SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

So we’ve covered HubSpot more than any other SaaS leader on this 5 Interesting Learnings series, in part because so many of us use HubSpot ourselves, and in part because its metrics and use cases are so like many of the apps we build and sell ourselves. 5 More Interesting Learnings then: #1.

SMB 315

SMB CTO Onboarding Scale 315

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2021

Q: What core SaaS metrics should we obsess about? Beyond MRR growth + managing the burn rate — which really are all that matters … you should obsess over improving every key metric and KPI. First just establish your baseline, for better or worse, in each key metric. Maybe your NPS isn’t that high.

Metrics 320

Metrics SaaS Churn Engineering 320

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 28, 2021

The increase in ACV, number of million dollar customers, and bookings composition implies the compnay pushed to serving bigger, enterprise customers. Larger enterprise contracts imply longer contract terms and larger pre-payments, boosting these figures. Why is this? The services gross margin is -19%.

Payment Services 359

Payment Services Metrics Payment Solutions Payments 359

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Offers workshops, networking, and investor matchmaking for startups and enterprises. The event is known for its focused content on SaaS growth strategies, metrics, and best practices, making it particularly valuable for B2B SaaS companies. Features 300+ speakers from top SaaS companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Snowflake.

Software 245

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 245

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 20, 2020

introduced a gem of a new metric : month zero cash-on-cash payback. It’s not a metric one sees very often in pitch decks. But it’s another metric to add to the toolkit. Where does ZCP fit into the panoply of metrics for SaaS companies? It’s a cash accounting metric, not an accrual accounting metric.

Metrics 347

Metrics Payments Banking Sales 347

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customer success, and post-sales team. But at the start of its expansion play, Checkr’s enterprise motion failed, and sales cycles were slow, taking up to a year for $100k & up deals.

Revenue 296

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 296

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2021

Moving from Churn to NRR as the Core Retention Metric. This may sound obvious to more enterprise folks, but many Very Small Business and SMB focused SaaS companies still focus more on churn than NRR. NPS is now the #1 metric at HubSpot — for all employees. NPS is A Great Core Metric. #3. I Was Wrong. But try it.

Metrics 62

Metrics SMB Scale B2C 62

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2024

So this may seem like a pretty specific post, but it’s a big and real issue I see so, so often these today in SaaS companies at scale, from $20m-$200m+ ARR: They’re reacting to tougher times by going “more enterprise” That can make a lot of sense. I hear this again and again. Which makes them even more valuable.

Enterprise 326

Enterprise Scale SMB Investment 326

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

The #1 Thing That Makes Enterprise Customers See Value: A Great Dashboard #3. The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #5. Top Posts: #1. 10 Ways AI Will Change Sales Forever. Its Already Happening, In Fact. #2.

AI 271

AI Venture Capital Sales B2B 271

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2025

Use metrics like product usage, NPS, and engagement to identify risks early. Focus on Net Retention Net retention is the ultimate metric for customer success. But in the earliest days, NRR is the simplest core metric for Customer Success. Track metrics like churn, NRR, time-to-value, and customer health scores.

Sales Hiring 234

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Retention 234

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

The summary statistics of the business reveal a company with a fairly high contract value of $98,600 and the largest customers generating 72% of revenue, putting the business squarely in the enterprise segment of SaaS companies. Revenue, $M. Revenue Growth. -. Gross Margin. Sales Efficiency. -. Net Income Margin. Where will Amplitude trade?

Metrics 295

Metrics Benchmarks PayPal Enterprise 295

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Greenhouse CMO, Carin Van Vuuren, and VP of Enterprise Revenue, Ankur Passi, share their approach to bridging the communication gap to bring the traditional frenemies together. But the thing that we really need to ensure is that our sales and marketing teams are aligned on the core metrics.” Align on a north star metric every year.

