Clouded Judgement

JUNE 20, 2023

Q1 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. As you can see from the data below most cloud businesses beat the consensus estimates for Q1. For businesses selling predominantly to SMB customers, these benchmarks are all slightly lower given the higher-churn nature of SMBs.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Benchmarks Scale 161

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 20, 2022

Q3 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. As you can see from the data below most cloud businesses beat the consensus estimates for Q3. This quarter more than half of cloud software businesses missed next quarters consensus. I consider >120% best in class for companies selling to SMBs (like Bill.com).

Cloud 130

Cloud Software Review Software Benchmarks 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

What we learned from ’08-’09 in SaaS: First, SMB churn went through the roof — as SMBs went under much more quickly and often. As soon as the economy went south, SMBs started to simply go bankrupt and/or shut down. Anyone processing a lot of SMB and credit-card deals saw churn probably double.

SaaS Payments 273

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 273

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2020

Ok so what are the top 5 learnings here for SaaS and Cloud founders? Zendesk’s churn is still a bit higher than pre-Covid, but is almost back to pre-Covid levels. So if you sell to SMBs, or a mix of SMBs and enterprise like Zendesk does (with 160,000 total customers), well … enough with the excuses on churn.

SMB 233

SMB Enterprise Churn Retention 233

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2024

The top leaders in SaaS and Cloud still have triple-digit NRR, so you’ll still grow even if you bring in no new customers. Key Takeaways Track your net new customers after churn. In your first couple of years, you might now have any customer growth, but for anyone at scale, from $4M ARR to $5B, new customer growth is anemic.

Metrics 235

Metrics SaaS Scale Social Media 235

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

Almost everything is going well in SaaS and Cloud these days — except multiples. Channel model and organic approach to SMB and mid-market yields a fairly efficient Sales & Marketing motion. Consistent growth, insanely high GRR, almost no churn, and deal sizes going up. Billion as I type this. It should be worth more.

Scale 217

Scale SMB Software Development Cloud 217

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

New Relic is one of my favorite Cloud stories. Times have changed, the Cloud has gotten a lot bigger, and there are many more vendors, including the red-hot DataDog, to grab mindshare. Do whatever you can to drive up NRR / net negative churn. Today New Relic is worth more than 10x that, at $4.3B. An incredible streak.

Scale 285

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 285

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

Founder and CEO of SaaStr Jason Lemkin deep dives into the current state of SaaS and the Cloud. 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.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 223

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. How do you diagnose and solve churn?

Scale 213

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 213

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2022

Your customers will eventually churn. Today, it’s the default cloud choice for content management at $1 Billion in ARR. HubSpot has stayed mostly SMB focused, but has over time evolved from a simple tool to the marketing and sales hub for many of its customers marketing efforts. But that may be about it.

Scale 268

Scale SMB Mobile Acquisition 268

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2023

The new app was extremely customer-focused and solved problems for people, like Doordash or Netflix might do, but within Enterprise and SMB. Navan solves all of those problems — meeting the CFO’s needs and providing a positive experience for the user, which is why companies rarely churn once they’ve joined.

Payment Solutions 205

Payment Solutions Payments Travel Scale 205

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Bessemer Venture Partners’ Alex Ferrara takes a look at trends and predictions for the cloud industry in 2019. One of the most popular sessions from SaaStr Annual, this presentation will provides an in-depth look at the cloud computing industry across Europe and globally. Want to see more content like this? A few more.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2019

This is pretty darn impressive, and probably more importantly, shows the continued jaw-dropping growth of Cloud. The space Ring Central plays in is huge, but has been surprisingly slow to move to the Cloud. Their churn is lower in the channel, as are total sales and marketing costs. At least to some extent.

Systems Review 201

Systems Review SMB Cloud Enterprise 201

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

In June, CNBC reported that recently listed cloud software companies were getting crushed for poor sales execution. Enterprise sales is hard, which is why most businesses start as an SMB org and grow into an enterprise org. 2 rules for transitioning from SMB to enterprise. That’s not hard to believe.

SMB 73

SMB Enterprise Strategy Compensation 73

OPEXEngine

MAY 18, 2021

According to Bessemer ’s State of the Cloud 2021 as of this January, there were a total of 527 private unicorns (a unicorn is a private company with a valuation over $1B), with a total cumulative value of more than $1.9 More and more Cloud companies are translating usage fees to ARR which can be tricky if usage is hugely variable.

SaaS Payments 98

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments Payment Services 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 235

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 235

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Eyal and Megan host a fireside chat between Google Cloud and Zenoss, a leader in software-defined IT operations. I thought CRM, in the cloud, et cetera, was never going to be anything. Do you not think that actually we’ve just transferred to cloud lock-in versus on-prem lock-in? So what do I know right? vendors right?

SaaS Payments 128

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 128

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

How does this differ when comparing enterprise to SMB? How does Tom think about calculating churn when it comes to multi-year contracts? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise? What were the commonalities of leading indicators of churn? What is the right way to conduct a churn analysis?

Scale 112

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 112

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 8, 2022

“OK, so if an SMB rep needs to make say $80-$100k in OTE (base + bonus) … and you need to clear, say, $300k in revenue from that rep to make the math work on your side … at, say, 100 closed deals a year, to bring in $300k to the company, each deal has to have a $3,000 ACV on average”. What Is a Good Customer Churn Rate?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring SaaS Scale Benchmarks 52

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

I’m going to first talk about some of the insights that we’ve gotten from serving Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies, both in terms of what they’re seeing in the market and how bookings and churn and things like that are heading, but then also how they’re adjusting to this on their go to market strategies.

