Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

For SaaS businesses that target smaller SMB customer segments, gross retention is typically in the mid to low 80’s with net expansion in the ~105% range. Headcount planning, budgeting, fundraising, etc can often be largely based on a top line plan. Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Any great VP of Sales knows other VPs of Sales and up-and-comers because sales is usually half the headcount in a startup. But they might want to stick with SMB. They might be passively recruiting, following up with people, and building relationships with people from past companies.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 145

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

Most companies test the waters with a SMB and/or freemium offering , and then work their way up to staking out territory in the mid-market and enterprise arenas. >> Read why Atlassian increased their average sales headcount by 45% and how they are doubling down on sales while maintaining a product-led model. Mid-market ?

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

Having a predictable pipeline enables more effective decision-making, from headcount planning to strategic investments in technology and beyond. The post How Salesforce Runs Its Internal Forecasting Process with Salesforce’s VP Sales Strategy & Programs and RVP SMB Sales appeared first on SaaStr.

Forecasting 240

Forecasting SMB Technical Review Sales 240

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

Founded in 2018 in Austin, this company takes a focused approach, offering forecasting and planning for SaaS and professional services businesses, built on the Salesforce platform, and with pricing suggestive of an SMB/MM focus. The company has raised $4M in pre- and seed financing. The product gets 4.9 stars on G2 across 13 reviews.

Finance 86

Finance Forecasting Software Review Systems Review 86

InsightSquared

FEBRUARY 22, 2018

My brain doesn’t struggle to translate Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 into SMB, Mid Market, and Enterprise. As headcount surges, what specific fields mean, why they are useful, and when the business requires that information can be lost in the shuffle. For other players this can often be confusing and it’s not hard to understand why.

Scale 82

Scale Sales Headcount SMB 82

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Sam Taylor: So no matter what, I mean, Dropbox, no matter how you slice it, what function you’re in, was just insane from a growth perspective, headcount-wise, user base-wise, you name it. And how do you think it maybe impacted your operating mentality today? How do I understand the product itself?”

Scale 169

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 169

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 14, 2022

They sit around a table and share actionable insights about their company’s transition from SMB to enterprise sales. . There’s one nightmare scenario every company wants to avoid when they make the transition from SMB to Enterprise. Pivoted away from having CSMs for SMB, replacing it with a support team to close tickets faster.

SMB 82

SMB Enterprise Scale Outbound Sales Team 82

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Let’s say you are at $10m ARR and decently funded, you’ll probably have 100 headcount by this point, or at least, by $15m ARR. You’ll probably want to add field sales (for Big Deals) by $10m ARR or so, another 2-3 headcount here, minimum. Let’s assume that takes 5 headcount, minimum, ideally 6. >>

Sales Hiring 344

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 344

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 188

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 188

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

We all become new customer-oriented, so we say we’re focused on the existing base, but once the sales team becomes 30-40% of headcount, it tends to dominate every conversation. Long-term marketing spend Holding customer success spend flat The study found that 62% of CS teams are maintaining or decreasing their non-headcount budget.

Customer Success 231

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale AI 231

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

So your goals in terms of headcount remained stable from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic? But at that level, it’s about more than just adding some headcount to individual teams, you’re building new teams, you’re creating new roles, potentially new reporting lines. We have SMB mid-market enterprise.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

Traditional Sales Organizations – Growth of headcount in sales was structured around revenue per individual contributor (IC). To grow, the company needs to structure its resources into two initiatives; SMB and MidMarket, each requiring a different approach. Traditional vs Modern Sales Organizational Structure.

Sales Recruiting 74

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 74

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Of course, we always excelled in SMB at Slack as well. It’s not analogous, but there are learnings you can take in your SMB business as you think about going up or getting into bigger companies and bigger deployments. When I left, we were just bridging the $1 billion mark. It was really an incredible learning journey.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

Those three together really comprise the entirety of the front office for the SMB. 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?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

Then everyone in the world was on Zoom selling flowers and yoga and things meant to be sold in person, so churn peaked at 3.6%, which isn’t terrible for SMB, but was higher than none. They grew headcount fairly aggressively from ‘21 to ‘22, and then Q4 of last year dipped and held flat before starting to regrow.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 236

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

You need to build an efficient sales team…you can’t just throw money or headcount at things. You need to maximize everything you possibly can to beat the competition because you can’t just throw money or headcount at things. Did you know there was an appetite for this? That was the impetus for starting Sales Hacker.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. For SMB SaaS apps, we look for ease of use and delightful user experience with consistent engagement and value delivery. For financial metrics, we’re really digging into your OPEX and how it’s serving the company and looking for answers to a multitude of questions (see below).

