Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

Above, I’ve charted the headcount growth rate for 10 of the fastest growing software companies in recent history. I’ve normalized the years for when all the businesses were roughly at the same headcount - fewer than 50 people. What does the “average” hyper growth software company look like in terms of headcount growth? How quickly do the fastest growing software companies build their teams? The answer is incredibly quickly.

Headcount 100

Headcount Scaling Software Business 100

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. “It’s We made our machine more efficient even as we scaled, grew headcount, and skyrocketed our revenue. The post 5 Ways to Keep Your Sales Machine Efficient While Scaling Headcount appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Headcount 82

Headcount Scaling Sales Acquisition 82

SaaStock

MARCH 27, 2019

In the last three years, it has grown from 60 to 225 in headcount, 10x in revenue and now serves 4 different verticals. Tune in for an extra bonus episode of the podcast, hosting SaaStock LatAm speaker André Baldini, CEO of Superlógica who tell us how the company grew revenue 10x.

Pricing 217

Pricing Headcount Banking Revenue 217

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. Over the last decade or so, I’ve compiled a metrics sheet to summarise a SaaS business. While no living document like this is ever perfect, this is currently the best board-level summary of the overall health of a business I have found. I’m sharing it so that others may benefit and improve it. If you have suggestions, please email me. Redpoint SaaS Metrics Template.

Metrics 178

Metrics Startup Headcount Engineering 178

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2019

Not that much given the overall headcount I nominally had assigned to me. A common VC-ism is that You Always Have Competition. This probably is mostly true, especially since 70% of the top SaaS companies are really just new versions of old, established categories.

Headcount 249

Headcount Enterprise Onboarding Pricing 249

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

At the highest level, SaaS companies look at sales expense, headcount, sales productivity and SaaS metrics like: The cost of new customer acquisition (CAC). Sales is the Growth Engine. Sales is the engine driving SaaS company value.

Metrics 240

Metrics Sales Benchmarks Headcount 240

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 19, 2018

If you have open headcount for Q1 be interviewing in Q4. Behind headcount equals behind plan. It’s two weeks until December.

Sales 208

Sales Headcount B2B Compensation 208

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

The chart above shows the headcount growth of the median publicly traded SaaS company from year four through year ten of the company’s life. The multiplicative effect of headcount growth and improving productivity fuels the growth of the business. SaaS companies are marvelous businesses. They are more predictable than most other kinds of companies and in addition they demonstrate leverage from technology.

Headcount 100

Headcount Benchmarks Branding Revenue 100

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. Double headcount every 6-9 months.

Venture Capital 184

Venture Capital Headcount Customer Lifetime Value Machine Learning 184

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

As you can see in the spreadsheet and in the chart, based on these assumptions your total sales headcount increases from 2 to 9 in year 2 and from 9 to 30 in year 3. PS: As you can see in the chart below, there's a 1:1 correlation (approximately) between ARR and sales headcount.

Headcount 205

Headcount Sales Churn Benchmarks 205

InsightSquared

FEBRUARY 22, 2018

As headcount surges, what specific fields mean, why they are useful, and when the business requires that information can be lost in the shuffle. Boston’s Trident Booksellers and Cafe thrums on a Saturday morning.

Sales 201

Sales Headcount Customer Success SMB 201

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 23, 2016

Financial Plan This template helps you create a full financial plan that includes everything from revenue modeling to costs projections and headcount planning. (As you can see, I really like placeit.net :) ) In case you haven't started to think about your plan for 2017 yet, now's the time.

Headcount 166

Headcount Churn Sales Revenue 166

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2014

Customer success teams must justify the investment of building a CS team, often at the expense of headcount in another team. Constrained by headcount budgets and burn requirements, startup leadership teams often must choose between hiring an additional sales person or investing in a customer success person, for example.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Headcount Compensation Education 100

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. I’ve been working within the software as a service (SaaS) industry for more than five years now.

Business 158

Business Churn Headcount Acquisition 158

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 16, 2018

How to Scale without Scaling Headcount. To ensure you success function scales without scaling your headcount, make sure everyone in the company is bought into the success mindset. Top 15 Takeaways from Pulse Europe 2018.

