Finance
I was playing around on the enterprise comps [1] section of Meritech's website today and a few of the charts I found caught my attention. Here's the first one, which shows the progression of the EV/NTM revenue multiple [2] for a set of 50+ high-growth
Finance
The other day I heard a startup executive say, "we will start to accelerate sales hiring -- hiring reps beyond the current staffing levels and the current plan -- once we start to see the pipeline to support it." What comes first: the pipeline or the egg? Or,
HR
I've worked with several startups that fell into the following pattern: * Selling a SaaS application at a healthy price (e.g., $100K to $200K ARR) * With low, fixed-cost implementation packages (e.g., $25K) * But a product that actually takes maybe $50K to $75K to successfully deploy * Resulting in
SaaS
You start by listing every rep your company has ever hired in order by hire date. You then record their sales productivity (typically measured in new ARR bookings) for their series of quarters with the company, up to and including their current-quarter forecast (which you shade in green).
Metrics
I'm pleased to announce that I was recently featured in a six-part SaaS podcast mini-series on SaaShimi hosted by Aznaur Midov, VP at PNC Technology Finance Group, a debt provider who works primarily with private equity (PE) firms for SaaS buyouts, growth capital, and recapitalizations. Let's
Boards
I'm a SaaS metrics nut and I go to a lot of SaaS board meetings, so I'm constantly thinking about (among other things) how to produce a minimal set of metrics that holistically describe a SaaS company. In a prior post, I made a nice one-slide
Customer Success
The CEO. Thanks for reading. # # # I was tempted to stop there because I've been writing a lot of long posts lately and because I do believe the answer is that simple. First let me explain the controversy and then I'll explain my view on it. In
SaaS
Some SaaS startups develop a form of zero-sum delusion early in their evolution, characterized by following set of beliefs. Believing that: * A customer has a fixed budget that is 100% fungible between ARR (annual revenue revenue) and services * It is in the company's best interest to turn as
Finance
[Updated 3/10 12:09] This is part II in this series. Part I is here and covers the basics of management education, employee communications, and simple steps to help slow virus transmission while keeping the business moving forward. In this part, we'll provide: * A short list of
Finance
I’ve seen numerous startups try numerous ways to calculate their sales capacity. Most are too back-of-the-envelope and too top-down for my taste. Such models are, in my humble opinion, dangerous because the combination of relatively small errors in ramping, sales productivity, and sales turnover (with associated ramp resets) can
Demandgen
Does my company spend too much on marketing? Too little? How I do know? What is the right level of marketing spend at an enterprise software startup? I get asked these questions all the time by startup CEOs, CMOs, marketing VPs, and marketing directors. You can turn to financial benchmarks,
CAC
Just a quick post to say I'm honored to have made number seven on the countdown of the top ten most downloaded podcasts of all time on the SaaStr Podcast. The podcast in question is an interview performed by Harry Stebbings of The Twenty Minute VC where we