Acquisition 124

Acquisition Scale SaaS Headcount 124

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

Forecasting through that disruption generally requires extensive cross-functional collaboration, including review of real-time, business-relevant data and metrics. For SaaS companies, it’s critical to ensure that finance and sales are aligned to accurately forecast revenue, growth, and expenses. . Include sufficient detail.

Forecasting 52

Forecasting Finance Headcount Communication 52

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Put simply, enduring companies have moats which defend their business model - they are a competitive advantage. There are many examples of businesses with moats and they’re characterised as being difficult to replicate (which is why they’re desirable) - below are several examples: Moat. Subscription business model.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Forecasting can’t be done in isolation, or from the top down, and alignment between financial and sales functions is central to creating accurate forecasts. Really robust forecasts rely on the drivers that matter most to the business. Including sufficient detail. Customizing scenarios to particular contexts and challenges.

Forecasting 40

Forecasting Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Scale 40

Valuize Consulting

MAY 4, 2022

Ultimately, building a business case is comparable to making a sale. When it comes to making a successful sale, the best practice is to always present a few possible choices for your buyers to consider. Consider presenting 3 versions of your Scale strategy: a ‘best case’, a ‘partial coverage model’ and a ‘do nothing’ option.

Scale 52

Scale Customer Success Scaling Strategy 52

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. Since then, you’ve spent over 12 years in post-sales leadership. Going through all parts of the customer journey.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. But even for companies with this early viral growth, there comes a point in time when this organic growth needs to be supplemented with formal sales. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Up until this point, to understand our customers, we had primarily relied on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework , product sense, research insight, sales input, and a belief that our customers were companies just like us. Done well, it’s a model that gives anyone at your company an immediate understanding of your customers.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

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? We’re behind on our sales projections. And by implementing the Customer Success capacity planning and budgeting models shared in this article , Kristen did just that. You can’t have more CSMs.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Benchmarks 98

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Here you can see the magic in MongoDB’s business model. As you build up a great sales team, they’ll get better at getting revenue up front, and that’s great up to a point. Some people want to move to a PLG model because they think it’s cheaper than Enterprise sales. They kept the headcount kind of flat.

Revenue 197

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 197

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This time, five minutes in this guy who’s really friendly and really enthusiastic, like with a big smile on his face, says, “Guys, I am so concerned about your business model.” It was a huge growth year from a revenue perspective for us and a huge growth year from an employee headcount perspective.

Scale 114

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Scaling 114

Hitenism

JANUARY 16, 2017

In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution. Reduce sales ramp time by 30-50% via sales enablement. Double headcount every 6-9 months. Innovate on the Business Model.

Scale 147

Scale Venture Capital SaaS Headcount 147

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

Leveraging survey data from 66+ enterprise SaaS companies, Matt Garratt, Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures shares the landscape of how businesses are shifting their sales & GTM strategies to react to today’s uncertain times. Adnan Chaudhry | SVP of Sales @ Salesforce.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 160

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 21, 2024

On a much smaller scale, we’ve also started to see some leaders deploying their genAI budget against headcount savings, particularly in customer service. While some leaders addressed this concern by hosting open source models themselves, others noted that they were prioritizing models with virtual private cloud (VPC) integrations.

Generative AI 145

Generative AI AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence 145

OPEXEngine

JANUARY 5, 2021

What it tells you about your company will depend on your goals, your business model and needs, and your customer lifecycle. So it’s important not to become obsessed with lowering that cost at the expense of the quality of your marketing, sales, and onboarding processes. What is CAC? Should you focus on lowering CAC?

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Acquisition Customer Lifetime Value Scale 52

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 25, 2020

A well-formulated model lets you run unlimited scenarios across any program, department, or business unit, according to your fiscal calendar or other business milestones. In other words, dynamic financial models show you the probable results of pulling various levers (e.g., Properties of robust models.

Headcount 52

Headcount Forecasting Finance Business Model 52

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones. To operate profitably, particularly in the early days, Buildium simply could not afford to offer top of the market salaries—this was a reality of the company’s business model. You read that right—two!

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Baremetrics

JULY 25, 2019

Data science is beginning to replace spreadsheets for entrepreneurs wrestling with uncertainty in their business models. If you’re like most SaaS founders, you’ve googled for a saas financial template you can use to forecast your subscription business. Hire two more sales reps?” How did we get here? What’s really new?

Forecasting 88

Forecasting Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 88

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

Other businesses, like LinkedIn and Netflix, have strong histories of being producers of open-source projects, which provides a strategic recruitment and retention tool for top-tier engineering talent. Related podcast episode: How MongoDB Scaled Their Open-Source Product with a Bottom-Up and Top-Down Sales Motion.

Business 52

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 52

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

JULY 24, 2018

The number of employees when things get particularly troublesome are three, 10, 30, 100, 300 and 1,000 - before company headcount hits these milestones you’ll need to rethink how you operate. Looking at these numbers as a ratio helps you understand how effective a business is at making money. Retention trumps acquisition.

SaaS Payments 131

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Services Business 131