Sales Hiring 155

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 155

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

If you didn’t catch it the other day … and you can read about it on SaaStr …Microsoft and Google Cloud both had extremely strong quarters, Microsoft Azure grew 40% last quarter , and a record number of nine-figure and billion-dollar deals. Having multiple billion-dollar deals in one quarter is pretty impressive.

Scale 184

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 184

OPEXEngine

MAY 12, 2020

Now you might be thinking “SaaS and cloud are already THE future – they replace the legacy software world of the past.” I’ve met thousands and thousands of SaaS CEOs and execs and I can affirmatively say that most SaaS businesses have adopted the product model of the future (cloud) but still employ the internal practices of the past.

Technical Review 59

Technical Review SaaS Software Review Sales Hiring 59

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

373: Bessemer’s 5th Annual State of the Cloud Report returns for a definitive look at the cloud industry today. We want to take you through the cloud journey over the last several years. Now, the cloud index fell along with it. If you go back to before 2014, what you see is the power of the cloud.

Sales Hiring 151

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 151

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Former Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz pointed out that product-led growth (PLG) firms are less profitable than sales-led growth firms, poking a hole in the “product sells itself” myth, and clouding dreams of liberation from costly S&M departments. Why are companies afraid of churn in 2023? Retain is the new add. Bankruptcy.

Software Review 118

Software Review Development Team Review Underperforming Technical Team Scale 118

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2019

Is it best to start at enterprise and work down to SMB or does SMB and work up to enterprise work best? When does SMB pricing turn into enterprise and mid level pricing and so much more. Can I not just start at SMB and stay there or can I start with SMB and scale up? What’s good for each segment?

Outsourcing Services 112

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring SMB 112

SaaStr

DECEMBER 6, 2019

288: Des Cahill is the Chief Marketing Officer for Oracle CX Cloud Suite, an integrated set of marketing, sales, commerce and service solutions that power customer experience for thousands of leading global brands. Prior to Oracle, Des was the CMO @ Kerio Technologies marketing to over 60,000 SMB customers and 5,000 channel partners.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Cloud Mobile Technology 131

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And G2 Gives, we partner with philanthropies, we partner with some of our customers like AWS and Google Cloud, who can then make donations for every review, to thank their customers. They’re scrutinizing their existing status and cloud spend more than ever. It’s most severe in the SMB world. So quite significantly.

Software Review 173

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 173

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2020

Pipe’s lending model is so centered around churn prediction, what does their churn analysis look like at Pipe? How does Harry think about the right way to structure churn postmortems? And I think the SMB mid-market sector is actually what’s fueling this tremendous growth we’re seeing year over year.

SaaS Payments 207

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Finance Payments 207

CustomerSuccessBox

MARCH 4, 2022

Architecting the customer success organization and solutions to leverage and grow in support of our revenue goals, including finding the correct balance of services and support for our many customer categories – Large Enterprise, Mid-market, and SMB. Does the Customer Success software predicts churn and recommend the next best actions?

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value Interviewing 52

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 5, 2019

Identifying a clear purpose and vision becomes all the more important given the rapid evolution of the SaaS industry, whether it’s how fast the underlying cloud technology is changing, the massive transformation of the app economy, or the race to incorporate AI. Without a strong rudder, you risk your ship running aground. trillion and $15.4

Scale 118

Scale Scaling Artificial Intelligence Business 118

CustomerSuccessBox

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

With this model for some reason people churn out and that’s when businesses are more likely to see a net retention rate in SaaSthat is less than 100%. For the cloud-scale applications, Datadog monitors the servers, tools, databases, and services, with a data analytics platform that is SaaS-based. An average customer pays $10,000.

Retention 52

Retention SaaS Payments Payments Payment Methods 52

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2023

Lucas Price , former SVP Sales @ Zipwhip, now Founder/CEO at Yardstick I work with a lot of partners that are trying to make this leap by working with Cloud Platforms or large System Integrators (Deloitte, Accenture). Once those are in place, then you can put together a real enterprise sales strategy. Remember this is an experiment.

Scale 67

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 67

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 12, 2021

Enterprise CRM vs. SMB CRM. Track your recurring revenue, upgrades, downgrades, and churn. This feature is designed to predict which sales leads are more likely to convert, churn risk, lifetime value, delayed payment, and more trends and patterns that managers can use to inform decisions. Create and send proposals using quotes.

Payment Solutions 84

Payment Solutions Enterprise Scale Payments 84

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 12, 2021

As Definitive Healthcare entered 2021, they realized they needed to revamp their onboarding process to reduce churn. Finally, their average churn score decreased in just a few months. They also increased client retention among SMB subscriptions by 2%. Onboarding Hero – VAIRKKO. Renewal/Expansion Hero – Jisr.

Healthcare 98

Healthcare Systems Review Scale Point of Sale 98

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

And to shift resources, we had to automate more and more of our SMB offering and make sure that we could refine our product to make sure self service journeys were more productive and frictionless. Jennifer Tejada: Another example we’ve seen plenty of in our customer world is this expedition of cloud migration.

Scale 154

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 154

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2019

Finally, before that, Amit was the Founder & CEO @ SparkThis, an outsourced marketing and sales service for cloud companies. And finally, before that, Amit was the founder and CEO at SparkThis, an outsource marketing and sales service for cloud companies. Be it enterprise or SMB. And again, it depends on the churn.

Outsourced Development 128

Outsourced Development Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 128

yoursales

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Mimiran – More Leads and More Deals for SMB Services Business. Online Succes – Simple Lead Generation Software from the Cloud. Mimiran – More Leads and More Deals for SMB Services Business. Churn Buster – Recover More Failed Payments. Maximizer CRM – Grow with Confidence. Grow with Maximizer CRM.

Scale 99

Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions Outsourcing Services 99