Enterprise 287

Enterprise Marketing Sales SaaS 287

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

implies a 17 month payback period with a contract size of $55k, but the S-1 suggests the enterprise part of the business has been an important focal point. The breadth of the solution is hard to convey, unless you visit the features page ; when printed it’s more than 100 pages long. Revenue, $M. Revenue Growth. -. Gross Margin.

Metrics 316

Metrics Outsourced Development Scale Cloud 316

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2024

What are the three most under-discussed metrics on social media, with VCs, and especially with founders? Fastly , an Enterprise CDN at $500M in revenue is only growing its customers 1%. They went from on-prem to a SaaS model and may flatter their metrics a little by confusing them. This should be your North Star metric.

Metrics 303

Metrics SaaS Scale Social Media 303

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

”” Benchmark Data The data shown below depicts how the ServiceTitan data compares to the operating metrics of current public SaaS businesses. Together, we refer to our Pro and FinTech products as “add-on products.””

Benchmarks 299

Benchmarks Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 299

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2024

Splunk is a 20-year-old Enterprise software giant that has accomplished many things — a 2012 IPO, a $28B+ Cisco acquisition in 2023, and $3.7 As Christian’s been the CRO of Splunk for over seven years now, he’s a wealth of knowledge on what it really takes to be successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales. His answer? Why is that?

Enterprise 309

Enterprise Scale Sales SaaS 309

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

PST, Bo Borland, founder, and CEO of playbuilt, shares four steps for creating repeatable success at every stage of growth, specifically in B2B Enterprise. Moving From SMB To Enterprise — A combination of pre-sales like solution or sales engineering, customer success, and a more robust revenue ops function.

Enterprise 294

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 294

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2025

We wanted to kick it off with some of the key insights with Box CEO Aaron Levie and IBM VP AI Raj Datta: The Numbers Don’t Lie – ChatGPT Hit 500M Users in Just ~2 Years Let’s start with the cold, hard metrics that SaaS leaders seem to underestimate: AI adoption is happening at an unprecedented velocity.

AI 217

AI Technology ChatGPT Cloud 217

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Collect customer data to calculate complex formulas for tracking metrics, monitor customer health scores, and resolve support tickets while continuously trying to improve retention and expansion. Top customer success management platforms for mid-market and enterprise companies. Defining a customer success tool and other FAQs.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 29, 2024

Dan, a Stanford-trained engineer with experience guiding companies like Intuit, understands how to optimize your product metrics for growth by focusing on retention and building a product users truly value. Understanding the product metrics Let’s have two products – A and B. The key is to go beyond surface-level metrics.

Metrics 105

Metrics Scale Acquisition Retention 105

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2024

Accel Partner Philipe Botteri and Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli deep dive into the lessons learned about building an Enterprise-focused Generative AI company and scaling it. AI Adoption in the Enterprise How do you make it happen? Synthesia has a great story, going from 0 to 50,000 customers.

Enterprise 296

Enterprise AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence 296

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

The conversation was great, and we went especially deep on how to run a business that has both a large self-serve component, and a free edition … and a fast-growing enterprise business as well. If You Want to Do Free, Self-Serve, and Enterprise Well — You Have to Leave Some Money on the Table. This energized everyone. #7.

Enterprise 302

Enterprise Scale Sales Hiring Headcount 302

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Let’s jump right into this set of community questions focused on SaaS metrics, growth, and efficiency. What metrics should we expect in this environment? These payback metrics are important for investing. Q: When it comes to GTM efficiency, what are the most important leading indicator metrics? Do zero-cost budgeting.

Metrics 274

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 274

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2023

So over the past decade-and-a-half we’ve come up with a lot of yardsticks, metrics and rules for SaaS companies. E.g.,: CAC of < 12 months is Good-to-Great Paying sales reps 25%-30% of what they close is Good A burn ratio of 1 or less is Good These metrics do sort of work, if you have some capital to spend (i.e., They don’t.

