Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2023

Startups selling to enterprises have increased 36%, twice those of Mid-Market & SMB focused companies. The distribution chart above shows about one-third of enterprise sales cycles take 50% or longer than last year to complete. But the latency isn’t evenly distributed.

Startup 350

Startup SMB Headcount Sales 350

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

Case shares the playbook for the “messy middle” to prevent the very predictable problems you run into in the middle ground of the mid-market, that space between SMB and enterprise. Some define it by headcount, typically around 200-2000 employees, and others by revenue, generally $10M to $1B annual recurring revenue.

Scale 243

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 243

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2024

1M+ ACV Customers Growing The Fastest UiPath at $1B+ ARR is a tale of going … even more enterprise. $1M+ Growing Headcount and Expenses, Just More Slowly Than Revenue The story for most SaaS and Cloud leaders. Grow headcount and expenses, but more slowly than bookings. #5. UiPath proves it again. #3.

Scale 304

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring AI 304

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 27, 2022

As companies and their headcounts grow, so do their tech stacks. The scale of enterprise businesses makes them inherently complex – they rely on a suite of tools tailored for specific workflows. This is the fourth post in a content series exploring Intercom’s investment in supporting enterprises.

Enterprise 205

Enterprise Headcount Engineering Cloud 205

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

resellers) that sold its product into the enterprise , and a lot of internal resources that supported the channel. Now, as it’s gone more and more enterprise, it’s staffed up with a deep and strong one. Then to sell Dropbox Enterprise, it added several. But then, as it went more enterprise, it finally did too : ).

Scale 342

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 342

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2023

B2B companies have reduced headcount to a greater extent than at any time since 2020. Longer-term contracts & steadier enterprise buyers help smooth shocks for B2B companies. The current wave of layoffs, a difficult component of the innovation boom/bust cycle, differs from the previous years’ dynamics. in 2021, & 6.9x

B2C 322

B2C B2B Headcount Business Model 322

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

They’re a barometer of sub-enterprise B2B SaaS in many ways. At the end of the day, in SaaS, efficiency really comes from growing revenue faster than headcount. Almost everyone is doing more with … yes, more headcount, but only a smidge more. We all at least sort of know HubSpot. And what’s the latest?

Scale 325

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 325

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Dorian Stone , Head of Organizations Revenue at Grammarly, is here to share lessons from his experience of scaling the company from consumer to SMB to Enterprise to help you steer your expansion efforts in the right direction. Overview: Grammarly’s Enterprise Evolution. But in an Enterprise setting, they will be very different people.

Scale 246

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

50k+ deals (which they define as enterprise) are the biggest engine of growth today, and growing 116% year-over-year. $50k+ Like many tech companies, Monday added a ton of headcount in 2021. It then added only 63 employees last quarter, and plans to continue with very slow headcount for a while.

Headcount 321

Headcount SMB Engineering Scaling 321

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

Last year, the company doubled its headcount, tripled revenue and landed on G2’s Top 100 Global Software list. . Keep in mind that Conversation Intelligence is the fastest-growing segment in sales technology, with much traction in the enterprise. And some of the marquee customers include MongoDB, Gitlab and Qualtrics. .

Scale 359

Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 359

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2021

“In enterprise SaaS , set up a quantifiable joint success plan and track progress with exec sponsor every month” — Himanshu Jain, VP Product Management, CommerceIQ. “Adding headcount in customer success dept” — Hoala Greevy, CEO, PauBox. You just make the headcount more effective. . “1.)

Churn 328

Churn Sales Hiring Headcount Technical Review 328

Tom Tunguz

JULY 10, 2024

Company Product Base Price AI Price Ratio Github Github Enterprise 21 10 0.67 Company Product Base Price AI Price Ratio Github Github Enterprise 21 10 0.67 If buyers act rationally & reduce headcount by 50% 1 which we know is probably not true, then to maintain the same revenue per customer, price would need to double.

AI 277

AI Pricing Sales Hiring Strategy 277

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 1, 2020

The rule says that all employees of affiliated companies must be considered headcount. The Federal government has become an important target for new business, particularly for enterprise companies because the budgets are stable. Historically, startups haven’t been able to access SBA programs because of this affiliation rule.

Headcount 329

Headcount Payment Services Government Innovation 329

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

But it’s already starting in the contact center, where leaders from Zendesk to Gorgias to Intercom to Talkdesk are automating away 30%-50% of contact center headcount. Complex enterprise business process change still takes time. Maybe, maybe not. All unstructured data to be instantly structured and searchable.

AI Search 305

AI Search SaaS Headcount AI 305

The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly. I've called them "Basic", "Pro" and "Enterprise". Revenues" tab The model assumes that you have three pricing tiers.

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

Atlassian plans to double its headcount over the coming few years. So while Atlassian has plenty of enterprise customers, it hasn’t gone that enterprise. And half of Atlassian’s employees now live 2 or more hours from the office. This is the secret sauce to Atlassian’s business model. And a few more: #6

Scale 289

Scale Headcount Cloud Forecasting 289

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2021

They wait for two reasons: first, it’s another headcount, which costs money, which can seem expensive when you have say just $5k-$10k a month in MRR and 6 months of runway left before you’re out of cash. Your first enterprise customer, more often than not, will actually get you your second. Yet still … people wait.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Customer Success Headcount Churn 299

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 17, 2022

Product: freemium, mid-market, enterprise, other SKUs. A spike of mid-market leads because a competitor has sunsetted their product raises the question of whether to grow the mid-market AE headcount. But $7m ready-to-close this quartery with 80% belonging to the ideal customer profile on a $1.5m Pipeline is prologue.