Finance 85

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 85

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 15, 2021

During one of our BIG RYG Hyper-Workshops on budgeting for Customer Success headcount, Kristen Hayer of The Success League, framed this shift by explaining that as a CS leader, you’re not running a happiness team, you’re running a revenue team. If you’re a startup or SMB, this sets you up with unrealistic NRR expectations.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Benchmarks Scale Underperforming Technical Team 97

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. For SMB SaaS apps, we look for ease of use and delightful user experience with consistent engagement and value delivery. For financial metrics, we’re really digging into your OPEX and how it’s serving the company and looking for answers to a multitude of questions (see below).

Finance 52

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 52

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Sales: Be able to route prospects to our self-service flow or the most appropriate team within Sales, e.g. startups, SMB, MME, based on well-defined customer segments. If your customers tend to be larger, public companies, then segmenting by revenue and size is reasonable, as most report financial results and headcount on a quarterly basis.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Simpler segmentation approach : By bucking the good, better, best seat-based pricing model, a single price point can be used to satisfy cost-conscious SMB customers as well as mid-market/enterprise businesses. In turn, these headcount costs can go directly towards building and selling the product. .

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

ChurnZero

AUGUST 23, 2019

Q: If there is no headcount for a new CS ops person, what’s the best way to incorporate the function until you can get budget? We think about a Marketing Ops Team if you have a SMB kind of go-to-market business, they are focusing on lead generation and scales. A: That’s another great question.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Retention 40

Sales Hacker

APRIL 29, 2021

The size of your company and the volume of content you must produce each quarter will determine the headcount needed on your team. The biggest challenge we see in our start-up clients is headcount; each team member is already pulled in 100 different directions. Here are the functions your content supply chain should include.

Scale 102

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 102

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

The answer likely depends on your market segmentation, as freemium may ease adoption friction for SMB/mid-market companies. Are you targeting enterprise or mid-market/SMB? The cloud-managed services attract the lower end of the market and make it possible for these businesses to address the SMB/mid-market segments.

Business 52

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 52

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

When I started, they had a big growth plan as far as headcount, but they were a little bit looser on processes and cadences and things like that framework I was talking about. So again, we got aggressive headcount to see the growth, and we put together a plan where we can actually see maybe even a little bit more growth with the same people.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

We’re going through layoffs and furloughs, recession planning and for me as the CMO, facing really massive cuts to marketing budgets and headcount. If you have a lot of SMB and commercial companies and they start to go out of business then that’s out of your control. Our workforce is remote.

Travel 171

Travel Marketing Scale Outsourcing Services 171

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Using Sales Navigator’s search engine, you can filter results by plugging in various titles, locations, industries, company headcounts, and so on, to come as close as you can to your ICPs. Apollo’s full plan comes with an SMB level price tag; as a startup, you probably want the basic plan.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Sales Hacker

JUNE 16, 2021

Startup hurdle: headcount. SMB hurdle: buy-in. Your GTM teams are made up of people, and people are resistant to change how they learn and sell. The types of obstacles will vary based on the size of your company. Everyone working at a new startup that has aggressive scaling plans wears multiple hats.

Sales Enablement 99

Sales Enablement Scale Sales Hiring Technical Review 99

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

They moved downmarket and released a freemium product for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). Employee headcount – company-wide and within key departments. A company that transitioned from a sales-led to a hybrid onboarding approach is HubSpot. This could be: Company size. Annual revenue. Role of contact. Technology they use.

Onboarding 93

Onboarding Sales Hiring Sales Consulting 93

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

It’s available to everyone bringing in third party speakers, bringing in, we had Mark Cuban couple of weeks ago, we’re having Brene Brown for our SMB business, around empathy, and leading through courage. It’s the SMB space. And so Leading Through Change is a series we’ve launched. One, Salesforce Care.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 156

Brian Balfour

JANUARY 4, 2017

A lot of companies have sales teams focused on different customer segments (SMB vs Enterprise or Industry A vs Industry B). So if your strategy is to increase quantity of content, that typically requires increased headcount. Same goes for allocating people/salary expenses from marketing. Learn Growth, No Fluff. One Essay Per Post.

Scale 71

Scale Marketplace as a Service Acquisition Content Marketing 71

Kellblog

JUNE 17, 2023

Then again, I come from an enterprise background, but I do work with some SMB companies. Sales headcount as % of total headcount. I get where they’re coming from with this metric, but I prefer to track what I call quota carrying rep (QCR) density = QCRs / sales headcount. S&M as % of total opex. See my post.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Benchmarks Metrics 103

Point Nine Land

APRIL 21, 2021

Give the candidate ~5 real examples of the kind of things you have to prioritize: customer integrations, feature requests, strategic releases, bugs, database extracts, opportunistic features… and ask them to prioritize. An organizational task.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Software Review 52