SaaS Payments 281

SaaS Payments Metrics SMB Payments 281

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

Metrics are critical in SaaS, and you need to track them fastidiously. But it’s also important to focus on the right metrics, at the right stage, and not obsess about the less important ones at the wrong times. If you are providing value into SMEs or Enterprises … it’s pretty sticky.

Sales Hiring 276

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 276

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

The Evolution of Vertical SaaS The shift from horizontal to vertical SaaS solutions represents a fundamental change in how enterprises buy and implement software. Balanced Metrics : While they track traditional SaaS metrics, they also measure customer success indicators specific to the construction industry.

Construction 253

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 253

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2023

Your enterprise must grow, and profitably. Kate Ahlering, CRO at Calendly, shares how revenue operations are every CRO’s secret weapon to revolutionizing enterprise sales growth. . Each channel, function, and team has different goals, metrics, and KPIs. Embracing revenue operations as buying cycles change. Not anymore.

Enterprise 263

Enterprise Sales Sales Funnel Compensation 263

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Elizabeth explained: “We continued doggedly poking at this problem of where else can Copilot help developers be more creative and more satisfied, and so we integrated Copilot then across the command line, across our pull request features, across issues and documentation, and that became the basis for CoPilot Enterprise.”

Scale 263

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

The $10M ARR Rule for Enterprise Here’s a controversial but important take: If you’re under $10M ARR, stay away from Enterprise. The $10M ARR Rule for Enterprise Here’s a controversial but important take: If you’re under $10M ARR, stay away from Enterprise.

Enterprise readiness 147

Enterprise readiness Enterprise compliance Acquisition 147

SaaStr

JULY 6, 2022

Founding a SaaS company is already a significant challenge for any entrepreneur, but targeting the enterprise space can be an entirely different beast. into one inbox, automates repetitive tasks, supports collaboration, and delivers analytics to track key performance metrics. Investors, the Enterprise Space, and Sales Strategy.

Enterprise 262

Enterprise Sales Hiring Social Media Communication 262

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2025

Enterprise Deal Velocity is Accelerating The company closed: 139 deals of at least $1 million 51 deals of at least $5 million 31 deals of at least $10 million With US commercial TCV growing 183% year-over-year, enterprise customers are making larger and larger commitments to the Palantir platform.

Artificial Intelligence 147

Artificial Intelligence Government AI Benchmarks 147

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2024

So, if an executive wants Enterprise software, they can bypass procurement. It’s to say many of us do not know how to use AI effectively enough yet to impact conversion metrics. #6: Why is the mid-market harder? So how much business has it closed? So it’s not to say that AI won’t work.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital Marketing AI SaaS 333

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2024

“Some teams consistently sold more enterprise SKUs, others had high volume but low ACV. . “At HubSpot, I had over 100 frontline sales managers reporting to me. What’s great about high-volume sales at that scale is the pattern recognition,” Michelle shared. “The latter is much higher risk.” ” 3.

Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 262

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

“Marketing is fluffy and unmeasurable” – Unlike sales, which has clear metrics like quota attainment, founders often believe marketing can’t be measured. Instead, focus on two key metrics: Pipeline coverage – Do we have a chance to hit our numbers? In fact, 50% of SaaS companies spend more than double.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 205

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

In this week’s Workshop Wednesday , Salesforce Ventures Investor, Jessica Bartos, shares the 5 metrics every SaaS company should care about in any market environment, especially the one we’re currently in. Growth Is Still Number One Growth is still the number one metric, but it’s not the only one. You do that by showing momentum.

Metrics 262

Metrics Marketing SaaS SMB 262

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

What data and metrics do you need to convince SaaS investors you’re in good shape and aligned with what they care about? These metrics are more targeted to those preparing for a Series A or B round and could make the difference between an excited-to-invest-in-you investor and a pass. What Goes into That Sheet? It’s pretty easy.

Metrics 187

Metrics Sales Hiring Retention Churn 187

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue. Even a DCF is riddled with long term assumptions. Top 5 Median: 18.3x

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299