Customer Success 55

Customer Success Headcount Churn Scaling 55

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 18, 2018

Imagine you work at a startup that is growing headcount 125% year over year. Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal break all the time as the company moults into a new skin. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring.

Headcount 102

Headcount Engineering Startup Management 102

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

DECEMBER 3, 2013

Besides working through your budget, marketing programs, headcount, and whatever else you need to have in place when the new year rolls around, I’d suggest you add another item: Review your value proposition and messages. I'll start by apologizing.

Headcount 130

Headcount Social Media Interviewing Mobile 130

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 14, 2013

And in a fast-growing startup which doubles headcount every year and where each individual employee can have a much bigger impact than in a large enterprise, it's even more important that everyone is on the same page.

Headcount 166

Headcount Communication Investment Enterprise 166

Sales Hacker

JULY 31, 2019

In a fast-paced environment where things like onboarding, headcount plans, comp, demo practice, deal strategy, and lots of other revenue-generating activities are top of mind and rapidly changing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters most to people.

Headcount 84

Headcount Engagement Sales Onboarding 84

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 6, 2016

When is the right time to increase sales headcount for a SaaS startup? It is one of the most strategic decisions for early-stage business to make given the amount of effort and expense involved in building, managing and scaling a sales team. While there is no single absolute sign, neither qualitative nor quantitative, these are some of the signals I have found indicate it might be a good time to scale sales. First, the pipeline to quota ratio exceeds 6X.

Scaling 100

Scaling Headcount Startup Education 100

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

Of course, headcount is always a sensitive topic, so start small to show your executives what is possible. If executed right, the headcount is truly an investment. In this article, you’ll learn how to structure your sales development (SDR) team for maximum efficiency and scalability. Sales leaders, read on! The only easy day was yesterday.”. Navy SEALs. This is one of the most famous principles of the U.S. Navy SEALs.

Development 76

Development Headcount Compensation Sales 76

Totango

APRIL 23, 2019

To account for that, you can insert potential and actual dollar values in place of the headcount: Customer Renewal Rate = Actual Renewal Value ÷ Potential Renewal Value X 100. Renewal is about a consistent revenue basis. The rate at which your customers extend their relationship with you determines how fast and how far your enterprise can grow. As such, being able to accurately calculate your renewal rate gives you insight into your customer success team’s performance.

Churn 80

Churn Headcount Customer Success Subscription 80

Sales Hacker

MAY 7, 2018

Or extra headcount? As a sales manager, your success is determined by the success of your reps. But, unfortunately, a lot of reps out there are barely hitting quota. In fact, the majority of today’s sales teams consist of average performers.

Headcount 74

Headcount Strategy Management Technology 74

Inside Intercom

APRIL 4, 2019

Despite the exponential growth they’ve gone through, Stripe have been refreshingly conservative about how quickly they grown the company from a headcount perspective. We are a very engineering-centric company, so 50% of headcount is always going to be on engineering.

Headcount 61

Headcount Sales Startup Engineering 61

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2016

At this scale, the economics of sales training are plain to see: less headcount required to attain the same bookings run rate. Sales leaders consistently underinvest in sales team training and development. As SaaS startups scale, sales execution becomes the most tangible metric of a business’ success, and the one by which the business’ health is benchmarked. Not to mention how the head of sales is evaluated. When is the right time to invest in sales training?

Headcount 100

Headcount Benchmarks Investment Startup 100

Inside Intercom

DECEMBER 21, 2018

But it’d be far more effective to share how Snapt uses Custom Bots to qualify and book meetings at scale, without additional headcount. In sales, the ability to connect with leads in real time can’t be understated.

Headcount 77

Headcount Communication B2B Branding 77

ProfitWell

MARCH 27, 2019

The continued support of their investors has underscored the market potential and has led the crew to expand their partner ecosystem and double their headcount across engineering, sales, and marketing. Hello, my pals.

Travel 56

Travel Cybersecurity Headcount AI 56

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Like a large tanker at cruising speed that cannot quickly take a turn, a startup with a fast-growing headcount and a high burn rate loses some of its ability to quickly react to new information, new insights, or changes in the market. A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “How fast is fast enough?”. The subtext of the question was “How fast do you have to grow if your ambition is to get to $100M in ARR and build a very large company”.

