Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2022

So, did headcount at the Series A. In 11 years, the median headcount at Series A swelled from 15 to 28. [1]. 1] Thank you to the Pitchbook team for running the headcount analysis data. [2] More capital meant the constraints of yester-decade no longer applied. Founders declared a maximum acceptable dilution instead.

Headcount 316

Headcount Venture Capital Finance Startup 316

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Some of the changes we’ve seen in the last year or two include: CAC reduction Headcount optimization Price complexity Quality of revenue A different environment means a different strategy, and Notion Capital lays out four business model changes that could be helpful based on what peers are doing. You don’t want to be there.

Business Model 238

Business Model SaaS Payments Payments Headcount 238

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

One powerful avenue is through the use of an exceptionally well-curated, comprehensive, and accessible virtual data room (VDR)! One of the most common questions we get from early stage founders is “what should I put in my data room?” key in vivo data results). What milestones do you intend to hit along the way (e.g.,

Development Team Review 128

Development Team Review Technical Review Finance Systems Review 128

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

Some good data on this split. There is almost no software and non-headcount budget for CS. This data is interesting. 64% of CS teams spend $200,000 or less a year on non-headcount, with growth stage companies spending the least, just 0.1% A few things stood out to me: #1. of revenue.

Customer Success 290

Customer Success Headcount Churn Revenue 290

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2023

The VSB chart shows a bi-modal tilt to the data: most companies observe a moderate increase but about one-quarter have seen a doubling. The antidote: greater pipeline-to-quota coverage ratios by either increasing the top of the funnel or reducing the account executive headcount.

Startup 326

Startup SMB Headcount Sales 326

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

Everyone is basically doing more with not much more headcount (see next point). #4. Growing Headcount, But Much More Slowly That Revenue. Headcount is up 29% year-over-year, but revenue is up 50%. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D.

Headcount 192

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2020

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. I also want to thank everyone contributed data.

Scale 364

Scale Headcount Benchmarks Retention 364

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2023

B2B companies have reduced headcount to a greater extent than at any time since 2020. The current wave of layoffs, a difficult component of the innovation boom/bust cycle, differs from the previous years’ dynamics. In the last three years, B2C startups’ ratio of layoffs have dwarfed B2B layoffs. In 2020, B2C companies cut 8.8x

B2C 288

B2C B2B Headcount Innovation 288

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 5, 2020

Over the weekend, I analyzed Roger’s data to answer this question. But starting that week, startups began reducing headcount by about 700 per day. However, there doesn’t yet seem to be a daily or weekly increase in the data. On the brighter side, it is a resource for startups looking to hire as they grow.

Sales Recruiting 329

Sales Recruiting Startup Headcount Sales Hiring 329

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 31, 2023

AI & data continue to dominate the funding landscape as founders & investors seek novel applications of the technology. Companies & startups in particular begin to report meaningful improvements in productivity from AI, reducing their headcount growth, butn growing revenue just as much as projected.

AI Search 234

AI Search AI Scale Headcount 234

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 2, 2019

Headcount Planning. But headcount planning is often a useful place to start because the inputs required to make decisions are the least dependent on factors outside of the sales organization. This decision will drive many of your other headcount decisions. How many direct reports do sales managers currently have? Quota Setting.

Headcount 41

Headcount Sales Hiring Scale Sales 41

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2022

Some about the data: PLG companies R&D spend hasn’t produced new business at the same rate as a dollar invested in sales & marketing post-Covid. Sales-lead teams cut headcount when account executives don’t attain numbers.

Headcount 305

Headcount Market Research Acquisition Education 305

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2022

And they’ll be able to do this efficiently, without increasing headcount or hours logged. Of course, we’re acutely aware that many businesses are operating with less headcount, resources, and bandwidth than before so we narrowed down our advice to the five essentials for driving true bottom-line impact.

Headcount 237

Headcount Customer Support Strategy Branding 237

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Deel solved this by scaling the revenue operations team in conjunction to support sales, design quotas, and go-to-market strategies, and leverage data to identify the best strategies. Without headcount planning for the support team, the company’s response time and customer satisfaction scores dipped. Use your data to inform.

Sales Hiring 220

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 220

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

Don’t Tie Revenue To Headcount “You want to get away from a business model where every incremental dollar requires incremental hiring,” says Deatsch. So instead of focusing on scaling headcount quickly, work toward growing revenue quickly. Why do they do it this way?

Sales Hiring 211

Sales Hiring Enterprise Headcount Scale 211

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. We made our machine more efficient even as we scaled, grew headcount, and skyrocketed our revenue. In the first six months of the year, our team’s headcount grew by almost 60%, yet our revenue outpaced that, growing by 142%. So how did we do it? It’s a byproduct.

Scale 55

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 55

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 23, 2022

With increasing business costs and reduced headcount, companies are feeling the squeeze as they also grapple with rising consumer expectations. Let customer data drive your efforts. So, with the expiry of third-party cookies on the horizon, businesses should make collecting, analyzing and acting on first-party data a priority.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Retention Headcount Customer Lifetime Value 211

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 6, 2023

First - some data on the magnitude of the slowdown. If we look at the net new ARR companies added in Q4 ‘22 vs Q4 ‘21 (we just wrapped up Q4 ‘22 earnings season and have that data), it paints a pretty bleak picture. That’s a big difference, especially when you layer in the growth in headcount from 2021 to 2022.

Cloud 130

Cloud Headcount Subscription Payment Features 130

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

The surge in pipeline is notable given the uncertainty in the market but the close rates are low & sales cycles slow : another confirmatory data point for startups to plan cautiously in 2023. Today, our largest R2 customer is another AI company using us for exactly the purpose of being a neutral place to store their training data.