Headcount 253

Headcount Engineering Trends Onboarding 253

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 16, 2024

Today, IT budgets are roughly broken down into: ~50% headcount / personnel, ~25% software, ~15% hardware, and ~10% outsourcing / consultants. As software grows as a percentage, I think we see headcount / outsourcing shrinking. Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue.

Outsourcing Services 274

Outsourcing Services Cloud Software Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2023

AI has been with IBM for 20 years, and now they have Enterprise-grade software. 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 305

AI Technology Scale Startup 305

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

The enterprise segment outgrew the company’s average growth rate by 8 percentage points. For fiscal 2022, large customers represented 61% of total revenue compared to 54% of total revenue in 2021 and 46% in 2020… Overall NDR fell, but enterprise spending remains steady.

Cloud 244

Cloud Azure Headcount Software Review 244

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2022

Like GitLab and other enterprise leaders for developing software, a lot still runs on private clouds, servers, and more. But they need the headcount to grow this quickly. #8. From 58% growth at $200m ARR to 71% at almost $500m in ARR. #2. Most customers still run Confluent on their own compute, but Cloud rapidly growing.

Scale 62

Scale Cloud Headcount Scaling 62

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 5, 2022

Companies selling to mid-market and enterprise see this pattern with about twice the frequency of those selling to small and very small businesses. About 20% of those polled will conduct a layoff, and on average will reduce headcount by 20%. 30% of respondents have observed longer sales cycles.

Startup 242

Startup Scale Headcount Compensation 242

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

Do you have to double your headcount to make it from $10M to $20M or even $2M to $5M? For headcount specifically, make sure that the constraint to growing faster is that you don’t have enough salespeople to work the demand that exists for your business. When those outcomes are achieved, the hire gets their headcount.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 306

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2020

Not if you are selling into the enterprise. No headcount limits. Every Great Engineer is Accretive at $2m in ARR. In Just One Full Release Cycl e. You think engineers are cost centers, at least from a financial model perspective? I didn’t figure this out until $4m in ARR. Once we got there, I saw all of this. No budgets.

Sales Hiring 344

Sales Hiring Headcount Engineering Banking 344

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

While these aren’t great metrics if Weave was enterprise, they are still solid for SMBs. Fairly low revenue per headcount, although being headquartered in Utah with a large presence in India does seem to bring costs down. #7. It’s a tough outcome for a team that is working hard to scale well into the nine figures of ARR.

SaaS Payments 290

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods SMB 290

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2024

Our focus is on enterprise software and commerce infrastructure such as fintech, and logistics. Until recently, founders would describe their growth rate by how fast they were growing their company headcount. Activant Capital is thrilled to have invested in Owner multiple times already. #2. And how big is your current fund?

Scale 275

Scale Headcount Travel B2B 275

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 21, 2024

In 2024, we believe the revenue opportunity will be multiples larger in the enterprise. Some naysayers doubted that genAI could scale into the enterprise at all. As always, building and selling any product for the enterprise requires a deep understanding of customers’ budgets, concerns, and roadmaps. Isn’t this all hype?

Generative AI 145

Generative AI Enterprise AI Artificial Intelligence 145

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2019

In the enterprise, CIOs are getting fatigued on the soft costs to train employees on new apps that don’t absolutely need to learn. Support OKTA and other solutions in the enterprise so your app works with their log-ins and identity systems out-of-the-box. Not that much given the overall headcount I nominally had assigned to me.

Headcount 259

Headcount Enterprise Pricing Onboarding 259

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2024

Part of the joy for him was being able to tie the two motions together, building an Enterprise business on top of an existing business, and by the time he left Heroku, they had gone from about 5% to 50% of revenue. Vimeo has new and Enterprise products so that probably means many ICPs. This is how Adam ended up at Vimeo.

AI Search 278

AI Search SaaS Advertising Sales Hiring 278

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Many people complain that there’s no budget in Enterprise and that it’s impossible to close bigger deals. Enterprise Customers Are 75% Of Revenue. MongoDB has become pretty Enterprise, and that’s common for people north of $1B ARR. Slack started as a free tool, and as it crossed $1B, its majority became Enterprise.

Revenue 245

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 245

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

Most of PagerDuty’s customers are Enterprises, and they’re in varying places on the continuum in their journey of adopting GenAI. Are Enterprise Leaders Excited About GenAI? Or supporting customers by enabling GenAI? They differ from startups because they’re Fortune 100 companies with a lot of legacy, incumbency, and regulation.

Generative AI 304

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 304

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 14, 2022

They sit around a table and share actionable insights about their company’s transition from SMB to enterprise sales. . Key KPIs for reaching the Enterprise milestone . There’s one nightmare scenario every company wants to avoid when they make the transition from SMB to Enterprise. Enterprise. “In Mid-market.

SMB 107

SMB Enterprise Scale Outbound Sales Team 107

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. The largest of enterprise customers should renew at a 95%+ rate for most SaaS apps. At $4m, $400k, and so on. You may be able to pare this back a bit later, but probably not too much. And then measure the results.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. The largest of enterprise customers should renew at a 95%+ rate for most SaaS apps. At $4m, $400k, and so on. You may be able to pare this back a bit later, but probably not too much. And then measure the results.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 245

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

The other thing is I’ve studied enterprise software for literally 30 years. “Look, here’s enterprise software. Peter : We’re on this enterprise software. I actually drive revenue from headcount, but I make sure I have enough stocked away. OK, I better learn how to read.” What are you doing?

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Especially for Enterprise software, there is no single persona in the buying journey. Enterprise has a budget owner, influencer, decisionmaker, and finance person to sign off. What kind of headcount do you have? If you’re self-serve appealing to SMBs, you have a budget owner and decision maker. What is the unifying framework?

Scale 280

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 280