Venture Capital 104

Venture Capital Headcount Forecasting Acquisition 104

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2019

Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. Successful customers are happy customers. Happy customers stick around and recommend your company to their friends.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Scaling Business Retention 98

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. Revenue-based financing is quickly becoming a popular way for startups to raise funds without sacrificing equity. This is how it works. This is a guest post by Brian Parks, Managing Partner at Bigfoot Capital.

Finance 61

Finance Revenue Metrics Venture Capital 61

Sales Hacker

MAY 17, 2019

Even without a clear understanding of her funnel, she can probably estimate the impact of a change in headcount accurately. Have you noticed the disconnect between how executives talk about Sales Development and how they treat Sales Development leaders?

Development 101

Development Headcount Metrics Engagement 101

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

JUNE 26, 2018

Leveraging automation is not only interesting, but important - after all, if a SaaS company’s headcount growth exceeds revenue growth, it impacts its ability to invest in product, and if that happens, things can start to go awry.

Sales Enablement 130

Sales Enablement Sales Headcount Consulting 130

Baremetrics

JULY 25, 2019

Hiring sales reps is sexy but what about your growing hosting costs, operations, SaaS vendors per headcount, and travel? Data science is beginning to replace spreadsheets for entrepreneurs wrestling with uncertainty in their business models. How did we get here? What’s really new? And how can founders at any stage get better at predicting their future? Staring into the Void.

Forecasting 58

Forecasting Government Headcount Travel 58

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

In-product guides and email cadences are low cost ways of steering users towards activation without engineering work or new customer success headcount. SaaS is now ubiquitous. Salesforce, which turned 20 in March, surpassed $13 billion in annual revenue this year.

Headcount 100

Headcount Travel B2C Enterprise 100

Inside Intercom

JULY 11, 2019

So often, when we think about investing in a support team, sometimes the conversation becomes about getting the headcount higher, higher, higher. But where else can you be investing outside of headcount to maintain that customer centricity?

Scaling 89

Scaling Headcount Customer Support Retention 89

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 19, 2014

The difference in valuation afforded to companies which grow revenues by leveraging technology rather than growing headcount can be 10x! Hortonworks filed their S-1 last week. Reading through the document, I noticed the company had quite a substantial fraction of professional services revenue; 41% of trailing 12 month revenue is services.

Headcount 100

Headcount Revenue Startup Software 100

Inside Intercom

AUGUST 13, 2019

When implemented well, automated customer service allows businesses to help more customers at scale without drastically growing headcount. Automated customer service isn’t a new concept. We’ve all navigated our fair share of automated phone menus or interacted with support bots to get help.

AI 65

AI Headcount B2C Customer Support 65

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 9, 2012

Cut sales and marketing headcount and scale back spending on customer acquisition programs. If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it?

Acquisition 151

Acquisition Headcount Banking Revenue 151

Inside Intercom

MARCH 12, 2019

” In our case, a resounding “yes” required seeing a positive impact on customer expansion and one big enough to justify the fully-loaded cost for the additional headcount.

Management 84

Management Headcount Sales Government 84

The Angel VC

MARCH 22, 2012

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. [Update 03/23/16: I've created an improved version of the template - check it out! ] A few people who read my recent post about financial planning asked if I could provide an example for a good financial plan, so I'd like to post one here.

Startup 159

Startup Headcount Advertising Acquisition 159

Inside Intercom

JULY 31, 2019

But how do you staff live chat for your marketing without ballooning your headcount? You might think chatbots are only for customer support, but using them to answer your customers’ questions is just one way to leverage chatbots.

Marketing 74

Marketing Headcount Pricing Engagement 74

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

Nick Petri assesses how to find the right ratio of headcount between product management, UX and development. Special thanks to Miriam Richter, Adelina Irimia and Adina Mic for helping compile this guide.

Management 80

Management Headcount Interviewing Metrics 80

Inside Intercom

JUNE 4, 2018

While it’s true you may need to incrementally add capacity for this new channel, the impact we’ve seen on our conversion rates has more than paid for the additional headcount. The promise of live chat for sales teams is being able to connect faster with high-quality leads.

Sales Funnel 84

Sales Funnel Headcount Sales B2B 84