Cloud 236

Cloud Azure Headcount Software Review 236

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2023

Security is all about where data is coming from and how you’re training your models. Ai made it possible to engage with students, teachers, and others within the platform, save on customer service headcount, and scale the company. Yet, 79% will struggle to ensure their AI models are responsible, secure, and free of bias.

AI 229

AI Technology Scale Startup 229

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. But if you were curious about what to expect at each stage of revenue growth, the data illustrates common patterns. Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales?

Scale 356

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 356

ChurnZero

JANUARY 11, 2024

Most company budgets that earmark dollars for customer success intend for it to go towards headcount. ChurnZero refers to that portion of the budget as the “non-headcount budget.” 2023 non-headcount customer success budgets as a percentage of revenue: Most non-headcount customer success budgets range from 0.08% of revenue to 0.2%

Headcount 52

Headcount SaaS Leadership Benchmarks 52

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 5, 2022

About 20% of those polled will conduct a layoff, and on average will reduce headcount by 20%. To summarize, the data highlights that we’re living in a market in flux. 50% of companies won’t change compensation this year, 33% will increase it, and 17% will reduce it.

Startup 220

Startup Scale Headcount Compensation 220

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 23, 2020

Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion. Internal data points are critical additions: adoption of new infrastructure technology, dissatisfaction with an incumbent vendor, budget availability, or a new project or initiative. A company anoints a new department head catalyzing change.

Scale 241

Scale Headcount Sales Startup 241

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 7, 2022

Capture customer data that helps you to personalize your sales outreach and improve the customer experience. Maintain sales hygiene by integrating with the other essential tools in your sales tech stack to ensure that your data is always up-to-date and synchronized. Increase your leads without increasing your headcount.

Sales Funnel 245

Sales Funnel Sales Headcount Subscription 245

CustomerSuccessBox

DECEMBER 3, 2021

However, if you do your homework and show quantitative data demonstrating CS contribution it will become easy. You may find yourself protecting your headcount, rooting for investments you want in tech, and giving suggestions for new product features. 5 Data points to get your Capacity Planning and CS Budget approved.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Data Technical Review Headcount 52

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

The three co-founders were gathering data in hot storage to respond more effectively to instances with the benefit of historical and technical context. Usually, they don’t have the most data scientists or experience in AI. Context is magic, but it’s often hard to come by when solving really complex problems,” Jennifer says.

Generative AI 226

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 226

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2024

1: Capital As an operator, your job is to take money and add headcount and programs to drive the growth engine for your company, You might think of capital as fundraising and budget. You look at data that says you need more pipeline, and you go address the issue.

Headcount 196

Headcount Scaling Finance Engineering 196

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

Last year, the company doubled its headcount, tripled revenue and landed on G2’s Top 100 Global Software list. . Chorus’s AI has reveled some interesting insights from the data. And some of the marquee customers include MongoDB, Gitlab and Qualtrics. . The funding comes at a point when Chorus is in the hypergrowth mode.

Scale 345

Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 345

Sales Hacker

MAY 19, 2021

If yes, does your data help them figure out what to do next? As a manager of SDRs and the co-founder of SDRs Anonymous, seeing sentiment gives me the ability to analyze the replies to our email sequences and use this data to coach my reps on how to really connect with their customers. 3 ways to use sentiment data.

Data 80

Data Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Funnel 80

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 16, 2022

Support teams are facing a critical juncture: business costs and customer expectations continue to grow while resources like headcount and budget are decreasing. A messenger can automatically gather rich, in-the-moment, first-party data for you via chatbots , surveys , third-party integrations , and other cutting-edge technology.

Headcount 118

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring Customer Lifetime Value 118

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 20, 2021

Much like its other business operations counterparts, customer support operations (or CS ops) aims to evaluate your existing customer support processes, metrics, and data to get insights and identify opportunities for optimization. Starting to build out a support operations function doesn’t necessarily mean adding headcount straight away.

Scale 156

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

But today, the underlying backbone of all of it is the right data. While science has always been part of sales, it’s hard to ignore the increasing importance of taking a data-driven approach to growing your business. As a sales rep, you need to be comfortable understanding the data behind your pipeline.

Sales Hiring 188

Sales Hiring Metrics Revenue Sales 188

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Back in 2015, when didn’t have the data or NRR or GRR of 115 public SaaS companies. SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin also wrote how Customer Success has now morphed into part of the sales team and that the 2024 trends in CS include everyone wanting to eliminate humans from support to replace that headcount with AI and bots.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 239

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

of Customer Success teams have fewer than 50 team members, and most teams surveyed fall well below industry benchmarks on CS team headcount. of respondents reported having non-headcount budgets of $200,000 or less: a severe under-investment in this critical business function. However, 76.5% In an encouraging sign, 59.5% of companies.

Leadership 98

Leadership Trends Customer Success Investment 98

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2020

But with so much data to consider, how can you define the help desk metrics that matter for your team? As Seth Godin once put it: “Don’t measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions.” Collecting concise metrics creates a rich tapestry of data to interpret and empathize with customer behavior.

Customer Support 211

Customer Support Metrics Technical Review Scale 211

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

Vimeo just hired their first sales rep 3 years ago to spearhead $20k+ deals … and now they have 100 reps, and are on track to double that headcount. The Key to Upgrades to Enterprise and from Free-to-Paid in Self-Service at Scale is Data. My Top 10 Learnings: #1. 50% of Vimeo’s revenue is international.

Enterprise 225

Enterprise Scale Sales Hiring Headcount 225