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. What ratio do you want between AEs and other sales roles?

Headcount 41

Headcount Sales Hiring Scale Sales 41

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 6, 2023

That’s a big difference, especially when you layer in the growth in headcount from 2021 to 2022. Essentially companies grew headcount significantly to add less ARR. We’re obviously seeing the rightsizing of this now with headcount reductions. The second chart comes from the latest MS CIO survey (below).

Cloud 130

Cloud Headcount Subscription Payment Features 130

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%.

Scale 55

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 55

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 26, 2022

The difference is starkest in headcount: Coinbase employs more than 5,000 people while Uniswap counts fewer than 100. But revenue growth is more sensitive to market swings, the company discloses fewer operating metrics, and their token offers fewer rights than COIN stock. Centralized exchanges hold or custody user accounts.

Benchmarks 269

Benchmarks Headcount Government Business Model 269

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 23, 2020

Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion. External signals are powerful proxy metrics. Whatever technique(s) you decide to use, I’d encourage you to think early about finding those proxy metrics for good prospects. A prospect experiences hypergrowth is perfect example.

Scale 236

Scale Headcount Sales Startup 236

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

Sales KPIs versus sales metrics: Is there a difference? Some might argue that there are fine-grained distinctions to be made between KPIs and metrics. You can think about it this way: your KPIs are the key metrics you use to measure sales performance. In my world, they’re just two sides of the same coin. Beware of headline KPIs.

Sales Hiring 188

Sales Hiring Metrics Revenue Sales 188

SaaSOptics

JULY 20, 2020

5 SaaS Metrics You’re Calculating Incorrectly . SaaS metrics : the performance indicators that startups love to hate. Whether you’re the CEO or an analyst at your company, SaaS metrics play a huge role in your day to day. Frequently miscalculated SaaS metrics. The Hidden Costs of Miscalculated SaaS Metrics .

Technical Review 56

Technical Review Metrics Deferred Revenue SaaS 56

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. As an operator, you’re mostly thinking about your need for your function in isolation — what you need to achieve the goal or metrics assigned to your team.

Headcount 225

Headcount Scaling Finance Engineering 225

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Companies have reduced headcount, but new bookings aren’t getting any easier Quarterly net new ARR growth : Some green-shoots! Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. Even a DCF is riddled with long term assumptions.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Review Headcount Trends 161

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

For these reasons, accurately tracking key sales metrics and benchmarking your performance against peers and market leaders is critical to getting the most out of your sales resources. Typical SaaS Sales Metrics. Underlying those metrics are processes which can improve or reduce performance in each of the above metrics.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Metrics Sales 102

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2020

Last year, the company doubled its headcount, tripled revenue and landed on G2’s Top 100 Global Software list. . Here are just some of the metrics: Cold calls have dropped 20% overall. 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 357

Scale Artificial Intelligence Payments Payment Services 357

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Turning to our customer metrics in the fourth quarter. As Google also reported, usage-based pricing models may weather downturns betterbecause the products they meter grow irrespective of headcount growth, a positive sign for infrastructure. From a geographic perspective, the U.S.

Cloud 229

Cloud Azure Headcount Software Review 229

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. However, it’s also one of the most loosely used metrics, and is frequently misused. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

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. There are a lot of metrics you can use to measure your customer support team’s performance.

Scale 156

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

The top metrics in CS are all revenue metrics. NRR, which tracks the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers, is now the top metric for CS teams in almost every revenue band. Why NRR (net revenue retention) is the SaaS metric to rule them all. However, 76.5% In an encouraging sign, 59.5%

Leadership 98

Leadership Trends Customer Success Investment 98

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 262

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 262

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2021

There’s a metric the very top founders track quitely, but ruthlessly, that I find other founders either don’t track, or sort of hide from. If nothing else, you can pretty reliability track headcount growth on LinkedIn). That’s % of marketshare. And importantly, if it’s growing, or shrinking. Why does it matter?

Azure 211

Azure Headcount AWS Education 211

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 17, 2019

In the many years I’ve worked with SaaS companies, I continue to observe a surprising lack of standardization of SaaS metrics and performance reporting. My experience reinforces the fact that SaaS business model variants and approaches to measuring performance via metrics are still very much undefined. The Value of Benchmarking.

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Metrics Headcount SaaS 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2021

A Fully Baked Financial Model — Including Crystal-Clear MRR and Operating Metrics. You need a baked financial model, that includes sales and marketing costs, scaling over time, headcount, and comparison to comps, and when you’ll need the next round(s). And no crazy aggregated quarterly metrics. Bookings second.

Scale 286

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Headcount 286

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

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. The world has changed. We still want to drive retention and growth and make money. There’s a lot of nuance.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 270

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. Anjali viewed this as a core place to drive up their metrics, with self-serve converting at half the rate to paid outside the U.S. My Top 10 Learnings: #1. This was interesting.

Enterprise 259

Enterprise Scale Sales Hiring Headcount 259

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

You’ll find that most SaaS companies at scale use a rough metric of 1 Customer Success Manager for every $2m in ARR. At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. Tie bonuses and comp to success on both metrics (favor, in most cases, pure retention first, and additional revenue second).

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 246

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 10, 2021

What to do: Increase your efficiency without increasing headcount using bots and automation. Monitor your most important metrics in one place with our new real-time dashboard. Read more: The custom bot that saved logistics platform Stuart over 2.5k hours per week. How to support your customers at scale with automated customer service.

Headcount 195

Headcount Customer Support Scale AI 195

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 14, 2020

Maintaining a 100% real-time experience typically requires: Increasing headcount to keep pace with a growing customer base and their conversations. And if you don’t increase headcount, you risk burning your team out. Rate of automated resolution (ROAR) , which is a metric that I’ve designed internally.

Headcount 224

Headcount Retention Customer Support Scaling 224

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Over the past year, many support teams have struggled with budget cuts, reduced headcount, and less bandwidth – while the volume and complexity of customer queries has only risen. So how can you manage a larger volume of queries without needing to add headcount? Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

You’ll find that most SaaS companies at scale use a rough metric of 1 Customer Success Manager for every $2m in ARR. At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. Tie bonuses and comp to success on both metrics (favor, in most cases, pure retention first, and additional revenue second).

Sales Hiring 215

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 215

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Headcount maybe goes from 2 or 4 to 10. The most underrated metric at this stage is time-to-value. As such, time-to-value is the most underrated metric in SaaS. Issues can lurk behind impressive metrics. The First Triple The first triple is one of John’s favorite stages of growth — going from $2M to $6M.

Scale 169

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 169

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2021

funnel analysis tying sales performance to lead generation and marketing budget for program spend and headcount. This is why median is a better metric in this case. consideration for both account executive and sales manager turnover of around 20-25% annually. Expected quota attainment is consistently overlooked and over projected.

Forecasting 152

Forecasting Sales Hiring Headcount Finance 152

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2021

Your sales headcount. If 20% of your revenue is Smaller customers, 50% Medium, and 30% Large (a not uncommon scenario), align your energy and efforts proportionately. Align your marketing budgets. Your product / dev budgets. Don’t chase “whales” and big deals IF that’s not your core. It’s just going to distract everyone now.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Headcount Pricing Market Segmentation 300

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

If we believe that AI will ultimately allow us to do “more with less,” we may see headcount growth slow for traditional roles. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. What do I mean by this?

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

With precise headcount and budget needs. I’ll Keep it Simple. I just want you to find a way to do 5 things: First, it’s time to build a real financial and operating model for next year — NOW. Pick a real ARR target for the end of next year, and back into who you’ll need to hit it — month-by-month.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Acquisition 277

ChurnZero

MARCH 14, 2024

A verified CSM headcount for your new model: Our guide shows you how to evaluate whether your current CSM staffing plan can accommodate your new model, using a formula that determines the future headroom for each CSM, and compares current capacity with forecasted demand.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Headcount Forecasting Communication 52

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

They all either have in their back pocket, and/or are constantly on the prowl for, the next 2-3 great reps because sales is a lead-driven but headcount-closed business. His or Her Claimed Metrics Don’t Make Sense. If the metrics make no sense, pass. And the great VP of Sales all know this. It doesn’t matter why.

Sales Recruiting 306

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 306

ChurnZero

JULY 14, 2021

This metric helps determine which customers are your most profitable and can be useful both pre-sale to focus on acquiring highly valuable customers but then also post-sale to make sure your Customer Success team is able to focus their efforts on retaining your customers with the strongest lifetime value. Customer Success Around the Web.

Customer Lifetime Value 98

Customer Lifetime Value Scale Headcount Churn 98

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 5, 2020

This INCLUDES headcount-related expenses. If you are utilizing Gusto or a similar payroll tool, your headcount expenses are likely coming into your P&L as one (or maybe two) line item(s). This may not seem like a major issue, but if you are calculating sales efficiency metrics like CAC, Months to Recover CAC, Magic Number , etc.,

Finance 118

Finance Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 118

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. And I don’t necessarily mean 10X in terms of headcount – I mean 10X in terms of efficiency.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

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. With the exception of the VP of Sales role, sales staff headcount planning is done on the separate "Sales Team Hiring Plan" tab (re-using a model that I've built for this post ).

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217